John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

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ESSAYS ON RELIGION. 1849-1872.
find it, and he looked forward to a time when happiness might
be the rule instead of the exception. I should have expected
him to push the analysis of the causes of evil a step farther ;
namely, first, to the inadequacy
of man s intellectual force to
cope with the obscurities of nature, and next to the want of
ability to counteract known causes of mischief. A remark that
he once made regarding his own temperament, is a part of the
case in considering nature : he said, in answer to some gloomy
utterance of Grote s, that with himself the difficulty was not so
much to realize pleasure as to keep off pain ; and it is the fact
that there are many pleasurable resources in the world, if we
could only submerge the attendant miseries. His exposure of
the insufficiency of Nature as a guide is pure logic, and in that
he was not likely to be wanting. The so-called Light of Nature
is mere darkness ; while we are often notoriously incapable of
following the light we have. We are only just beginning to
track the secrets of disease ; including the forms of pestilence
that from time to time commit wholesale ravages alike upon
man and beast.
The Essay on the Utility of Religion is a farther illustration
of his old theme (in the Utilitarianism) as to the sufficiency of
the sanctions and motives of the present life for sustaining, not
only the inferior moral virtues, but also the elevated sentiments
of mankind. He here puts forward a sort of Religion of
Humanity, constructed on the basis of men s amiable feelings
towards one another. To this he had been led, I have no
doubt, in the first instance, by Comte, although the filling-up
is his own.
But by far the most laboured of the Essays is the last
uniting a destructive and a constructive Theism. The de
structive part is in accordance with all his antecedents ; it is
the constructive part that we were not prepared for. It was
indeed quite compatible with his warm human sympathies, and
with his long-standing doctrine that every creed is likely to
contain some portion of truth, that he should try to ascertain