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...