I am, however, inclined to think that my father was not so much opposed as he seemed, to the modes of thought in which I believed myself to differ from him; that he did injustice to his own opinions by the unconscious exaggerations of an intellect emphatically polemical; and that when thinking without an adversary in view, he was willing to make room for a great portion of the truths he seemed to deny. I have frequently observed that he made large allowance in practice for considerations which seemed to have no place in his theory. His “Fragment on Mackintosh,” which he wrote and published about this time, although I greatly admired some parts of it, I read as a whole with more pain than pleasure; yet on reading it again, long after, I found little in the opinions it contains, but what I think in the main just; and I can even sympathize in his disgust at the verbiage of Mackintosh, though his asperity towards it went not only beyond what was judicious, but beyond what was even fair. One thing, which I thought, at the time, of good augury, was the very favourable reception he gave to Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.” It is true, he said and thought much more about what Tocqueville said in favour of Democracy, than about what he said of its disadvantages. Still, his high appreciation of a book which was at any rate an example of a mode of treating the question of government almost the reverse of his—wholly inductive and analytical, instead of purely ratiocinative—gave me great encouragement. He also approved of an article which I published in the first number following the junction of the two reviews, the essay reprinted in the “Dissertations,” under the title “Civilization;” into which I threw many of my new opinions, and criticised rather emphatically the mental and moral tendencies of the time, on grounds and in a manner which I certainly had not learnt from him.
Note from KBJ: The phenomenon Mill describes—namely, exaggeration for polemical effect—is quite common in political discourse, even (especially?) by philosophers. Take torture, for example. The "new absolutists," such as Jeremy Waldron and Jamie Mayerfeld, say that torture is never justified. Fiat justitia, ruat cœlum. (Let right be done, though the heavens should fall.) There is no doubt in my mind that they do not believe what they say. What they believe is that torture is rarely justified. What they say is that torture is never justified. They are afraid that if they say that torture is sometimes justified, it will open a can of worms; so they exaggerate and say that it is never justified. Two things are funny about this. First, these "absolutists" would happily torture someone if the life of their child were at stake. Second, they almost certainly believe that it is sometimes justifiable to kill an innocent person (to prevent the killings of many other innocent people). Why is it justifiable to kill an innocent person but unjustifiable to torture a guilty person? What sort of warped value system would allow such a result? One reason I enjoy reading the literature of torture is that I get to see grown-ups such as Waldron and Mayerfeld make fools of themselves. They exaggerate for polemical effect. Some day, they will look back and be embarrassed by what they wrote on torture. They will realize that they got caught up in the emotion of Bush hatred. Serious, responsible thinkers don't get caught up in emotion of any kind, much less hatred.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 