Search

So, on 22 July 1865 (p. 32), under the title ‘Philosophy and Punch’, did England's premier comic weekly greet the election of J. S. Mill as MP for Westminster. Mill held his seat for only one term, until the general election of 1868, when his Whig-Liberal colleague Robert Wellesley Grosvenor was re-elected, but Mill was replaced by the loser in 1865, the Conservative W. H. Smith, Jr., who, though he never went to sea, became the ruler of the Queen's navy. The reasons for that reversal have engaged the attention of many, including Mill himself; I should like to introduce into the discussion material from an ignored source, the comic weeklies, which took a continued and close look at Mill's behaviour during his parliamentary years. While this evidence generally does not disconfirm earlier judgments—including my own— it does more than merely add to the induction. First, it shows how different political stances led journals to focus on different aspects of Mill's parliamentary career, and to adopt different rhetorical strategies in portraying him in picture and word. Second, it demonstrates how the hardening of party allegiances during the parliament of 1865–68, which accelerated in the preparatory campaigns for the general election of 1868, affected Mill adversely. Third, it suggests strongly that it was not his ‘crotchets’ or ‘whims’, especially women's suffrage and proportional representation, that damaged his chances for re-election, but his advocacy of causes unpopular with the majority of Liberals as well as with Conservatives.

The physics of the forward motion of the flyline during a fly cast is discussed, and a computer model of this motion is proposed which reproduces the main features of this part of the cast.

The primary aim of the edition is to present fully collated texts of those works which exist in a number of versions, both printed and manuscript, and to provide accurate texts of those works previously unpublished or which have become relatively inaccessible. The series is complete.

‘Science was not generally seen as in opposition to religion before the publication of the Origin of Species, but as part of a widely accepted natural theology.’ This judgment by T.W. Heyck is well based,1 though it is not correct to see 1859 as the end of natural theology for scientists. An examination of evidence that might be used to support such a judgment, however, suggests an excitement not completely compatible with complacency about the effect on religious belief of scientific facts and theories, especially on the untutored mind. In particular, the series of Bridgewater Treatises, published initially from 1833 to 1836, invites conclusions and speculations about the perceived relations between science and religion.2

The happy dreams of editors the nightmares are privileged com munications-feature banners with the strange device,"DEFiNiTiVE!" And sometimes incautious and over-generous reviewers make those dreams an apparent reality. But the irony has entered the soul, and can not be long forgotten. Those of us engaged in editing John Stuart Mill's Collected Works have always known that, quite apart from our fail ings, it is impossible to produce an edition that will stand up for all time. Even more important is the realization that no editor of an author such as Mill can fully satisfy any one generation of actual, let alone poten tial, readers. This apologia is a proper introduction, because our procedures in tentionally and not merely accidentally depart from what might be called the best-established textual methods "definitive" cannot be applied to any method and occasionally even from themselves. It need not be said, however, that an apologia is not an apology in the common sense.

The computer program described, designed for use in the second quarter of the beginning course for science and engineering majors at the University of California, Irvine, simulates an experimental investigation of a pulse in a rope. The student is provided with a “measurement” facility: If he enters time and position he is told the rope displacement. His problem is to discover enough about the disturbance to answer numerical questions about its behavior. Auxiliary facilities such as plotting and listing are provided. Checks are made as to the reasonableness of the student strategy, and suggestions are given based on these checks. It is hoped that through this simulation students can in many cases “discover” the preservation of “shape,” the x−vt dependence of the pulse.

Little is known about John Stuart Mill's compiling of the bibliography of his writings, which has been edited by Ney MacMinn, J. R. Hainds, and J. M. McCrimmon as Bibliography of the Published Writings of John Stuart Mill (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1945). The manuscript, in the British Library of Political and Economic Science (London School of Economics), is a notebook copy, presumably but not necessarily made from a similar notebook in Mill's hand. Its many errors ("Representable Government" for "Representative Government") and "Senin" for "Senior," for example), the gaps within entries, and repetitions, as well as pasted-over rewritings, indicate the dangers of complete reliance. And there must also be questions about the accuracy and completeness of the original list compiled almost certainly by Mill himself.

John Stuart Mill is often held up to scorn as a cold, mechanical thinker for whom ethics is no more than logic, and politics no more than political economy. Swathed in mournful black, hard-visaged and ice-veined, Mill stands for the Victorian virtues to which we (thank heaven) cannot pretend. The picture is patently a caricature, failing to do justice to the man or to his thought, but correcting it seems difficult. Mill is himself mainly responsible for the difficulty, his Autobiography being little more than the history of his education and opinions. His first biographer, Bain, was plus royalist que le roi, and recent biographers (most notably Packe), while reopening important evidence, appear strangely unable to relate his personal experience to his thought. Actually, though most of Mill’s work seems to hide rather than to reveal the man, and most of his correspondence is public rather than private, even in his System of Logic there is material to show more than a superficial relation between his life and his thought. What the evidence shows, in fact, is that Mill not only had emotions and was motivated by them, but recognized their place in a complete moral and social theory.