The position we are maintaining is that Mill's fundamental principles have neither proof nor philosophical authority, but are commitments to action, the outcome of assertions to claim knowledge of the nature of the world and the direction men's duty ought to take within it: and that they cannot sustain claims to be something other, or something more, than this. Mill seems sometimes to suggest that they perform one function—a philosophical, or even a positive, scientific one—but at times that they perform the other, practical one. He does not always think that they have scientific authority: at moments when he is most explicit, he does not say so at all. Nevertheless, where assumptions are made without scrutiny, he seems to think it; and it is difficult to avoid feeling that much of what we will characterize as his arrogance is connected with want of clarity at this point.

The statements we have been discussing are religious: Mill himself says so. The principle of utility enjoins maximization of the finest things of which men are capable: and this is what Mill means by the Religion of Humanity.