Indeed, it is not too much to
say that his writings produced a veritable _debacle_ in the English
mind. The younger generation were a good deal stirred by Carlyle;
but Carlyle, after all, only woke people up, and made them look out
of the window to see what was the matter, after which most of them
went to bed again and slept comfortably. His cries were rather too
inarticulate to furnish anything like a new gospel, and he never
took hold of the intellectual class. But Mill did. The "Logic" and
"Political Economy," as reinforced and expounded by his earlier
essays, were generally accepted by the younger men as the teachings
of a real master, and even those who fully accepted neither his
mental philosophy nor his social economy, acknowledged that the day
of old things was passing away under his preaching. His method,
however, as applied to politics, was not original--in fact, it was
Bentham's.
Bentham, who was perhaps, in the field of jurisprudence, the most
destructive critic that ever appeared, had the merit which in his
day was somewhat novel among reformers, and marked him out as
something very different from Continental radicals--of being also
highly constructive.
Pages:
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90