ill nevertheless cherish the belief that
economical improvements, public instruction, good laws, and regular
administration will obliterate antipathies, eradicate irrational
prejudices, and reconcile Asiatic folk to the blessings of scientific
civilisation. But he will confess that it is a stubborn element, if
not innate yet very like such a quality; if not ineffaceable yet
certain to outlast his dominion. It is at least remarkable that Mill's
protest against explaining differences of character by race, to which
Buckle 'cordially subscribed,' should have been answered in our time
by a clamorous demand for the recognition of those very differences,
and by an increasing tendency to admit them.

Upon Mill's theological speculations Mr. Stephen has written an
interesting chapter, illustrating Mill's desire to treat religion more
sympathetically, with a deeper sense of its importance in life, than
in the absolute theories of the older Utilitarians. Bentham had
declared that the principle of theology, of referring everything to
God's will, was no more than a covert application of the test of
utility. You must first know whether a thing is right in order to
discover whether it is conformable to God's pleasure; and a religious
motive, he said, is good or bad according as the religious tenets of
the person acting upon it approach more or less to a coincidence with
the dictates of utility. The next step, as Bentham probably knew well,
is to throw aside an abstraction that has become virtually
superfluous, and to march openly under the Utilitarian standard. But
there was in Mill a moral and emotional instinct that deterred him
from resting without uneasiness upon such a bare empirical conclusion.
He rejected all transcendental conceptions; yet he did his best, as
Mr. Stephen shows, to find reasonable proofs of a Deity whose
existence and attributes may be inferred by observation and
experience. He agreed that such an inference is not inconsistent, _a
priori_, with natural laws, and the argument from design was admitted
as providing by analogy, or even inductively, a large balance of
probability in favour of creation by Intelligence. The difficulty is
to attain by these methods the idea of a Deity perfect in power,
wisdom, and goodness; for the order of Nature, apart from human
intervention and contrivances for making the earth habitable,
discloses no tincture of morality. We are thus reduced to the dilemma
propounded by Hume, bet