In morals Mill may be considered the creator of what Henry Sidgwick, in his _Methods of Ethics_ (1874), called Universalistic Hedonism. The English moralists of the {136} eighteenth century had set up the greatest happiness of the greatest number as the ideal end of action; but they did not hold that each individual could be expected to pursue anything but his own happiness; the object of Bentham (1748-1832) being to make the two coincide. Kant showed that the rule of right excluded any such accommodation, and a crisis in his own life led Mill to adopt the same conclusion. Afterwards he rather confused the issues by distinguishing between higher and lower pleasures, leaving experts to decide which were the pleasures to be preferred. The universalistic standard settles the question summarily by estimating pleasures according to their social utility. Mill fully sympathised with Comte's demand for social reorganisation as a means towards the moral end. But, with his English and Protestant traditions, he had no faith in the creation of a new spiritual power with an elaborate religious code and ritual as the best machinery for the purpose. In his opinion, the claims of the individual to extended liberty of thought and action, not their restriction, were what first needed attention. Second to this--if second at all--came the necessity for reforming representative government on the lines of an enlarged franchise and a readjusted electoral system with plural suffrage determined by merit, votes for women, and a contrivance for giving minorities a weight proportioned to their numbers. The problem of poverty was to be dealt with by restrictions on the increase of population and on the amount of inheritable property, the maximum of which ought not to exceed a modest competence. Among the noble characters presented by the history of philosophy we may distinguish between the heroic and the saintly types. To the former in modern {137} times belong Giordano Bruno, Fichte, and to some extent Comte; to the latter, Spinoza, Berkeley, and Kant. To the second class we may surely add John Stuart Mill, whom Gladstone called "the saint of rationalism," and of whom Auguste Laugel said, "He was not sincere--he was sincerity itself." HERBERT SPENCER.