John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

l68 SYMPATHY IN OPINIONS. 1849-1872.
apparent in mixed races like ourselves. In mental peculiarities,
contrast also dominates in many subtle forms which I need not
here dilate upon.
Mill would fain make us believe that the attachment in his
case was based altogether on mental superiority intellectual
and moral. The influence of beauty in general, the special
attraction of fair for dark, of tall for short, and other such in
fluences, he would have us leave entirely out of the account.
Hard thinkers are most often charmed, not by other thinkers,
but by minds of the more concrete and artistic mould. He
would have perhaps allowed something of this sort, in his case,
with the condition, that the artistic element was merely one of
the aspects of a genius that took the first rank in every form
of intellectual greatness.
The influence of contrast in producing the love of attach
ment must be so expressed as not to exclude sympathy or
agreement in opinions, objects, and aspirations; which is one
great cause of individual likings. This is a broad general fact,
but does not go far towards explaining the select overpowering
attachments. Mill tells us that his opinions on the complete
equality between the sexes in all legal, political, social, and do
mestic relations were, he believed, more than anything else,
the originating cause of the interest his wife felt in him. This
is so far in conformity with the general principle ; yet does not
help us very much.
His hyperbolical language of unbounded laudation, which
has been the cause of so much wonderment, can be somewhat
checked by the details that he himself supplies. His accus
tomed precision does not desert him in regard to these ; and
we are enabled to form a probable estimate of what his wife
really was to him.
In the first place, he tells us that the Logic owed nothing to
her, except the minutiae of composition. Then as to the
Political Economy, the purely scientific part he did not learn
from her. What was entirely her work was the chapter en-