Bentley's Quarterly Review (Volume 2) (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1860 Excerpt: ... MILL ON LIBERTY. EVERY one who feels interest in truth, and who tries to 'enlighten his practice by philosophical meditation, ' must feel thankful when a bold and powerful thinker like Mr. J. S. Mill takes in hand one of those latent but embarrassing difficulties, which few think of putting into words, but which underlie whole tracts of discussion, and are for ever coming up in the commonest questions of practical life. We run against them, or they against us, at any moment: but because they are so common, and wo feel sure that they must occur to every one round us--and yet no one seems to think them worth special notice--we fancy them too trivial to be made the distinct subject of our thoughts, and allow the feeling of the difficulty to haunt us obscurely, and often to inflict an indefinite but serious sense; of dull worry. One of these usually unanalyzed difficulties is the question, which most people must have practically encountered some time or another, of the influence to be exercised, by any means short of or beyond direct argument, on other people. In the present Essay, Mr. Mill luidcrtakes to discuss this question, or, as he states it in its broadest terms, 'the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society on the individual.' The value of such an attempt is not to be measured simply by the conclusions arrived at. A man must be very sanguine who should expect to see a question, which he must have found for ever recurring in human history and pervading his own ex Sjrieuce, closed and settled, even by a thinker like Mr. Mill, nly very young speculators, who, in their earliest attempts at thought, turn in their simplicity to logic, or to Locke on the 'Conduct of the Understanding, ' for an infallible specific which shall ...