John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

LOGIC REVIEWED BY WARD IN THE BRITISH CRITIC. 69
handsomely of it ; and desired his bookseller to get an addi
tional copy for him, and expose it in the window.
While the work was printing, I prepared from the sheets a
review of it, which came out in the Westminster in the April
number, and was even more laudatory than Mill liked. The
first adverse criticism of importance was an article in the
autumn number of the British Critic, of nearly a hundred
pages, known to have been written by Mr. W. G. Ward, the ally
of Newman and Pusey. It was a most remarkable production,
and gave Mill very great satisfaction, all things considered. It
was not so much a review of the Logic, as of Mill altogether.
Mr. Ward had followed him through his various articles in the
London and Westminster, and had mastered his modes of
thinking on all the great questions ; and the present article
takes these up along with the Logic. He expresses a warm
interest in Mill himself: remarking "An inquirer, who bears
every mark of a single-minded and earnest pursuit of truth,
"
cheers and relieves the spirits ; a to the prevailing dispositions of
pretty strong innuendo as
so-called inquirers. He
miserable moral and religious deficiencies,"
deplores Mill s
"
and says if his "principles be adopted as a full statement of
the truth, the whole fabric of Christian Theology must totter
and fall ". Accordingly,
the article is devoted to counterwork
ing these erroneous tendencies and the parts chosen for
attack are the Experience-foundations of the Mathematical
Axioms, the derived view of Conscience, and Necessity as
against Free-Will. Mr. Ward has continued to uphold his
peculiar tenets against the Experience-school. He had after
wards, as he informs me, a good deal of correspondence with
Mill, and once met him. At his instigation, Mill expunged
from his second edition an objectionable anecdote.*
* In regard to the British Critic, Mill wrote,
"
I always hailed Puseyism,
and predicted that Thought would sympatise with Thought though I did
not expect to find my own case so striking an ". example I was told that he
had written several letters in the Morning Chronicle in this strain of subtle
remark.