just coming in sight of the
stage where these most complex of all phenomena can be fruitfully
studied on positive methods, and he was content with doing as much as he
could to expel other methods from men's minds, and to engender the
positive spirit and temper. Comte, on the other hand, presumed at once
to draw up a minute plan of social reconstruction, which contains some
ideas of great beauty and power, some of extreme absurdity, and some
which would be very mischievous if there were the smallest chance of
their ever being realised. 'His book stands,' Mr. Mill truly says of the
_System of Positive Polity_, 'a monumental warning to thinkers on
society and politics of what happens when once men lose sight in their
speculations of the value of Liberty and Individuality' (p. 213).

* * * * *

It was his own sense of the value of Liberty which led to the production
of the little tractate which Mr. Mill himself thought likely to survive
longer than anything else that he had written, 'with the possible
exception of the _Logic_,' as being 'a kind of philosophic text-book of
a single truth, which the changes progressively taking place in modern
society tend to bring out into ever stronger relief; the importance to
man and society, of a large variety in types of character, and of giving
full freedom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable and
conflicting directions' (p. 253). It seems to us, however, that Mr.
Mill's plea for Liberty in the abstract, invaluable as it is, still is
less important than the memorable application of this plea, and of all
the arguments supporting it, to that half of the human race whose
individuality has hitherto been blindly and most wastefully repressed.
The little book on the _Subjection of Women_, though not a capital
performance like the _Logic_, was the capital illustration of the modes
of reasoning about human character set forth in his _Logic_ applied to
the case in which the old metaphysical notion of innate and indelible
differences is still nearly as strong as ever it was, and in which its
moral and social consequences are so inexpressibly disastrous, so
superlatively powerful in keeping the ordinary level of the aims and
achievements of life low and meagre. The accurate and unanswerable
reasoning no less than the noble elevation of this great argument; the
sagacity of a hundred of its maxims on individual conduct and character,
no less than the comb