nk themselves wiser than all the rest of the world
fall into snares which the simple good sense of their neighbours detects
and avoids. It is one of the principle tenets of the Utilitarians that
sentiment and eloquence serve only to impede the pursuit of truth. They
therefore affect a quakerly plainness, or rather a cynical negligence
and impurity, of style. The strongest arguments, when clothed in
brilliant language, seem to them so much wordy nonsense. In the meantime
they surrender their understandings, with a facility found in no other
party, to the meanest and most abject sophisms, provided those sophisms
come before them disguised with the externals of demonstration. They do
not seem to know that logic has its illusions as well as rhetoric,--that
a fallacy may lurk in a syllogism as well as in a metaphor.

Mr Mill is exactly the writer to please people of this description.
His arguments are stated with the utmost affectation of precision; his
divisions are awfully formal; and his style is generally as dry as that
of Euclid's Elements. Whether this be a merit, we must be permitted to
doubt. Thus much is certain: that the ages in which the true principles
of philosophy were least understood were those in which the ceremonial
of logic was most strictly observed, and that the time from which we
date the rapid progress of the experimental sciences was also the time
at which a less exact and formal way of writing came into use.

The style which the Utilitarians admire suits only those subjects on
which it is possible to reason a priori. It grew up with the verbal
sophistry which flourished during the dark ages. With that sophistry it
fell before the Baconian philosopher in the day of the great deliverance
of the human mind. The inductive method not only endured but required
greater freedom of diction. It was impossible to reason from phenomena
up to principles, to mark slight shades of difference in quality, or to
estimate the comparative effect of two opposite considerations between
which there was no common measure, by means of the naked and meagre
jargon of the schoolmen. Of those schoolmen Mr Mill has inherited
both the spirit and the style. He is an Aristotelian of the fifteenth
century, born out of due season. We have here an elaborate treatise on
Government, from which, but for two or three passing allusions, it
would not appear that the author was aware that any governments actually
existed among men. Certain pr