John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

DISCUSSION OF COMTE IN DETAIL. 7 1
displayed in the five years of their correspondence from 1841
to 1846. In our many conversations, during
the summer oi
1842, Mill occasionally mentioned Comte, but not in a way to
give me any clear conception of what his merits consisted in.
Among his associates at that time was William Smith, lately
dead, and known as the author of Thorndale and various other
works. He was a pupil of the Mills in Philosophy, and oc
cupied himself in contributing to magazines.
In the winter of
that year, he wrote a review of Comte in Blackwood (March,
1 843), giving very well selected extracts ; and from these I
derived my first impression of the peculiar force of the book.
I remember particularly being struck with the observations on
the metaphysical and critical stage, as a vein of remark quite
original.
It was in the summer of that year, 1843, that I read the
work for myself. I was in London as before, and had the
same opportunities of conversing with Mill. We discussed the
work chapter by chapter, up to the last volume, which I had
not begun when I left town. We were very much at one both
as to the merits and as to the defects. The errors were
mostly of a kind that could be remedied by ordinary men
better informed on special points than Comte ; while the
systematic array was untouched. The improvement effected
in the Classification of the Sciences was apparent at a glance ;
while the carrying out of the Hierarchy, involving the double
dependence of each science upon the preceding, first as to
Doctrine and next as to Method, raised the scheme above the
usual barrenness of science-classifications. Mill had already
seized with alacrity, and embodied in the Logic, Comte s great
and I
distinction between Social Statics and Social Dynamics ;
was even more strongly impressed than he was, respecting the
value of that distinction, as an instrument of analysis. Comte,
according to his plan of pushing forward the ideas of each of
the fundamental sciences into the succeeding, had taken up
the distinction in Abstract Mechanics, and carried it first into