and
simplicity of the speaker's accents. A generation continually excited by
narratives, as sterile as vehement, of storm and stress and spiritual
shipwreck, might do well, if it knew the things that pertained to its
peace, to ponder this unvarnished history--the history of a man who,
though he was not one of the picturesque victims of the wasteful
torments of an uneasy spiritual self-consciousness, yet laboured so
patiently after the gifts of intellectual strength, and did so much
permanently to widen the judgments of the world.

If Mr. Mill's Autobiography has no literary grandeur, nor artistic
variety, it has the rarer merit of presenting for our contemplation a
character that was infested by none of the smaller passions, and warped
by none of the more unintelligent attitudes of the human mind. We have
to remember that it is exactly these, the smaller passions on the one
hand, and slovenliness of intelligence on the other, which are even
worse agencies in spoiling the worth of life and the advance of society
than the more imposing vices either of thought or sentiment. Many have
told the tale of a life of much external eventfulness. There is a rarer
instructiveness in the quiet career of one whose life was an incessant
education, a persistent strengthening of the mental habit of 'never
accepting half-solutions of difficulties as complete; never abandoning a
puzzle, but again and again returning to it until it was cleared up;
never allowing obscure corners of a subject to remain unexplored,
because they did not appear important; never thinking that I perfectly
understood any part of a subject until I understood the whole' (p. 123).
It is true that this mental habit is not so singular in itself, for it
is the common and indispensable merit of every truly scientific thinker.
Mr. Mill's distinction lay in the deliberate intention and the
systematic patience with which he brought it to the consideration of
moral and religious and social subjects. In this region hitherto, for
reasons that are not difficult to seek, the empire of prejudice and
passion has been so much stronger, so much harder to resist, than in the
field of physical science.

Sect is so ready to succeed sect, and school comes after school, with
constant replacement of one sort of orthodoxy by another sort, until
even the principle of relativity becomes the base of a set of absolute
and final dogmas, and the very doctrine of uncertainty itself becomes
fixed