f whatever was mean and cowardly, and a burning
indignation at everything brutal or tyrannical, faithless or
dishonourable in conduct and character, while making the broadest
distinction between _mala in se_ and mere _mala prohibita_--between acts
giving evidence of intrinsic badness in feeling and character, and those
which are only violations of conventions either good or bad, violations
which, whether in themselves right or wrong, are capable of being
committed by persons in every other respect lovable or admirable.

To be admitted into any degree of mental intercourse with a being of
these qualities, could not but have a most beneficial influence on my
development; though the effect was only gradual, and many years elapsed
before her mental progress and mine went forward in the complete
companionship they at last attained. The benefit I received was far
greater than any which I could hope to give; though to her, who had at
first reached her opinions by the moral intuition of a character of
strong feeling, there was doubtless help as well as encouragement to be
derived from one who had arrived at many of the same results by study
and reasoning: and in the rapidity of her intellectual growth, her
mental activity, which converted everything into knowledge, doubtless
drew from me, as it did from other sources, many of its materials. What
I owe, even intellectually, to her, is in its detail, almost infinite;
of its general character a few words will give some, though a very
imperfect, idea.

With those who, like all the best and wisest of mankind, are
dissatisfied with human life as it is, and whose feelings are wholly
identified with its radical amendment, there are two main regions of
thought. One is the region of ultimate aims; the constituent elements of
the highest realizable ideal of human life. The other is that of the
immediately useful and practically attainable. In both these departments,
I have acquired more from her teaching, than from all other sources
taken together. And, to say truth, it is in these two extremes
principally, that real certainty lies. My own strength lay wholly in the
uncertain and slippery intermediate region, that of theory, or moral and
political science: respecting the conclusions of which, in any of the
forms in which I have received or originated them, whether as political
economy, analytic psychology, logic, philosophy of history, or anything
else, it is not the least of my intellec