NICHOLAS CAPALDI
J.S. Mill’s conception of metaphysics is not only of intrinsic interest but it has important implications for his political and social philosophy. Unfortunately, his metaphysical views have been obscured for a number of reasons. One reason is that his preeminence has encouraged philosophers either to assimilate him to their favored positions or to attack him for not reflecting their own. A second reason is that there are conflicting views of philosophy itself. What is true of “philosophy” in general is true of “metaphysics” in particular. Finally, in interpreting any philosopher, scholars try to place that philosopher within a larger intellectual context of an on‐going conversation(s). Given the conflicting conceptions of philosophy, there will inevitably be conflicting understandings of the larger context within which that philosopher is to be placed.
In order to avoid prejudicing any one particular view, I shall begin by understanding “metaphysics” in a very broad sense. When the term “metaphysics” is used in this essay what is meant is (1) the identification of fundamental truths, (2) the status of these truths, and (3) how the philosopher understands his relationship to those truths. It is worth noting that Mill’s own use of the term is idiosyncratic, in that it sometimes seems to be synonymous with psychology.
Three generic metaphysical traditions have emerged within the history of Western thought (Capaldi 2009). Those traditions are here labeled as naturalism, idealism, and Copernicanism.
The world is fully intelligible in its own terms. Its narrative is monistic (we understand both ourselves and the world in the same way); rationalistic (everything is in principle conceptualizable); impersonal (the ultimate principles of intelligibility have no direct reference or concern for human welfare); and secularly Pelagian: despite the world’s impersonality, humanity can solve its problems on its own and by exclusive reference to the natural order. Since Individuals are part of the natural order, they can achieve fulfillment only through their larger social role.
Metaphysics is the most comprehensive and most general characterization of existent things. It is arrived at by abstraction from the specialized sciences. Hence, metaphysics is a kind of empirical super‐science. There is a tendency to reduce meaning to reference; truth consists in correspondence. More importantly is the connection in naturalism between epistemology and ontology. Reality is said to consist of individual or particular things or substances. A substance (thing) is something more than its properties and it is ultimately identified as the subject matter of discourse. Since epistemology is understood as the study of the basic categories used for describing and explaining our experience, epistemological conclusions have metaphysical import. Language somehow (naturalistically) mirrors psychology that somehow (naturalistically) mirrors an external physical world.
The world of everyday experience cannot be understood on its own terms. As a consequence, a distinction is introduced between the world of appearance (or everyday experience) and ultimate reality. Science can account for the world of appearance, but it cannot account either for itself or for ultimate reality. Hence, metaphysics is a kind of non‐empirical pre‐science. Ultimate reality is conceptual or logical, (consisting of forms, ideas, or universals, etc.), not a system of physical objects. The conceptual entities that comprise ultimate reality are related to each other in logical fashion. Idealism rejects any distinction between a thing and its properties. A thing is a particular set of properties (ideas, forms, etc.), thus conceding the fundamental and irreducible nature of the self; we derive conclusions about ultimate reality from our knowledge of the self. Here, too, we can conceptualize the pre‐conceptual.
Idealism is marked by a series of dualisms. The dualism of subject and object exemplifies that how we understand ourselves is different from and more fundamental than how we understand the world. Mind (and spirit) are fundamental. At the same time, by insisting that everything is somehow related to everything else, idealists assert the social nature of the self and the organic nature of society. The empirical social world is always construed as a dualism between utopia and the “cave” within which we live; hence history is a series of events that imperfectly reflect an ideal.
The Copernican Revolution in philosophy was introduced by Hume (Capaldi 1972) and Kant (Beck 1979), and it suggests a third or alternative vision of metaphysics. The ultimate source of reality and intelligibility is neither the physical world nor a supersensible conceptual world, but the everyday pre‐theoretical world constituted by the interaction of human beings with their environment and each other.
Science itself can no longer be construed as observational; in order to obtain knowledge of a thing we need to have it interact with other things; hence science is to be understood as experimental. Science is not the observation of nature but experimentation on and with nature. It is technological. Physical Science itself would seem to be, post‐Newton, a form of practical knowledge. But, unlike as in naturalistic metaphysics, there cannot be a theoretical account of practical knowledge. Any attempt to give a scientific account of how human beings interact with the world and attempt to manipulate the world for practical purposes would itself be an interaction. Any alleged meta‐theoretical explanation of the theoretical explanation of practical knowledge would itself be another interaction, ad infinitum.
Whereas, both naturalists and idealists believe that the pre‐conceptual can be conceptualized, Copernicans do not. The human mind is not a mirror of nature but something that interprets nature and that interpretation presupposes a self that is spontaneously free. This self and its freedom are conditions of knowledge but not themselves possible objects of knowledge. Hence metaphysics cannot prove the existence of either a self or of freedom. Individual freedom is a presupposition of daily, common sense morality. Moreover, some conceptions of both God and immortality might be held as presuppositions of common sense morality but not theoretically provable.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of much of British thought is the appeal to “experience,” understood as a kind of know‐how or practice. The concept of experience generally refers to knowing how or procedural knowledge rather than propositional knowledge. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as, “the basic level of practical knowledge and judgment that we all need to help us live in a reasonable and safe way.” This appeal to experience is the view that practice precedes theory, that theory is an explication of previous practice, and that theory can never transcend practice. In one form or another, this view can be found in twentieth century philosophers such as Hayek, Wittgenstein, Ryle, Polanyi, and Oakeshott.
This raises the further question, how do we know when we have definitively and exhaustively understood something? The answer is that we do not – there is always more to come. Hence, no generalization can ever be secure. If there is always more to come, when does an assertion achieve impregnable status? The answer is never. There cannot be any a priori knowledge of a genuinely mind‐independent world.
The ultimate explanation of experience cannot lie in the passive receptivity of external stimuli (the “given”). Following Newton, everything interacts with everything else; hence “experience” has to be the interaction of human beings (subjects) with objects or other subjects. What the human being contributes to the interaction is twofold: the imposition of structure both (1) psychologically, through the laws of association and (2) socially, through custom – understood as the historical pattern of past interactions. “Philosophy,” for Hume is common sense methodized and corrected (Livingston 1998). Neither the “subject” nor the “object” can be known independent of its properties, and those properties are revealed only in the interaction. Since human action is primordial, reflection is always ultimately reflection on prior practice. Explanation is not the abstracting of an external structure but the subject’s explication of our ordinary understanding of our practices, in the hope of extracting from our previous practice a set of norms that can be used reflectively to guide future practice. We do not change our ordinary understanding but rather come to know it in a new and better way.
There is the ever‐present temptation to rigidify custom, either by assimilating custom to naturalistic teleology (not evolution) or to timeless ideal patterns. Copernicanism eschews timeless analysis and sees discourse (and epistemology) as conventional in the sense that it denies that structure can be explicated apart from the agent. However, there are no hidden rigid substructures to social practice such that one can predict (or normatively require) future permutations of that practice (there are no rules for the application of rules) and no structures that would show the “hidden” logic of a practice. The application of an understanding of a practice to a novel set of circumstances requires analogical imagination. Since no culture dictates its own future, human beings are free to accept, reject, or redeploy specific features of their inheritance. Note that this also means that we can never start de novo behind a veil of ignorance. Following the Newtonian analogical model further, the social world is the interaction of self‐directed individuals.
Copernican metaphysics is directly connected with the advocacy of individual autonomy. Personal autonomy is itself a modern notion that was articulated prior to the advent of a self‐conscious Copernican metaphysics, most notably by Hobbes.
Almost all modern writing about moral conduct begins with the hypothesis of an individual human being choosing and pursuing his own directions of activity … this autonomous individual remained as the starting point of ethical reflection … Every human being, in virtue of not being subject to natural necessity, is recognized by Kant to be a Person, an end in himself, absolute and autonomous … he will recognize in his conduct the universal conditions of autonomous personality; and the chief of these conditions is to use his humanity, as well in himself as in others, as an end and never as a means.
(Oakeshott 1991: 367)
In practice, one can embrace autonomy and still be committed to either a naturalistic or idealistic metaphysics. However, there is a high price to be paid. When the new wine of personal autonomy is poured into the old bottles it is easy to understand how those bottles lead to formulations that are easily misread as forms of authoritarianism (e.g., Hobbes and even Locke or Hegel) or evolve into something that can become authoritarian – think of Dicey’s explanation (1917) of how Bentham’s views were transmuted into socialism and more recently Hayek’s critique of his friend Popper (1973).
Since autonomy is a modern notion it is clear that pre‐modern expressions of metaphysics have always been connected with enterprise (collective goal or organic communities) social philosophies. Are the classical forms of metaphysics compatible with individual freedom? More to the point, if human beings are part either of a natural order or even reflect an ideal order, it is inevitable that wisdom will be construed as requiring (1) discovery of the independent order (often teleological) and (2) conformity to that order. It would make no sense to co‐create or transform the order or to negotiate with the order.
Mill has been mistakenly assimilated to naturalism as far back as his association with Bentham, James Mill (his father), and Bain, all of whom were naturalistic; by idealist critics such as Green and Bradley; and most recently by Skorupski (1989), Andy Hamilton (1998), and Donner and Fumerton (2009). Since naturalists link epistemology with ontology, when they examine what they see as Mill’s phenomenological epistemology they are frustrated by Mill’s refusal to draw metaphysical conclusions: for example, that Mill did not attempt to establish the independent existence of external physical objects, he refused to reify sensations as sense‐data, and declined to reduce the self to a series of sensations. Others remain unsympathetic if not appalled at Mill’s willingness to talk about God, freedom, and immortality (Millar 1998); there is a cottage industry of scholarship that critiques Mill’s so‐called utilitarianism for failing to reconcile how the pursuit of personal fulfillment (self‐interest) serves a larger (collective) social good. Seemingly reassured by Green and Bradley’s dismissal of Mill, naturalists remain mystified by Mill’s appreciation for Berkeley and Kant; and finally, many discount the idea that Mill would take history seriously or that Mill’s own views evolved as reflected in the Autobiography.
Does this mean that Mill was an idealist as he once classified himself? Green and Bradley certainly did not think so. As Passmore put it,
The proper approach, he [Green] argued, is not from the individual mind to the world, but rather from the world to the universality of mind. In thus taking the world as the starting point of his philosophy, Green, like so many of his contemporaries, returns to Kant. His method of argument, too, is Kantian – or, often enough, Platonic, in the manner of Plato’s Theatetus especially – rather than Hegelian.
(Passmore 1957: 56)
Green understood himself to be reacting against Humean skepticism (Hume, after all, had also refused to conceptualize the pre‐conceptual) as well as Spencer and Mill because they, in Green’s mind, reduced the person to natural forces, and thereby made any theory of conduct meaningless. For Green, individuality is rendered more perfect only when the separate individualities are integrated as part of a social whole.
Bradley maintained that “Outside of spirit, there is not, and there cannot be, any reality….” and therefore contemptuously dismissed Mill for refusing to make the recognition of a self into the recognition of an Absolute. As Bradley put it, when Mill had,
the same fact before him, which gave the lie to his whole psychological theory, he could not ignore it, he could not recognize it, he would not call it a fiction; so he put it aside, as a “final inexplicability,” and thought, I suppose, that by covering it with a phrase he got rid of its existence.
(Bradley 1924: 40n)
This does a great injustice to Mill, but more to the point it is a criticism of Mill for not conceptualizing the pre‐conceptual. Bradley’s endorsement of “My Station and Its Duties” is the classic naturalistic reduction of ethics to politics. Bradley’s student Bosanquet would, in The Philosophical Theory of the State (1899), endorse the total subordination of the individual to the state.
Mill qualifies as an advocate of Copernican metaphysics. Mill believed himself to have joined a conversation that was defined directly by Kant and indirectly by Hegel.
Kant … holds so essential a place in the development of philosophic thought, that until somebody had done what Kant did, metaphysics according to our present conception of it could not have been continued … he has become one of the turning points in the history of philosophy.
(Examination, IX: 493n)
This is one of the many reasons that the so‐called empiricist‐rationalist debate is not the context of Mill’s thought.
The other important element in the conversation was practical: understanding and trying to guide England in the transition from feudalism to a modern industrial democracy. The enemies, so to speak, were the forces of feudal orthodoxy – conservatism and Anglicanism. Mill was concerned with epistemology and metaphysics, in part, because philosophical doctrines were used to rationalize orthodoxy.
The notion that truths … may be known by intuition … independently of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions.
(Autobiography, I: 233)
Among the truths which are thus known a priori, by occasion of experience, but not themselves the subjects of experience, Coleridge includes the fundamental doctrines of religion and morals, the principles of mathematics, and the ultimate laws even of physical nature.
(Coleridge, X: 126)
As Mill saw it, the great philosophical controversy was between the intuitionists and the school of “Experience and Association.”
[T]he associationist‐philosophy as taught by Hartley, and the metaphysics of the German school … are the two systems between which, and which only, almost every metaphysician, deserving the name, in all Europe, is now beginning to be convinced that it is necessary to choose: the two most perfect forms of the only two theories of the human mind which are, strictly speaking, possible.
(Blakey’s History of Moral Science, X: 23)
The latter attempted to buttress traditional institutional structures by claiming that discursive reason revealed permanent truths which served to support those practices and render them impervious to change.
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.
(Autobiography, I: 233)
Mill was not in principle opposed to custom or tradition. What he opposed was the rigidification of custom, the rendering of it as impervious to change or development. Consider that one of his arguments in favor of free speech was that if we do not remind ourselves of the arguments why we accept something that something becomes a dead dogma instead of a living truth.
Their mistake was, that they did not acknowledge the historical value of much which had ceased to be useful, nor saw that institutions and creeds, now effete, had rendered essential services to civilization, and still filled a place in the human mind, and in the arrangements of society, which could not without great peril, be left vacant. Their [Bentham, etc.] mistake was, that they did not recognize in many of the errors which they assailed, corruptions of important truths, and … necessary elements of civilized society, though in a form no longer suited to the age … They threw away the shell without preserving the kernel.
(Coleridge, X: 138)
The deductive sciences give rise to the illusion that there are necessary truths. The System of Logic was written in part to dispose of deduction by arguing that all inference is ultimately inductive. It did not matter to Mill what the personal social/political views of individual thinkers may have been. What mattered to him were the intellectual foundations of a rigid conservatism. His formal attack on such dogma began with the System of Logic. In true Anglo‐Saxon and Baconian fashion, he defended an inductivism that denied any possibility of permanent or a priori truths. The Baconian conception of science involves the accumulation of useful facts – theories (hypotheses) are suggested to the mind via the imagination (association) from past experience (never completely novel as the history of science shows) and are useful in discovering new facts – but the facts are what count. It is these facts that give us control over nature. Explanation and prediction are in the service of control. Critics such as Whewell responded that science often proceeds through speculative hypotheses that guide future research. Can these hypotheses be reduced to inductive thinking? Yes, if we keep in mind that Mill does not deny the operation of imagination and the laws of association working upon previous experience. When we examine actual hypotheses in hard science we do not find them to be de novo. The theory of relativity, for example, was not formulated by indigenous natives of the Amazon rain forest but by a European deeply immersed in the history and controversies of then contemporary physics. Hypotheses, in short, are secondary or tertiary level inductions.
The starting point is not an ideal Platonic world, and it is not the natural world outside of the subject. Mill’s starting point is the pre‐theoretical, the common sense world of individuals engaging in various practical tasks with the world:
To draw inferences has been said to be the great business of life. Every one has daily, hourly, and momentarily … to ascertain certain facts, in order that they may afterwards apply certain rules, either devised by themselves, or prescribed for their guidance by others … It is the only occupation in which the mind never ceases to be engaged.
(Logic, VII: 9–10)
Reflection is reflection on the pre‐theoretical or prior practice:
If a science of logic exists…it must be useful. If there be rules to which every mind consciously or unconsciously conforms in every instance in which it infers rightly, there seems little necessity for discussing whether a person is more likely to observe those rules, when he knows the rules, than when he is unacquainted with them.
(Logic, VII: 11)
Self‐understanding precedes our understanding of everything else – something already inherent in the Cartesian starting point culminating in Hume and Kant. There is a metaphysical world view already assumed by Mill in his treatment of logic; but the enumeration of the norms of inference inherent in everyday practice can be carried out without directly addressing metaphysical issues. “Logic is common ground on which the partisans of Hartley and of Reid, of Locke and of Kant, may meet and join hands” (Logic, VII: 14), “and the views which will be here promulgated, may, I believe, be held in conjunction with the principal conclusions of any of their systems of philosophy” (Logic, VII: 14n). This is why Mill’s metaphysics cannot be found full blown in the System of Logic. Mill’s views on metaphysics did not shift radically in between the writing of the Logic and that of the Examination. However, he was reticent to spell out the full implications of those views in the earlier work, for a number of reasons (Capaldi 2004: 185–6).
While Mill will use his inductivism to address issues in metaphysics, he believed that his analysis of inference was metaphysically neutral. It is neutral in the sense that Mill begins his analysis with the everyday practical world – namely, the pre‐theoretical. He leaves open at this point the question whether the pre‐theoretical can itself be conceptualized. To that great issue he turns attention in Examination.
J.S. Mill’s metaphysical positions are presented full‐blown in An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865). Mill’s “subject” was “less Sir. W. Hamilton, than the questions that Sir W. Hamilton discussed” (Examination, IX: 2). These questions were metaphysical ones, and “the difficulties of Metaphysics lie at the root of all science” (Examination, IX: 2). Hamilton was important because he addressed the important “philosophical conversation” (dispute) between “Locke and Hume” on the one hand and the reaction against them “which dates from Reid among ourselves and from Kant for the rest of Europe” (Examination, IX: 1). Hamilton seemingly combined both the Reidian and Kantian positions. To refute Hamilton was to resuscitate Locke and Hume.
Mill added three qualifications. First, although he endorses the Kantian doctrine of the relativity of knowledge that “we mentally invest the objects of our perceptions with attributes,” which are “constructed by the mind’s own laws” (Examination, IX: 8), Mill rejects the Kantian view that the construction reveals innate forms. The rejection is necessary to support Mill’s contention that there are no eternal truths that ground eternal institutional structures. This is what he detests about intuition. Second, he sees the resuscitation as best embodied in “the doctrine of Hartley, of James Mill, of Professor Bain,” namely that the constructions of the mind are “put together out of ideas of sensation, by the known laws of association” (Examination, IX: 9). Thirdly, he quietly suggests, without elaboration, that the latter position is compatible with the Berkeleian theory (Examination, IX: 8–9). Lurking in the background is the question of the status of the mind (ego, self, etc.).
The upshot of Mill’s laborious examination of Hamilton per se is that some of the proponents of common sense either make empirically false claims, such as the contention that we have direct perception of external objects or they violate the norms of common sense inference (Mill’s enumerative induction). More fundamentally, Hamilton does not see the incoherence of combining the primacy of the subject (Kant’s Copernicanism) with the belief in the external “objectivity” of objects (Reid). To put this in our terms, you cannot be both an idealist and a naturalist at the same time. Moreover, we cannot explain the subject by reference to anything transcendent or transcendental (Mill’s critique of Hamilton, Mansel, theology, and Continental thought in general) because the norms of common sense inference (Mill’s enumerative induction) will not license it.
The Pre‐theoretical consists of two kinds of truths: intuitive truths (province of Metaphysics) and inferential truths (province of Logic). In his analysis and explication of logic, Mill identifies two primitive cognitive dispositions: the reliance on memory and the habit of enumerative induction. Both of these dispositions are properties of the mind. So far, the analysis of the pre‐theoretical has led us to the activities of the mind. How then are we to understand the mind? Metaphysics deals with the “original furniture of the mind” (Logic, VII: 8–9). It also takes cognizance of the following issues:
the existence of matter and of spirit; of the existence of any connexion between cause and effect, other than the constancy of their succession; of the reality of time & space as entities per se, distinguishable from the objects which are said to exist in them … inquiries into the nature of conception, perception, memory and belief … Whether our emotions are innate, or the result of association: Whether God and duty, are realities … the original premises of all our knowledge … is the object of the higher, or remoter metaphysics.
(Logic, VIII: 964).
Following Berkeley, Mill identified himself as a kind of “idealist.” Specifically, this meant three things to Mill: (1) the mind is incontrovertibly aware of “sensations,” (2) we can never be directly aware of physical objects, and (3) we cannot infer the latter from the former. Matter is the permanent possibility of sensation. This philosophical idealism, which Mill thinks is consonant with common sense, is a rejection of both naturalism and the kind of idealism one finds in Berkeley, Green, and Bradley. Unlike Berkeley, Mill does not endorse an inference to the mind of God. Given his inductivism, Mill rejects Kant’s and Green’s “transcendental idealism” and Hegel’s “absolute idealism.”
Can a similar analysis be given of the mind? Mill rejects the idea because the mind is aware of memories and expectations, and the latter presuppose an “I.” The mind or ego is either a series that is aware of itself or something over and above the series. The examination of the “original furniture” reveals a distinction between a subject who engages in reflection/action and an object. How we understand the subject – ourselves – is primary; how we understand the object – non‐human world – is derivative. We cannot explain the pre‐theoretical by reference to the non‐human. This is the fatal and boring flaw of naturalism; it is the former that explains the latter because the norms of explanation are themselves drawn from common sense. We cannot treat the subject as itself an object or a series of objects (a point already made by both Hume and Kant); the meaning of the self cannot be explicated solely by reference.
The fact of recognizing a sensation … remembering that it has been felt before … and the inexplicable tie … which connects the present consciousness with the past one … is as near as I think we can get to a positive conception of Self. That there is something real in this tie … I hold to be indubitable … Whether we are directly conscious of it in the act of remembrance … or whether, according to the opinion of Kant, we are not conscious of a Self at all, but are compelled to assume it as a necessary condition of Memory, I do not undertake to decide … As such, I ascribe a reality to the Ego – to my own Mind – different from that real existence as a Permanent Possibility, which is the only reality I acknowledge in Matter: and by fair experiential inference from that one Ego, I ascribe the same reality to other Egos, or Minds.
(Examination, IX: 207–8)
Metaphysics is not an analysis of the brain; it is not empirical psychology or brain physiology. Those sciences cannot explain the mind or self; rather an understanding of the self precedes, and is presupposed by, those sciences. All natural sciences presuppose metaphysics; metaphysics is not an empirical super‐science and it cannot be arrived at by abstraction from the special sciences. There can be no monistic and holistic account; we cannot conceptualize the pre‐conceptual. Echoing Hume, Mill confesses that:
The truth is, that we are here face to face with that final inexplicability, at which, as Sir W. Hamilton observes, we inevitably arrive when we reach ultimate facts; and in general, one mode of stating it only appears more incomprehensible than another, because the whole of human language is accommodated to the one, and is so incongruous with the other, that it cannot be expressed in any terms which do not deny its truth.
(Examination, IX: 194)
No further philosophical explanation of the self is possible. The self is a condition of knowledge not an object of knowledge.
Does this reflect a failure on Mill’s part? It can be a failure in one of two ways. It is a failure if one insists that everything is in principle conceptualizable and that the explication must refer to other facts about the natural world. In short, this is a failure if one subscribes to naturalistic metaphysics. It can also be a failure if one believes that we can offer a transcendental proof of the existence and nature of the self, that is, if one is a post‐Copernican idealist (Kant/Green/Hegel/Bradley). Mill is none of these, and he believes that both of these metaphysical approaches are wrong because they indulge in a form of inference not licensed by ordinary practice. Perhaps it is time to recognize that Mill was a radical Copernican. Like the idealists, Copernicans insist upon the distinction between, and the irreducibility of, subjects to objects; but, unlike idealism, the subject is rooted in the pre‐theoretical world of everyday practices.
We turn our attention now to the question of the freedom the will. Given what we have said above, what should we expect Mill’s position to be? Given the existence of the self (subject) that is not explainable by or reducible to an object or series of objects, the “will” would seem to be an inherent property of such a self. This is what the Examination adds to the earlier discussion of the System of Logic. The “will” would have to be an inexplicable ultimate fact. Mill denies that there is “any mysterious compulsion” (Examination, IX: 467). There is not, contra Hamilton himself, and there cannot be, a positive argument that somehow proves the will is free. Any argument would have to take the form of a causal induction (how do you show that something is “uncaused”?) or a transcendental one (which Mill considers an illegitimate form of inference that adds nothing to common sense).
Putting the adjective “free” in front of the “will” does not seem to add anything to its meaning. What would a “un‐free” will be like? Mill insists that “not only our conduct, but our character, is in part amenable to our will” (Examination, IX: 466) and that “we can, by a course of self‐culture, finally modify, to a greater or less extent, our desires and aversions.” (Examination, IX: 467). The doctrine of fatalism in all of its forms is incompatible with the notion that the “will” exists and makes choices. The choices may be influenced by other data, but the data do not “determine” the will. This is all that Mill needs for his and for practical common sense purposes.
Rather than doing what cannot be done, Mill focuses on those who deny the “freedom” of the will. Such a denial would be tantamount to denying the existence of “a” will and seemingly to assert that there are choices but “we” do not make them, rather the choices are dictated by some other entity or entities. Almost the whole of Mill’s treatment of this issue in the Examination is focused on exposing confusion in the minds of those who either present arguments in favor of some sort of causal compulsion or those who like Hamilton present a bad argument in favor of the “freedom” of the will. This should remind us of Kant’s antinomies.
Given the Newtonian inspiration, and consistent with idealism but not naturalism, a thing can only be known indirectly by its properties. We discover the Self through its interactions. Richard McDonough (2011) has suggested that Mill exhibits an early form of British emergentism, something Mill may have acquired from Kant and Hegel via Coleridge.
Mill’s own Autobiography is a narrative history, not a synthetic a priori history (Kant) and not a teleological account (Hegel), but an inductive narrative account of the evolution of Mill’s thinking as influenced by interactions with others – his father, Carlyle, Coleridge, Harriet, and so on. It is an account of how Mill discovered his autonomy, his freedom and took responsibility for shaping his life. Just as the discovery of this autonomy in his own self allows the attribution of this autonomy to other minds or selves, so the social world becomes intelligible as the interaction of self‐directed individuals. Ethics is the clarification of individual autonomy and responsibility.
If the pre‐conceptual cannot be conceptualized, how then are we to “understand” it? In the absence of any further philosophical explanation, can we offer some other kind of account? The previous discussion of Mill’s understanding of himself offers a clue and a suggestion. What we can offer is a grand narrative. This narrative is speculative but is not to be construed as the residue of discursive reason. It is a “practical” narrative. As Herbert Butterfield once put it,
When we have reconstructed the whole of mundane history it does not form a self‐explanatory system, and our attitude to it, our whole relationship to the human drama, is a larger affair altogether – it is a matter not of scholarship but of religion … Ultimately our interpretation of the whole human drama depends on an intimately personal decision concerning the part we mean to play in it.
(Butterfield 1949: 27, 86)
It is precisely such a grand narrative that Mill offers us in his writings on religion. It is not a futile exercise in alleged “proofs,” which violate common sense inference, and it is not a defense of clerics, or an outdated feudal institutional bureaucracy. It is a narrative that references God, freedom, and immortality. Here we come to the end of metaphysics and the beginning of something else.