J S Mill Quotes

“Nevertheless, we can face the deeper problem, which Mill formulates as follows: 'What really are the intellectual characteristics of this age; whether our mental light - let us account for the fact as we may - has not lost in its intensity, at least a part of what it has gained in diffusion?' Mill is formulating the problem as a question. But the article to which he is responding was a plea 'for the moderns against those who placed the ancients above them,' so that Mill's signature would seem to imply an answer to his question which would place the ancients above the moderns. The phrasing of the question is, in any case, an endorsement of a reflexive criterion that Mill's father would repudiate: 'The intense was with him a bye-word of scornful disapprobation.' In fact Mill is pitting the Romantic and poetic criterion of inner 'intensity' against his father's utilitarian and journalistic criterion of public diffusion.''' That Mill has lost his youthful confidence in the progress attendant upon the diffusion of knowledge is even more evident form his next question: 'Whether our 'march of intellect' be not rather a march towards doing without intellect and supplying our deficiency of giants by the united efforts of a constantly increasing multitude of dwarfs?”
― Robert Denoon Cumming, Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought