shop-windows where he never thought to see it. Whately spoke handsomely of it, and desired his bookseller to get an additional copy for him, and expose it in the window.
While the work was printing, I prepared from the sheets a review of it, which came out in the "Westminster" in the April number, and was even more laudatory than Mill liked. The first adverse criticism of importance was an article in the autumn number of the "British Critic," of nearly a hundred pages, known to have been written by Mr. W. G. Ward, the ally of Newman and Pusey. It was a most remarkable production, and gave Mill very great satisfaction, all things considered. It was not so much a review of the "Logic" as of Mill altogether. Mr. Ward had followed him through his various articles in the "London and Westminster," and had mastered his modes of thinking in all the great questions; and the present article takes these up along with the "Logic." He expresses a warm interest in Mill himself, remarking, "An inquirer, who bears every mark of a single-minded and earnest pursuit of truth, cheers and relieves the spirits"; a pretty strong innuendo as to the prevailing dispositions of so-called inquirers. He deplores Mill's "miserable moral and religious deficiencies," and says if his "principles be adopted as a full statement of the truth, the whole fabric of Christian theology must totter and fall." Accordingly, the article is devoted to counterworking these erroneous tendencies; and the parts chosen for attack are the experience-foundations of the mathematical axioms, the derived view of conscience, and necessity as against free-will. Mr. Ward has continued to uphold his peculiar tenets against the experience-school. He had afterward, as he informs me, a good deal of correspondence with Mill, and once met him. At his instigation, Mill expunged from his second edition an objectionable anecdote.[1]
Without pursuing further at present the fortunes of the "Logic," I will allude to the connection between Mill and Comte, and to the share that Comte had in shaping Mill's political philosophy. Wheatstone always claimed to be the means of introducing Comte in England. He brought over from Paris the first two volumes of the "Philosophic Positive," after the publication of the second, which was in 1837. It would appear that the first volume, by itself, published in 1830, had fallen dead; notwithstanding that the first two chapters really contained in very clear language, although without expansion, the two great foundations that Comte built upon—the Three Stages and the Hierarchy of the Sciences. Wheatstone mentioned the work to his scientific friends in London, and among others to Brewster, who was then a contributor of scientific articles to the "Edinburgh Re-
- ↑ In regard to the "British Critic," he wrote, "I always hailed Puseyism, and predicted that thought would sympathize with thought—though I did not expect to find my own case so striking an example." I was told that he had written several letters in the "Morning Chronicle" in this strain of subtile remark.
