The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches-2 [91]
unusual degree," leads to the conclusion that those who possess this power will always desire to use it. It is plain, therefore, that, if Mr Mill's principles be sound, the check on a monarchical or an aristocratical government will not be the want of will to oppress. If a king or an aristocracy, having, as Mr Mill tells us that they always must have, the will to oppress the people with the utmost severity, want the power, then the government, by whatever name it may be called, must be virtually a mixed government or a pure democracy: for it is quite clear that the people possess some power in the state--some means of influencing the nominal rulers. But Mr Mill has demonstrated that no mixed government can possibly exist, or at least that such a government must come to a very speedy end: therefore, every country in which people not in the service of the government have, for any length of time, been permitted to accumulate more than the bare means of subsistence must be a pure democracy. That is to say, France before the revolution, and Ireland during the last century, were pure democracies. Prussia, Austria, Russia, all the governments of the civilised world, are pure democracies. If this be not a reductio ad absurdum, we do not know what is. The errors of Mr Mill proceed principally from that radical vice in his reasoning which, in our last number we described in the words of Lord Bacon. The Westminster Reviewer is unable to discover the meaning of our extracts from the "Novum Organum", and expresses himself as follows: "The quotations from Lord Bacon are misapplications, such as anybody may make to anything he dislikes. There is no more resemblance between pain, pleasure, motives, etc., and substantia, generatio, corruptio, elementum, materia,--than between lines angles, magnitudes, etc., and the same." It would perhaps be unreasonable to expect that a writer who cannot understand his own English should understand Lord Bacon's Latin. We will therefore attempt to make our meaning clearer. What Lord Bacon blames in the schoolmen of his time is this,-- that they reasoned syllogistically on words which had not been defined with precision; such as moist, dry, generation, corruption, and so forth. Mr Mill's error is exactly of the same kind. He reasons syllogistically about power, pleasure, and pain, without attaching any definite notion to any one of those words. There is no more resemblance, says the Westminster Reviewer, between pain and substantia than between pain and a line or an angle. By his permission, in the very point to which Lord Bacon's observation applies, Mr Mill's subjects do resemble the substantia and elementum of the schoolmen and differ from the lines and magnitudes of Euclid. We can reason a priori on mathematics, because we can define with an exactitude which precludes all possibility of confusion. If a mathematician were to admit the least laxity into his notions, if he were to allow himself to be deluded by the vague sense which words bear in popular use, or by the aspect of an ill-drawn diagram, if he were to forget in his reasonings that a point was indivisible, or that the definition of a line excluded breadth, there would be no end to his blunders. The schoolmen tried to reason mathematically about things which had not been, and perhaps could not be, defined with mathematical accuracy. We know the result. Mr Mill has in our time attempted to do the same. He talks of power, for example, as if the meaning of the word power were as determinate as the meaning of the word circle. But, when we analyse his speculations, we find that his notion of power is, in the words of Bacon, "phantiastica et male terminata." There are two senses in which we may use the word "power," and those words which denote the various distributions of power, as, for example, "monarchy":--the one sense popular and superficial, the other more scientific and accurate. Mr Mill, since he chose to reason a priori, ought to have clearly pointed out in which sense he intended to use words of this kind, and to have