John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

COMTE S PECUNIARY MISFORTUNES. 75
reservation as before. Mill exerted himself with Grote and
Molesworth, who, with Raikes Currie, agreed to make up the
deficiency for the year. Another election came round, and he
and was again dependent on the assistance
was not reinstated ;
of his English friends. They made up a portion of his second
year s deficiency, but declined to continue the grant. He is
vexed and chagrined beyond, measure, and administers to Mill
a long lecture upon the relations of rich men to philosophers ;
but his complaint is most dignified in tone. This puts
Mill into a very trying position : he has to justify the
conduct of Grote and Molesworth, who might, with so little
inconvenience to themselves, have tided him over another
year. The delicate part of the situation was that Grote, who
began admiring Comte, as Mill did, although never to the same
degree, was yet strongly adverse to his sociological theories,
especially as regarded their tendency to introduce a new
despotism over the individual. Indeed, his admiration of
Comte scarcely extended at all to the sociological volumes.
He saw in them frequent mistakes and perversions of historical
facts, and did not put the same stress as Mill did upon the
Social analysis the distinction of Statics and Dynamics, and
the Historical Method; in fact, he had considerable misgivings
throughout as to all the grand theories of the French school on the
Philosophy of History. But the repression of liberty by a new
machinery touched his acutest susceptibility ; he often recurred
in conversation to this part of Comte s system, and would not
take any comfort from the suggestion I often made to him, that
there was little danger of any such system ever being in force.
It was the explanation of this divergence that Mill had to
convey to C o nte ; who, on the other hand, attempted
in vain
to re-argue the point, by calling to mind how much he and Mill
were agreed upon ; this, however, did not meet Grote s case.
He returned to the theme in successive letters, and urged upon
Mill that there was an exaggeration of secondary differences,
and so on. What may be said in his favour is, that Grote