Nevertheless, Mill's outlook upon the world was much wider than his father's, and his aim was so to adjust the Utilitarian creed as to bring it into closer working accord with the advancing ideas and projects of the political parties to whom he was nearest in sympathy. He allied himself in the beginning with the Philosophical Radicals, in the hope of organising them for active service in the cause. But this group soon broke up, and Mr. Stephen ascribes their failure in part to their name, observing that the word '"Philosophical" in English is synonymous with visionary, unpractical, and perhaps simply foolish.' There would be less satire, and possibly more justice, in saying that the word gives a chill to the energetic hot-gospeller of active Radicalism, who pushes past the philosopher as one standing too far behind the fighting line, although he may be useful in forging explosives in some quiet laboratory. Mill himself was continually hampered, as an ardent combatant, by the impedimenta which he brought into the field in the shape of abstract speculations, which could not be made to fit in with the immediate demands of thorough-going partisans. His democratic fervour was tempered by his conviction of the incapacity of the masses. He was a Socialist 'in the sense that he looked forward to a complete, though distant, revolution in the whole structure of society'; he discovered that the Chartists had crude views upon political economy; his attitude toward factory legislation was very dubious. Yet in the main purpose of his life and writings, which was to mend and guide public opinion on social and political questions by theoretical treatment--that is, by a logically connected survey of the facts--he was undoubtedly successful, as is shown by the popularity of his two great works on _Logic_ and _Political Economy_, which became the text-books of higher study on these subjects for a whole generation. On the other hand, he exposed himself to the distrust and hostility that are always aroused by philosophical arguments which strike at the roots of established beliefs and prejudices, and are discovered to be really more dangerous to them than a direct assault.
It was the philosophic strategy of J. S. Mill to prosecute the Utilitarian war against metaphysics, and finally to exterminate Intuitions, being convinced, as he said, that the _a priori_ and spiritualistic thinkers still far exceeded the partisans of experience, and that a great majority of Englishmen were still Intuitionists. Is this actually a true account of English thought? Mr. Stephen thinks not, for he believes that if Mill had not lived much apart from ordinary folk he would have found Englishmen practically, though not avowedly, predisposed to empiricism, which has been the philosophic tradition in this country since Hobbes. We so far agree with Mr. Stephen that we believe Englishmen, in general, to practise a great deal more of empiricism than they avow. But Mill proposed to demonstrate and declare it as a weapon in polemics and an engine of action, and it was here, probably, that the main body of Englishmen deserted him. They were not ready to cut themselves off from theology and from all ideas that transcend experience, and they demurred to the paramount jurisdiction of logic in temporal affairs. To every section of Churchmen the relegation of moral sanctions within the domain of verifiable consequences was a doctrine to be resisted strenuously. With the high sacerdotalist it amounted to a denial of the Christian mysteries; to the Broad Churchman it was ethically inadequate and ignoble; to the scholastic professor of divinity it meant ruinous materialism.