Abstract
In a letter to The Republican of 3 January 1823, one of his earliest appearances in print, John Stuart Mill objected to use which you frequently make of the term Nature as denoting some positive, active, if not intelligent being.' Throughout his career Mill would continue to attack the infirmity, as he put it nearly fifty years later, of being led away by phrases and treating abstractions as if they were realities which have a will and active power (17: 1912). Nature, completed in 1854, is Mill's most sustained dissection of the most important of those abstractions, and a landmark among skeptical treatments of natural as an ethical norm. Yet Mill's extraordinary rhetoric in this essay seems strangely at odds with his skeptical aim:
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