John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

7 g ARTICLE ON MICHELET. 1841-1848.
It was during this dreadful depression of June and July, 1843,
and after the American Repudiation had beggared him, that he
made his offer of pecuniary
assistance to Comte. He had had
no holiday for two years, and, except for his customary Sunday
walks, he did not leave town that autumn :
I suspected that his
money affairs had something to do with his still postponing his
holiday. In October, his letters announce an improved state
of health.
His work in 1843, after the publication
of the Logic, was his
"
"
Michelet article, written in autumn. In September, he
"
writes, I am now vigorously at work reviewing Michelet s
History of France for the Edinburgh. I hope to do Napier, and
get him to insert it before he finds out what a fatal thing he is
On doing." 3rd Nov., he says, My review of Michelet is in
Napier s hands. If he prints it, he will make some of his
readers stare." The article appeared in January, and had none
of the serious consequences predicted. We have a difficulty,
dreadful in its views. But
reading it now, to see anything very
a philosophic vindication of the Papacy and the celibacy of
the clergy, as essential preservatives against barbarism, was not
then familiar to the English
mind. Mill had worked himself
into sympathy with everything French, and echoed the import
ance of France from the French historians. He always dealt
gently with her faults, and liberally with her virtues.
While writing this article, he was projecting in his mind his
next book, which was to be on the new science, first sketched
in the Logic, and there called Ethology . With parental fond
ness, he cherished this subject for a considerable time; regarding
"
it as the foundation and cornerstone of Sociology. There is
no chance, he says, for Social Statics at least, until the laws of
human character are better treated." A few months later he
wrote
"
I do not know when I shall be ripe for beginning
scheme has not assumed any definite shape
Ethology . The
with me yet." In fact, it never came to anything; and he
seems shortly to have dropped thinking
of it. I do not believe