John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

ADOPTIONS FROM COMTE. 73
greatest living authority on scientific methods in ". general On
p. 506, 1. 5 from bottom, before
first edition has
" To
prove (in short)," the
"
It is therefore well said of M. Comte ".
In
p. 512, 1. 13 from top, the words "but deem them," are
followed in ist ed. by "with the single exception of M. Comte".
In p.
1. 513, 9 from
"
top, after up to the present time," a long
sentence of reference to Comte is left out. In p.
1. 530, 14
from top, after
"
attempted to characterise," there is omitted
the clause
"
but which hitherto are to my knowledge exem
plified nowhere but in the writings of M. Comte ".
The distinction of Statics and Dynamics was carried by Mill
into the plan of his Political Economy. It also entered into
his Representative Government ; and if he had written a com
plete work on Sociology, he would have made it
his arrangement as Comte did.
the basis of
Mill s correspondence with Comte began in 1841. I heard
from himself a good deal of the substance of it as it went on.
Comte s part being now published, we can judge of the charac
ter of the whole, and infer much of Mill s part in the work. In
1842 and 1843, the letters on both sides were overflowing with
mutual regard. It was Comte s nature to be very frank, and
he was circumstantial and minute in his accounts of himself
and his ways. Mill was unusually open ; and revealed, what he
seldom told to anybody, all the fluctuations in his bodily and
mental condition. In one of the early letters, he coined the
word
and threw
"
pedantocracy," which Comte caught up,
about him right and left ever after. Already, in 1842, troubles
were brewing for him in Paris, partly in consequence
of his
peculiar tenets, and still more from his unsparing abuse of the
notables of Paris, the foremost object of his hate being the
all-powerful Arago. His personal situation, always detailed
with the utmost fulness, makes a considerable fraction of the
correspondence on his side. When in 1843, the
"
Polytechnic
pedantocracy," that is to say, the Council of the Polytechnic
School, for which he was Examiner, first assumed a hostile