Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches — Volume 2Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron
General
Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches — Volume 2
Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron
English essays
Mr Mill is exactly the writer to please people of this description.
His arguments are stated with the utmost affectation of precision; his
divisions are awfully formal; and his style is generally as dry as that
of Euclid's Elements. Whether this be a merit, we must be permitted to
doubt. Thus much is certain: that the ages in which the true principles
of philosophy were least understood were those in which the ceremonial
of logic was most strictly observed, and that the time from which we
date the rapid progress of the experimental sciences was also the time
at which a less exact and formal way of writing came into use.
The style which the Utilitarians admire suits only those subjects on
which it is possible to reason a priori. It grew up with the verbal
sophistry which flourished during the dark ages. With that sophistry it
fell before the Baconian philosopher in the day of the great deliverance
of the human mind. The inductive method not only endured but required
greater freedom of diction. It was impossible to reason from phenomena
up to principles, to mark slight shades of difference in quality, or to
estimate the comparative effect of two opposite considerations between
which there was no common measure, by means of the naked and meagre
jargon of the schoolmen. Of those schoolmen Mr Mill has inherited
both the spirit and the style. He is an Aristotelian of the fifteenth
century, born out of due season. We have here an elaborate treatise on
Government, from which, but for two or three passing allusions, it
would not appear that the author was aware that any governments actually
existed among men. Certain propensities of human nature are assumed;
and from these premises the whole science of politics is synthetically
deduced! We can scarcely persuade ourselves that we are not reading a
book written before the time of Bacon and Galileo,--a book written in
those days in which physicians reasoned from the nature of heat to the
treatment of fever, and astronomers proved syllogistically that the
planets could have no independent motion,--because the heavens were
incorruptible, and nature abhorred a vacuum!
The reason, too, which Mr Mill has assigned for taking this course
strikes us as most extraordinary.
"Experience," says he, "if we look only at the outside of the facts,
appears to be DIVIDED on this subject. Absolute monarchy, under Neros
and Caligulas, under such men as the Emperors of Morocco and Sultans of
Turkey, is the scourge of human nature. On the other side, the people of
Denmark, tired out with the oppression of an aristocracy, resolved that
their king should be absolute; and, under their absolute monarch, are as
well governed as any people in Europe."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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