John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

70 COMTE S WORK BROUGHT TO ENGLAND. 1841-1848.
Without pursuing farther at present the fortunes of the Logic,
I will allude to the connexion between Mill and Comte, and to
the share that Comte had in shaping Mill s Political Philosophy.
Wheatstone always claimed to be the means of introducing
Comte in England. He brought over from Paris the two first
volumes of the Philosophic Positive, after the publication of the
second, which was in 1837. It would appear that the first
volume, published by itself, in 1830, had fallen dead; notwith
standing that the two first chapters really contained in very
clear language, although without expansion, the two great
foundations that Comte built upon the Three Stages and the
Hierarchy of the Sciences. Wheatstone mentioned the work
to his scientific friends in London, and among others to
Brewster, who was then a contributor of scientific articles to
the Edinburgh
as a good topic ;
Review. Comte s volumes struck him at once
and he wrote an article on them in the August
number for 1838. Anyone knowing him would have predicted,
as the strain of his review, an indignant or else a contemptuous
exposure of the atheism, a fastening on the weak points in his
own special subjects, as Optics, and a cold recognition of his
systematic comprehensiveness. This, however, was to leave
out of the account one element his antipathy to Whewell ;
sufficiently marked in a review of the History of the Inductive
Sciences in the previous year Brewster found with joy a
number of observations on Hypothesis and other points, that
he could turn against Whewell ; and the effect was, I have no
doubt, to soften the adverse criticisms, and to produce an
article on the whole favourable to the book, and one that even
Comte himself regarded with some complacency. Mill got
wind of the two volumes in the end of 1837, after he had
completed the draft of his Book on Induction. The Autobio
graphy gives (pp. 210-14) the general effect produced upon him
by the whole work, which he perused with avidity as the
successive volumes appeared ; but does not adequately express
the influence in detail, nor the warmth of esteem and affection