MILL, JOHN STUART

(b. London, England, 20 May 1806; d. Avignon, France, 8 May 1873)

philosophy, economics.

Mill was the son of James Mill, a London Scot who had risen from humble origins to become a prominent intellectual, a collaborator of Jeremy Bentham, and a leading exponent of utilitarianism. Mill’s childhood was a singular one. He was educated at home by his father, learning both Greek and Latin before he was nine years old. All religion was excluded from his upbringing. James Mill, an even more rigid adherent than Bentham to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, was determined to educate his son to be another philosopher in the same mold. At sixteen the younger Mill started to earn his living as a clerk in the East India Office, where his fither was a senior official. At seventeen he published his first article, in the Westminster Review, and in the same year he made his debut as a radical reformer, spending a day or two in the police cells for distributing pamphlets recommending contraception as a solution to the population problem.

In his posthumously published Autobiography, Mill recalls that at the age of twenty he went through a period of acute depression, from which he was delivered by reading the poetry of Wordsworth. Through Wordsworth he met a romanticism that challenged the whole rationalistic ethos in which he had been so carefully bred. After this experience, wrote Mill, “I did not lose sight of … that part of the truth I had learned before … but I thought that it had consequences which required to be corrected, by joining other kinds of cultivation with it” (Autobiography, p.34). Mill’s aim thenceforth became to produce a philosophy that combined the virtues of rationalism with those of romanticism; but the contradictions between them proved to be too fundamental for even the ablest mind to reconcile, and Mill’s philosophy is marred by a certain incoherence that even his most fervent admirers cannot deny.

Mill’s most important work in pure philosophy was his System of Logic, which he began at the age of twenty-four and completed thirteen years later. Soon after he had started work on it, Mill met a beautiful, intelligent, and imperious young woman named Harriet Taylor. He fell in love with her, and she with him; but she was already the wife of a wholesale druggist and the mother of two children. In the nineteen years before the druggist’s death enabled them to marry, Mill and Harriet Taylor were constantly in each other’s company—“Seelenfreunden” (“soul friends”), as they put it, but not lovers. Victorian society’s frowns (and his own sense of guilt) drove Mill to lead a lonely life, and Mrs. Taylor’s hold over his thinking was immense. She was not a Wordsworthian but a rationalist of the left—and, paradoxically, she reinforced the influence of James Mill’s training rather than that of romanticism.

Mill’s marriage to Harriet Taylor took place in 1851; but seven years later she died at Avignon, and Mill bought a house there to live near her tomb. But by this time Mill’s books had made him famous, and in 1865 he was persuaded by the controversial and progressive Viscount Amberley to stand for election to Parliament in Westminster. Mill was elected, and he sat until 1868 as an independent Liberal M.P. He died at the age of sixty-six, having just become the agnostic’s equivalent of a godfather to Amberley’s son, Bertrand Russell.

Mill’s central endeavor as a philosopher was to provide science with a better claim to truth than that afforded by the skeptical philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Locke had written: “As to a perfect science of natural bodies (not to mention spiritual beings) we are, 1 think, so far from being capable of any such thing that I conclude it lost labour to look after it.” Mill disagreed. Indeed, he wrote his Logic precisely to formulate “a perfect science of natural bodies”—or, in other words, a demonstrative theory of induction—by which he hoped to reduce the conditions of scientific proof “to strict rules and scientific tests, such as the syllogism is for ratiocination.”

Mill called himself a “philosopher of experience”; he believed that all knowledge of the universe is derived from sensory observation, and he opposed those who claimed that some knowledge of synthetic truth is either innate or acquired by rational insight. He was what has come to be known as an empiricist, although that word did not then have the commonly accepted usage it has today and Mill rejected it. But he tried to give what we should call empiricism a form that would satisfy the nineteenth century’s demand for certainty.

Mill’s Logic seeks to diminish the value of knowledge achieved deductively—that is, by deriving particulars from universal—and to vindicate the importance of knowledge derived inductively, by the accumulation of evidence from particulars. Our “universal” knowledge, Mill argued, comes from particulars. We begin with particulars and end with particulars, and it is the method of science that enables us to formulate the “universals” or “generalities” that the mind knows.

In book II of his Logic, Mill claimed that even mathematics is, in a way, inductive. In the manner of Kant he said that mathematical propositions are synthetic propositions about the world of measurable things, but he denied the Kantian view that the mind imposes categories on experience. He argued instead that mathematical propositions are experimental truths of a highly general kind. Mill did not even admit that they are necessarily true, except in the sense that it is psychologically impossible for us to doubt them. His mathematical theory has not had much support from theorists of later generations. He is generally considered to have failed to solve logical problems by proposing psychological answers, and the reform of deductive logic that was begun by Boole and completed by Mill’s “godson” Russell has suggested that Mill was mistaken about what could be done with inductive logic.

Book III of Mill’s Logic has been more influential. Here Mill explained what he means by induction. He said it depends on the “assumption” that nature is uniform and that its future course will be like that of the past. Elementary induction is based on the enumeration of like instances: “All the crows we have seen are black, therefore all crows are black.” Mill next distinguished between uniformity of “togetherness” and uniformity of sequence. In the first class he put properties that exist at the same time and can be measured or counted so as to give our knowledge a formal order. The second class, uniformities of sequence, he called “causal”; and here, instead of mere enumerations, he believed we can establish laws. These laws are discovered with the aid of Mill’s famous “eliminative methods of induction.”

These methods are (1) the canon of agreement, which asserts that if those instances in which a phenomenon occurs have only one feature in common, then that feature contains the cause of the phenomenon; (2) the canon of difference, which asserts that if those instances in which the phenomenon occurs differ from instances in which it does not occur in only one feature, then that one feature contains the cause of the phenomenon; (3) the canon of residues (a variant of the canon of difference), which asserts that if we take away from a phenomenon all the effects we know to be caused by certain antecedents, then the remainder is the effect of the remaining antecedents; (4) the canon of concomitant variations, which asserts that when one phenomenon varies only when another varies, there is either a causal relation between them or they are both causally related to a third factor.

Although Mill’s “eliminative methods of induction” have figured prominently in subsequent controversies about scientific method, their value has been criticized on several grounds. First, they cannot be used to vindicate the assumptions on which they are grounded: the uniformity of nature and the ubiquity of causality, Second, no method of elimination can yield demonstrably certain conclusions about the candidates that remain, although it may well yield high probabilities. Third, science is not primarily interested in the kind of “common sense” causal relations that Mill’s methods can be used to discover. Fourth, science is not properly understood as an inductive enterprise; it does not proceed by the observation of regularities in nature but by the use of conjecture and “experimental refutation,”

Some of these objections to Mill’s inductivism can be met by a more sophisticated reformulation of his thesis, but the consensus among twentieth-century specialists in scientific method is that the more skeptical approach of Mill’s predecessors, including perhaps Kant as well as Locke and Hume, comes closer both to the realities of scientific discovery and to the exigencies of logic.

In 1848, shortly after the publication of his Logic, Mill brought out another of his most influential books, The Principles of Political Economy. This is a curious mixture of orthodox economic theories and arresting, original ideas. Some of the new ideas are expressed in the language of classical economics, so that the shock of them is softened. Mill maintained that “the economic man” is a fiction, a way of registering the tendency of men to pursue wealth. He suggested that economic principles should be tested by their stability in a particular era and by their ability to promote transition to another era.

In his review of political economy as a static science, Mill did little but repeat the principles laid down by Adam Smith and others about production and exchange, the dependence of wealth on production and of profit on the cost of labor, the token nature of money, the need to balance imports with exports, and so forth. It was when he turned from the static to the dynamic side of the subject, to economics as related to social progress, that Mill propelled economic thought into new channels.

He remained true to Malthus on the subject of the population problem. There was no remedy for poverty, he thought, unless excessive numbers could be reduced, although, unlike Malthus. Mill favored contraception as well as “moral restraint But Mill differed from his predecessors in his understanding of the concept of property and on the distribution of wealth. Property rights were conventional; and although private property was a useful institution, the only basis of a sound entitlement was a man’s own labor. There was no natural right to inheritance or to the ownership of land. In the first edition of his Political Economy, Mill criticized the socialist theories put forward by Louis Blanc and others as unrealistic, but in later editions he withdrew these strictures and wrote sympathetically of socialism. It is probable that he made these changes under pressure from Harriet Taylor, a convert to socialism.

The intrusion of socialist sentiments into a book that was substantially based on the principles of classical economics has seemed to some readers to be yet another mark of Mill’s inconsistency. A similar criticism might be addressed to his writings on politics and ethics. In ethics Mill affirmed his adherence to his father’s utilitarianism, the doctrine that the rightness of an act is to be measured by the extent to which it promotes pleasure. But Mill rejected his father’s belief that pleasure has only quantitative differences. Ever since he had read Wordsworth, Mill had believed in the superiority of the “’pleasures of the mind” over the brutish pleasures of the uncultivated: “Better Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied’s But Mill was never able to produce any utilitarian or empirical reason to justify this preference.

The same ardent belief in the values of culture influenced Mill’s political theorizing. He was an eloquent champion of freedom; but although he sometimes defined freedom as the absence of constraint, he went on to speak of it as “self-perfection” and said that men should be free in order to improve themselves. Although Mill came out (as his father had done) in favor of democratic government, he proposed that democratic institutions should be carefully designed to prevent government by the majority: he wanted a form of government by a cultured elite that would rest upon the assent of a progressively more educated populace. Like many another intellectual of the Victorian period, Mill made something of a religion of the culture of the sensibilities, notwithstanding his general belief, as an empiricist, that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works, A bibliography is N. MacMinn, J. R. Hainds and J. M. McCrimmon, The Bibliography of Published Works… (Evanston, III., 1945), A more up-to-date bibliography is being published in serial form in the Mill News Letter (Toronto, 1965-), Publication is in progress on the 13-vol. Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto, 1963 -). Among his earlier writings are A System of Logic, 2 vols, (London, 1843); Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (London, 1844); Principles of Political Economy, 2 vols. (London, 1848); On Liberty (London, 1859), also repr, with Representative Government and an intro, by R, B. MacCallum (Oxford, 1946); Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (London, 1859); Dissertations and Discussions, 2 vols, (London, 1859), articles repr. from periodicals, chiefly Edinburgh Review and Westminster Review; Considerations on Representative Government (London, 1861); Utilitarianism (London, 1863), also edited by J. Plamenatz (Oxford, 1949); Auguste Comte and Positivism (London, 1865); An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (London, 1865); Inaugural Address to the University of St. Andrews (London, 1867); England and Ireland (London, 1869); and The Subjection of Women (London, 1869), also edited with an intro, by S. Coil (London, 1906).

Works published later are Autobiography, Helen Taylor, ed. (London, 1873), repr., with an appendix of unpublished papers, and an intro. by H. J. Laski (London, 1924); Three Essays on Religion (London, 1874); Chapters on Socialism, W, D. K Bliss, ed. (New York, 1891); Early Essays, J. W. M. Gibbs, ed. (London, 1897); On Education, F.A. Cavanagh, ed, (London, 1931), printed with writings on the Same subject by James Mill; The Spirit of the Age, edited, with an intro,, by F. A. son Hayek (Chicago, 1942), articles contributed to Examiner in 1831; Four Dialogues of Plato, edited, with an intro., by R, Borehardt (London, 1946); On Bentham and Coleridge, edited, with an intro., by F. R. Leavis (London. 1950), repr. from Dissertations ami Discussions; An Early Draft of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, J. Stillinger, ed. (Urbana. Ilk, 1961); Milts Essay’s on Politics and Culture, G. Himmelfarb, ed. (New York, 1962); Mill’s Essays on Literature and Society, J. B. Schneewind, ed. (New York-London, 1965); and Mill’s Ethical Writings. J. B. Schneewind, ed. (New York-London, 1965).

II. Secondary Literature. Biographical studies are A. Bain, John Stuart Mill (London, 1882), a study of Mill and his philosophy, with personal recollections by a close friend of his later years; W.D. IX Christie, X 5. Mill and Mr. Abraham Cowley, Q.C. (London, 1873); G. J. Holyoak, John Stuart Mill as the Working Class Knew Him (London, 1873), a short personal memoir; and M. St. J. Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill (London, 1954), the standard biography.

Critical and expository studies include R. P. Anschutz, The Philosophy of J. S. Mill (Oxford, 1953), and K. Britton, John Stuart Mill (London, 1953), both written from the point of view of modern analytic philosophy; Britton stresses the lasting value of Mill’s achievement and is less sharply critical of Mill’s shortcomings than is the Anschutz work; M. Cowling, Mill and Liberalism (Cambridge, 1963), a brisk conservative criticism of Mill; R. Jackson, Examination of the Deductive Logic of J. S. Mill (Oxford, 1941); O. A. Kubitz, The Development of John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic (Urbana, III., 1932); E. Nagel, ed., Mill’s Philosophy of Scientific Method (New York, 1950)—this and the works of Jackson and Kubitz are up-to-date books concerned with Mill as a logician; E. Neff, Carlyle and Mill (New York, 1926), an instructive comparison of rival philosophies; B. Russell, John Stuart Mill (London, 1955); J. B. Schneewind, ed., Mill: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York, 1968), short studies of Mill’s thought from a philosophical perspective; and C. L. Street, Individualism and Individuality in the Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (Milwaukee, Wis., 1926), a study of Mill’s ethical and political theory.

Maurice Cranston