t faire parler de lui_
in certain circles is his heaven.'[565]

Mackintosh would have been most at home in a professorial chair. He
was, indeed, professor at Haileybury from 1818 to 1824, and spoken of
as a probable successor to Brown at Edinburgh. But he could never
decidedly concentrate himself upon one main purpose. Habits of
procrastination and carelessness about money caused embarrassment
which forced him to write hastily. His love of society interfered with
study, and his study was spread over an impossible range of subjects.
His great abilities, wasted by these infirmities, were seconded by
very wide learning. Macaulay describes the impression which he made at
Holland House.[566] He passed among his friends as the profound
philosopher; the man of universal knowledge of history; of ripe and
most impartial judgment in politics; the oracle to whom all men might
appeal with confidence, though a little too apt to find out that all
sides were in the right. When he went to India he took with him some
of the scholastic writers and the works of Kant and Fichte, then known
to few Englishmen. One of Macaulay's experiences at Holland House was
a vision of Mackintosh verifying a quotation from Aquinas.[567] It
must have been delightful. The ethical 'dissertation,' however, had to
be shortened by omitting all reference to German philosophy, and the
account of the schoolmen is cursory. It is easy to see why the suave
and amiable Mackintosh appeared to Mill to be a 'dandy' philosopher,
an unctuous spinner of platitudes to impose upon the frequenters of
Holland House, and hopelessly confused in the attempt to make
compromises between contradictory theories. It is equally easy to see
why to Mackintosh the thoroughgoing and strenuous Mill appeared to be
a one-sided fanatic, blind to the merits of all systems outside the
narrow limits of Benthamism, and making even philanthropy hateful. Had
Mackintosh lived to read Mill's _Fragment_, he would certainly have
thought it a proof that the Utilitarians were as dogmatic and acrid as
he had ever asserted.

Mackintosh's position in ethics explains Mill's antagonism. Neither
Aquinas nor Kant nor Fichte influenced him. His doctrine is the
natural outcome of the Scottish philosophy. Hutcheson had both
invented Bentham's sacred formula, and taught the 'Moral Sense' theory
which Bentham attacked. To study the morality from the point of view
of 'inductive psychology' is to study the moral facul