John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

1 86 CONVERSATIONAL POWER. 1849-1872.
the Church it seems is robbed. What follows? That the
Church may be robbed, and no man, woman, or child be the
worse for it. If this be so, why, in Heaven s name, should it
not be done ? If money or money s worth can be squeezed
out of an abstraction, we would appropriate it without scruple.
We had no idea that the region
Where entity and quiddity,
The ghosts of defunct bodies, fly,
was an Eldorado of riches. We wish all other abstract ideas
had as ample a patrimony. It is fortunate that their estates
are of a less volatile and airy nature than themselves, and that
here at length is a chimaera bombinans in vacuo, which lives
upon something
more substantial than secundas intentiones .
We hold all such entia rationis to be fair game, and their pos
sessions a legitimate subject of invasion and conquest.
"
Any act may be a crime, if giving it a bad name could
make it so ; but the robbery that we object to must be some
thing more than robbing a word. The laws of property were
made for the protection of human beings, and not of phrases.
As long as the bread is not taken from any of our fellow-
creatures, we care not though the whole English dictionary had
to beg in the streets."
The mathematicians, owing to their very high pretensions to
set forth reasoning in its most perfect form, have exposed
themselves to the jibes of profane wit. Thus, Berkeley ridi
culed the Fluxions of Newton, as made up of the "ghosts of
departed quantities ".
Mill
contributes to the same purpose.
Speaking of Mathematics as a whole, he says, "it is as full of
fictions as English Law, and of mysteries as Theology ".
I have now a few. remarks to make upon his Conversational
power, which was part of his influence, although not to so great
a degree as in his father s case. That he was a striking talker,
even as a boy, we have good testimony. Still, he impressed