hrown away. If he was so, he would probably have made his mark rather
in the history of philosophy than in philosophy itself, for there are no
signs in him of much original depth. But he wrote very well, and was a
sound and on the whole a fair critic.

Of the two Mills, the elder, James, was like Mackintosh only an
_interim_ philosopher: his son John belongs wholly to our present
subject. James was the son of a farmer, was born near Montrose in 1773,
and intended to enter the ministry, but became a journalist instead. In
the ten years or so after 1806, he composed a _History of British
India_, which was long regarded as authoritative, but on which the
gravest suspicions have recently been cast. Mill, in fact, was a violent
politician of the Radical type, and his opinions of ethics were so
peculiar that it is uncertain how far he might have carried them in
dealing with historical characters. His book, however, gained him a high
post in the East India Company, the Directors of which just at that time
were animated by a wish to secure distinguished men of letters as
servants. He nevertheless continued to write a good deal both in
periodicals and in book form, the chief examples of the latter being his
_Political Economy_, his _Analysis of the Human Mind_, and his _Fragment
on Mackintosh_. James Mill, of whom most people have conceived a rather
unfavourable idea since the appearance of his son's _Autobiography_, was
an early disciple of Bentham, and to a certain extent resembled him in
hard clearness and superficial consistency.

His son John Stuart was born in London on 20th May 1806, and educated by
his father in the unnatural fashion which he has himself recorded.
Intellectually, however, he was not neglected, and after some years,
spent mainly in France, he was, through his father's influence,
appointed at seventeen to a clerkship in the India House, which gave him
a competence for the rest of his life and a main occupation for
thirty-four years of it. He was early brought into contact (by his
father's friendship with Grote and others) with the Philosophical
Radicals, as well as with many men of letters, especially Carlyle, of
the destruction of the first version of whose _French Revolution_ Mill
(having lent it to his friend Mrs. Taylor) was the innocent cause. To
this Mrs. Taylor, whom he afterwards married, Mill was fanatically
attached, the attachment being the cause of some curious flights in his
later work. His c