on their most elevated objects as
unpractical, or at least too remote from realisation to be more than a
vision or a theory: and if, more fortunate than most, they retain their
higher principles unimpaired, yet with respect to the persons and
affairs of their own day, they insensibly adopt the modes of feeling and
judgment in which they can hope for sympathy from the company they keep'
(p. 228). That a man loses something, nay, that he loses much, by being
deprived of animating intercourse with other men, Mr. Mill would
probably have been the first to admit. Where that intercourse can be
had, nothing is more fit to make the judgment robust, nothing more fit
to freshen and revive our interests, and to clothe them with reality.
Even second-rate companionship has some clear advantages. The question
is, whether these advantages outweigh the equally clear disadvantages.
Mr. Mill was persuaded that they do not.

Those whom disgust at the aimlessness and insignificance of most of our
social intercourse may dispose to withdrawal from it--and their number
will probably increase as the reaction against intellectual flippancy
goes on--will do well to remember that Mr. Mill's retirement and his
vindication of it sprang from no moral valetudinarianism. He did not
retire to gratify any self-indulgent whim, but only in order to work the
more uninterruptedly _and definitely_. The Autobiography tells us what
pains he took to keep himself informed of all that was going on in every
part of the world. 'In truth, the modern facilities of communication
have not only removed all the disadvantages, to a political writer in
tolerably easy circumstances, of distance from the scene of political
action, but have converted them into advantages. The immediate and
regular receipt of newspapers and periodicals keeps him _au courant_ of
even the most temporary politics, and gives him a much more correct view
of the state and progress of opinion than he could acquire by personal
contact with individuals; for every one's social intercourse is more or
less limited to particular sets or classes, whose impressions and no
others reach him through that channel; and experience has taught me that
those who give their time to the absorbing claims of what is called
society, not having leisure to keep up a large acquaintance with the
organs of opinion, remain much more ignorant of the general state either
of the public mind, or of the active and instructed part of