 To feel entirely confident about any judgment about how far Taylor Mill influenced Mill, we would need not only access to her letters which were destroyed but recordings from inside their home at Blackheath. But as with the descriptions of Taylor Mill’s character and ability discussed above, there is a wide middle ground between the minimalist and maximalist assessments. One intermediate view is that of Bain, who suggests that just as Mill’s friend John Sterling “overflowed in suggestive talk, which Mill took up and improved in his own way,” so Taylor Mill might have done as well (1882, 173–4). Robson comments that “[I]n what we have of her writings, Harriet constantly has her eye on the future, even when criticizing the present; she was a woman of dreams and aspirations, and she must constantly have breathed into Mill a hopeful and expansive view of human possibilities” (1966,  178).[8]  What Bain seems to be suggesting is that Taylor Mill’s greatest contribution to the Mills’ collaboration, apart from any writing that she did herself, was to turn Mill’s attention to the defense of a set progressive ideals and causes reflective of these possibilities: Socialism, women’s rights, individual liberty, and above all a “utopian” view of humanity’s improvability. This is not necessarily to say that he held these positions just because she did, which he explicitly tells us was not the case with women’s rights ([ALE], 253n). Nor must it mean that she contributed little or nothing to the arguments by which he defends them. Bain knew Mill extremely well, and even though he says that his friend was under “an extraordinary hallucination as to the personal qualities of his wife,” and “outraged all reasonable credibility in describing her matchless genius,” he is also adamant not only that Mill “was not such an egoist as to be captivated by the echo of his own opinions” but also that he would only have been stimulated by someone with “independent resources” who had a “good mutual understanding as to the proper conditions of the problem at issue” (1882, 173–4).