INSURGENT PHILOSOPHERS AND RELIGION

Mill argues that when religions are unable to explain the meaning of human existence a vacuum develops, which allows new philosophical and scientific explanations to come forward. “With the decline of polytheism came Greek philosophy; with the decline of Catholicism, the modern” (Mill 1969a, 270). A period of conflict then ensues between the prevailing religious faith and the new philosophic and scientific understandings. Mill charges that when the highest thinkers confront this conflict between faith and reason, they tend to either compromise or disengage completely from political discourse, either because they are unable to shed completely the old ways of thinking or because they prefer to contemplate privately the newly discovered truths. Those few intellectuals who challenge the gods are persecuted. The schism between wisdom and the public, knowledge and action, is established, and society as well as the intellectuals suffer because of it (Mill 1981a, 245, 247).

To Mill, religions are products of the imagination, but they are not arbitrary constructs. They emerge from the human desire to understand the meaning and highest form of human existence and develop in relation to prevailing philosophic and scientific understandings. For instance, ancient Greek religions addressed the needs of a people struggling to move beyond the presocial stage of existence: the legends provided a sense of continuity with the past; and the heroic founders of family, tribe, or race (whether mythical or not) provided deities that cultivated a courageous attitude toward the future. These polytheistic religions also conformed to the prescientific understanding that the phenomena of nature seem to be the result of forces altogether variant, each taking its force without relation to the other (Mill 1969a, 272–78; 1969d, 419; 1978a, 274–81).

This is not Mill's final say on ancient religions, however. Mill explains that as the philosophers and natural scientists of ancient Athens systematically studied natural phenomena, they discovered that every natural event depends for its existence on some antecedent and that each of these relations is influenced by other types of regularities or laws. From this complex understanding the belief followed that a Being controls all of nature (Mill 1969a, 275–56). Equally important, when the philosophers and scientists attempted to explain physical phenomena by physical causes, they were regarded as sacrilegious. Faced with the challenge of overcoming both persecution and the weight of an entire tradition of thought, the highest minds of the ancient world were either unwilling or unable to challenge polytheism. Almost all reconciled the new reason with the old faith. “Mankind do [sic] not pass abruptly from one connected system of thought to another: they first exhaust every contrivance for reconciling the two…. In general, they [the ancient intellectuals] were unable to emancipate themselves from the old religious traditions, but were just as incapable of believing them literally.” Many centuries would pass before polytheism was finally laid to rest, and to Mill's deep regret, philosophy did not contribute to its replacement (Mill 1969a, 276; 1977b, 236–67; 1978a, 286–87).

Mill frames the conflict between reason and faith for the contemporary English intellectual in the same way he did for the ancient thinker. “We are too well acquainted with this form of religious sentiment [persecution in Athens] even now, to have any difficulty in comprehending what must have been its violence then” (Mill 1969a, 276–77). Although a few contemporary thinkers wage ill-tempered polemics against Christianity, the most important thinkers respond to this conflict by compromising or disengaging from direct debate on moral and religious doctrines. These individuals mask their views in mystery, afraid to speak out their genuine beliefs. “A strong premium is placed on dishonesty on their part,” Mill notes in a letter, “and those that have a natural energy of character are drawn into violence of language which hurts the feelings of other people and arouses in themselves something of that very intolerance from which they are sufferers” (Mill 1972, 1500).

No doubt thinking of himself, Mill states that a few of the highest type of thinkers are able to present some of their most important political and moral teachings in this environment, by “exhaust[ing] the resources of ingenuity in attempting to reconcile the promptings of his conscience and reason with orthodoxy” (Hamburger 1999, 55–85; Mill 1977b, 242). But these “great thinkers” have shown throughout history that they have the capacity to survive in all kinds of environments of “mental slavery.” It is society as a whole that suffers the greatest loss, as mass individuals lose their opportunity to develop their minds. The English mind is either paralyzed, or led to confine its thinking to matters of little value, “by the apprehension that any real freedom of speculation…might, by making them unbelievers, be the surest way to render them vicious and miserable” (Mill 1969d, 425; 1977b, 243). Like the ancient intellectuals of late polytheism, English intellectuals have great difficulty either disengaging from or directly confronting their religious tradition, and both the society and its intellectuals suffer.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT'S COMPROMISE

Even more important, Mill explains that, just as the ancient thinkers compromised with polytheism, the circumscribed intellectual outlook of contemporary England is the result of a too similar compromise—the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment and Christianity. Rather than directly challenge Christian beliefs, the Enlightenment of the United Kingdom reformed Christianity to show it contained nothing offensive to society, states Mill. In fact, Christianity's highest teachings were reworked to support the requirements of a new liberal state. The reformers claimed “natural religion”—establishing an understanding of God through the exercise of our cognitive powers—had “as much right to the religious argument as their opponents, and that if the course they recommended seemed to conflict with some parts of the ways of Providence, there was some part with which it agreed better than was contended for on the other side” (Mill 1978b, 383). Mill summarizes the overall outcome of this compromise between the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment and Christianity:

It is now clear why in On Liberty Mill continually refers to England as “Christian,” even though he argues that few English embrace traditional Christian beliefs. The gravity of Mill's charges in On Liberty of a “convenient plan for peace in the intellectual world” and a “tacit convention that principles are not to be disputed” also is now becoming apparent (Mill 1977b, 242–43). Mill is arguing that the Enlightenment advocates of natural religion set themselves the task of domesticating Christianity's religious authorities and their zeal for persecution. They preferred to turn Christianity against itself, rather than directly attacking it, “being often themselves not free from the feeling (of Christian belief), and in any case afraid of incurring the charge of impiety by saying anything which might be held to disparage the Creator's power” (Mill 1978b, 383).

Mill argues that the new religious teachings flowed from Enlightenment philosophers first recognizing, then taking advantage of, a contradiction in the traditional Christian outlook that an all-good, all-wise, and all-powerful God created nature. The Enlightenment knew that during Christianity's period of dominance, Christian theology largely embraced the ancient philosophers' view that humans are wild, but crafty, animals, and that instilling ethical obligations into recalcitrant human material was a highly valued task. The modern philosophers also understood that during this Christian era, the paradoxical idea that an omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent Deity created a wicked, evil human nature, which needed to be tamed, was a source of moral confusion. Rather than directly challenge Christian beliefs, the Enlightenment took advantage of this contradiction to develop an alternative view of the Deity's relationship to morality and human nature. What resulted is the argument for a new liberal civil theology centered on self-preservation and human happiness, which is more consistent with the Christian belief of an all-powerful, all-wise, and all-good Deity. The Enlightenment, Mill continues, was confident that it would “win” this compromise in the end. “In this mode of dealing with the great a priori fallacies, the progress of improvement clears away particular errors while the causes of errors are still left standing, and very little weakened by each conflict: yet by a long series of such partial victories precedents are accumulated, to which an appeal may be made against these powerful pre-possessions, and which afford a growing hope that the misplaced feeling, after having so often learnt to recede, may some day be compelled to an unconditional surrender” (Mill 1978b, 383).

Indeed, Mill recognizes that through a long series of partial victories, the British reformers weakened most features of the revealed Christian morality. Christianity has accommodated itself to the prevailing philosophy of the day and now borrows “a considerable part of its color and flavor from sentimental deism.” The Church of England's primary goal is civil peace, serving as a “sedative to the religious spirit, to preventing it from disturbing the harmony of society and the tranquility of states.” After the 1688 Revolution, Christianity's moral doctrine had dropped spiritually minded goals and embraced the prevailing self-interested ethos. “One of the crotchets of the philosophy of the age was, that all virtue is self-interest; and accordingly, in the textbook adopted by the Church…for instruction in moral philosophy, the reason for doing good is declared to be, that God is stronger than we are, and is able to damn us if we do not” (Eisenach 1998b, 201; Mill 1969b, 144–45).

Mill praises the religious compromise for contributing to liberating the individual from bondage to superstition and ecclesiastical authority (Mill 1977b, 222). But Mill argues that the Enlightenment's resolution of the religious question also created costs—at best underestimated, at worst completely unforeseen. First, Mill charges that, as the new religion does not teach anything other than rational obedience to liberal rules of justice, it is incapable of establishing an ennobling idea of the best life that either the ancients or romantics foster—an idea that the new liberal society desperately requires. Mill argues that religion, like art, should establish something more than the devotion to practical aims. Religion creates a strong imaginative picture of what human perfection is and how to realize it (Mill 1969d, 416). “The evil is,” Mill summarizes, “that such a belief [natural religion] keeps the ideal wretchedly low; and opposes the most obstinate resistance to all thought which has a tendency to raise it higher. Believers shrink from every train of ideas that would lead the mind to a clear conception and an elevated standard of excellence, because they feel (even when they do not distinctly see) that such a standard would conflict with many of the dispensations of nature, and much of what they are accustomed to consider as the Christian creed” (Mill 1981a, 45).

Furthermore, Mill charges that the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment compromise with Christianity contributes to a modern England that is a secularization of biblical themes in key ways, and none more so than the Christian tradition of obedience and fear of the creative will. Like Christianity, the founders of British liberalism (such as Hobbes, Locke, and Hume) saw the virtues of the ancients—most notably, honor and courage—as contributors to instability and strife (Hobbes 1994, 74–8; Hume 1987, 514–15; Locke 1975, 70–2). This continued emphasis on restraint of the will is, for Mill, ultimately at odds with his conviction that attention needs to be paid to developing a more creative will in the face of modern England's normalizing tyranny (Mill 1977a, 131–32). The central issue that Christianity and English justice have been designed to solve is the imposition of universal obedience, states Mill. Christianity compelled obedience to a universal faith, whereas modern justice compels obedience to universal law.

It cannot be denied, Mill concedes, that real differences exist between traditional Christianity and modern England, and the modern Englishman in fact benefited from this new environment because modern justice makes few epistemic demands on its adherents. It allows more space for free human conduct than Christianity (Mill 1977b, 222, 255). But the continuity is significant, and the English liberal tends to underrate its importance: the main object of modern justice is to compel general obedience to the law. What is missing in English liberalism is what Taylor (1985, 15–44) describes as human agency, the cultivating of the individual's ability to make qualitative evaluations of his or her desires. The English make choices not because there is something more worthy about this action rather than another, but because it conforms to a rule, custom, or public opinion. This Christian-derived morality is “negative rather than positive; passive rather than active; innocence rather than nobleness; abstinence from evil rather than energetic pursuit of the good…In its horror of sensuality, it made an idol of asceticism which has been gradually compromised away into legality” (Mill 1977b, 242–43, my emphasis).

Mill argues that the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment compromise with Christianity limits English liberalism's capacity to develop institutions and a culture that fosters human agency and moral development. For instance, unlike many of his liberal forbears, Mill did not object that England's established church violated the liberal doctrine of separation of church and state. Civil and ethical, state and church, Mill argued, are not as opposed to one another as many liberal thinkers suggest. Each provides different means to the same end: the mental expansion and moral development of the individual. The civil laws protect the liberty and security of the individual; the church helps shape individual and national character.

Mill argues that for Enlightenment thinkers a “case for the feudal and ecclesiastical institutions of modern Europe was by no means impossible: they had a meaning, had existed for honest ends, and an honest theory of them might [have been] made” (Mill 1969b, 142). Mill was particularly attracted to Coleridge's position on the need for a national institution focused on the advancement of knowledge, ultimately encouraging the civilization and cultivation of the national community (Mill 1977b, 303). However, despite his attraction to Coleridge's view of a national institution focused on ethical and moral development, Mill rejects Coleridge's position that the Church of England could eventually perform this task. Mill claims Coleridge's standard provides the “severest satire” on what the Church of England is. He charges that the Church of England is a victim of the compromise brokered between the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment outlook and the prevailing Christian authorities.

Mill takes particular aim at that “negative philosopher,” David Hume, who advocated the state limit religion's role in shaping human motivations through bribery of the established church. Hume charged religion promoted two different harmful tendencies. On the one hand, the independent (Catholic) church promoted itself by fostering human passivity and superstition. On the other hand, when competing (Protestant) religious sects are free from the state, efforts are continuously launched to foster religious enthusiasm, producing fanaticism. It is preferable, he continued, for the state to purchase the clergy's indolence. Putting the ministers on the dole eliminates their incentives for activism and emphasizes their role in preventing patrons from straying outside the boundaries of the Church. As Hume put it, the civil magistrate makes it “superfluous for them to be further active than merely to prevent their flock from straying in the quest for new pastures” (Hume 1983, 136).

“What neither party cared about, the ends of existing institutions, the work that was done by teachers and governors was flung overboard,” charges Mill. In this compromise, the Church retained its form, rituals, and establishment, but the Church no longer embodied an independent moral outlook. It stopped being “the champion of arts against arms, of the serf against the seigneur, peace against war, or spiritual principles and powers against the domination of animal forces.” The Church was envisioned “by philosophers” as a bulwark for civil peace and tranquility. The clergy of the establishment thought they had a good compromise on these terms, “and kept its conditions very faithfully” (Mill 1969b, 143). Mill argues that an entirely new institutional framework will have to be established in the future as an organized body, set apart and subsidized with the task of cultivating and diffusing higher forms of knowledge (Eisenach 1998b, 219–20; Mill 1967, 199; 1981a, 191).

Finally, another important impact of the Enlightenment–Christianity compromise in England is on the “freed” intellectuals themselves, who are now restricted and weakened by adhering to beliefs that they either do not believe or fully comprehend. “Their minds were once active—they are now passive; they once generated impressions—they now merely take them” (Mill 1986, 228). Just like the confused ancients who could not figure out how to engage the weight of an entire religious tradition they in part rejected, the compromised modern intellectual lives in a mental fog. “This simple and innocent faith can only, as I have said, co-exist with a torpid and inactive state of the speculative faculties” (Mill 1969d, 425). In Mill's account, late Christianity, like late polytheism, is characterized by a condition of progressive intellectual disengagement.

Mill concludes that “It is time to consider…whether all this straining to prop up beliefs which require so great an expense of intellectual toil and ingenuity to keep them standing, yields a sufficient return in human well being.” It is preferable, he continues, to apply our mental energies to the sustenance and maintenance of those other sources of human character—most notably, the ancients and the romantics—that are not linked to Christianity (Mill 1969d, 422–28; 1977b, 252–57). To produce a comprehensive morality that will promote “the moral regeneration of mankind,” Mill advocates a reconciliation of those outlooks that promote human agency with those that establish universal moral obligations, as opposed to the already existent reconciliation of Christianity with English liberalism (Mill 1977b, 242–43).

NATURAL RELIGION

The Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provides us with the grounds for understanding, if not accepting, Mill's position that natural religion fails to cultivate human agency and higher modes of human existence. Those who founded the Enlightenment saw themselves as engaged in a bitter, long, drawn-out battle with the adherents of religion or orthodoxy, who continued to have faith in such supernatural phenomena as miracles, creation, and heaven. Biblical dogma, what Hobbes called the “kingdom of darkness,” had to be pushed into the background to allow for civil peace and the rational pursuit of truth. The problem ran deeper than the hierarchy and superstition promoted by the ecclesiastics. By establishing that revealed truth is a standard above government laws and by anointing themselves the sole interpreters of such truth, religious dissenters and zealots undermined political authority and induced lawlessness throughout society (Hobbes 1994, 411–88).

Most of Mill's great predecessors in modern political philosophy, when they discussed the political consequences of Christianity, drew a line of demarcation between a false Christianity, which had bad consequences, and a true Christianity, which they held to be perfectly compatible with their understanding of the requirements of a free political society. Seminal Enlightenment thinkers developed a rational Christianity as an alternative to the Scriptural theology of the New Testament. Pufendorf, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke, among many others, devoted enormous energy to biblical commentaries and interpretations that replaced the rule of Scripture with natural religion, which established an understanding of God's will based on our cognitive capacity to recognize His laws of nature. Most of the standard bearers of this new Christianity saw the attainment of civil peace as the most important end of a political society. The precepts of the new theology tended to be simple, few in number, and stated with precision. They posited such things as a belief in the existence of an omnipotent and omniscient God, punishment of the wicked, and the sanctity of the rules of justice. As Spinoza put it, “Scriptural doctrine contains not abstruse speculation or philosophic reasoning, but very simple matters able to be understood by the most sluggish mind…God…asks no other knowledge of himself than the knowledge of his divine justice and charity, that is, such attributes of God as men find it possible to imitate by a definite rule of conduct” (Spinoza 2001, 153, 156). The simple doctrinal core of the Enlightenment's new natural religion accomplished the goal of civil peace by limiting the possible challenges to God's will by ambitious religious ideologues and moralists who escaped and subverted positive law through appeals to a higher law (e.g., Smith 1997).

Modern natural law theorists stated that we can “determine what it is that God wills” for humanity, “not by consulting Scripture, but by considering what must be done” if a human being, made as God has made it, is to be preserved among other human beings. Pufendorf argued that by diverting Christianity from other worldly goals and redirecting it toward more sociable and peaceful ends, Christianity itself was addressing the basic characteristics of human nature created by God: an instinct for self-preservation, and sound judgment as to what makes life with others possible. God's command to humanity, as discovered by human reason (as opposed to revelation) was to live in conformity with these natural laws. That is, to live in accordance with natural justice—giving each his due, refraining from harm to others. Based on these natural laws, we can have society and thereby the fundamental elements of moral life, whereas if we neglect them and act based on that neglect, we can have neither society nor humanity. “It follows that God wills that a man should use for the preservation of his nature the powers within him in which he is conscious of surpassing the beasts; and that he also wills that human life be different from their lawless life. Since he cannot achieve except by observance of natural law, it is also understood that he is obligated by God to observe it as the means which God Himself has established expressly to achieve this end, and which is not a product of man's will and changeable at his pleasure” (Pufendorf 1991, 36–37; Tuck 1987, 112). On the one hand, this modern natural law outlook conforms to the Christian idea that nature is a product of a wise, powerful, and benevolent Creator. On the other hand, the focus of this outlook takes morality and law out of the disputed territory over which religious wars were being fought. Instead, reason is emphasized as key to understanding the morally good and bad. As Locke put it, human reason is to be established as our “only Star and compass” (Locke 1996, 200; Waldron 2002).

Later Continental thinkers—most notably, the German Romantics–eventually replaced natural religion with culture as the source of moral integration and self-direction (Abrams 1971, 192–95; Hunter 2001, 353–76). But natural religion—as exemplified by the writings of Locke, Smith, and William Paley, for instance—was rarely challenged by Anglo-Scottish thinkers. Britain's seminal philosophers continued to center Christianity on a handful of basic beliefs to limit challenges to the law by ambitious ideologues and moralists (Reventlow 1985, 223–414). Indeed, Anglo-Scottish thinkers extended the characteristics of human nature created by God to be even more compatible with the new liberal state. Locke, Smith, and Paley propounded that compliance with the laws of justice established by the “Author of nature” created the basis for human happiness, as well as for self-preservation. “The happiness of mankind, as well as of all other rational creatures, seems to have been the original purpose intended by the Author of nature, when he brought them into existence,” states Smith. “By acting according to the dictates of our moral faculties, we necessarily pursue the most effectual means for promoting the happiness of mankind, and may therefore be said, in some sense to co-operate with the Deity, and to advance as far as in our power the plan of Providence” (Locke 1975, 68–9, 352; 1996, 288–90; Paley 1820, 19–24; Smith 1984, 5n10, 77n10).

So, the Enlightenment devoted an enormous amount of energy to the goal of supplanting the scripture of the New Testament, the traditional authoritative guide and teacher of morality, with a new kind of religion based more on reason than ever before. This new Christianity promised a “new world” of civil peace: toleration, security, happiness, private property, and equality under the law. But Mill raises a daunting question: is the Enlightenment's new religion a sufficient break from the Christianity it has compromised with? He recognizes that no philosopher can now be “found who, like the institutional writers of former times, adopts the so-called Law of Nature as the foundation of ethics, and endeavors consistently to reason from it.” Nonetheless, the outlook established by this theory “must still be counted among those which carry great weight in moral argumentation.” We live in an era, Mill states,

English liberal society is an improvement on Christianity in ensuring human equality and general moral improvement, concludes Mill. But English society has not broken from those features of Christianity that limit human energy. The natural religion of the Enlightenment provides a low or vulgar picture as to what is the meaning and best forms of life.

RATIONAL AND MORAL CRITIQUES

Mill is keenly aware that his assessment that the Enlightenment's natural religion is irrational, immoral, and a detriment to self-development will be judged in part on the validity of the method he proposes to assess it. He initially attempts to explain the existence of God by means of strictly natural causes. On nature, Mill adopts a Baconian outlook: a vast and interlocking network of efficient causes (Bacon 1996, 215–37). In order to explain God one must ultimately know if He is the cause whereby all things are determined. Mill's methods of experimental enquiry are “designed specifically to locate, by means of eliminative reasoning, a salient condition preceding or accompanying a phenomenon ‘with which it is really connected by an invariable law’” (Mill 1973, 388; Scarre 1998, 125). From the precepts of his inductive method, Mill analyzes arguments for Theism, focusing primarily on whether nature reflects Design.

Mill's inductive method of agreement suggests that some parts of nature may have been designed by an intelligent will. The thought behind Mill's method of agreement is that no feature not common to the circumstances in which the phenomenon occurs can be its cause, because the phenomenon is capable of occurring in its absence. In short, if there is a sole feature common to all the different cases, this is the only remaining candidate to play the causal role (Mill 1973, 388–91). Although Mill generally prefers other inductive approaches, he asserts that this particular argument is a strong one for this type. For instance, Mill cannot disprove the hypothesis that the eye has been designed. The disparate components of the eye resemble one another in that they all enable the eye to see. The conjunction of parts that form the eye had a foundation in time, suggesting another antecedent. The eye exists in a diverse set of animals, reducing the possibility of chance and suggesting a common antecedent. The distinct components of the different animals' eyes contribute to one end—sight—suggesting the possibility of Design (Carr 1962; Mill 1969c, 446–50). Mill declares that the idea of a Creator cannot be denied, although it must be placed on the lower level of possibilities. “Though [this] ground is unsafe we may, with due caution, journey to a new destination on it.” Skepticism is the right theoretical attitude toward God (Mill 1969c, 482).³

However, the principles of scientific investigation are a necessary but insufficient condition for developing valid views of God, states Mill. It is not enough that God's existence be evaluated naturalistically. It is also necessary to distinguish the moral meaning of God from His existence.⁴

Mill examines the modern natural law theorists' position that an idea of reciprocal rights and obligations exists instinctually and prior to society. Mill counters that there is no objective, rational standard of order derived from nature that constitutes a binding code of morality or natural law. He demonstrates this through his account of nature, which explains that, without the artificial aid of human activity, nature does not provide ends or purposes; it is chaotic, meaningless, and unjust.

How can a reckless nature, Mill asks, which ushers in anarchy, chaos, and injustice, be attributed to a God at once good and omnipotent?

Mill repudiates two key precepts of natural religion: the machinery of nature creates a reciprocity of rights that is the foundation of justice and all social existence; the design of nature indicates a Deity who wills happiness for His creatures. Mill complains that these principles transform the conception of a developed existence into an essentially selfish existence. It debases the meaning of religion and insulates a prosaic, self-interested morality from scrutiny and reform. “[T]his falling below the best of the ancients, and doing what lies in it to give human morality an essentially selfish character…disconnects each man's feelings of duty from the interests of his fellow creatures, except so far as a self-interested inducement is offered to him for consulting them” (Mill 1977b, 255). Mill recognizes that human happiness exists, and that one cannot rule out that an Author of nature included this capacity in His design. But to infer from this capacity that the single or highest aim of the Creator is human happiness “is not only not justified by the evidence but is a conclusion in opposition to such evidence as we have” (Mill 1969c, 458). Mill goes further and qualifies Pufendorf's (1991) position that God wills humanity's self-preservation. Observation of the species, responds Mill, reveals that little more can be said than that the Creator “does not wish His works to perish as soon as they are created” (Mill 1969c, 457). Mill concludes that “that much applauded class of authors, the writers on natural theology, have, I venture to think, entirely lost their way…If the maker of the world can will all that he will, he wills misery, and there is no escape from the conclusion” (Mill 1978b, 388). Mill summarizes a morally and intellectually consistent position for natural religion on the attributes of God:

Going on the offensive, Mill argues that the continued association of an omnipotent and omniscient God with an “immoral” nature contributes to the view that power is God's most important characteristic. Such a view diminishes the distinction between noble and maleficent force and lowers the idea of a good human being. Now, God is worshipped by an immense majority, as “the Almighty, not as the All-good, as he who can destroy, not as he who has blessed” (Mill 1986, 229).

More important, states Mill, the stance that nature reflects God's will contributes to a political and moral outlook that is not interventionist toward nature, including human nature. It reinforces traditional liberalism's restricted view that justice and the good existence are mere mechanical effects of incentives. This view that human conduct is automated obedience to causal natural laws turns its back on an integral dimension of the human condition: mental and moral development. Human nature left to take care of itself inevitably decays, and Mill challenges the value of an outlook that maintains normative goods such as justice and freedom can be so mechanized. “We mustn't forget the lessons of the ancients, that there is an incessant and ever-flowing current of human affairs toward the worse, consisting of all the follies, all the vices, all the negligences, indolences, and suppinenesses of mankind” (Mill 1977c, 388; Robson 1998). Like Aristotle, Mill views human nature as neither wholly determinate of human actions, but not irrelevant to it. Human nature is a source of difficulties to be addressed and capacities to be cultivated. “The duty of man is the same in respect to his own nature as in respect to the nature of all things, namely not to follow but amend” (Aristotle 1985, 33–34, 44–46; Mill 1978b, 397; Muirhead 2004, 126).

Mill concludes that, although nature may at times fill us with awe and wonder, no one who has studied it seriously would establish nature as a normative standard or ought. If forced to choose between nature and artifice, Mill clearly opts that the side of freedom and progress is certainly with the latter. “There is hardly anything valuable in the natural man except capacities,” declares Mill, “a whole world of possibilities, all of them dependent upon eminently artificial discipline for being realized” (Mill 1978b, 393). The Enlightenment's natural religion, Mill reasons, limits the role of artificial discipline and fetters development of higher modes of human life.

TRUTH, MEANING, AND HUMAN AGENCY

Mill concludes “Theism” by staking out a position on natural religion that will further his goal of cultivating human agency and human excellence. Mill posits that, at most, we are left with the “hope” that there is a creator and an afterlife. He now asks what is the proper attitude the philosopher should take to this god whose very existence is considered to be only marginally possible, whose power over matter is not absolute, and whose love for his creatures is not his single actuating aim. Should the philosopher include this god in the ethics and morality of the future? Mill is asking himself what is the proper relation between reason and poetry, reason and faith? That is, what is the relation between philosophy's quest to discover the truth and the social need for ennobling poetical and religious teachings?

In answering these questions, Mill, as he is wont to do, weaves his way through traditional liberalism and romanticism—expanding beyond the bounded, reproductive view of the imagination posited by the Anglo-Scottish tradition, while also rejecting the boundlessly creative imagination of the German Romantics (Abrams 1953, 156–225). To an early Anglo-Scottish thinker such as Hobbes, the poet was a mere recorder, whose imagination was only a “sort of decaying memory.” Moreover, Hobbes emphasized that the human imagination's response to fear of the unknown led to “the greatest part of the religion of the gentiles in times past, that worshipped satyrs, fawns, nymphs, and the like; and now-a-days the opinion that rude people have of fairies, ghosts, and goblins, and the power of witches” (Hobbes 1994, 10). For later Anglo-Scottish thinkers such as Hume and Smith, the imagination had a slightly wider significance: a type of aggregative power that may, by a process of association, rearrange ready made elements so as to establish a new pattern (Hume 1975, 47). The imagination has the potential to provide “extra,” adding beauty or color to the impressions of truth known through sensory experience. But because the imagination has the potential to create both deception and harmony, these thinkers never overcame their ambivalent attitude toward it. On the one hand, states Hume, “nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination.” On the other hand, Hume continues, we overcome the skepticism of the world created by reason “by means of that singular and seemingly trivial property of the fancy, by which we enter with difficulty into remote views of things” (Griswold 1999, 336–44; Hume 1978, 267–68; Smith 1982, 113–14).

For the German Romantics, the objects that impressions throw off are always of far less consequence than the imagination, by means of which the individual—most notably, the artist—controls and reshapes the outside world. To these thinkers, the mind is not a reflector of external objects; it is a radiant projector that shapes and reshapes the world we see. Many German Romantics rejected the idea that objective laws solely govern an external world, arguing that the artists' imagination is the tool with which to transform and create the world. Here the most creative individuals combine nature and art, both the knowledge of understood rules and a spontaneous creativity that transcends conventions and prevailing practices. The former can be taught and learned, but the latter is a gift of nature (Fichte 1845, 144–55; Schelling 1994, 98–101).

Mill argues that the German Romantics have gone too far. He insists that the imagination is not a blind or spontaneous agent: it must respect the laws of nature and society that have been discovered by science and philosophy. “The Germans…have perverted both thought and phraseology when they made Artist the term for expressing the highest order of moral and intellectual greatness. The older idea is true—that Art, in relation to Truth, is but a language. Philosophy is the proper name for that exercise of the intellect which enucleates the truth to be expressed. The Artist is not the Seer; not he who can detect truth, but he who can clothe a given truth in the most expressive and impressive symbols” (Mill 1988, 667).

Mill also denies the view prevalent among Anglo-Scottish thinkers that scientific investigations can provide normative guidance to philosophers on the proper goals and ends of a political society (Collini, Winch, and Burrow 1983). Truth by itself is not ennobling and must be clothed with meaning. To Mill, science primarily enables philosophers who aim to create or legislate goals for society to avoid foolish and futile proposals. He explains that the philosophic legislator's Art or Poetry shapes chaotic nature into a harmonious whole and structures human conduct at different levels and ends. To Mill, the artistic side of political philosophy—the poeitic feature of political philosophy—defines and proposes ends to be attained by different sections of society and hands them over to science for investigation. The scientific side of the philosopher studies the aims and sends it back to Art with a theorem of the combination of circumstances by which they could be produced. At this point, Mill concludes, “Art then examines these combinations of circumstances, and according as any of them are not in human power, pronounces the end attainable or not.” The philosopher's vision of the good society “is thus a joint result of laws of nature disclosed by science, and of the general principles of what has been called…the Doctrine of Ends” (Mill 1973, 943–52).

Mill concludes that the political and moral philosopher combines in himself the elements of art and reason, the ability to create meanings for human existence within the context of knowable laws of nature and society. “Now, the imperative mood is the characteristic of art, as distinguished from science…and ethics or morality is properly a portion of the art corresponding to the sciences of human nature and society” (Mill 1973, 943–44). He posits that the imaginative mind that does not conflict too sharply with philosophic and scientific understandings of the truth is a powerful constructive influence in society. Art is good as long as it hovers around the understanding of reason (Woods 1961, 187–207).

CHRISTIANITY OR THEISM OF THE FUTURE

Mill retains this framework on the relation between art and reason in his assessment of the role that “hope” or belief in a Christian God or any type of Theism will play in the morality of the future. He also adopts the same orientation toward Christianity as the Enlightenment thinkers he criticizes: namely, establishing a compromise with Christianity that will reform it. Anticipating the prosaic character of modernity, Mill cautions future philosophy to leave as much room as possible to “even small probabilities on this subject [God] which furnish the imagination with any footing to support itself upon” (Mill 1969c, 483). He argues that it is legitimate to establish hope for, or belief in, the Christian idea of God—provided that it is a God of limited powers—because this idea of God does not conflict too sharply with reason. When “reason is strongly cultivated, the imagination may safely follow its own end, and do its best to make life pleasant and lovely inside the castle, in reliance on the fortifications raised and maintained by Reason round the outward bounds” (Mill 1969c, 485; 1978b, 388). Furthermore, Christianity is moral as long as it continues to reform itself. The recognition of a God of limited powers provides a moral imperative to the tasks of encouraging human energy and cultivating human character. Rather than regarding life and nature as reflections of the moral character of the Deity, Christianity should see the world as the product of a conflict between God's contrived goodness and an intractable matter (Mill 1969c, 484–88; 1969d, 422).

Mill believes that this form of Christianity is consistent with England's need for an aesthetic culture—sometimes put forth as the Religion of Humanity—that establishes creative deeds that serve the public good as the highest type of life. This form of art focuses on perfection of the individual, not of the community. Anticipating some of the themes found in Nietzsche's monumental history, Mill explains that the ethical aim of aesthetic culture is the presentation of scenes and characters that play on the feelings in such a way as to establish love for the noblest conduct (Nietzsche 1990).⁵

An ennobling pleasure, counsels Mill, comes from learning about individuals who have accomplished great deeds, and this aspiration of looking up to excellence is needed for the English people more than any other as they are increasingly attending to the mundane. “The more prosaic our ordinary duties, the more necessary it is to keep up the tone of our minds by frequent visits to that higher region of thought and feeling, in which every work seems dignified in proportion to the ends for which, and the spirit in which, it is done” (Mill 1984a, 254–57). To Mill, the value of aesthetic culture for social life throughout history has been that from the heroic characters “not only the noblest minds in modern Europe derived much of what made them noble, but even the commoner spirits what made them understand and respond to nobleness.” The goal of aesthetic culture, then, was the cultivation of the potentially heroic to be heroic and to make the general public appreciative of such risk-taking conduct. Mill called for the study of aesthetic culture to become a part of general education (Alexander 1965, 172–73; Mill 1981b).

Some commentators argue Mill envisions an elite imposing an aesthetic culture as the general ethos of society, establishing a level of social obligation inimical to human liberty (Cowling 1963; Hamburger 1999). But Mill claimed that liberalism should learn from Catholicism's distinction between a morality obligatory on all members and the standards required for attaining perfection (Mill 1969a, 338).⁶

How seriously Mill took to the possibility of a restoration of deep beliefs in a Christian God can only be a matter of speculation. We do know for certain that Mill felt such beliefs should not center on the idea of an omnipotent creator. Still, he is willing to maintain God's goodness, however facetious or serious Mill may be. Christianity must take another step, however. Only by reforming the Enlightenment's natural religion that had reformed revealed Christianity, concludes Mill, could Christian beliefs contribute to ending intellectual and moral confusion and help establish practices and values that generate human creativity that contributes to the public good.⁸

CHRISTIANITY AND MODERNITY

Mill's position that modern England is a secularization of Christian beliefs in key dimensions has important continuities and differences with positions developed by seminal Continental philosophers. By situating Mill's position in relation to some of these thinkers, Mill's (and the other philosophers') self-imposed task for formulating a morality of the future grows clearer. Liberalism, in Mill's view, is not nearly as narrow a moral outlook as many commentators on liberalism and Mill, whether admirers or critics, believe. Mill argues liberalism must have a comprehensive morality, cannot be satisfied with the establishment of equal rights and free human conduct, and requires a positive conception of the best life.

Kant, for instance, maintained that Christianity inaugurated “the moral law” that created “a thoroughgoing revolution in doctrines of faith.” The Christian religion, Kant writes, taught what no prior ethical philosophy had recognized: the moral law in all its purity provides an opportunity and a necessity for our own moral development (Kant 1960, 43, 70–1; Sullivan 1989, 143). Among all historical faiths, Christianity best embodied the essence of pure, rational ethical religion, discoverable behind the symbolism of its various dogmas and rituals (Kant, 146–47). What enabled Christianity to develop this universal character, Kant continued, is its founding as a moral, rather than a statutory, religion: “and as thus entering into the closest relation with reason so that, through reason, it was able of itself, without historical learning, to be spread at all times and among all peoples with the greatest trustworthiness” (Kant, 155). Jesus' essential message was the public promulgation of a “pure rational faith,” a “moral religion” consisting of the same moral law that all persons already find in their hearts (Kant, 118–20, 147–51, 155). Kant's self-imposed task was to complete the revolution initiated by Christianity. This required the negative task of clearing up the inconsistencies and mystical notions of the old historical religions, including those of Christianity, which had to be done before the constructive goal of establishing a new moral religion of reason that identifies what duty requires, could be fully accomplished (Smith 1997, 179–85).

In his accounts of Plato, and then Jesus and the Apostle Paul, Hegel argued that all were unable to integrate subjective freedom with a new universalistic outlook, a failure that continued to plague Western culture (e.g., Hegel 1900, 267–71; 1952, 10, 42–43, 123–24, 132–33, 156–59). However, to Hegel, the secularization and diffusion of the Protestant moral conscience had begun to overcome this schism and become the great engine of history from the Reformation to the French Revolution, “as everything in the moral and spiritual world began to be submitted to subjective thought” (Franco 1999, 217). Human beings no longer “acknowledge in their attempts anything which has not been justified by thought,” states Hegel. This subjective freedom “is the characteristic property of the modern age, as well as being the distinctive principle of Protestantism” (Hegel 1900, 344, 416–17, 496–97). Hegel maintains that this subjective point of view, “one that ties moral evaluation to the purity of intentions and admits as good only intentions to obey” subjective freedom, “is itself a particular historical practice.” It does not simply discover at a certain time “what pure reason determines as obligatory.” Indeed, this moral conscience, when isolated from other moral considerations, necessarily leads to radical subjectivism and nihilism (Hegel 1900, 267–71; 1952, 92; Pippin 1997, 107).

Hegel's self-imposed task is to enable the present historical epoch to realize its potential through the subjective will derived from Protestantism attaining the objective determinations of right and duty. “In this way the ethical substantial order has attained its right, and its right to validity. That is to say, the self-will of the individual has vanished together with the private conscience that had claimed independence and had opposed itself to the ethical substance” (Hegel 1952, 109). Modern institutions and practices such as family life, civil law, commerce, corporate associations, and a world order of states, all embody modern social roles within which the subjective freedom of agents derived from Protestantism is realized. These institutions are the true objects of the subjective will. The philosopher's task is to comprehend and identify this realization (Franco 1999, 216–17; Hegel 1952, 122–223; Pippin 1997, 125).

Like Kant and Hegel, Mill embraces the idea that modern England is a secular realization of Christian principles in important dimensions. But Mill emphasizes the negative consequences that stem from this continuity. In his account, both outlooks continue the historical tendency whereby a new mode of thought discards the half-truths of that mode of thought it supersedes. English liberalism continues Christianity's opposition to the active and energetic human qualities that lead to high ambitions, dignity, self-respect, self-command, and exertions of human energy. Although the modern English individual is more just than the ancient Greek, the former has far less faith in himself as an agent of his own desires, has less energy, and in important respects, is less free.

Mill also is far less hopeful about an imminent realization of principles of freedom than either Kant or Hegel. The antagonistic relations between opposing ideas demonstrate that one-sidedness is the rule and synthesis is the exception. And there does not seem to be any alternative to this constant action and reaction of historically significant modes of thought. Public opinion rallies around the dominant idea of truth, whereas oppositionists, rather than aim to add to the “suppressed and neglected truths” that form the necessary balance to the received ones, establish an alternative one-sided idea as the whole truth (Alexander 1965, 35–36, 61–64, 163; Mill 1969a, 361).

Thus, in Mill's account, contrasting ideas of Western morality have issued conflicting lessons, and contemporary liberalism has much work to do. “The new synthesis is barely begun, nor is the preparatory analysis completely finished,” he writes, but it is necessary to proceed with the project to establish a comprehensive morality, for “the old edifice will remain standing until there is another that is ready to replace it.” (Mill 1977b, 252–57; 1986, 234). On the one hand, the classical and romantic outlooks teach (in different ways) that the will, powerful desires, developed rationality, pride, and the desire for distinctiveness and excellence are powerful springs for human agency. On the other hand, Christianity's moral universalism and English liberalism's justice instruct the importance of equality, obedience, and general moral development. Mill summarizes that neither of these outlooks are the law of human development. He believes that liberalism in general and himself in particular must desire and work for the reconciliation of these giant adversaries. The resolution of their respective thesis and antithesis into the synthesis of a comprehensive morality of the future, is the liberal philosophers' highest goal, and reforming the natural religion of the Enlightenment is an integral part of this task.