The society in which such a thing as this was possible stood in crying need of an intelligent philosophy. The matter was all the worse because this incident came after the great English school, dominant during the first three quarters of the century, had grown and flourished, and was on the point of decay. This was the school which in the early years of the century had for its prophet Jeremy Bentham, and as inferior lights James Mill and the economists. During the third decade we see the thinkers who were in sympathy with these men gradually grouping themselves round John Stuart Mill, whose family connexions, as well as his own ability, made him a centre of the school. He was the son of the hard, dry, but able and clear-headed Scotch philosopher and historian, James Mill, who, almost from his son's cradle, set about the task of fashioning him in his own image. In some respects James Mill's success was wonderful. 'I started,' says J. S. Mill, 'I may fairly say, with an advantage of a quarter of a century over my contemporaries.' But even he was aware of the concomitant defects of the system. A want of tenderness on the part of James Mill led to the educational error of neglecting the cultivation of feeling, and hence to 'an undervaluing of poetry, and of imagination generally, as an element of human nature.' There are indications all through the younger Mill's life as of a warm-hearted, affectionate nature struggling to burst the fetters linked around him by his early education; and there is a touch of irony in the fact that in an early mental crisis John Mill found relief in the 'healing influence' of Wordsworth. [Sidenote: John Austin (1790-1859).] Among those who frequented James Mill's house were Grote and the two Austins, John and Charles, the latter a man of almost unequalled reputation for brilliant talents, who contented himself with extraordinary pecuniary success at the bar, and early retired with a fortune. The elder brother, John Austin, was rather an independent thinker who adopted many of the same views, than a disciple of James Mill. He never achieved what was expected of him. S. Mill says that his error was over-elaboration: he wore himself out before his work was accomplished through incapacity to satisfy himself. His writings are nevertheless full of redundancies; but he did a great deal towards forming a terminology for scientific jurisprudence. His works, _The Province of Jurisprudence Determined_ (1832), and _Lectures on Jurisprudence_ (1863), are, like nearly all the writings of his school, deficient in human interest.