Ethics

Of what account, for instance, was the wrangling in the senate and the parliament of a little country like Denmark compared with Hegel's vision of the mighty march, inevitable and determined by spiritual laws, of the idea of freedom through the world's history? And of what account was the daily gossip of the newspapers compared with the possibility now thrown open of a life of eternal ideals lived in and for them? 15.

I had an even deeper perception of my initiation when I went back from Hegel to Spinoza and, filled with awe and enthusiasm, read the Ethica for the first time.

Here I stood at the source of modern pantheistic philosophy.

Here philosophy was even more distinctly religion since it took religion's place.

Personally, Mill believed neither in a God nor in a future life.

In morals, Mill may be considered the creator of what Henry Sidgwick, in his Methods of Ethics, 1874, called universalistic hedonism.

The English moralists of the 18th century had set up the greatest happiness of the greatest number as the ideal end of action, but they did not hold that each individual could be expected to pursue anything but his own happiness, the object of Bentham, 1748-1832, being to make the two coincide.

Kant showed that the rule of right excluded any such accommodation, and a crisis of his own life led Mill to adopt the same conclusion.