MILL, JOHN STUART

The most influential philosopher in England during the mid-19th century; b. London, May 20, 1806; d. Avignon, May 8, 1873.

Life. One of the two major influences in Mill's life was that of his father, James mill, who tutored John intensively from his 3d to his 14th year with the aim of making his son able to carry on his own work as chief exponent of empiricist and Benthamite utilitarian philosophy. James, and later John, who edited and annotated his father's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (London 1869), were psychological associationists. The Mills' circle included Jeremy bentham (whose Rationale of Judicial Evidence, 5 v., John edited when he was 21), David Ricardo (whose economics John never outgrew), and John austin, the utilitarian legal theorist. At 17 Mill entered the examiner's office of the East India Company, where he remained for 35 years, reaching, as had his father before him, the highest administrative position in the London office.

The other major influence in Mill's life was that of Mrs. Harriet Taylor, who dominated him for 28 years, first as his Seelenfreundin (as she described herself), then, after her husband died, for seven years (1851–58) as his wife. He believed her to be the spiritual peer only of Shelley and to lack no virtue, intellectual or moral. At her direction he made changes in the later editions of his Political Economy ("a joint production with my wife") in the direction of socialism and away from the Benthamite laissez-faire tradition of the first edition (London 1848). She led him away from his earlier interest in, and sympathy with, T. Carlyle, S. T. Coleridge, and A. Comte; and many of his major essays, including Utilitarianism (London 1863) and Considerations on Representative Government (London 1863), were first sketched out with her. On Liberty was the development of an early paper by Harriet on toleration.

Teaching. Mill's principal philosophical work is his System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (2 v. London 1843), an empiricist attack on a prioristic intuitionism, which he regarded as the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions: "And the chief strength of this false philosophy in morals, politics, and religion, lies in the appeal which it is accustomed to make to the evidence of mathematics and of the cognate branches of physical science. To expel it from these is to drive it from its stronghold" (Autobiography ). A contemporary reader of Logic would find Mill's discussion of the following topics valuable—though perhaps mainly because of Mill's instructive errors.

Logic. Mill believed that in order to find the meaning of a proposition one must first find the meaning of its constituent verbal parts; and for this he is usually criticized on the basis of an analysis of meaning deriving mainly from L. wittgenstein, according to whom propositional meaning is primary and the meaning of individual words is derivative.

Mill was an empiricist: for him, a proposition is significant if and only if it describes what has been or could be experienced. He was in some ways an even more thoroughgoing empiricist than D. hume: failing to distinguish pure from applied mathematics, Mill maintained that even mathematical axioms and theorems are generalizations from experience. One might object that if mathematical propositions are empirical generalizations, they can be disproved by experience; yet what sort of evidence would tell against "things equal to the same thing are equal to each other"?

On the value of the categorical syllogism Mill held a middle position between those who, like R. whately (Elements of Logic, 1826), find in it the ground of all proof, and those who, like J. locke, regard it as worthless because circular. Mill maintains that the syllogism, not being a "real" inference (one in which the conclusion asserts more than the premises), is circular but not worthless. One is really interested in going from "all observed X is Y " to "this X is Y "—a formula reminding him of the manner in which he has been in the past, and is in the future, entitled to infer from a number of particular cases yet another particular case: "What is called Formal Logic is the logic of consistency."

Method. That part of his Logic for which Mill is best known is his analysis of the five "experimental methods" (agreement, difference, etc.), which, by eliminating all but one of the initially possible alternatives (eliminative induction), are claimed to be the only rigorous methods of establishing true causal laws. Now Mill maintains that any conclusion drawn from an application of these methods presupposes the "law of universal causation" as a major premise (e.g., all events have a cause; the only possible cause of rust here is moist oxygen; so moist oxygen is the cause of rust). But this law needs to be inductively established, and cannot, without petitio principii, be established by eliminative induction. There remains only enumerative induction (C is the cause of E, where C and E are frequently repeated events). Now if enumerative induction is sufficient to establish the universal law of causation, why is it not sufficient simply to establish particular causal laws—which, according to Mill, can be established only by eliminative induction—the sum total of which particular laws are called for to establish the universal law? It is now generally maintained that any attempt to justify inductive reasoning by general postulates about the constitution of nature cannot fail to be circular. (see induction.)

In the social sciences one must generally avoid reliance on unanalyzed experience alone (exemplified by Macaulay's 1829 Edinburgh Review critique of James Mill's essay on "Government") or on the "geometrical" method (exemplified by his father's essay itself) of deducing social phenomena from a single principle. Usually the "inverse deductive method" (attributed by Mill to Comte) should be followed: begin, as Bacon or Macaulay did, by generalizing on the basis of historical evidence; then, since empirical laws are not of themselves sufficient for long-range prediction, go on to show that these generalizations are deducible from the laws of experimental psychology and "ethology" (science of the formation of human character).

Metaphysics. In a later metaphysical work, The Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (London 1865), Mill defends a Berkeleian phenomenalism. But whereas G. berkeley had made the existence of a physical object depend on its actually being perceived, Mill made its existence depend on the possibility of perceiving it: what constitutes the existence of a physical object is that under certain conditions, themselves describable in sensory terms, certain sorts of sensations regularly occur. "Matter, then, may be defined, as a Permanent Possibility of Sensation. If I am asked, whether I believe in matter, I ask whether the questioner accepts this definition of it. If he does, I believe in matter: and so do all Berkeleians. In any other sense than this, I do not. But I affirm with confidence, that this conception of matter includes the whole meaning attached to it by the common world, apart from philosophical, and sometimes from theological, theories" (ch. 11). Now Mill is surely wrong when he claims to be asserting the common conception of things: things as ordinarily conceived exist actually, whereas for Mill things exist only potentially. Further, though Mill insists on the publicity of possible sensations, any particular sensation actually felt or even able to be felt by one person is private and cannot be felt by another person. And finally, Mill might well be accused of falling into the genetic fallacy: to say that one's conception of matter originates in his conception of possible sensations and thus matter is really only a complex of possible sensations is like saying that a man originates in a complex of chemical elements and so is really only a composite of those elements. Like Berkeley, but unlike Hume, Mill backs away from a phenomenalist account of minds or persons. For that which can remember actual sensations and anticipate possible ones can hardly be only a set of possible sensations: here is a "finally inexplicable fact"; but no alternative account of this is proposed by Mill.

Political Theory. In Utilitarianism Mill's primary objective was to explain and defend the truth of an importantly modified Benthamite utilitarianism against intuitionists such as I. Kant and W. Whewell.

On Liberty is quite probably the most powerful political sermon preached in English since the mid-19th century. Mill's main objective was to persuade his hearers that though England was free, it should be freer and that greater freedom could come only if society resolved to avoid the use, not only of government coercion, whether democratic or not, but even of "the moral coercion of public opinion" in order to enforce conformity. Otherwise, he argued, genius, independence, and originality would go to the wall: "The grand, the leading principle, towards which every argument in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity." Each adult should have a private sphere of individual liberty, comprising any of his acts that do not "affect prejudicially the interests of others"; and one should never, above all, interfere with freedom of thought and expression, for the progress of society depends on this. Mill can be criticized on the ground that almost any act a man does may be held to affect prejudicially the interests of others; and that to the extent that people are dissuaded from using nonviolent "tyranny of opinion," they will tend to use the violence of governmental coercion, which even a strongminded man finds far harder to resist.

Religion. Mill wrote Three Essays on Religion. The first two, "Nature" and "Utility of Religion," he wrote under his wife's influence in the 1850s: there is little value in religion. The last, "Theism," written in 1869–70, is far more sympathetic; it shocked his agnostic and atheist friends when it was published posthumously, though in it issues of truth and appropriate feeling continued to be mingled; Mill's main concern was with the question whether the consequences of belief in God would be beneficial. It is not unreasonable, he claimed, to maintain that God exists: the a posteriori argument from design, as Hume and Kant had said, offers some evidence; and the human soul may be immortal: there is no decisive evidence against it; and Christianity has the status of an inspiring and edifying belief. But Mill could not accept a God who was at once omnipotent and benevolent, an "Omnipotent Author of Hell"; a powerful but finite God seemed more morally stimulating to him. Thus man is enabled to cultivate "the feeling of helping God—of requiting the good He has given us by a voluntary cooperation which He, not being omnipotent, really needs."

See Also: empiricism; eudaemonism; logic, history of.

Bibliography: Bibliography of the Published Writings of J.S. Mill, ed. from his ms, n. macminn et al. (Evanston, Ill. 1945). m. st. j. packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill (New York 1954), excellent bibliog. j. a. passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (New York 1957). r. p. anschutz, The Philosophy of J. S. Mill (Oxford 1953). k. britton, John Stuart Mill (Baltimore 1953). a.v. dicey, Lectures on the Relation between Law and Opinion in England (London 1905; repr. 1924). j. day in A Critical History of Western Philosophy, ed. d. j. o'connor (New York 1964). b. russell in Proceedings of the British Academy 41 (1956) 43–59. j. d. collins, A History of Modern European Philosophy (Milwaukee 1954).

[r. l. cunningham]