The Pursuit of Certainty. Shirley Robin Letwin

trying to draw a detailed picture of what a man ought to be, of how he should order his faculties and all his activities. To Mill, as to the early Christian puritans, man was a corrupt and fallen being, who had to struggle constantly against the sin within him.

      But with this he combined an unprecedented optimism in man’s ability to save himself through his reason. John Mill was not a man to tolerate doubt about anything, however profound, nor to be amused by confusion. Earnestness, moral certainty, righteousness were more natural to him. His interest in giving emotion its due did not move him to abandon his father’s moral spirit, but to reject the prevailing British suspicion of comprehensive views of the universe. The upshot of his personal search for something spiritually more inspiring than Benthamism was an ambition to contain the whole world in a single theory, which constituted his real break with Benthamism. By comparison, Bentham’s most grandiose schemes were child’s play. Whereas Hume, like Hobbes and Locke, had used philosophy to underscore the limits of human powers and to advocate more modest aspirations, Mill saw in philosophy the guide to complete and final truth.

      Yet he failed to rid himself altogether of the prejudices bred in him by his early training. As a philosopher, he remained within his native tradition. But his flirtation with alien ways of thinking left its mark—his early interest in a comprehensive philosophy turned into an interest in a comprehensive politics and science, animated by a faith in progress. Only those who were coldhearted or philistines, he came to think, considered politics merely a means to peace and security and liberty. Those who were aware of man’s higher potentialities would make politics a means to human perfection. And a new role for science would make this feasible. From his father, Mill had learned the puritan notion that society is best governed by an elite, although they were to be elected by a wide suffrage. He came to identify this elite with those who had scientific knowledge and to believe that a new set of intellectual leaders would conduct men to salvation on earth. The new priesthood were to be sociologists, able to understand the true course of events, and on the basis of this information to tell people how they should live.

      But a science of sociology had still to be developed, and while he devoted much thought to it, Mill did not get far beyond suggesting some modifications in classical economics. He persisted in founding his social analysis on individuals, just as Bentham had done, and from such an assumption the results he wanted were difficult to come by. Nor could he ever renounce his allegiance to the traditional liberties even while preaching his new spiritual politics. He marked the birth of the “liberal intellectual,” so familiar today, who with one part of him genuinely values liberty and recognizes the equal right of all adults to decide their lives for themselves, but with another wants the government, under the direction of the superior few, to impose what he considers the good life on all his fellows.

      Precisely how politics could be based on science and made to serve spiritual ends was proposed in a consistent and clear-cut manner by Beatrice Webb. In her, the urge for improvement was altogether freed of inhibitions inherited from the eighteenth century. That she and Sidney Webb should both have become such important figures in the history of British political practice is in itself significant. For though Beatrice Webb was an impressive and moving figure, and in her way deeply reflective, she cannot be ranked with the greatest among either philosophers or statesmen. Yet she offered most eminently what her time demanded. Englishmen, even thoughtful ones, had come to care above all for getting results at once. The pressure of social problems and a changed understanding of civilization made them indifferent to discussions of eternal dilemmas and impatient of anything that encouraged them to be undecided or troubled. They were ready to dispense with profundity and elegance, if only they could find some simple directions for improvement. This sort of need Beatrice Webb could satisfy.

      Although she was not, like John Mill, strictly born into puritanism, it was easily available to her and early in life she adopted it as her own. In time she learned to equate the triumph of reason over passion with the rule of science over all of human life. For Mill, science still retained the character of a technique, though a very superior and broad technique. For Beatrice Webb, science assumed the quality of a religion. It represented not only man’s victory over nature but a superior discipline that could truly purify human life. Diverse influences helped to shape this image of science—the impact of new discoveries in the physical sciences, Darwin’s theory of evolution, Spencer’s grand synthesis, idealist philosophy, and Evangelical morals. It did not correspond very well to what scientists actually did or believed, but it came closer than anything else to satisfying her emotional and intellectual wants.

      Above all, it transformed her image of political activity. Science, Beatrice Webb believed, taught that politics should concern itself with the generations of the future more than with individuals living here and now, that in fact it ought not to deal with persons but with constituents of a social organism. The new politics could depend wholly on impersonal knowledge. For since science taught her, she believed, to think of society as an organic whole, the sociology that Mill had failed to develop seemed ready at hand. It followed that just as with the advancement of medicine, the physician replaced the barber, so politics had now to be taken out of the hands of ordinary men, however well educated or discerning, and turned over to the only ones who could be trusted with it, scientific experts. To the ordinary man was left a greater opportunity to join in public discussion and the joy of dedicating himself to Humanity, an infinite, possibly eternal being, though, happily for a scientific age, not a transcendental being.

      Beatrice Webb continued to speak of a mysterious realm of values that neither science nor politics could reach, but doubts about ultimate truth never interfered with her dreams of human perfection through politics. She sanctioned only the usual parliamentary means, but in all other ways her view of political activity broke profoundly with the British tradition. Politics was at one stroke both destroyed and sanctified. It was destroyed in the old sense because political wisdom, all the skills once considered necessary in politics, even the old moral standards, became irrelevant. In its new sense, politics was no longer one of several human activities and at that not a very noble one; it encompassed all of human life. The City of Man was to be not a means of reaching the City of God, not even a reflection of it, but the Heavenly City itself.

      Thus Hume’s picture of man as a balanced whole whose object is merely to live decency and enjoyably was replaced by a view of man as essentially sinful, obliged to struggle against the evil within him, and most likely to succeed if he submits himself wholly to reason and puts his life at the service of future generations. In the new picture, man acquired new resources—accurate and very detailed knowledge about how to live, untainted by anyone’s prejudices or interests. The earth was no longer peopled by free moral agents deciding their own actions, in a world as far as possible removed from the consistency of a machine because every moral problem was unique. There was no longer merely a great variety of goods, but a coherent, all-inclusive system of life, arranging the things men seek in a clear hierarchy. The old dilemmas of human life, it seemed, could be disposed of, the difference between man and God reduced to a bare minimum, and tragedy translated into inefficiency.

      But these are only the bold outlines in the pattern. There is besides a wealth of surprising detail. Apparent affinities hide the widest divergence—Hume uses Newton’s method to thwart the scientific spirit; the aversion to magic, that more than any other sentiment unites John Mill to Bentham, leads him to qualify liberty for the sake of progress; the established picture of Benthamite individualism is taken from a Darwinist who cares nothing for individuals. But the real affinities are often no less startling—Hume shares Montaigne’s preference for Catholicism; John Mill denounces nature in the same terms as the Scots Presbyterian ministers castigated by Hume; the collectivist, T. H. Huxley, and the Comtist, Frederick Harrison, echo the Westminster reviewers on education, art, and science; the same antipathies shape the lives and work of Bentham, Spencer, and Beatrice Webb. The masters rarely teach what they intend—Hume becomes the patron saint of men utterly devoid of the scepticism and irony he had carefully cultivated; Bentham’s gadgets for tolerance come to serve as a dogma of the righteous; Locke’s psychology, designed to restrain human ambition, inspires James Mill to believe that men can be remade to order; John Mill’s rejection of organic sociology prepares Englishmen to accept it. The same sentiment felt with equal passion and sincerity comes to bear very different connotations—we move from Hume’s detached ironic