SOURCE: Donovan, Robert Alan. “Mill, Arnold, and Scientific Humanism.” In Victorian Science and Victorian Values: Literary Perspectives, edited by James Paradis and Thomas Postlewait, pp. 181-96. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1985.

[In the following essay, Donovan compares Arnold's philosophy with that of John Stuart Mill, discussing Arnold's societal remedy of taking authority out of the hands of the state and placing it into the “hands of those who are able to transcend class spirit and prejudice.”]

In “Bentham” and “Coleridge,” two early essays long considered classics, John Stuart Mill defined the mental postures that, he thought, simultaneously polarized and rendered coherent the intellectual life of the century. Out of strikingly unlike minds and temperaments grew the basic opposition in epistemological assumptions, in mental attitudes and habits, that characterized the empiricist Bentham and the idealist Coleridge. It is clear enough that a similar opposition is to be observed between Mill's own skeptical and nominalist views and the transcendentalism of Carlyle, but what may be even more far-reaching in its consequences is the less obvious antagonism that developed between Mill and Matthew Arnold.

Like Bentham and Coleridge, Mill and Arnold belonged to different spheres of life, separated by age, occupation, fortune, and circle of acquaintance, and there is no record of any meeting between them.¹ Indeed, during the early stages of their careers they had so little in common that the likelihood of their entering the same intellectual arena must have seemed remote, yet their responses to the implications of what was to be the dominant movement of the midcentury, the emergence of political democracy, were often strikingly parallel, but perhaps more often in striking opposition to each other. Democracy, which they were both prepared to welcome, nevertheless raised certain insistent questions for both of them, most notably the question of individual self-development in a world where traditional authority and traditional values were being superseded by cultural forces that could not yet be accurately understood or measured. To deal with this absorbing question, Mill—in On Liberty (1859)—and Arnold—in Culture and Anarchy (1869)—found it necessary to make explicit their own epistemological assumptions, for they were concerned not only with the social conditions and consequences of education, but also with the natural and inherent conditions of knowledge itself.

The words in which Mill and Arnold attempt to formulate the ends of education were curiously alike. In On Liberty, Mill writes, “The end of man. … is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole.”² For Arnold, in Culture and Anarchy, perfection, as culture conceives it, “is a harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature, and is not consistent with the over-development of any one power at the expense of the rest.”³ The similarity is perhaps to be explained on the ground that Arnold is paraphrasing the same work that Mill quotes directly, The Sphere and Duties of Government, by Wilhelm von Humboldt, the first Prussian Minister of Public Instruction. At any rate, it is certain that Arnold knew and admired Humboldt's work, for in a later chapter of Culture and Anarchy he objects to an English reviewer's distortion of the book and refers to Humboldt himself as “one of the most beautiful souls that have ever existed.” (vol. V, p. 161). Whatever the reason, it is clear that in stressing the harmonious development of diverse human powers to form a complete and balanced whole, Mill and Arnold are in entire agreement as to what constitutes the aim of individual self-development. Where they differ is in the role society or the state is to play in the process, a difference that grows out of a still more fundamental disagreement about the natural processes that govern human development, specifically the processes by which the mind attains to truth.

[I]

From the time of his earliest writings in the 1820s up to the publication in 1843 of his monumental System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive, Mill directed his studies towards discovering a way to apply the laws of Newtonian science to what he liked to call the “moral sciences,” a term that reflects not so much a conviction as a hope, and perhaps an expectation, of what the study of man and his institutions might become. The first fruit of these studies was the precocious review of Whately's Elements of Logic, which appeared in the Westminster Review in 1828, when Mill was only 22. The following March, Macaulay's devastating attack in the Edinburgh Review on the a priori method of James Mill's Essay of Government forced the younger Mill to reexamine the question whether human society lent itself to scientific inquiry and, if so, what laws governed that inquiry. Macaulay's attack had shown Mill that to determine the natural laws that regulate the conduct of men toward one another more was needed than a set of assumptions about human nature from which the best practicable form of government could be deduced without reference to experience. On the other hand, the method that Macaulay seemed to be advancing, based entirely on experience without reference to principle, was equally deficient.

Macaulay's method of simple extrapolation from experience Mill calls the “chemical, or experimental, method,” and he finds it wholly inadequate as a procedure in the social sciences since the complexity of human nature, and still more of human society, renders the causes of political phenomena impossible to isolate and bring under observation in the fashion of the more elementary researches in inorganic chemistry:

In an age in which chemistry itself, when attempting to deal with the more complex chemical sequences, those of the animal or even the vegetable organism, has found it necessary to become, and has succeeded in becoming, a Deductive Science—it is not to be apprehended that any person of scientific habits, who has kept pace with the general progress of the knowledge of nature, can be in danger of applying the methods of elementary chemistry to explore the sequences of the most complex order of phenomena in existence.

(vol. VIII, p. 886)

Since the Utilitarian position is at stake, Mill is somewhat less abrupt about dismissing the alternative fallacy, which he designates the “geometrical, or abstract, method,” but here, too, he is led to the conclusion that social phenomena are too complex to be accounted for by one or a few assumptions about human nature:

It is unphilosophical to construct a science out of a few of the agencies by which the phenomena are determined, and leave the rest to the routine of practice or the sagacity of conjecture. We either ought not to pretend to scientific forms, or we ought to study all the determining agencies equally, and endeavour, so far as it can be done, to include all of them within the pale of the science; else we shall infallibly bestow a disproportionate attention upon those which our theory takes into account, while we misestimate the rest, and probably underrate their importance.

(vol. VIII, p. 893)

There remains a procedure that embraces both the experimental and abstract methods, or, more precisely, lies somewhere between them. Social science can never be truly experimental, since society does not submit to experiment, nor can any procedure remain truly abstract it if insists on referring the results of abstract speculation to experience. What is possible and fruitful, according to Mill, is to deduce the consequences of one's assumptions or hypotheses about states of society and then verify the deduced consequences by comparing them with the actual course of history. This is the “direct” or “concrete” deductive method, which Mill proposes as the true scientific method in the moral sciences. He is also, however, prepared to admit the validity of what he calls the “inverse deductive, or historical, method,” which he derived from Comte.⁴ Here the collection of historical evidence precedes the deductive process, which is then used to verify the results of historical generalization. That deduction forms an important part of all scientific method, and in fact gives its essential character to the highest and most mature form of scientific reasoning, is to be explained by the fact that empirical or experimental methods by themselves, though they can describe, or even predict the consequences of, the invariable processes of the phenomenal world, can never explain those processes or show why their consequences follow.

Curiously, however, although what he calls the deductive sciences are the most mature and least fallible, Mill has no high regard for deduction itself, rejecting the traditional concept of the syllogism as a valid form of inference. The conclusions of so-called syllogistic reasoning are already implicit in the premises, Mill insists, and since the conclusion can yield no new knowledge, there can be no inference. “All inference,” he maintains, “is from particulars to particulars: General propositions are merely registers of such inferences already made, and short formulae for making more” (vol. VII, p. 193). The true form of the argument that we usually represent by the syllogism:

All men are mortal.
The Duke of Wellington is a man.
The Duke of Wellington is mortal.

ought really to be: “If John, Peter, and Thomas are mortal, then the Duke of Wellington is mortal,” and our so-called major premise, “All men are mortal,” is merely a convenience for generalizing a procedure that actually depends on something else for its validity, namely that we expect nature to be uniform in its operations.

But why not take this last, most universal proposition and reason downward (that is, deductively) from it to less general and ultimately to particular consequences? The answer is that we do not know the truth of this most general proposition until we can see it as the product of all the accumulated inferior inferences that can be subsumed under it (vol. VII, p. 307). Ironically, our most universal law, the one logically antecedent to all the rest of our knowledge, is in fact dependent on that knowledge for whatever certainty it can possess. The consequence is that we can never begin to know anything, because what is necessary a priori is a truth that can be approached only a posteriori. Knowledge is possible only after knowledge already exists, or, to put it another way, any individual act of knowing presupposes a structure of knowledge. This is the structuralist premise, and it poses a dilemma that Lévi-Strauss and his followers call the problem of origins. How can one get back to the original structures of meaning or knowledge?

Induction itself, to which Mill looked for the knowledge that deduction could never supply, and for which he devised his four methods of experimental inquiry, is equally helpless to break out of the circle. Deduction, if it is constrained to proceed from particulars to particulars, is only a special case of induction; so induction, if, as Mill suggests (vol. VII, p. 308), it can be cast into the form of a syllogism with the major premise suppressed, is only a special case of deduction; and the two forms of inference are subject to the same inherent limitation. Unlike Whately, who assimilated induction to deduction, Mill preferred to think of induction as the universal type of all inference, but no induction that lays any claim to being scientific proceeds ab initio, for two reasons. In the first place, to assume with Descartes that nothing whatever is already known is not only impracticable, it is wholly at variance with our everyday experience, in which we constantly base our inferences and our actions on prior generalizations. And in the second place, an objection that cuts much deeper is that we have no means of testing the correctness of inductions except by reference to others already performed, for it is the accumulated result of all our inductive inferences, as we have already seen, that gives authority to the proposition that is itself the ground of all induction, the law of universal causation, so that the validity of any induction depends on that of all the rest. This is the reason behind Mill's assertion that “this mode of correcting one generalization by means of another, a narrower generalization by a wider, which common sense suggests and adopts in practice, is the real type of scientific Induction” (vol. VII, p. 319).

From the beginning Mill is careful to avoid metaphysical questions, such as the existence of matter or spirit, or the reality of time and space:

This inquiry [he insists] has never been considered a portion of logic. Its place is in another and a perfectly distinct department of science, to which the name metaphysics more particularly belongs: that portion of mental philosophy which attempts to determine what part of the furniture of the mind belongs to it originally, and what part is constructed out of materials furnished to it from without.

(vol. VII, p. 8)

Logic, in fact, has little or nothing to do with the means by which we obtain knowledge or the conditions of our assent to the propositions that express that knowledge. Logic looks back at what the mind has done, not forward to what it may do. “Logic is not the science of Belief, but the science of Proof, or Evidence.”⁵ And what is true of logic is true of all science. The structure of knowledge in any department of science can never be predicted, but can only be known after the fact. Accordingly,

the definition of a science must necessarily be progressive and provisional. Any extension of knowledge or alteration in the current opinions respecting the subject matter, may lead to a change more or less extensive in the particulars included in the science; and its composition being thus altered, it may easily happen that a different set of characteristics will be found better adapted as differentiae for defining its name.

(vol. VII, p. 140)

The progress of knowledge in any branch of science, besides being measurable in its direction and extent only by hindsight, is made more problematic still by the fact that it is determined not by natural law but by the unpredictable advent of new paradigms⁶ for organizing the elements of our knowledge. In his review of Whately's Elements of Logic, Mill had stressed the fact that “classification is arbitrary” and that species or other logical categories are things that we make (vol. XI, p. 23). This view he was to modify in the System of Logic, recognizing that some species (for example, sulphur or phosphorus) are the work of nature (vol. VII, p. 122), but it remains true that the structure of knowledge depends less on natural distinctions than on the arbitrary distinctions of thought or nomenclature. Science, therefore, as the Cambridge cosmologist Herman Bondi once put it, has nothing to do with truth, for it has no means of perceiving or recognizing the truth of propositions about the natural world. What it can and perforce must do is either to disprove propositions that cannot be reconciled with a previously established paradigm, or to cast about for a new paradigm with which they can be reconciled. The apparatus of logic, like that of any science, can do no more than detect falsehood or, what amounts to the same thing, inconsistency with the results of previous inductions. Positive advances must always be the result of guesswork or inspiration or serendipity.

The formidable machinery of A System of Logic, by which Mill sought to settle the problem of induction and, more important, to provide a systematic methodology adequate to the requirements of the human sciences, fails to do either. The underlying reason, as I believe Mill would have readily acknowledged, is in the fatal discontinuity between the processes of the natural or the human world and man's cognitive apparatus. However profound or universal it may turn out to be, truth has no inherent power by which it can command assent from men's minds; nor are men's minds naturally equipped with any special faculty for discerning truth. Such truth as mankind possesses owes more to exceptional insight than to any systematic process whatever, although the laws of induction can provide a regular and systematic account of what has already taken place without their aid. Nowhere is this made clearer than in Mill's strictures against Macaulay for assuming that the natural law of progress, the inevitable march of mind, has given mankind truths that needed no exceptional insight to perceive. Macaulay's image is the sun, which illuminates the hills while it is still below the horizon, but eventually shines also on the plain:

If this metaphor is to be carried out [Mill remarks], it follows that if there had been no Newton, the world would not only have had the Newtonian system, but would have had it equally soon; as the sun would have risen just as early to spectators in the plain if there had been no mountain at hand to catch still earlier rays. And so it would be, if truths, like the sun, rose by their own proper motion, without human effort; but not otherwise. I believe that if Newton had not lived, the world must have waited for the Newtonian philosophy until there had been another Newton, or his equivalent. No ordinary man, and no succession of ordinary men, could have achieved it.⁷

Mill's acute sense of the difficulties that remain standing in the way of truth, in spite of his elaborate machinery of induction, accounts in large part for the utility he assigns to the freedom of thought and discussion in On Liberty. If, as he believes, truth is a precious commodity, and at the same time so difficult of attainment as to threaten to elude all the snares that care and foresight can set for it, mankind should not only refrain from discouraging the free exchange of ideas, but should bend every effort towards fostering that exchange as the best, perhaps the only, means of rectifying our opinions and guarding them against the intrusion of error. Indeed, the assumption on which the argument rests is the idea put forward many years earlier in the essay on Coleridge, that truth depends on the “noisy conflict of half-truths.” Englishmen, Mill believes, do not yet sufficiently realize “the importance, in the present imperfect state of mental and social science, of antagonist modes of thought: which, it will one day be felt, are as necessary to one another in speculation, as mutually checking powers are in a political constitution” (vol. X, p. 122). But what, in “Coleridge,” had been a temperate plea for liberality and tolerance, becomes, in On Liberty, an impassioned warning against the dangers of allowing truth to shift for itself as somehow naturally recommending itself to mankind:

The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed forever, if may be thrown back for centuries. To speak only of religious opinions: the Reformation broke out at least twenty times before Luther, and was put down. Arnold of Brescia was put down. Fra Dolcino was put down. Savonarola was put down. The Albigeois were put down. The Vaudois were put down. The Lollards were put down. The Hussites were put down. Even after the era of Luther, wherever persecution was persisted in, it was successful. In Spain, Italy, Flanders, the Austrian Empire, Protestantism was rooted out; and, most likely would have been so in England, had Queen Mary lived, or Queen Elizabeth died. Persecution has always succeeded, save where the heretics were too strong a party to be effectually persecuted. … It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake.

(vol. XVIII, p. 238)

What becomes for Mill by 1859 an extreme pessimism about the power of truth to prevail over error, notwithstanding the advantages that the science of induction affords, leads naturally to the value Mill places on individuality in the same work, for if the fallibility of opinion is such that truth cannot be clearly distinguished from falsehood, and no reliable calculus of the probabilities of happiness is possible, it is clear that all people need to be free to follow the promptings of their own reason and inclination, to attempt, in Mill's phrase, “different experiments of living,” in order to realize their full human potential. That Mill does not attempt to specify what this full human potential is, beyond affirming, in the language of Humboldt already quoted, that it ought to be as many-sided as possible, has been made the focus of attack. R. P. Anschutz, for example, complains that if Mill's principle of individuality is to serve as a guide to life, “some content has to be found for it,”⁸ but individuality, once we attempt to specify its “content,” ceases to be individuality, in the sense of a course freely and spontaneously chosen. Anschutz's error, I believe, consists in confusing a necessary condition of human life with its end or goal. The fact is that Mill does not offer individuality as the fundamental principle of an ethical system, but merely as a practical necessity that presides over every man's quest for the meaning and purpose of his life.

[II]

For his part, Arnold never doubted the possibility of a scientific humanism, endorsing the opinion of the Homeric scholar F. A. Wolf: “There can be no doubt that Wolf is perfectly right; that all learning is scientific which is systematically laid out and followed up to its original sources, and that a genuine humanism is scientific.”⁹ But, although Arnold acknowledged the natural human need “to combine the pieces of our knowledge together, to bring them under general rules, to relate them to principles” (vol. X, p. 62), he had little concern with the method of scientific investigation beyond insisting that it be systematic and derive its light from the “original sources” of knowledge.

Arnold's preferred rhetorical stance is that of the amateur, and he never lays claim to any special fund of knowledge, scientific or otherwise. His self-characterization in the later chapters of Culture and Anarchy is typical:

Knowing myself to be indeed sadly to seek, as one of my many critics says, in “a philosophy with coherent, interdependent, subordinate, and derivative principles,” I continually have recourse to a plain man's expedient of trying to make what few simple notions I have, clearer and more intelligible to myself by means of example and illustration.

(vol. V, p. 126)

The same rhetorical pose served him also in the later “Literature and Science,” where he proclaims himself deficient in scientific learning (vol. X, p. 55). What Arnold intended, however, to be merely disarming candor proves to be a damaging admission indeed, for his understanding of science is extraordinarily naive. In “Literature and Science” he constantly stresses the importance of knowing the “results” of scientific study,¹⁰ but he seems curiously insensitive to the claims of science as a mode of intellectual culture and thus as an important element in a liberal curriculum. Arnold acknowledges the value of what he calls “instrument-knowledges” as contributing to our store of interesting knowledge without themselves being, for the mass of mankind, interesting. “For the majority of mankind,” he remarks, “a little of mathematics … goes a long way” (vol. X, p. 64). The natural sciences, although more intrinsically interesting than instrument-knowledges, are still primarily valuable for their “results,” not for their procedures.

Arnold's naive conception of science is shown most clearly perhaps in the comparison he offers to display the superiority of literary to scientific knowledge. The passage must be quoted in full.

I once mentioned in a school-report, how a young man in one of our English training colleges having to paraphrase the passage in Macbeth beginning,

“Can'st thou not minister to a mind diseased?”

turned this line into, “Can you not wait upon the lunatic?” And I remarked what a curious state of things it would be, if every pupil of our national schools knew, let us say, that the moon is two thousand one hundred and sixty miles in diameter, and thought at the same time that a good paraphrase for

“Can'st thou not minister to a mind diseased?”

was, “Can you not wait upon the lunatic?” If one is driven to choose, I think I would rather have a young person ignorant about the moon's diameter, but aware that “Can you not wait upon the lunatic?” is bad, than a young person whose education had been such as to manage things the other way.

(vol. X, pp. 69-70)

Quite apart from the rhetorical effect of the iteration of the absurd “Can you not wait upon the lunatic?” or the unnecessary specificity with which the diameter of the moon is given, the comparison is a prejudicial one, for it presents as analogous knowledge of a bald, meaningless fact about the natural world and a complex judgment, involving both a determination of verbal meaning and a qualitative estimate, upon a line of poetry that can only be understood and evaluated in the light of the connotations it derives from its context, the play as a whole. It would be both fairer and more accurate to present the moon's diameter as comparable in educational importance with a fact that Arnold mentions earlier in the same essay: “If we are studying Greek accents, it is interesting to know that pais and pas, and some other monosyllables of the same form of declension, do not take the circumflex upon the last syllable of the genitive plural” (vol. X, p. 62). Or conversely, it might be appropriate to suggest that accurately paraphrasing a line of Macbeth is comparable in difficulty and importance to explaining how the moon's diameter is determined.

Science, for Arnold, is reducible to the facts that can be demonstrated by means of its ancillary “instrument-knowledges,” and he is quite incapable of conceiving it as a structure of knowledge, humanly interesting in its own right and valuable, either as a form of intellectual training or discipline, or as a perspective from which to view humanistic thought. To speak of humanistic learning as scientific, therefore, is not to lay claim to the coherence of what Mill would call the moral or human sciences, nor is it even to claim the authority of a philosophically grounded method common to the humanities and the natural sciences. It affirms no more than that the methods of humanistic scholarship are, or ought to be, in some unspecified way, “systematically laid out,” and that their products therefore have a share in the authority we grant to the results of investigation in the natural sciences.

Ironically, however, neither Arnold's low opinion of the pretensions of science to an important place in liberal education nor his rather hazy notion of the claims of scientific methodology lead him to adopt a skeptical position about the status of knowledge, which he persists in regarding as not only possible, but, under certain conditions, easy of attainment. Not that Arnold subscribes to what he calls in Culture and Anarchy “a peculiarly British form of Quietism,” the belief that we can attain to certitude without taking thought, “by the mercy of Providence, and by a kind of natural tendency of things” (vol. V, p. 156). On the contrary, Arnold sees formidable obstacles standing in the way of truth, but these do not, as they did for Mill, arise in the disparity between man's powers or faculties and the nature of things; they are not inherent in the cognitive act itself.

In On Liberty Mill had taken Humboldt's notion of a harmonious development of human powers as confirming his own view that, lacking any authoritative prescription, man's safest course was to experiment with as many modes of life as possible in an effort to realize his individual potential. Arnold also heeded Humboldt's words, although in his view they directed, not a restless search for one's individuality, but the realization of an ideal that was at once social and authoritative. Culture, he said, “is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man” (vol. V, p. 112). The argument of Culture and Anarchy consists essentially of adapting the idea of culture—accessibility to ideas and the disposition to be moved by ideas—as an instrument to combat “anarchy,” conceived in both political and intellectual terms. To counter political anarchy, culture proposes the instrumentality of the State, embodying the national and collective best self (vol. V, pp. 134-35); to counter intellectual anarchy, culture suggests a law of taste and the idea of right reason. Among the obstacles to the recognition of a law of taste Arnold reckons man's “natural taste for the bathos” (vol. V, p. 147); what chiefly militates against the recognition of right reason is a social structure that imprisons people within the attitudes and values peculiar to their class. The effect of such a social arrangement, as Arnold was to sum it up in the later essay, “Equality,” lies in “materialising our upper class, vulgarising our middle class, and brutalising our lower class. And this is to fail in civilisation” (vol. VIII, p. 299). The remedy proposed in Culture and Anarchy is to take the authority of the State out of the hands of those who are activated chiefly by class spirit or prejudice and place it in the hands of those who are so far able to transcend class spirit and prejudice as to be accessible to right reason and to be moved by a general humane spirit.

No one, surely, would quarrel with Arnold's notion that an indispensable condition of knowing the truth, or as Arnold was fond of putting it, knowing “the best that has been known and thought in the world,”¹¹ is to be freed from those impediments created and fostered by society itself in the form of class attitudes and prejudices. A more difficult problem arises when we begin to inquire into the method by which Arnold proposes to discover and recognize “the best that has been known and thought in the world,” supposing those class attitudes and prejudices to be overcome. The phrase “right reason” begs the question, for how can we know when we are reasoning rightly? As Mill neatly demonstrates in his review of Whately's Logic, “Men may easily persuade themselves that they are able to reason although they are not; because the faculty which they want, is that by which alone they could detect the want of it” (vol. XI, p. 5). Has Arnold discovered some royal road to knowledge that Mill could not find in fifteen years of groping with the problem of induction?

Arnold confronts methodological questions rarely and reluctantly, and epistemological questions never, yet it is possible, by examining some of the conclusions he reaches, and by exploring the implications of his favorite terms and metaphors, to recover his tacit assumptions about the way the mind arrives at truth. Very early in Culture and Anarchy he speaks of “the universal order which seems to be intended and aimed at in the world” (vol. V, p. 93), a concept he apparently also had in mind as he rang the changes on the phrase, “the true, firm, intelligible law of things.”¹² Now to speak of “the universal order” or “the firm intelligible law of things” clearly implies a faith in an inherent correspondence between things and the mind that comprehends them, a belief that the laws of nature, while possessing objective reality, are at the same time adapted to human intelligence, which is understood as specially empowered to grasp them. To Mill's nominalism, expressed in his belief that species are, for the most part, man-made, Arnold opposes a belief in the reality of universals; to Mill's skepticism, which can accord only a contingent probability to the results of induction, and looks in vain for a sign by which truth can be known, Arnold opposes the rationalist's faith in the intelligibility of a universal order, and thus also in man's natural capacity to seize truth.

It seems natural to suppose, furthermore, that man's innate capacity to grasp truth is the faculty to which Arnold had already given the name “right reason,” and which needs only to be freed from external restraints to fulfill its function. Knowledge, accordingly, is not what we create but what we discover, and the law that both culture and education are to follow is to allow the mind's own light to shine upon its objects. The intrusion of abstract systems of thought turns out to be itself a major obstacle to the discernment of truth. “Here,” Arnold wrote in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” “the great safeguard is never to let oneself become abstract, always to retain an intimate and lively consciousness of the truth of what one is saying, and, the moment this fails us, to be sure that something is wrong” (vol. III, p. 283). But when the mind frees itself from practical concerns, when its operations are not impeded by specious dogmas and claptrap, or even by too rigorous or slavish a dependence on intellectual method, then it can, by a free and inward action, seize and hold the truth. The nature of this mental act is suggested by Arnold's favorite metaphors for it: “giving our consciousness free play” and “letting the natural stream of our consciousness flow over [its objects] freely.”¹³ Here is no laborious seeking after truth, but a fluid, effortless, essentially passive operation, which we permit rather than actively will.

Arnold's insistence on freedom as a condition of the mind's most creative activity suggests, at least superficially, that like Mill he regards truth as the product of a dialectic conflict of half-truths and that human development is synonymous with free individual self-expression. But the resemblance is misleading. Of the two mutually supporting aspects of culture, Hebraism and Hellenism, it is unquestionably Hellenism that Arnold regards as most exigent (however he may shift the emphasis later), and to define Hellenism he coins the phrase, which he uses over and over again, “spontaneity of consciousness.”¹⁴ “Spontaneity” is a favorite word of Mill's, too,¹⁵ but for Mill it refers to voluntary activity that is natural and unforced, while for Arnold it has the suggestion of disinterestedness and freedom from prejudice, conditions that, far from being natural, are achieved only by the transcendence of one's ordinary self. Thus Arnold's “free play of mind” means, not unconditioned, or even undisciplined, mental activity, but mental activity that is not subservient to circumstance. For Arnold a “free” play of mind is perfectly consistent with an attitude of deference toward the best that has been known and thought in the world, and with the willingness to suppress personal preferences in favor of objectively and even authoritatively determined values. In fact, Arnold objects strongly to Mill's more literal interpretation of freedom, attacking what he thinks of as the anarchy of “doing as one likes.”

The practical and political consequences of this epistemological difference between Mill and Arnold emerge in their view of human rights. From one point of view, rights—and their correlative, duties—are nothing more than the defining characteristics of liberty, which may be regarded as directly proportional to the first and inversely proportional to the second, and therefore the relevant question for both Mill and Arnold—whether rights and duties are inherent in the human condition—is really the same as the question whether liberty is an essential condition of human life. Nevertheless, the former question is worth examining directly, for it shifts the emphasis from liberty as an end in itself, or as a means of perfecting knowledge, to the original sanctions of liberty. If, as Mill argues, liberty is indispensable to, or even identical with, human individuality, it follows that the rights that define liberty are also indispensable and belong to man even in the unaccommodated state of nature. Of course Mill is enough of a realist to know that even natural rights require the guarantees of law, and therefore of organized society, but he cannot enumerate the rights of man because they are infinite. Man has a right to do anything at all that does not interfere with the similar right of other men. Self-protection is the sole end that justifies society in abridging any man's liberty.

Arnold's view is diametrically opposite. “Now does any one, if he simply and naturally reads his own consciousness, discover that he has any rights at all? For my part, the deeper I go in my own consciousness, and the more simply I abandon myself to it, the more it seems to me that I have no rights at all, only duties” (vol. V, p. 201). Like Carlyle, Arnold holds that “renouncement,” rather than liberty, “is the law of human life” (vol. V, p. 207), but this disparagement of liberty does not mean that Arnold has abandoned the ideal of spontaneity of consciousness; it means only that he rejects the notion of natural, a priori rights, discoverable by man's reason, substituting instead a notion of right and liberty that must be achieved through spiritual conquest. There is a kind of Hebraism in Arnold's Hellenism, which stresses not sensation, enjoyment, and untrammeled appreciation, but development, self-discipline, and self-improvement.

[III]

Modern structuralist thought has discovered in language the power that simultaneously constitutes human knowledge and renders it impossible. “The fundamental codes of a culture,” Foucault argues persuasively, “… establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home.”¹⁶ But at the same time, language, which has become detached from the things it formerly signified, can now signify only itself, can tell us nothing about the world of things. It is a tissue of words, containing its own taxonomy, imposing its own order on what can be known or thought, and interposing itself between us and reality.

Obviously the radical gulf between words and things envisaged by Foucault amounts to a total repudiation of Arnold's comfortable assumption about “the firm intelligible law of things,” knowable by a kind of introspection, or “spontaneity of consciousness.” It is a curious paradox that Arnold, who was skeptical of the pretensions of natural science to an equal dignity with humanistic learning, yet believed firmly that humanistic learning could itself be scientific, and that real knowledge (science, scientia) was possible. It is perhaps a greater paradox that Mill, who did so much to make available for man's humane concerns the precision of method of Newtonian science, should remain so pessimistic about the possibility of any scientific knowledge at all, but perhaps both paradoxes reflect the immense changes that have overtaken both humanistic and scientific thought in the last hundred years. In his naive faith that the laws of nature were conformable to man's powers of cognition, Arnold remains a characteristic Victorian; in his fears that truth might elude man's most searching inquiries, Mill foreshadows the despairing skepticism of Foucault.

Notes

1. Edward Alexander, Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), p. 28.

2. Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963-), vol. XVIII, p. 261. All references are to this edition and will be identified parenthetically in the text, except where additional information is to be provided.

3. The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960-77), vol. V, p. 94. All references are to this edition and will be identified parenthetically in the text, except where additional information is to be provided.

4. John Stuart Mill, Autobiography and Other Writings, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), p. 126.

5. Mill,² vol. VII, p. 9. In his Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, Mill was strongly to endorse Hamilton's assertion that “logic considers Thought, not as the operation of thinking, but as its product.” vol. IX, p. 361.

6. Mill does not use this term, which I have borrowed in this sense from Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 10-22.

7. Mill,² vol. VIII, p. 937. Macaulay's views are set forth in the Essay on Dryden.

8. R. P. Anschutz, The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 26.

9. Arnold,³ “Literature and Science”, vol. X, p. 57.

10. Arnold,² vol. X, p. 59. Cf. also pp. 60, 64, 68.

11. Arnold,³ “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” vol. III, pp. 268, 270, 282, 283, 284.

12. Arnold,³ vol. V, pp. 178, 184, 191, 201, 209, 213, 218, 219, 225.

13. Arnold,³ “Giving our consciousness free play,” vol. V, pp. 181, 186, 191, 192, 196, 201, 218, 221, 228, 229; “letting the natural stream of our consciousness flow” etc., vol. V, pp. 188, 209, 220, 221.

14. Super's index gives ten page references.

15. Mill,² vol. XVIII, pp. 261, 264, 277.

16. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. xx.