Migrations of ‘Spirit’ in Mill’s Theory of History

Eisenach – Mill Spirit Paper - 10/19/2022 - 1

Draft: not for citation or quotation without author’s

permission.

Migrations of ‘Spirit’ in Mill’s Theory of History

Eldon J. Eisenach

The University of Tulsa, USA

[email protected]

Abstract

John Stuart Mill wrote the essay The Spirit of the Age as seven

installments in the Examiner between January and May, 1831.

This essay was Mill’s first attempt to outline in a

systematic way his new opinions following his mental crisis

in 1826 and the subsequent break with Benthamism. This paper

examines the uses and meanings of “spirit” in this essay and

then explores the ways in which “spirit” migrated into and

became central in Mill’s later philosophy and in those of

his closest followers. Spirit could be said to represent the

conceptual lever by which Mill moved both himself and 19th

century liberalism from its older foundations on to newer

historical and evolutionary ones.

---------------------------------------------------


[A prefatory note: When I began to study Mill almost forty

years ago, I recall reading The Philosophy of J.S. Mill by R. P.

Anschutz, the most respected (and probably the only)

comprehensive survey of Mill at the time. I didn’t like the

book, especially for its condescending treatment of Mill

born of the supreme self-confidence that Anglophone (aka,

Oxford) academic philosophy seemed to possess at the time. I

recall being especially miffed at a passage, early in the

book which read: “Somewhere or other in [Mill’s] writings

you can discern traces of every wind that blew in the early

nineteenth century.”1 This paper – admittedly an exploratory

and speculative first effort – looks at “wind” in Mill’s

writings, not as invisible forces that blew through his

writings causing philosophical confusion and contradiction,

but as a category of analysis that structured his writings

and gave them – and 19th century liberalism – a new kind of

coherence and power.]

John Stuart Mill wrote The Spirit of the Age in 1831. While

“spirit” in this essay is used primarily as the key element

in a larger theory of historical change, spirit plays an

equally important role in this essay in shaping, motivating,

and empowering the historical agents who effect that change.

Thus, spirit can be said to “migrate” between the inner

recesses of moral character formation and large-scale

political, social, and religious institutions and practices.


Another migration can be said to occur between inner

feelings and the external and systematic thoughts that

constitute the legitimating language of political

institutions and social practices. These two parallel

oscillations of spirit – from individual consciousness to

institutions and practices and from consciousness to

authoritative speculative and philosophical thought –

explain the power of human freedom and agency in history.

Mill’s final and most comprehensive analysis of these

migrations of spirit is found in Books IV and VI of System of

Logic, published in 1843. In the twelve-year period between

The Spirit of the Age and Logic, Mill wrote a series of essays and

reviews that also grappled with the location, movement, and

power of spirit. Most notable are “On Genius” (1832),

“Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy” (1833), Civilization (1836),

“Bentham” (1838), and “Coleridge” (1840). This paper will

first examine The Spirit of the Age, then turn to the meanings and

uses of spirit in these other writings, and, after turning

to the ways in which Mill’s spirit migrated into the

writings of some of his followers, conclude with reflections

on how Mill’s history of spirit is related to his writings

on religion.

I. The Spirit of the Age


Mill says in his Autobiography that The Spirit of the Age was

written, “to point out in the character of the present age,

the anomalies and evils characteristic of the transition

from a system of opinions which had worn out, to another

only in process of being formed” (1 CW, 181).2 Only by

understanding the inner spirits of our own age, will we be

able to understand the future. The leading argument of Spirit

begins in this context.

The present alone affords a fund of materials for

judging [our present condition], richer than the whole

stores of the past, and far more accessible…. No man

whose good qualities were mainly those of another age,

ever had much influence on his own. And since every age

contains in itself the germ of all future ages as

surely as the acorn contains the future forest, a

knowledge of our own age is the fountain of prophecy –

the only key to the history of posterity. It is only in

the present that we can know the future; and it is only

through the present that it is in our power to

influence that which is to come (22 CW, 229-30).3

This beginning, to say the least, does not seem to

constitute a strong brief for the study of history; indeed,

adds Mill, at best the study of history is the study of “the

spirit of ages long past, and more often the mere inanimate


carcass without the spirit” (22 CW, 230). But this anti-

historical impression is quickly belied. To call our present

age “an age of transition” (230) is to contrast it to the

“natural” or “organic” age from which it came (252).4 In

transitional ages, “mankind have outgrown old institutions

and old doctrines, and have not yet acquired new ones”

(230). A rupture between “worldly power” and “moral

authority,” once recognized, has the effect of awakening

from a dream (228). Beliefs which formerly “would call forth

or allay the spirit of the English people at pleasure”

(231), for example, have lost their power to charm: “the

superior capacity of the higher ranks for the exercise of

worldly power is now a broken spell” (315).

Spirit, as used here, is a kind of self and world-ordering

force. Natural ages are enchanted and whole; transitional

ages are disenchanted, full of contending theories, and,

therefore, disorganized and unstable. Now a younger and more

radical Mill would have praised this disenchantment as an

unalloyed good. Indeed, Mill’s first use of the term of

“spirit of the age” in a speech on Parliamentary reform in

1824, implied exactly that:

But if (which if God forbid) it should come at last to

this; and if moderate means, after repeated trials,

should fail to produce the desired effect; let all the


evils necessarily occasioned by these commotions, which

are the last and dangerous resort of the people, be on

the heads of those eternal enemies of mankind, who, by

their interested resistance to the spirit of the age,

will have rendered such a crisis inevitable (26 CW,

270).5

Here, the spirit of the age is to destroy the enchanted

past, under the assumption that recent advances of knowledge

have rendered nugatory its bewitching superstitions. To

destroy the old spell is to reveal new truth. In

“Coleridge,” however, he caricatures his earlier position:

“At their millennium, superstition, priestcraft, error and

prejudice of every kind, were to be annihilated; … and, this

accomplished, they never for a moment suspected that all of

virtues and graces of humanity would fail to flourish” (10

CW, 132). And in The Spirit of the Age, he immediately follows his

outline of an age of transition by explicitly denying that

the “discredit into which old institutions and old doctrines

have fallen” can be explained by “the growth of the human

understanding” and to a newly-acquired “capacity of

perceiving our true interests,” that can negate “the power

of imposters and charlatans to deceive us” (22 CW, 231-232).

Disenchantment is the loss of a common spirit, and this loss

of spirit, for individuals and for nations, is both an evil

and a danger:


A person may be without a single prejudice, and yet

utterly unfit for every purpose in nature. To have

erroneous convictions is one evil; but to have no

strong or deep-rooted convictions at all, is an

enormous one…. So long as this intellectual anarchy

shall endure, we may be warranted in believing that we

are in a fair way to become wiser than our forefathers;

but it would be premature to affirm that we are already

wiser. We have not yet advanced beyond the unsettled

state in which the mind is, when it has recently found

itself out in a grievous error, and has not yet

satisfied itself of the truth” (233).6

At this point the substantive argument of the essay begins

to take shape. In all natural or organic ages “the

uninstructed have faith in the instructed” (238). The shared

opinions of the instructed possess “moral influence” in the

larger society, infusing the society and its institutions

with a common spirit. These opinions are grounded in the

best knowledge and the deepest reflection then available.

Through the instruments of “worldly power” represented by

wealth and political and religious power, the ideas of the

instructed are translated into moral authority, and moral

authority, in turn, legitimates worldly power. As doctrine,


then, spirit organizes both personalities and societies,

infusing both with purpose and will.

As it stands, this formulation of a natural state of society

suggests a perverse tautology: worldly power declares truth

and truth legitimates power. Mill lends support to this

tautology by attributing moral influence to three

“distinguishable sources … eminent wisdom and virtue, real

or supposed; the power of addressing mankind in the name of

religion; and, finally, worldly power” itself (290).7 The

force of this impression is not lessened when he adds that,

in Europe, worldly power usually follows wealth, first in

the form of land, and then augmented by commerce. And Mill

does not elide the fact that most landed wealth was

hereditary and that its holders constituted a corporate

landed aristocracy at whose peak sat a hereditary monarch.

On what basis do kings, aristocrats, and priests claim their

authority? Mill takes it for granted that “superiority of

wisdom and virtue, or … religion, pre-engages men’s minds with

the opinions and feelings in favour of which those

authorities declare themselves” (290, italics mine). This

holds as well with the moral influence of aristocrats and

kings.


All persons, from the most ignorant to the most

instructed, from the most stupid to the most

intelligent, have their minds more or less under the

dominion of one or other, or all, of the influences

which have just been mentioned. All bow down, with a

submission more or less implicit, to the authority of

superior minds, or of the interpreters of the divine

will, or of their superiors in rank and station (290).

At this point, however, Mill interjects a new argument that

undermines the supposition that, in natural or organic ages,

power determines truth – at least in societies that are

progressive and serve as the engines of civilizational

advance. If claims to moral authority and to worldly power

are considered historically and in terms of the available

alternatives, Mill argues, there is no question that, in

medieval Europe, kings, aristocrats and priests had the

strongest claims. Such was the fragility of political power

that those able to seize and hold it did so by overcoming

their opponents in mind, body, and spirit (255-258). And the

clergy, as the “sole depositaries of all the treasure of

thought, and reservoirs of intellectual delight” and who,

alone, were permitted “the tranquil pursuit of peaceful

occupations and studies” were the only body capable of

“curbing the unruly passions of mankind” by “teaching them

to set a value upon a distant end … and to prize


gratifications consisting of mental feelings above bodily

sensation” (305-306). Measured by the standards and state of

knowledge available, “the ascendancy of the Catholic clergy

was to be desired, for that day, even by the philosopher”

(306). And this same hypothetical philosopher might equally

have approved their monarchical and aristocratic governments

1Endnotes

? R. P. Anschutz, The Philosophy of J.S. Mill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), 5. 2 All quotation from Mill’s writings is from Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, John Robson, General Editor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963--), and are cited as CW, preceded by the volume number and followed by page numbers.3 A similar idea is expressed many years later in “On the Definition of Political Economy:” No one who attempts to lay downpropositions for the guidance of mankind, however perfect his scientific acquirements, can dispense with a practical knowledge of the actual modes in which the affairs of the world are carriedon, and an extensive personal experience of the actual ideas, feelings, and intellectual and moral tendencies of his own age” (4 CW, 333).4 These terms were originally used by Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) and then by Auguste Comte (1798-1857).5 This is how Joseph Hamburger portrays James Mill in James Mill and the Art of Revolution (Greenwood Press, 1977).6 Later in the essay Mill asks, “is it an evil to have strong convictions, and steady unfluctuating feelings? It is on the contrary, essential to all dignity or solidity of character, and to all fitness for guiding or governing mankind. It constitutes prejudice, only when society is at one of those turns or vicissitudes in its history, at which it becomes necessary that it should change its opinions and its feelings” (294).7 As restated later in the essay, “the three sources of moral influence are, supposed wisdom and virtue, the sacerdotal office,and the possession of worldly power” (312). Bruce Baum, Rereading Power and Freedom in J. S. Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), chapters 3 and 8, contains an excellent analysis of Mill’smany writings on the relationship between social/cultural and


(289). For all of its faults, and in comparison with all

other ordered societies at the time, Mill concludes,

European Christendom was the only civilization that was at

once stable and progressive (305).

Against this background of a “fully realized … natural state

of society,” (306) Mill traces the path of civilizational

progress into the current period. In countries that remained

Catholic, the Church became wholly dominated by worldly

power and interests, thereby losing its separate moral

influence. Thus united, worldly authority and moral

influence “fell together to the ground” because moral

authority, now dead matter, stood in the path of emergent

spirits. In Protestant Europe, spirit continued to flourish,

but under markedly changed conditions. Because the church

did not claim direct sacerdotal authority from God, religion

as a source of moral authority came from many different

sources: national princes, politically appointed clergy,

self-chosen clergy, religiously enthused layman, and, as in

Scotland, even heads of families, all competed to instruct

the multitudes in their religion (312).

In this “period of intellectual excitement and hardy

speculation which succeeded the crisis of the Reformation”

political power, pointing especially to “Armand Carrel” (1837), “De Tocqueville on Democracy in America” I (1835) II (1840), and Considerations on Representative Government (1861).


the British Isles entered an “intermediate stage” between

Christendom and modernity – an age of incredible moral and

political advance. Because the power of monarchy and the

church became contested, Parliament became the source of new

men arising to prominence on the basis of their energy,

virtue, and will. Country gentlemen such as Elliott,

Hampden, Colepepper, and Wentworth were joined by Bacon,

Cecil, Walsingham, Seldon, Ireton, Pym, Coke and others

trained in the law (281-82). These men, “in fulfilling the

exalted mission, to which they were called by an ambition

justly to be called noble,” became “the natural leaders of

the people,” making “this country the nurse of more that is

exalted in sentiment, and expansive and profound in thought,

than has been produced by all other countries in the modern

world taken together” (282).

This shining 17th century English moment, this triumph of

living spirit over dead matter, was not to last. Because

worldly advantage often accompanied adherence to the

established church, the separate moral influence of the

church and its universities became subordinated to the moral

influence of temporal superiority generally – that is, the

religious and intellectual spirit was not free. Even

Dissenters became more pliant and acquiescing (313). Soon,

political, religious and intellectual energy “passed into

the hands of the wealthy classes, and became united with


worldly power.” And while they did not monopolize moral

influence, their opinions respecting government, morality,

education, and the structure of society “took a deep root in

the English mind” (313-14).

The 18th century subordination of spirit to worldliness did

not immediately result in a moral and political crisis

associated with a transitional period. While the wealthy

classes by no means included “all the persons qualified to

govern men’s minds, or to direct their temporal interests”

(314) they did contain a larger share than all other classes

combined and often co-opted talented outsiders into their

ranks. Having just enough moral influence “to prevent any

opinions, which they do not acknowledge, from passing into

received doctrines” (316) they were able to maintained their

worldly privileges and powers.

Eighteenth-century England, living on the residues of the

previous century’s explosion of intelligence and spirit, was

still able to continue, for at time, the conditions of a

natural state of society. But as spirit waned, the strength

and character of Britain’s leaders continued to fall even as

they prospered in wealth, influence, and power. As if

refuting David Hume’s essays on refinement, commerce, and

national greatness, Mill concludes “In the same ratio in

which they have advanced in humanity and refinement, they


have fallen off in energy of intellect and strength of

will.” Their business acumen dulled as hereditary wealth

flourished. Their political skills atrophied along with

their knowledge of the world, a knowledge now so narrow and

impaired as to be less even than “a fellow of a college”

(315).

Here, then, is Mill’s portrait of England entering an age of

transition – power without moral authority, and no body of

persons waiting in the wings with a coherent and attractive

alternative vision. Early in the essay Mill depicted England

in an age of transition because

the progress of inquiry has brought to light the

insufficiency of the ancient doctrines; but those who

have made the investigation of social truths their

occupation, have not yet sanctioned any new body of

doctrine with their unanimous, or nearly unanimous,

consent. The true opinion is recommended to the public

by no greater weight of authority than hundreds of

false opinions; and even at this day, to find any thing

like a united body of grave and commanding authority,

we must revert to the doctrines from which the

progressiveness of the human mind, or, as it is more

popularly called, the improvement of the age, has set

us free (245).8


Now, at the end of the essay, having explained how and why

England had reached this state, Mill calls for the

divestment of this “monopoly of worldly power” held by the

wealthy classes in England to make possible the emergence of

an new spirit shaped by “the most virtuous and best-

instructed of the nation” (316). As their moral influence

acquires an “ascendancy over the opinions and feelings of

the rest … England can emerge from this crisis of

transition, and enter once again into a natural state of

society” (316). This ringing conclusion, however, entails an

obvious difficulty: such a class of the most virtuous and

best instructed has yet to be formed. The very definition of

a transition age implies an anarchy of conflicting theories

and world views, none of which has sufficiently engaged the

energies and talents of a new set of natural intellectual,

moral and political leaders. Unlike England’s shining moment

in the Reformation period, no shared spirit has impelled the

kinds of courage and sacrifice required to forge a new

spirit to beckon and then to underwrite a new set of

national leaders.

This particularly difficulty – and there are others9 -- will

be set aside for later consideration. The more interesting

8 Interestingly, Mill labels weakly or inconsistently held beliefs as “theory;” see 22 CW, 240 and 313 and a letter to Carlyle, 12 CW, 154.


path is to trace the ways in which Mill’s use of spirit in

this essay migrates into and is partially transformed in his

other writings in this period.

II. Migrations of Spirit in Mill’s Other Writings.

The most obvious connection to The Spirit of the Age is Mill’s

essay Civilization, published with the subtitle “Signs of the

Times,”10 in the London and Westminster Review in 1836.

Civilization can be understood in two ways, as human

improvement in general, or as the kinds of improvement that

has distanced “wealthy and powerful” nations from backward

ones. Mill addresses civilization in this second sense, as

the acquisition of wealth and power, for it is this meaning

of civilization that has elicited concerns about its

accompanying vices and miseries – even to the point of

asking whether civilization is, on balance, a good or an

evil (18 CW, 119). While Mill judges civilization a good,

it is not an unalloyed good: “we think there is other good,

much even of the highest good, which civilization in this

9 The most notable one is Mill’s discussion of England in the 17th

century. How can the political and religious turmoil in the period between the reign of Mary (1553-1558) and the Treaty of Utrecht (1713-1714) be treated as a natural or organic period? 10 This subtitle is from Carlyle’s famous 1829 essay of the same name, in which he excoriates the radicals for thinking that good government will follow from cultivating and mobilizing more intense feelings of self-interest. For a discussion of Carlyle’s essay in relation to Mill, see Nicholas Capaldi, John Stuart Mill; A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 93-94.


sense does not provide for, and some which it has a tendency

(though that tendency may be counteracted) to impede”

(119).11

The “highest good” involves loss of spirit as energy and

force of will. This loss is most marked in the effect of

civilization upon “character … a relaxation of individual

energy: or rather, the concentration of it within the narrow

sphere of the individual’s money-getting pursuits” (129).

While the reasons for both the loss and the redirection of

energies are complex, the most obvious reason is “that power

passes more and more from individuals, and small knots of

individuals, to masses: that the importance of the masses

becomes constantly greater, that of individuals less” (121).

Mill traces out the “causes, evidences, and consequences of

this law of human affairs” (121) regarding loss of

individual efficacy and individual energy. Paralleling his

distinction between “worldly power” and “moral influence” in

The Spirit of the Age, Mill distinguishes two elements of

importance and influence over mankind, “property” and

“acquirements of mind” (121). In earlier ages, only the very

few had either, and they were usually allied. Two new

11 John Robson, “Civilization and Culture as Moral Concepts,” in John Skorupski, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Mill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 338-371, is a comprehensive survey of the centrality of this concern across the entire range of Mill’s writings.


factors, both the products of advancing civilization, “the

gradual rise of trading and manufacturing classes” and “the

progress of the power of co-operation” (121-22), vastly

diluted the material power and moral influence of the few

and increasingly diffused it among the middle classes.

Keeping to this distinction, the essay proceeds to consider,

first, the material or external effects of civilization, by

considering institutions, and then, the spiritual or

internal effects, by considering the effects of civilization

on the character of individuals and societies.

The most obvious political effect of civilization is to have

wholly undermined the older constitutional arrangements that

presumed the dominance of a hereditary landed aristocracy.

Echoing Tocqueville’s call12 for a new science of politics

for a new era, Mill declares:

Whoever can meditate on it, and not see that so great a

revolution vitiates all existing rules of government

and policy, and renders all practice and all

predictions grounded only on prior experience

worthless, is wanting in the very first and most

elementary principle of statesmanship in these times

(126).

12 Mill had written his review of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America,vol. one, a year before writing Civilization.


The only question that remains is whether the masses are

prepared or unprepared for their new role. And because they

are not, there are two ways in which to prepare them.

Using all means, on the one hand, for making the masses

themselves wiser and better; on the other, for so

rousing the slumbering energy of the opulent and

lettered classes, so storing the youth of those classes

with the profoundest and most valuable knowledge, so

calling forth whatever of individual greatness exists

or can be raised up in the country, as to create a

power which might partially rival the mere power of the

masses, and might exercise the most salutary influence

over them for their on good (127).

Mill saw his role as that of helping create a new

intellectual class infused with a common spirit anchored in

a new way of understanding man and society. This response

takes shape as Mill shifts his attention from the

external/political to the internal/moral effects of

civilization. Here, Mill explores “the direct influence of

Civilization itself upon individual character, and the moral

effects produced by the insignificance into which the

individual falls in comparison with the masses” (129).


Amending what he had said earlier about civilization as both

relaxing individual energy and redirecting it toward money-

getting pursuits, Mill now separates these two phenomena:

“Thus it happens that in highly civilized countries, and

particularly among ourselves, the energies of the middle

classes are almost confined to money-getting, and those of

the higher classes are nearly extinct” (130). This

understanding of a transitional age, then, suggests that, as

energy turns to worldly interests, spirit is dissipated and

lost in matter, becoming, by default, the servant of

material interests rather than its leader and master. Those

who previously were the main bearers of spirit become

demoralized and passive. The corrosion of private virtue and

individual character, “corrupts the very fountain of the

improvement of public opinion itself; it corrupts public

teaching; it weakens the influence of the more cultivated

few over the many” (133-34).

In the concluding portion of the essay, Mill turns to

remedies for the moral effects of civilization, i.e., a

program by which England might move from a transitional age

to a new organic or natural one. The first proposal is that

intellectual distinction be more clearly recognized and

given increased deference by a better organization of the

intellectual professions (136-37). The second proposal, also

briefly summarized, suggests creating organizations to


establish standards for literature and other high

intellectual production, “whereby works of first-rate

merit ... might come forth with the stamp on them … of the

approval of those whose names would carry authority” (138).

These are mere external and somewhat artificial palliatives,

however, in comparison with his third project.

Mill’s longest and most ambitious remedy addresses the

“regeneration of individual character” (138) through

inspiriting reforms of the universities and the Church. This

remedy has not even begun because both contemporary popular

doctrines and older prejudices have proven too powerful for

a new set of ideas and ideals to be heard. And without a new

spirit, neither education nor religion can reassume its

historic tasks. In the face of the many new theories of man

and society, each contending for leadership, intellectual

and moral regeneration must begin from the ground up.

In the department of pure intellect, the highest place

will belong to logic and the philosophy of mind: the

one, the instrument for the cultivation of all

sciences; the other, the root from which they all

grow…. The pupil must be led to interrogate his own

consciousness, to observe and experiment upon himself:

of the mind, by any other process, little will he ever

know (146).13


Mill’s call for new “philosophy of mind” – a new and

compelling moral and social psychology – becomes Mill’s way

of conceiving his own intellectual and political vocation.

Through a series of long letters to Carlyle in the period

1832-1834, Mill seeks to shape a new vocation for himself in

terms of this regenerative project. “My vocation” as he sees

it, is to be “a logical expounder [rather] than an artist …

yet in a spirit higher than was ever inspired by mere logic”

(12 CW, 113).14 Most thoughtful people “must have the logical

side of [Truth] turned first toward them; then it must be

quite turned round before them, that they may see it to be

the same Truth in its poetic that it is in its metaphysical

aspect” (113). Mill’s task is to feel and understand these

higher and more elusive truths so clearly and self-

consciously that he can restate them in philosophical form.

He is prepared for this reconstructive task because, as he

13 In an earlier review Mill had sketched out a similar project: “If there is any period in man’s history in which the scientific study of the human mind is indispensable, it is at a period of moral transition like the present; when those general creeds, which had kept the diversities of individual character in subordination by a common rule of right, are breathing their last– and others, more adapted to the present condition of the species, are slowly and with difficulty evolving themselves out of the shapeless and tumultuous chaos of conflicting opinions. The ancient doctrines will never more regain the ascendancy they have lost….. That unity of doctrine, however, which formerly existed, must exist once more, though under other auspices, ere men can yet again have earnest, solemn convictions, and yield willing obedience to a new and steady rule of life” (23 CW, 425).


told Carlyle, incidents in his own “spiritual history” (224)

have not only disabused him of older certainties, they have

plunged him into a personal version of an age of transition,

forcing him to discover and incorporate new forms of self-

understanding. This “internal” occupation, this “increased

experience of [his] own feelings” (161), constitutes an

“intellectual history” (205) that prepares him to understand

the loss of spirit in his own age and the means by which

spirit might be restored.15

Restoring spirit to thought will not only free thought from

subordination to mere matter (and mere prevailing logic), it

will emancipate ideas from prevailing worldly powers and

interests, and in so doing, empower new and higher values.

Civilization contains just this hope.

The very corner-stone of an education intended to form

great minds, must be the recognition of the principle,

that the object is to call forth the greatest possible

quantity of intellectual power, and to inspire the

intensest love of truth … for in proportion to the degree

of intellectual power and love of truth which we

succeed in creating, is that certainty that (whatever

may happen in any one particular instance) in the

aggregate of instances true opinions will be the result

(18 CW, 144).


As these new truths gain mastery and power, even religious

differences will be healed: “the spirit of English religion

[will] become catholic instead of sectarian, favourable

instead of hostile to freedom of thought and the progress of

the human mind” (146).

In a series of shorter essays and reviews also written in

the 1830s, Mill expands on the uses of spirit as a means of

self- and social understanding, in this instance, through a

reading of history as the domain of past spirit. Carlyle’s

history of the French Revolution captures “not the dry,

mechanical facts which comprise the story; but the feelings –

14 In a later letter to Carlyle, this same idea is repeated: whilea few people will grasp poetic truths intuitively, “the other andmore numerous kind of people will consider them as nothing but dreaming or madness…. Now this last [task of translation] I thinkis the proper office of the logician or I might say the metaphysician, in truth he must be both…. [I]t is possible to convince him who never could know the intuitive truths, that theyare not inconsistent with anything he does know; that they are even very probable, and that he may have faith in them when highernatures than his own affirm that they are truths…. Now this humbler part is, I think, that which is most suitable to my faculties, as a man of speculation” (12 CW, 163; and see 219). This might be read as an argument in “Theism.”15 This parallel has led some students of Mill to suggest that Spirit of the Age was Mill’s first attempt to write his autobiography.This secondary literature is discussed in Eldon J. Eisenach, “Mill’s Autobiography as Political Theory” and “Self-Reform as Political Reform in the Writings of John Stuart Mill,” in Eldon J. Eisenach, ed., Narrative Power and Liberal Truth: Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, and Mill (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 155-72 and 173-88.


the high and solemn, the tender or mournful, even the gay

and mirthful contemplations, which the story, or the manner

of relating it, awakens in our minds” (20 CW, 137).

Michelet’s history of France “has aimed at giving us, not

the dry husk, but the spirit of those ages … what was really

passing in the collective mind of each generation … [the]

many successive conditions of humanity, and states of the

human mind” (20 CW, 233).

Other literatures besides histories must also play their

parts in shaping individual and collective consciousness.

Here, given the sheer amount of publication, literary

criticism must play a decisive role. In an 1832 review of

Use and Abuse of Political Terms, written by a young Benthamite,

Mill excoriates the author for seeing past political ideas

through “the eye of a mere logician” rather than seeking to

learn from them by discerning their deeper meanings. By

failing to look upon “great men and their works with a

reverential spirit,” the writer fails to “discern that there

is truth at the bottom” of what might appear on the surface

to be error (23 CW, 6-7).16 In his “Remarks on Bentham’s

Philosophy” (1833) and in “Bentham” (1838), Mill extends

this argument to critique the very heart of utilitarian

16 And see 23 CW, 748-49 on how this search for spirit helps us to see the real character of the “man” in the “writer.” This review, Mill told Carlyle, was “the truest paper I had ever written, for it was the most completely an outgrowth of my own mind & character” (12 CW, 205).


philosophy. Bentham, like his young disciple, failed to

derive “light from other minds” (10 CW, 90; and see 18).

This failure to discern the inner spirit of outward forms of

the thoughts of others places ones own ideas in thrall to

prevailing “worldly power” and interests – which is exactly

how Mill characterized Bentham’s philosophy in “Logic of the

Moral Sciences” (8 CW, 889-90). Translated into the

argument from Civilization, Benthamism is a philosophy showing

us, at best, “the means by which, in any given state of the

national mind, the material interests of society can be

protected” (10 CW, 99). Without considering the “national

mind,” the spirit behind the matter, Bentham’s philosophy is

radically deficient.

The absence of spirit in Bentham yields a related defect in

his moral psychology. Morality consists of two parts, “the

training, by the human being himself, of his affections and

will” and “the regulation of his outward actions” (10 CW,

98). Bentham’s psychology only addresses the second, and,

therefore, has nothing to say about self-culture and the

formation of character. Without consideration of spirit,

there can be no real understanding of character, whether

individual or national. Here, Mill argues, the writings of

Coleridge are needed. Coleridge outlined the spiritual

requisites for social union, and in so doing, underlined the

importance of meaning and spirit for the effective


organization of material life.17 Because Coleridge “looked

upon the culture of the inward man as the problem of

problems” (10 CW, 140), he connected inward moral culture

and national spirit. While Bentham merely reflected the

prevailing spirit (or lack thereof) of his day (10 CW, 5),

Coleridge, by seeking “to preserve the stores and to guard

the treasures” of the past, binds “the present with the

past” and thus connects “the present with the future” (10

CW, 147, quoting Coleridge). However, the time for

Coleridge has not yet arrived; “a class of thinkers has

scarcely yet arisen by whom he is to be judged” (10 CW,

121).

A true thinker can only be justly estimated when his

thoughts have worked their way into minds formed in a

different school; have been wrought and moulded into

consistency with all other true and relevant thoughts;

when the noisy conflict of half-truths, angrily denying

one another, has subsided, and ideas which seem

mutually incompatible, have been found only to require

17 10 CW, 133-36. These requisites include a system of education and restraining discipline; a feeling of allegiance or loyalty, “something which is settled, something permanent, and not to be called in question” (133); and a “strong and active principle of cohesion … a feeling of common interest among those who live under the same government” (134-35). This section of the essay isrepeated verbatim in “Logic of the Moral Sciences” (8 CW, 921-24), in section 5, “Social Statics, or the science of the Coexistences of Social Phenomena” which is part of the chapter, “Of the Inverse Deductive, or Historical Method.”


mutual limitations. This time has not yet come for

Coleridge. The spirit of philosophy of England, like

that of religion, is still rootedly sectarian (122).

Mill’s regenerative vocation was to integrate the material

truths of Bentham with the spiritual meanings of Coleridge:

“whoever could master and premises and combine the methods

of both, would possess the entire English philosophy of

their age” (10 CW, 121). Mill’s System of Logic, already being

written when “Coleridge” was published, is just this

attempt. Two features stand out in Mill’s attempted

synthesis, the centrality of spirit at the linguistic

foundation of his reasoning and the spiritual elements built

into his “inverse deductive, or historical method” for the

study of man and society.

“Of the Requisites of a Philosophical Language,” is, to my

knowledge, wholly ignored by students of Mill’s moral and

political philosophy. In this chapter of Book IV of System of

Logic (uninvitingly called “Of Operations Subsidiary to

Induction”) Mill laments the fact that philosophers, in

their attempts to give a term a fixed meaning, often discard

connotations “which the word, in however indistinct a

manner, previously carried with it.” In so doing, language

can lose one of its most valuable properties, “that of being

the conservator of ancient experience; the keeper-alive of


those thoughts and observations of former ages, which may be

alien to the tendencies of the passing time.” Daily life and

the power of present interests combine to strip words down

to those meanings “with which the association is most

immediate and strongest, or most kept up by the incidents of

life: the remainder being lost; unless the mind, by often

consciously dwelling on them, keeps up the association” (8

CW, 679-81). Mill illustrates this process in the context of

religious, ethical, and political doctrines, which are “so

full of meaning and reality to first converts” but then

“degenerate rapidly into lifeless dogmas” unless

counteracted by education expressly designed to keep their

earlier meanings alive” (681).18 More typically, however,

there results “the perpetual oscillation in spiritual

truths…. Their meaning is almost always in a process either

of being lost or of being recovered” (682).19

In “On Genius” (1832), Mill explored the idea of recovery of

linguistic meaning by comparing it to the discovery of new

truth.

Philosophic genius is said to be the discovery of new

truth. But what is new truth? That which has been known

a thousand years may be new truth to you or me…. A man

who knows may tell me what he knows … and I may learn

to parrot it after him; but if I would know it, I must


place my mind in the same state in which he has placed

his; I must make the thought my own thought; I must

verify the fact by my own observation, or by

interrogating my own consciousness (1 CW, 330-31).

Especially in “knowledge of supersensual things, of man’s

mental and moral nature” this appropriation of the thoughts

of others requires “self-knowledge … by a mind which has

actively studied itself.” Recovery then becomes discovery.

As the light of others “comes … from within” this discovery

becomes genius bearing new truths for mankind (332).

Given Mill’s discussion of the oscillation of meaning in

language, periods of transition, when moral, political, and

religious language has lost its spirit, are in special need

18 This argument is repeated in On Liberty. Without the challenge of debate and contestation, the spirit of prevailing truths will be sacrificed to the letter. Words will contract, ceasing “to suggest ideas, or suggest only a small portion of those they wereoriginally employed to communicate. Instead of a vivid conceptionand a living belief, there remain only a few phrases retained by rote, or, if any part, the shell and husk only of the meaning is retained, the finer essence being lost. The great chapter in human history which this fact occupies and fills, cannot be too earnestly studied and meditated on” (18 CW, 247).19 This argument is surprising close to that of Charles Taylor, “Philosophy and its History,” in Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneedwind, and Quentin Skinner, ed., Philosophy in History; Essays on theHistoriography of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 17-30. “We may be driven to historical retrieval not only by the need to escape from a given social form, but also because we want to recover or restore one which is under pressure and in danger of being lost” (27).


of this kind of genius. But the very conditions constituting

the need for this kind of genius are barriers to its

appearance. The first barrier is that the older truths have

lost their power to enchant. The meaning “which was

contained in them” was “only the meaning of that which they

have been taught, and still profess to believe” (682), but

no longer a living force in shaping the character of

individuals and society. The recovery of forgotten truths on

their older terms is further retarded by the emergence of a

new kind of philosopher, one appropriate to an age of lost

spirit.

Towards the close of the downward period [of

oscillation], when the words have lost part of their

significance, and have not yet begun to recover it,

persons arise whose leading and favourite idea is the

importance of clear conceptions and precise thought,

and the necessity, therefore, of definite language

(683).

Incapable of “rediscovering the lost signification,” they

also reject as unmeaning or nonsense the “formulas” or

contexts within which those significations were embedded

(683). As if Bentham (and contemporary British philosophy)

is not clearly enough signaled here, Mill adds that these

new philosophers then proceed to


fasten down the name to what it connotes in common use

and the time when it displays the smallest quantity of

meaning; and introduce the practice of employing it,

consistently and uniformly, according to that

connotation. The word in this way acquires an extent of

denotation far beyond what it had before…. Of the

propositions in which it was formerly used, those which

were true in virtue of the forgotten part of its

meaning are now, by the clearer light which the

definition diffuses, seen not to be true…. The ancient

formulas are consequently treated as prejudices (683).

At this point, Mill credits the rise of “the Coleridge

school” and its potential for the recovery of older truth as

a resource from which to construct newer truths not bound to

present interests and power. Because “language is the

depository … of experience to which all former ages have

contributed their part … we have no right to prevent

ourselves from transmitting to posterity a larger portion of

this inheritance than we may ourselves have profited by”

(685).

Mill concludes by alluding to his new vocation. While


logicians cannot make the meaning of any but scientific

terms … logicians can ascertain clearly what it is

which, working obscurely, has guided the general mind

to a particular employment of a name; and when they

have found this, they can clothe it in such distinct

and permanent terms, that mankind shall see the meaning

which before they only felt, and shall not suffer it to

be afterwards forgotten or misapprehended (697).20

This vocational understanding is embedded in Book VI of

System of Logic, “The Logic of the Moral Sciences.” For spirit

to be free to penetrate, organize, and transform society,

spirit must first be free to penetrate, organize, and

transform individual character. Mill’s moral science starts

by replacing the earlier utilitarian understanding of

freedom and necessity with a moral psychology grounded in “a

feeling of moral freedom.” This reflexive capacity, this

“consciousness of the freedom,” provides a more capacious

understanding of “the laws of the mind” by demonstrating how

“a state of mind is produced by a state of mind” (8 CW, 841

and 849). In his earlier critiques of Bentham, Mill says

that only as we are emancipated from enslavement to external

circumstances – circumstances often embedded in language

itself – are we able to acquire a “power over our own 20 In an earlier draft, the passage contained this concluding sentence: “And this is a power not lower in dignity, and far lessliable to abuse, than the chimerical one of domineering over language” (8 CW, n. 8, 697).


character” and to desire, “for its own sake, the conformity

of our [own] character to [our own] standard of excellence,

without hope of good or fear of evil from other sources than

[our] own inward consciousness” (10 CW, 8 and 95).

The laws of the individual mind run parallel with the laws

of the national mind; the formation of individual character

runs parallel with the formation of national character. The

connecting point is the process by which the spirit of free

individuals becomes translated into the legitimating ideas

and moral influences of the larger society – the main theme

of Spirit of the Age. Here, however, Mill makes the connection

between moral psychology and social theory even stronger.

Because the “inverse deductive, or historical method”

incorporates “consciousness of freedom” into the center of

this method, history, like autobiography, must be understood

as charting changes in consciousness.

Any one who is willing to take … the trouble of

thinking himself into the doctrine as thus stated, will

find it, I believe, not only a faithful interpretation

of the universal experience of human conduct, but a

correct representation of the mode in which he himself,

in every particular case, spontaneously interprets his

own experience of that conduct. But if this principle

is true of individual man, it must be true of


collective man. If it is the law of human life, the law

must be realized in history (8 CW, 932).21

Mill’s analysis of states of society and changes in those

states parallels his moral psychology and reflects the

influence of “the Coleridge school.” The role of spirit is

expressed as the power of “speculative ideas” to shape a

common culture and a shared set of moral opinions. History

is the study of “the successive transformations of human

opinions” (927) that are each the product of the “the

speculative faculties of mankind, including the nature of

beliefs which by any means they have arrived at concerning

themselves and the world by which they are surrounded”

(926). Confirmation of this proposition comes both from the

“evidence of history and that of human nature” (926). Such

is the power and freedom of spirit in history, that, in the

transition from one age to another, it not worldly power and

the force of material circumstances that powers the change,

but the migration of spirit from one set of speculative

ideas to another.

Polytheism, Judaism, Christianity, Protestantism, the

critical philosophy of modern Europe, and its positive

science – each of these has been the primary agent in 21 In Autobiography, Mill refers to the way in which this part of System of Logic was “a veritable life saver” because it released him from the Benthamite doctrine that he was merely “the helpless slave of antecedent circumstances” (1 CW, 175-177).


making society what it was at each successive period,

while society was but secondarily instrumental in

making them, each of them … being mainly an emanation

not from the practical life of the period, but from the

previous state of belief and thought (927).

When dramatic historical change does occur, it results from

individual spirit migrating outward to other individuals and

then to society at large. Men of genius, then, are those who

understand the inner spirit of their times, but transcend it

by catching a vision of a world (and of lives) not yet born.

Eminent men do not merely see the coming light from the

hill-top; they mount on the hill-top and evoke it; and

if no one had ever ascended thither, the light, in many

cases, might never have risen upon the plain at all

(938).22

III. Migrations of Mill’s Spirit in his Followers

Mill’s “spirit,” both as an intellectual construct and as

the influence of his character on others, rapidly spread.

The first group to manifest this influence was energetic 22 This same “plains” image is used in Civilization (18 CW, 126), buthere in the modern democratic context where “raising the plains” by empowering the masses tends to reduce the visibility and powerof “eminences.”


university-trained men, many from Cambridge University, who

became influential writers and reviewers in, and editors of,

the major periodicals of higher journalism.23 A second group

consisted of liberal churchmen at Oxford, who received

Mill’s teaching largely through his System of Logic which was

incorporated into the curriculum almost immediately after

its publication.

The first group, led by Leslie and James Fitzjames Stephen

and John Morley, also included Frederic Harrison, Mark

Pattison, and G. H. Lewes, the life-long partner of the

novelist George Elliot. The writings of this group, which I

have summarized elsewhere,24 include autobiographies, like

Mill’s own, as testaments tracing the paths and “moments” in

the writers’ spiritual or intellectual history.25 This same

focus on inner spirit is found in the many biographical histories

of ideas they wrote, either as individual studies or as the

succession of individual thinkers.26 As Leslie Stephen put

it, because we live in “an historical age; our special

function is critical. We do not produce original thought,

but live upon examining and dressing up the inheritance of

our ancestors.”27 Historical consciousness, what Mill called

the spirit of the age, was the medium through which Mill and

his followers wrote their own lives and examined the ideas 23 See, Christopher Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism; University Liberals and the Challenge of Democracy, 1860-1886 (London: Allen Lane, 1976); and Christopher Kent, “The Higher Journalism and the Mid-Victorian Clerisy,” 23 Victorian Studies (1969): 181-98.


of others. These genres were not philosophy, nor even the

history of philosophy as the path of logic and analysis, but

the history of spirit as manifested in individuals and

through the path of their ideas over time.

The clearest articulation of this focus on spirit is in the

writings of Mark Pattison of Oxford. A close student of Mill

and thoroughly conversant in German historicism, Pattison

sought to apply “the laws of thought and of the succession

of opinion … to the course of English religious thought”

(E&R, 255).28 Because “the province of a history of

philosophy is very different from a province of a history of

thought,” which embraces politics, art, and religion, in

addition to philosophy, one must seek to find the

“regulative ideas” that integrate all of these spheres.29

The power of this new historical consciousness is such, he

concludes, that “all the philosophy that is now influential

is spiritual.” The centrality of “the laws of the human

mind” anchored in consciousness and reflexivity affirms that

“intellectual truth [is] in its very essence traditive and

progressive.”30

In applying this understanding to 18th century English

theology, Pattison begins by noting the deep religious

conflicts wrought by the Reformation. By ignoring

nonconformity, the unity of the National Church in the 17th


century England existed only in theory, and “the [Puritan]

revolution had crushed the theory” (E&R, 290-91). But the

Puritan attempt, in turn, to rest religious authority “upon

the inward light within each man’s breast” was equally

ineffective in reconstituting a common national faith. Into

the vacuum created by the failure of both Church and Spirit,

popular appeal was made to “the common reason of men” in the

form of self-interest and evidences of the truth of

scripture.

Here Pattison makes an argument parallel to that of Mill.

Enlightenment reason did not arise in England as an external

and hostile force, but arose by default and was urged by 24 “John Stuart Mill and the History of Political Thought,” in Eldon J. Eisenach, Narrative Power and Liberal Truth, 223-26. 25 Most notably, Frederic Harrison, Creed of a Layman (1907) and Autobiographical Memoirs (1911); Leslie Stephen, Free Thinking and Plain Speaking (1884) and Agnostics Apology (1893); and John Morley, On Compromise (1874) and Recollections (1917). Mark Pattison begins his autobiography in 1832, the year he entered Oxford, because, he says, “I have really no history but a mental history.” Memoirs (London: Macmillan, 1885), 1. 26 The first in this genre was G.H. Lewes, Biographical History of Philosophy (1854); the most famous was Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876) that ends with John StuartMill. The list of individual studies, first as articles and then as book collections, is very large: James Fitzjames Stephen wrotethree essay reviews of Hobbes, four of Locke, four of Burke, and others on Hume, Paine, Bentham, and John Stuart Mill. John Morleywrote two books on Burke, one each on Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Voltaire, and articles on de Maistre and John Stuart Mill. LeslieStephen founded, edited and contributed to “The English Men of Letters” series. 27 Leslie Stephen, Essays on Free Thinking and Plain Speaking (London: Longmans, 1873), 63.


those who sought to conserve religion and morality. Given the

failure of church authority and of inner light, the

alternative to reason was irreligion and moral anarchy.

“Good men saw with alarm, and almost with despair, that what

they said in the obsolete language of religious teaching was

not listened to, and tried to address the age in plain and

unmistakable terms” (E&R 324-25). Mill’s parallel argument

in “Coleridge” maintains that in England (unlike on the

Continent) this new philosophy “pushed its way into

religion,” reducing theology to a narrow self-interest in

salvation to regulate our behavior and an even narrower

“bibliolatry” to regulate our faith, leaving religion

debased and weakened (10 CW, 144-45). Without a living and

vibrant religion, the 18th century became, for Mill, an age

“without earnestness … of compromises and half-convictions …

incapable of producing deep or strong feeling” (142).

Pattison takes this argument a step further. Theological

disputation in the era between Locke’s Reasonableness of

Christianity (1695) and the Oxford movement in the 1830s might

appear dry and carpingly philosophical, but it was 28 All quotation from Oxford churchman writing in Essays and Reviews (London: John W. Parker & Son, 1860) is cited E&R, followed by the page numbers.29 Mark Pattison, “The Age of Reason,” 21 Fortnightly Review (1877), 344.30 Mark Pattison, “Learning in the Church of England” (1863), in Henry Nettleship, ed., Essays of the late Mark Pattison, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899), 279 and “Buckle’s History of Civilizationin England” (1857), ibid., 410.


undertaken to “preserve the practical principles of moral

and religious conduct for society.” Against the threat of

the entire absorption of spirit by worldly power and bodily

interests, this disputation was in fact “a life and death

struggle of religious and moral feeling to maintain itself”

(E&R, 320). Now, however, this period has ended. With the

appearance of Coleridge, the power of rationalism in English

theology has been broken: “the evidence makers ceased from

their futile labors all at once, as beneath of spell of some

magician.” And with the appearance of Mill, the study of

ecclesiastical history is now capable of being studied from

a philosophical perspective that is embedded in the history

of the human spirit (E&R, 263).

Pattison calls for the regeneration of Christianity by

opening the Church and its universities to all intellectuals

with talent and moral energy. Because the Reformation

asserts “the right of each generation of Christian men to

form its own conception, according to its best knowledge, of

the economy of Gods dealings with man,” Protestantism made

available to each generation “the whole spiritual history of

the human race” as a source of God’s continuing and

progressive revelation. Like Mill, Pattison saw the

contemporary High Church as a “party … making common cause

with all the social elements which are against

intelligence.” Also like Mill, Pattison thought that reform


of the Church and the university would restore a common

intelligence and spirit to the English mind. In Pattison’s

more Christian understanding, “by instruction, discipline,

and moral preparation, the heart is made ready to be the

recipient of the influences of the Holy Spirit.”31

At Pattison’s instigation, he and six other Oxford churchmen

each contributed to a collection published in 1860 as Essays

and Reviews.32 While written independently, the essays take a

remarkably coherent position emphasizing the centrality of

spirit to the restoration of the English mind. Frederick

Temple distinguishes between the material and spiritual

worlds, placing man within the law-like characteristics of

each. The “laws of the spiritual … world” (E&R, 2), he says,

have shown us that humanity has been educated from childhood

into adulthood through three distinct moments. Their first

education was through external rules and punishments; the

second was through the power of example; and the final will

be through “the office of the spirit” as “the guide … into

truth.” Modern man “looks inwards … he is free” (E&R, 32-

31 Pattison, “Learning in the Church of England,” 289, 293.32 The occasion of its publication and the controversy it raised are discussed in Eldon J. Eisenach, “Mill and Liberal Christianity,” in Mill and the Moral Character of Liberalism, edited and with an introduction by Eldon J. Eisenach (University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 1998), 204-216. Two of the best studies are Josef Altholz, “Periodical Origins and Implications of Essays and Reviews,” 10 Victorian Periodicals Newsletter (1977), 140-54; andIeuan Ellis, Seven Against Christ: A Study of “Essays and Reviews” (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1980.


34). Toleration is now inseparable from a commitment to

“spiritual truth and religiousness of life;” he “who fears

the result of any investigation, whether philosophical, or

scientific or historical … is guilty of high treason against

the faith” (E&R, 45).

Henry Bristow Wilson’s essay on the National Church extends

the distinction between external matter and inner spirit by

urging that the Church replace its concern with creedal

forms and verbal formulas of speculative doctrine with “the

ethical development of its members” (E&R, 202). In his 1851

Bampton Lectures at Oxford, he anticipated Mill’s argument

in On Liberty by declaring that continued reliance on creeds

and formulas “is inconsistent with man’s condition as a

progressive being.”33

This same theme is carried through in Benjamin Jowett’s

essay defending a Biblical hermeneutic premised on spirit.

Because “Scripture has an inner life or soul” as well as “an

outward body or form,” its meaning for us must begin by

recovering the “meanings … of the words as they first struck

on the ears or flashed before the eyes of those who heard

and read them” (E&R, 389). This way of reading will make the

Bible part of “the history of the human mind,” enabling us 33 Quoted in Ieuan Ellis, Seven Against Christ, 14. Another essayist, Baden Powell, had urged in an earlier writing that the Bible be read as a progressive revelation, “in the spirit of the doctrine” ratherthan “the letter of history.” Quoted in Ellis, Seven Against Christ, 19.


to separate its living spirit and permanent truths from

contingent doctrines and creeds that are so often embedded

in “the language and practices of our own age” (E&R, 338,

341). In this way, too, we free ourselves from “false and

miserable applications” of doctrines that have become “a

tool of the kingdoms of the world” (E&R, 358).

For these liberal churchmen, as for Mill’s followers in

higher journalism, the history of ideas as a history of

spirit functioned as a continuous and progressive revelation

that empowered and shaped human destiny. The difficulty

confronting both Mill and these followers, however, was

that, while “spirit” can be said to have a history, its

evidences are revealed in history only indirectly, through

institutions and moral opinions that come to prominence,

prevail, and are replaced over time. It is difficult,

however, to establish logical connections between the rise and

fall of speculative beliefs and the particular moral

doctrines and opinions they purportedly underwrite. This is

most obvious when those speculative beliefs are part of

doctrinal and institutionalized religion. Mill was not alone

in confronting this difficulty but this confrontation in

Mill’s writings was particularly sharp given his

contestations with Protestant Christianity in contemporary

England.


IV. Spirit, Morality, and Christianity

It is difficult to sort out – let alone resolve – the

relationship in Mill’s writings between his project for the

restoration of spirit and contemporary Protestant

Christianity. While Mill readily acknowledged the historical

role that Protestantism played in English civilizational

advance, it is unclear how Mill’s own attempt to articulate

a new spirit is related to that history. One resolution of

this relationship would say that speculative religious

beliefs are to be replaced by secular reason but that this

reason, unlike its eighteenth-century articulations, must

now rest on a metaphysical faith that man is a progressive

being with a destiny to achieve ever higher levels of virtue

and justice in this world (see 8 CW, 913-14). This

metaphysics is encapsulated in Mill’s “inverse deductive, or

historical method,” as “consciousness of freedom.” But is

this new spirit to replace or to extend Protestantism in

England?

Resolution to this issue cannot be settled by quoting from

his letters and diaries and other writings on Christianity,

for they point in both directions. All one can say is that,

for Mill, Christianity in all its forms served the proper

office of spirit only among a very small, intensively self-

conscious, and spiritually reflexive set of persons. In


Mill’s analysis, this higher form of religion for the few

was seen as a necessary means throughout the history of

progressive societies of protecting spirit from

subordination to worldly powers and bodily passions. At

best, the many relied on these few for instruction and

example. But this protection of living spirit from dead

matter and bodily necessity can and has been protected

historically in many other ways as well.34 And despite the

progressive role of Christianity for the few, Mill was

harshly critical of doctrinal Protesantism, especially its

doctrines of salvation, of God’s sovereign will, and of its

contemporary intuitionist apologetics, all of which he saw

as barriers to reform because they served to protect

prevailing powers and interests.

Part of the difficulty, one that did not begin or end with

Mill, lies in the relationship first raised in The Spirit of the

Age, between “speculative ideas” and “moral influence,” both

of which Mill holds are decisive in shaping character and

society. Clearly, Mill sees the former as the agent or

“spirit” legitimating standing moral opinions or engendering

new and higher moral opinions. But the relationship seems

hidden in the mysteries of reflexive consciousness,

34 Mill’s discussion of ancient republics in The Spirit of the Age, and of the role of poetry in the cultivation of feelings in his letters to Carlyle and, later, in “Utility of Religion,” attest to these possibilities. His discussions of a religion of humanitypoint in this same direction.


unavailable to the philosopher except as an organizing

assumption (the “laws of the mind”) that structure both moral

psychology and the understanding of historical change. And

as a matter of historical analysis, Mill never thought that

Christian and Protestant theological doctrines had a

necessary connection to the moral systems they underwrote. For

example, in On Liberty Mill repeats an argument made earlier

in an essay on Sedgwick, that the Gospels were never

intended “as a complete doctrine of morals,” and that the

ethical doctrines of the Old Testament were “in many

respects barbarous, and intended only for a barbarous

people” (18 CW, 254-55).

In a larger sense, Mill could be said to argue that all moral

and ethical doctrines are temporal and incomplete, whatever

their origins in religious or metaphysical reflexive

consciousness. The office of spirit (and of religion

properly understood) should correct and improve personal

ethics and social morality by transforming the feelings of

higher individuals into moral authority – chapter three of

On Liberty is a contemporary guide to this process. The office

of spirit can only be exercised in the modern age of

equality if spirit is free, that is, if the speculative and

intellectual life of a people is not bound to provisionally

dominant institutions and moral doctrines. This argument,

however convincing an organizing assumption about the path


of historical change, does not resolve the philosophical

relationship between the speculative ideas of spirit and the

empirical and logical properties of moral doctrines.35

If I might depart from Mill and his followers for a moment,

this same difficulty is built into John Locke’s defense of

religious toleration. “Speculative religious opinions” are

to be free from all regulation by civil or religious

authority. Speculative religious truth is “faith … and not

knowledge … a persuasion of our own minds short of

knowledge.” These truths, precisely because they are

speculative “are not in men’s power to perform.”36 For

Locke, this spirit-truth was free from the necessities and

bonds of the truths anchored in bodily sensations and

desires. In contrast to speculative religious ideas,

“practical moral opinions” – those standards and rules

regulating our desires and actions – do fall under the

jurisdiction of the state which, in turn, gives it

jurisdiction over churches (and universities) because they

teach moral doctrine.37 Rational moral opinion was, for

Locke, both a product of reason and a contingent historical 35 In “Logic of the Moral Sciences,” Mill argued that the empirical laws in the specific moral sciences, such as economics and jurisprudence, receive their verification from a general science of society founded on the inverse deductive, or historical method (see 8 CW, 905-10). 36 John Locke, “Letters on Toleration,” in The Works of John Locke in Ten Volumes (London: T. Tegg, 1823), vol. 6, 144 and 40. 37 See Eldon J. Eisenach, “Body-Truth and Spirit-Truth in Locke’s Way of Knowing,” in Narrative Power and Liberal Truth, 71-83.


product – exactly like the appearance of a legitimate

rights-protecting state. The appearance of this universal

truth depends upon the migration of spirit in history.

Our savior found mankind under a corruption of manners

and principles, which ages after ages had prevailed….

Natural reason nowhere had cured, nor was likely to

cure, the defects and errors in them. Those measures of

right and wrong … were looked on as bonds of society

and conveniences of common life … but where was it that

their obligation was thoroughly known and allowed and

they received as precepts of law.38

Christian faith functioned for Locke as a kind of “ultimate

sanction,” both philosophically and psychologically, for a

reason-based morality and a political regime based on

consent. Does the organizing assumption of Mill’s moral

sciences – the progressiveness of man toward equality and

justice – also serve as an “ultimate sanction” in this same

sense? In Utilitarianism and in “On the Subjection of Women,” a

vision of achieving justice as “perfect equality” should

become part of our own conception of happiness, explaining

and justifying our energies and sacrifices in the name of

the improvement of mankind. If, as Mill held in “Logic of

the Moral Sciences,” “none but a person of confirmed virtue

38 John Locke, “On the Reasonableness of Christianity,” in Works of John Locke, vol. 7, 144.


is completely free” (8 CW, 841) this vision of man’s

ultimate destiny both frees and empowers us to be virtuous.

In “Utility of Religion,” this vision becomes the basis of a

religion of humanity.

The essence of religion is the strong and earnest

direction of the emotions and desires toward an ideal

object, recognized as the highest excellence, and as

rightfully paramount over all selfish objects of

desire. This condition is fulfilled by the Religion of

Humanity … as by the supernatural religions… (10 CW,

422).

Another source contributing to our reading of the

relationship of spirit as speculative ideas to morality in

Mill is evidenced by the contributors to Essays and Reviews. It

has been said that these Oxford churchmen were “Protestants”

without being “Christian,” in so far as they saw religious

spirit migrating out of doctrinally-based churches and into

the ethical life of the entire society. We might add that

Coleridge, whose influence was so pronounced in this group,

began his speculations as a romantic Unitarian.39

Coleridge’s distinction between the National Church and the

Church of Christ, for example, was extended by Henry Bristow

Wilson in Essays and Review, to the assertion that “a national

39 This body of scholarship is used and discussed in Eisenach, “Mill and Liberal Christianity,” 216-22.


Church need not, historically speaking, be Christian, nor,

if it be Christian, need it be tied down to particular forms

which have been prevalent at certain times in Christendom”

(E&R, 173). Mill, too, not only supported a national church

establishment and a clerisy on these Coleridgean terms, he

seemed to be writing directly to this new kind of non-

doctrinal Protestant in chapter two of On Liberty.40

The progressive spirit of Protestantism, on this reading,

has now migrated into the history of speculative thought

generally. Revelation has migrated out of theology into

human history and man’s moral life. This ethical turn

suggests that the progress of morality itself increasingly

becomes the content and the guiding spirit of religious

faith, not the other way around. In the words of one astute

student of this ethical turn, “even if Christianity itself

be the victim, the legacy of the English Reformation must be

preserved.”41

In addition to Locke and these Oxford churchmen, there is a

third group who might provide a source for understanding

Mill on the relationship of religion to morality. In

America, the subordination of religion to morality was to

40 I make this argument in Eisenach, “Mill and Liberal Christianity,” 222-229.41 Howard Murphy, “The Ethical Revolt Against Christian Orthodoxy in Early Victorian England,” American Historical Review, vol. 60 (1955), 810.


become a commonplace of liberal Protestant thinkers in the

late 19th century. Henry Ward Beecher, the most influential

Congregational clergyman of his day and an early exponent of

what later became known as the Social Gospel, put it most

vividly: “Morality is the indispensable ground of spiritual

fervor…. An elevated morality blossoms into spirituality.

And eminent spirituality sends down the elaborated sap into

every leaf, fiber and root that helped create it.” Religious

creeds of the future will begin where the old ones ended,

“upon the nature of man, his condition on earth, his social

duties and civil obligations, the development of his reason,

his spiritual nature.” Man’s religious spirit “will ascend

from the known to the unknown.”42 John Bascom, another

Congregational clergyman who later became President of the

University of Wisconsin, was a close student of Mill. He put

this relationship even more succinctly: religion “is not so

much the foundation of morals, as morals is the foundation

of religion.”43

This form of theological modernism in late 19rh century

America bears strong affinities to Mill and to the Oxford

Churchmen. Lyman Abbott (another Congregational clergyman

42 Quoted in D.H. Meyer, “American Intellectuals and the VictorianCrisis of Faith,” in Daniel Walker Howe, ed., Victorian America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), 72-73. 43 Quoted in Meyer, “American Intellectuals and the Victorian Crisis of Faith,” 71.


and another student of Mill), termed this “new theology”

movement “The New Puritanism.”44

New Theology is neither new nor a theology … [but] new

only in contrast with the Puritan theology out of which

is has sprung, and from which it is a reaction. It is

not truly a theology, since its chief inspiration is a

deep desire to get away from the questions of the

purely speculative intellect, the answers to which

constitute theology, to the practical questions of the

Hebrew seers, the answers to which constitute

religion…. The church, then, is coming more and more to

conceive of God, not as some one outside of his

creation ruling over it, but as some one inside his

creation ruling within it.45

In Abbott’s perspective, because the experience of spirit

takes place in time and history, authentic religion, for

each age of man, “is always new” and must find new forms of

articulate expression. Christianity, therefore, is

evolutionary because God “manifests himself [to man] in

growth.”46 History “is but the record of the process of this

evolution of the divinity out of humanity. It is a continuous

44 Lyman Abbott, Amory H. Bradford, et al, The New Puritanism (New York: Fords, Howard, and Hulbert, 1898).45 Lyman Abbott, The Evolution of Christianity (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1892), 109-110.46 Abbott, Evolution of Christianity, iii and v.


progressive change, from lower to higher, and from simpler

to more complex. It is according to certain definite laws of

the moral and spiritual life.”47 Progressive revelation

turns religious life increasingly toward ethics and the life

of the church from inward maintenance to outward action.

Because God is disclosed ever more fully in this process,

through man’s moral and social life God “is training

children to be free like himself, and by their own free

choice to become partakers of his nature.” Evidence of this

disclosure is in man’s increasing capacity for

“righteousness.”48

These constructions by American clergymen, Oxford churchmen,

and Mill’s immediate circle do not resolve Mill’s own

understanding of spirit to morality. What they all do

suggest, however, is a migration of spirit from religion and

theology to a progressive and evolutionary history of ideas

that itself incorporates and furthers this migration. They also suggest,

perhaps, a new way of reading his posthumously published

essay, “Theism.” Clearly, a history of ideas – the history

of man’s spirit – cannot be reduced to a history of morality.49

To do so would leave out religion, art, poetry, philosophy,

47 Abbott, Evolution of Christianity, 254, emphasis added.48 Abbott, Evolution of Christianity, 237 and 247. This analysis is found later in the writings of Walter Rauschenbusch, the social gospel theologian most known today by historians of America political thought. See, for example, Christianity and the Social Crisis (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 201-210.


and all of the manifestations of individual feelings,

courage and energy that both establish and overturn systems

of morality. And surely, morality, like law and politics,

tied as they are to the organization and coordination of

temporal passions and interests, can never be free in the

way “consciousness of freedom” is. And, if the history of

spirit is written as “the evolution of Christianity,” the

power behind that spirit is supernatural.

With this background in mind, “Theism,” might be read in two

complementary ways, both of which might serve as a fitting

conclusion to Mill’s writings on the migrations of spirit.

First, to grant the possibility of a supernatural being is a

way of accounting for human freedom as a divine gift free

from temporality, to account for the mystery of

consciousness that ranges over space, time, and body.50

49 In “Utility of Religion,” Mill suggests that the sentiments calling upon the hypothetical approval of our actions from our ancestors, or from Socrates or Christ, are more than morality: “They are a real religion; of which, as of other religions, outward good works … are only a part, and are indeed rather the fruits of the religion rather than the religion itself” (10 CW, 422). 50 See note 13, above. This understanding of consciousness is mostclearly laid out in An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy. Consciousness, says Mill, is “the true incomprehensibility … something which has ceased, or is not yet in existence, can stillbe, in a manner present; that a series of feelings, the infinitely greater part of which is past or future, can be gathered up, as it were, into a present conception” (9 CW, 194). For a similar reading of “Theism” tied to this idea of consciousness, see Capaldi, John Stuart Mill, 348.


Secondly, the centrality of spirit in Mill’s theory of

history makes the existence of a supernatural being

something of a philosophical imperative accounting for the

experience of consciousness itself. And, in so far as God is

posited as existing in the history of spirit, God, like

history, cannot be omnipotent because God is not “complete.”

Like the Oxford churchmen and the theological modernists in

America, Mill suggests that God’s omnipotence – the victory

of the Kingdom of God – can only be achieved in history as

the true destiny of man is finally unfolded.

Documents

Migrations of ‘Spirit’ in Mill’s Theory of History