structure of the whole. What he says of one stage in his growth
remained generally true of him until the very end:--'I found the fabric
of my old and taught opinions giving way in many fresh places, and I
never allowed it to fall to pieces, but was incessantly occupied in
weaving it anew. I never in the course of my transition was content to
remain, for ever so short a time, confused and unsettled. When I had
taken in any new idea, I could not rest till I had adjusted its
relations to my old opinions, and ascertained exactly how far its effect
ought to extend in modifying or superseding them' (p. 156). This careful
and conscientious recognition of the duty of having ordered opinions,
and of responsibility for these opinions being both as true and as
consistent with one another as taking pains with his mind could make
them, distinguished Mr. Mill from the men who flit aimlessly from
doctrine to doctrine, as the flies of a summer day dart from point to
point in the vacuous air. It distinguished him also from those
sensitive spirits who fling themselves down from the heights of
rationalism suddenly into the pit of an infallible church; and from
those who, like La Mennais, move violently between faith and reason,
between tradition and inquiry, between the fulness of deference to
authority and the fulness of individual self-assertion.

All minds of the first quality move and grow; they have a susceptibility
to many sorts of new impressions, a mobility, a feeling outwards, which
makes it impossible for them to remain in the stern fixity of an early
implanted set of dogmas, whether philosophic or religious. In stoical
tenacity of character, as well as in intellectual originality and
concentrated force of understanding, some of those who knew both tell us
that Mr. Mill was inferior to his father. But who does not feel in the
son the serious charm of a power of adaptation and pliableness which we
can never associate with the hardy and more rigorous nature of the
other? And it was just because he had this sensibility of the intellect,
that the history of what it did for him is so edifying a performance for
a people like ourselves, among whom that quality is so extremely
uncommon. For it was the sensibility of strength and not of weakness,
nor of mere over-refinement and subtlety. We may estimate the
significance of such a difference, when we think how little, after all,
the singular gifts of a Newman or a Maurice have done for th