The Literary Theory of John Stuart Mill

Abstract

It is the contention of this paper that, contrary to his own belief, John Stuart Mill did not, after his "mental crisis" of 1826, succeed in his attempt to achieve a meaningful integration of the analytical and the affective, through his cultivation of the feelings by poetry. On the contrary, through his subsequent detemination to place these two attributes (the analytic and the affective) in a clearly proscribed xelation to each other (by virtue of his postulation of the exclusive presence of the former in science or logic and the latter in poetry), Mill only succeeded in creating, in this codification, what we can describe as an image of his {to use T. S. Eliot's somewhat unfashionable phrase) "dissociated sensibility."