issue. That so obvious a
kind of reflection should not have previously interested Mr. Mill's
judgment in favour of the writer of the _Outcasts_, the _Legend of the
Ages_, the _Contemplations_, only shows how strong was his dislike to
all that savoured of the grandiose, and how afraid he always was of
everything that seemed to dissociate emotion from rationally directed
effort. That he was himself inspired by this emotion of pity for the
common people, of divine rage against the injustice of the strong to the
weak, in a degree not inferior to Victor Hugo himself, his whole career
most effectually demonstrates.

It is this devotion to the substantial good of the many, though
practised without the noisy or ostentatious professions of more egoistic
thinkers, which binds together all the parts of his work, from the
_System of Logic_ down to his last speech on the Land Question. One of
the most striking pages in the Autobiography is that in which he gives
his reasons for composing the refutation of Hamilton, and as some of
these especially valuable passages in the book seem to be running the
risk of neglect in favour of those which happen to furnish material for
the idle, pitiful gossip of London society, it may be well to reproduce
it.

'The difference,' he says, 'between these two schools of philosophy,
that of Intuition and that of Experience and Association, is not a mere
matter of abstract speculation; it is full of practical consequences,
and lies at the foundation of all the greatest differences of practical
opinion in an age of progress. The practical reformer has continually to
demand that changes be made in things which are supported by powerful
and widely spread feelings, or to question the apparent necessity and
indefeasibleness of established facts; and it is often an indispensable
part of his argument to show how those powerful feelings had their
origin, and how those facts came to seem necessary and indefeasible.
There is therefore a natural hostility between him and a philosophy
which discourages the explanation of feelings and moral facts by
circumstances and association, and prefers to treat them as ultimate
elements of human nature; a philosophy which is addicted to holding up
favourite doctrines as intuitive truths, and deems intuition to be the
voice of Nature and of God, speaking with an authority higher than that
of our reason. In particular, I have long felt that the prevailing
tendency to regard all