John Stuart Mill and Company
Life with Father
I acquired … a mental habit to which I attribute all that I have ever done, or ever shall do, in speculation; that of never accepting half-solutions of difficulties as complete … never allowing obscure corners of a subject to remain unexplored, because they did not appear important; never thinking that I perfectly understood any part of a subject until I understood the whole.
—JOHN STUART MILL, AUTOBIOGRAPHY
A memorable champion of the open society, critical thinking, human dignity, and women’s equality, John Stuart Mill is surely the most popular and most widely read of the classical utilitarians, with such immortal works as Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and On the Subjection of Women having become part of the canon of global higher education. Whatever else he did or was, he succeeded, with Harriet Taylor Mill, in framing a vision of a vibrant, individualistic liberalism replete with a healthy public sphere and grounded on the progress of civilization and happiness.1 Although their vision can today seem rather too individualistic, too fearful of dependency on government or government control, their reformist efforts during a period when, despite the reforms of 1832, the working class and much of the middle class (and all women) could not vote and were often seriously hampered in their progress by the sinister interests of a paternalistic agricultural aristocracy still bent on protecting itself through legislation (including the hated “Corn Laws”), should be appreciated for the emancipatory potential they represented, however unevenly. The means may not have been adequate to the task, but the task was to see that every individual, man or woman, would be provided with the capabilities needed to become his or her own person, leading his or her own life and finding the happiness fitting for humanity.
Like the other great utilitarians, Mill put his own stamp on the creed, and this in ways that have made many doubt whether his creed should still be considered utilitarianism. Yet despite his many worries about Bentham—not all of them warranted, as we have seen—he always remained ready enough to identify with the Benthamite legacy, particularly when it was under attack by the likes of William Whewell, the formidable Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, who stood for Mill as a kind of Master of all the pernicious intuitionist doctrines calling for attack. Thus, in the 1852 essay “Whewell on Moral Philosophy,” he would write:
Dr. Whewell’s objections to utility, or the ‘greatest happiness,’ as the standard of morals, are chiefly contained in his animadversions on Paley and on Bentham. It would be quite open to a defender of the principles of utility, to refuse encumbering himself with a defence of either of those authors. The principle is not bound up with what they have said in its behalf, nor with the degree of felicity which they may have shown in applying it. As for Paley, we resign him without compunction to the tender mercies of Dr. Whewell. It concerns Dr. Whewell more than ourselves to uphold the reputation of a writer, who, whatever principle of morals he professed, seems to have had no object but to insert it as a foundation underneath the existing set of opinions, ethical and political; who, when he had laid down utility as the fundamental axiom, and the recognition of general rules as the condition of its application, took his leave of scientific analysis, and betook himself to picking up utilitarian reasons by the wayside, in proof of all accredited doctrines, and in defence of most tolerated practices. Bentham was a moralist of another stamp. With him, the first use to be made of his ultimate principle, was to erect on it, as a foundation, secondary or middle principles, capable of serving as premises for a body of ethical doctrine not derived from existing opinions, but fitted to be their test. Without such middle principles, an universal principle, either in science or in morals, serves for little but a thesaurus of commonplaces for the discussion of questions, instead of a means of deciding them. If Bentham has been regarded by subsequent adherents of a morality grounded on the ‘greatest happiness,’ as in a peculiar sense the founder of that system of ethics, it is not because, as Dr. Whewell imagines … he either thought himself, or was thought by others to be the ‘dis-coverer of the principle,’ but because he was the first who, keeping clear of the direct and indirect influences of all doctrines inconsistent with it, deduced a set of subordinate generalities from utility alone, and by these consistently tested all particular questions. This great service previously to which a scientific doctrine of ethics on the foundation of utility was impossible, has been performed by Bentham (though with a view to the exigencies of legislation more than to those of morals) in a manner, as far as it goes, eminently meritorious, and so as to indicate clearly the way to complete the scheme.2
Mill does go on to rehearse his qualms about Bentham’s “want of breadth and comprehension,” explaining that it was Bentham’s method that “justly earned a position in moral science analogous to that of Bacon in physical,” though as with Bacon the method was often applied without sufficient evidence. Nonetheless, there is no mistaking which side Mill took himself to be on. In his own fashion, he was always ready to fight for the cause, whatever the risk to his reputation.
Of course, Mill’s literary reputation was vast for much of his own lifetime, with fewer of the serious downs suffered by Godwin, Bentham, and his own father, James Mill, and if anyone could seriously be labeled the “spirit of his age,” he was the one. A serious, scholarly, thirty-three volume Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, edited by John Robson, was published between 1963 and 1991, and the entire breathtaking work has been made readily available at the Online Library of Liberty, at ll.libertyfund.org/groups/46, in an act of public beneficence that Godwin himself might have found astonishing.3 Consequently, although there is always more research to be done, recent research on Mill—of which there is much—has not had to confront quite the same obstacles as research on Godwin, Bentham, and Sidgwick. And although the biographies are not exactly plentiful, at least some notable efforts do exist, from those by Alexander Bain and Leslie Stephen, to the substantial work by Michael St. John Packe, down to the more recent ventures by Nicholas Capaldi and Richard Reeves. And this is not to mention the many fine overviews of Mill’s work, such as those by Alan Ryan, John Skorupski, and Dale Miller, and the brilliant feminist readings of Mill by Martha Nussbaum, Jo Ellen Jacobs, Wendy Donner, Maria Morales, Elizabeth Anderson, Janice Carlisle, and others who have worked hard to present a sympathetic portrait of Mill’s feminism and the role of Harriet Taylor Mill. And of course, there is Mill’s own Autobiography, a classic that is as revealing in its omissions as in its acts. The father looms very large, while the mother was largely edited out of successive drafts.
Despite this attention, there is still much to worry about in the reception and reconstruction of Mill. In philosophical terms, he has too often been the object of the cheapest of cheap shots, turned into a textbook example of (supposedly) fallacious reasoning on such subjects as the proof of utilitarianism and the theory of the higher pleasures. However, as this chapter will show, although there are certainly many interpretive controversies swirling around Mill’s texts, there are highly plausible strategies for making Mill out as a consistent and powerful champion of utilitarianism. Following John Skorupski, it is helpful to think, rather abstractly, of “pure utilitarianism” as holding that “(i) There is a system of agent-neutral final ends (the Good). … (ii) There are no complete agent-relative telic reasons. (iii) There are no complete non-telic reasons.” This is, of course, simply a slightly technical way of saying that the best action is one that “promotes the most Good” and that “all practical reasons are Good-based, that is, that when spelled out they are instances of the principle of Good.” And although Skorupski does not count himself as a pure utilitarian, he forcefully maintains that of “the classical utilitarians, Sidgwick is the only one who is clearly not a pure utilitarian. … Mill, on the other hand, is a pure utilitarian: he says that the principle of utility is ‘the ultimate principle of teleology’ … the utility principle is the principle of practical reason as such, regulating all its sub-departments (which Mill here [in his Logic] describes as ‘Morality, Prudence or Policy, and Aesthetics: the right, the Expedient, and the Beautiful or Noble, in human conduct and works’).”4
Such, then, is the verdict—not an isolated verdict—of one of the leading Mill scholars of the last half century, illustrating how, when one draws on the full range of Mill’s writings, including the bits on the Art of Life in his Logic, Mill can indeed be cast as a consistent (and consistently high-minded) utilitarian, rather than as a jumble of pure utilitarianism with liberalism, perfectionism, egoism, etc. Skorupski also defends, as later sections will show, the coherence of Mill’s hedonism and other components of his utilitarianism. He has his qualms about the Millian perspective, particularly its naturalism and associationism, but like Ryan, Crisp, Miller, and many other Mill scholars, he takes Mill very, very seriously as a philosopher—a utilitarian philosopher.
Thus, compelling defenses of Mill are possible, and needed, though in other areas more critical readings are needed as well, and not only when it comes to his fashioning of the story of utilitarianism. As enlightened as he doubtless was on many subjects, Mill’s views on “savages,” “backwards peoples,” colonization, blacks, the Irish, and India often convey a kind of Orientalism or a subtle (or not so subtle) prejudice that calls for forms of critical cultural and political analysis, as in critical race studies, that have not figured prominently enough in the literature on him.5 Moreover, as Duncan Bell has urged:
Recent scholarship on Mill has greatly improved understanding of his arguments about the ethical defensibility of imperial rule, and in particular his account of India, but it has tended to ignore or downplay his extensive writings on colonization. Yet this was a subject that Mill returned to frequently throughout his long and illustrious career. While initially he regarded colonization as a solution to the “social problem” in Britain, he came to believe that its legitimacy resided primarily in the universal benefits—civilization, peace, and prosperity—that it generated for humanity as a whole. In the final years of his life Mill seemed to lose faith in the project. Confronted with the political intransigence and violence of the settlers, yet refusing to give up on the settler empire altogether, his colonial romance gave way to a form of melancholic resignation.6
And somehow, work on his relationship with Harriet Taylor Mill, the subject of an extensive literature in itself, still manages to raise more questions than it answers. The same goes for work on his relationship with his father, who, with Taylor Mill, represented the other great influence on his life. In the case of Mill, and by his own critical lights, the extraordinary life and the many works are so deeply and intriguingly entangled that to narrow one’s focus is inevitably to distort.
Born in 1773 to James and Isabel Milne, Mill senior had grown up in a severe and religious Scottish household, escaping the modest poverty of his father’s shoemaking and farming vocations only through the efforts of his socially ambitious mother, who changed the family name to Mill and insisted that her son devote all his time to reading, and through the good fortune of his benefactors, Sir John and Lady Jane Stuart, who recognized his talents and saw to it that he received a serious education (aimed for the Presbyterian ministry) that included a deep exposure to Greek philosophy at Edinburgh University. It would be James Mill, more than either Bentham or his son, who first effectively combined utilitarianism with a keen admiration for the ancient Greek philosophers, particularly his favorite philosopher, Plato. Although eventually licensed as a preacher, the elder Mill had rather lost all religious orthodoxy and was besides too abstractly intellectual for the role, and in 1802 opted to pursue a career in journalism in London, a career that was moderately successful and relatively conservative until he decided to stake his all on a larger literary and scholarly success, namely, his History of British India, which took eleven years to complete, not the four that he had originally supposed. He had married Harriet Burrow in 1805, but his greatest love had been Wilhelmina Stuart, the daughter of his benefactors, for whom he had worked as a tutor from 1790–94. She was, however, too far above him in class, married another aristocrat, and soon thereafter died in childbirth, supposedly using her last breath to call his name.7
At any rate, it was from roughly this time to 1817 that the influence, friendship, and support of Bentham (from 1808) proved so crucial, especially given Mill’s growing family, with his first child, born on May 20, 1806, being named after his great benefactor. Once the History was finally published, in 1817, his name was made and, thanks to both the book and some powerful connections, a position at the East India Company followed (in 1819), a position that ironically proved to be a great blessing to the cause of the Philosophical Radicals. It provided financial security for both Mill senior and Mill junior, demanded little of their time (despite the fact that they were in effect governing India), and exposed them to real-world issues of governance and administration (not that they ever felt compelled to actually visit India).
Thus, the younger Mill was practically born to the part. His father was soon to be taken up by Bentham and converted to utilitarianism, just in time to insure that his first son would, via home schooling, have one of the most remarkable first class educations in history and be bred to become the world’s leading utilitarian, albeit one writing from the comfortable, remunerative position at India House that had been secured him by his father when Mill junior was still a teenager. The keys to literary fame were handed to him by his father and Bentham, who brought him into the group that had formed around their organ, The Westminster Review (very successfully launched in 1824), though it should be added that he also did his time editing Bentham’s manuscripts (the massive, four volume Rationale of Judicial Evidence) and proceeded to build his reputation with his weighty A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive (1843) and Principles of Political Economy (1848).
If he was early on a fixture of various reading, discussion, and debate societies—the “Society for Mutual Improvement,” the “Utilitarian Society,” the “Society of Students of Mental Philosophy,” and the “London Debating Society”—his pen was his real strength, and he used his fortunate start in life to good advantage to build, in due course, a solid reputation through sound scholarly work, not merely by means of essays and activism as was usual for the Philosophical Radicals (though he certainly did a good deal of that as well, and for much of his youth seemed to entertain Parliamentary aspirations, a goal that would only finally be achieved in 1865).
His father and Bentham had contrived that it would be only after a yearlong sojourn in France—a sojourn that would leave him a lifelong Francophile—that he would first (in 1821) read the creed itself, which happily took the form of Dumont’s Traités. The effect was as planned. He “became a different being. The feeling rushed upon me, that all previous moralists were superseded, and that here indeed was the commencement of a new era in thought.”8 Much of his education in the broader philosophy of utilitarianism would come from his father’s works as well—his Elements of Political Economy (1821), various essays (especially the famous “Essay on Government”), Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829), and A Fragment on MacIntosh (1835). His mother, unlike his grandmother on his father’s side, seems not to have been a force in the family, and Mill’s remarks about her in the early draft of the Autobiography were slighting at best.
Yet as everyone who knows the name John Stuart Mill knows, the conversion soon led to crisis, and the crisis was borne of the childhood, and the child Mill only truly became his own man when he discovered both Romantic poetry and romance itself, in the form of Harriet Taylor (née Hardy), the other half without whom he would never have deemed himself whole. All that is to say, his life often looked quite different from the inside. If he credited his father with giving him not only a great deal of time, but also the outlook described in the epigraph to this chapter, he also credited him with having deprived him of the pleasures of childhood, indeed, of childhood itself, and of stunting him in a way that was all too “Benthamite,” in the bad sense.
No doubt Mill’s home schooling was impressive and intensive, though it is not clear that he was any more a prodigy than Bentham or various others who had received special attention. At any rate, Mill began studying Greek when he was about three, and Greek and arithmetic, along with reading and writing, took up most of his early years, until he began on Latin at about age eight. By the time he was a teenager, he was engaged in much else besides. He gave an extensive description of his studies in a letter to Bentham’s brother Samuel, a letter that also indicates how he was helping with the education of his sisters Wilhelmina and Clara (he was the eldest of nine children):
Acton Place, Hoxton
July 30, 1819
My dear Sir,
It is so long since I last had the pleasure of seeing you that I have almost forgotten when it was, but I believe it was in the year 1814, the first year we were at Ford Abbey. I am very much obliged to you for your inquiries with respect to my progress in my studies; and as nearly as I can remember I will endeavour to give an account of them from that year.
In the year 1814, I read Thucydides, and Anacreon, and I believe the Electra of Sophocles, the Phœnissæ of Euripides, and the Plutus and the Clouds of Aristophanes. I also read the Philippics of Demosthenes.
The Latin which I read was only the Oration of Cicero for the Poet Archias, and the (first or last) part of his pleading against Verres. And in Mathematics, I was then reading Euclid; I also began Euler’s Algebra, Bonnycastle’s principally for the sake of the examples to perform. I read likewise some of West’s Geometry.
Æt. 9.—The Greek which I read in the year 1815 was, I think, Homer’s Odyssey, Theocritus, some of Pindar, and the two Orations of Æschines, and Demosthenes on the Crown. In Latin I read the six first books, I believe, of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the five first books of Livy, the Bucolics, and the six first books of the Æneid of Virgil, and part of Cicero’s Orations. In Mathematics, after finishing the first six books, with the eleventh and twelfth of Euclid, and the Geometry of West, I studied Simpson’s Conic Sections and also West’s Conic Sections, Mensuration and Spherics; and in Algebra, Kersey’s Algebra, and Newton’s Universal Arithmetic, in which I performed all the problems without the book, and most of them without any help from the book.
Æt. 10.—In the year 1816 I read the following Greek: Part of Polybius, all Xenophon’s Hellenics, The Ajax and the Philoctetes of Sophocles, the Medea of Euripides, and the Frogs of Aristophanes, and a great part of the Anthologia Græca. In Latin I read all Horace, except the Book of Epodes; and in Mathematics I read Stewart’s Propositiones Geometricæ, Playfair’s [8] Trigonometry at the end of his Euclid, and an article on geometry in the Edinburgh Encyclopædia. I also studied Simpson’s Algebra.
Æt. 11.—In the year 1817 I read Thucydides a second time, and I likewise read a great many Orations of Demosthenes and all Aristotle’s Rhetoric, of which I made a synoptic table. In Latin I read all Lucretius, except the last book, and Cicero’s Letters to Atticus, his Topica, and his treatise, De Partitione Oratoria. I read in Conic Sections an article in the Encyclopædia Britannica (in other branches of the mathematics I studied Euler’s Analysis of Infinities and began Fluxions, on which I read an article in the Encyclopædia Britannica), and Simpson’s Fluxions. In the application of mathematics I read Keill’s Astronomy and Robinson’s Mechanical Philosophy.
Æt. 12.—Last year I read some more of Demosthenes, and the four first Books of Aristotle’s Organon, all which I tabulated in the same manner as his Rhetoric.
In Latin, I read all the works of Tacitus, except the dialogue concerning oratory, and a great part of Juvenal, and began Quintilian. In Mathematics and their application, I read Emerson’s Optics, and a Treatise on Trigonometry by Professor Wallace, of the Military College, near Bagshot, intended for the use of the cadets. I likewise re-solved several problems in various branches of mathematics; and began an article on Fluxions in the Edinburgh Encyclopædia.
Æt. 13.—This year I read Plato’s dialogues called Gorgias and Protagoras, and his Republic, of which I made an abstract. I am still reading Quintilian and the article on Fluxions, and am performing without book the problems in Simpson’s Select Exercises.
Last year I began to learn logic. I have read several Latin books of Logic: those of Smith, Brerewood, and Du Trieu, and part of Burgersdicius, as far as I have gone in Aristotle. I have also read Hobbes’ Logic.
I am now learning political economy. I have made a kind of treatise from what my father has explained to me on that subject, and I am now reading Mr. Ricardo’s work and writing an abstract of it. I have learnt a little natural philosophy, and, having had an opportunity of attending a course of lectures on chemistry, delivered by Mr. Phillips, at the Royal Military College, Bagshot, I have applied myself particularly to that science, and have read the last edition of Dr. Thomson’s system of chemistry.
What English I have read since the year 1814 I cannot tell you, for I cannot remember so long ago. But I recollect that since that time I have read Ferguson’s Roman and Mitford’s Grecian History. I have also read a great deal of Livy by myself. I have sometimes tried my hand at writing history. I had carried a history of the United Provinces from their revolt from Spain, in the reign of Phillip II., to the accession of the Stadtholder, William III., to the throne of England.
I had likewise begun to write a history of the Roman Government, which I had carried down to the Licinian Laws. I should have begun to learn French before this time, but that my father has for a long time had it in contemplation to go to the Continent, there to reside for some time. But as we are hindered from going by my father’s late appointment in the East India House, I shall begin to learn French as soon as my sisters have made progress enough in Latin to learn with me.
I have now and then attempted to write Poetry. The last production of that kind at which I tried my hand was a tragedy. I have now another in view in which I hope to correct the fault of this.
I believe my sister Willie was reading Cornelius Nepos when you saw her. She has since that time read some of Cæsar; almost all Phædrus, all the Catiline and part of the Jugurtha of Sallust, and two plays of Terence; she has read the first, and part of the second book of Lucretius, and is now reading the Eclogues of Virgil.
Clara has begun Latin also. After going through the grammar, she read some of Cornelius Nepos and Cæsar, almost as much as Willie of Sallust, and is now reading Ovid. They are both now tolerably good arithmeticians; they have gone as far as the extraction of the cube root. They are reading the Roman Antiquities and the Greek Mythology, and are translating English into Latin from Mair’s Introduction to Latin Syntax. This is to the best of my remembrance a true account of my own and my sisters’ progress since the year 1814.
I hope Lady Bentham, and George, and the young ladies are in good health.
Your obedient, humble servant,
John Stuart Mill9
The exposure to Plato was crucial, as Mill explained in the earlier draft of his Autobiography:
There is no author to whom my father thought himself more indebted for his own mental culture, than Plato, and I can say the same of mine. The Socratic method, of which the Platonic dialogues are the chief example, is unsurpassed as a discipline for abstract thought on the most difficult subjects. Nothing in modern life and education, in the smallest degree supplies its place. The close, searching elenchus by which the man of vague generalities is absolutely compelled either to express his meaning to himself in definite terms, or to confess that he does not know what he is talking about—the perpetual testing of all general statements by particular instances—the siege in form which is laid to the meaning of large abstract terms, by laying hold of some much larger class-name which includes that and more, and dividing down to the thing sought, marking out its limits and definition by a series of accurately drawn distinctions between it and each of the cognate objects which are successively severed from it—all this even at that age took such hold on me that it became part of my own mind; and I have ever felt myself, beyond any modern that I know of except my father and perhaps beyond even him, a pupil of Plato, and cast in the mould of his dialectics.10
The emphasis on Greek and Greek literature clearly owed much to his father, who devoted a truly extraordinary amount of attention to his son’s education. They would both work at the same table, seated across from one another, the father trying to make headway on his History of British India, the son trying to master Greek vocabulary and, in the absence of lexicons, interrupting his father frequently to ask for help. The precise texture of the relationship is curious: Mill senior was quite patient and devoted in some respects, in others less so. In the earlier and somewhat more candid draft of the Autobiography, Mill explained how his father, as devoted as he was, could be impatient and angry with him, especially given his weak performances when reading aloud: “[T]hough he reproached me when I read a sentence ill, and told me how I ought to have read it, he never shewed me: he often mockingly caricatured my bad reading of the sentence, but did not, by reading it himself, instruct me how it ought to be read.” In fact, as Mill elaborates, it “was a defect running through his modes of instruction as it did through his modes of thinking that he trusted too much to the intelligibleness of the abstract when not embodied in the concrete.”11 As progressive as his father was, he seems to have lacked the Deweyan touch, though his son would deny that his was “an education of cram. … Anything which could be found out by thinking, I never was told, until I had exhausted my efforts to find it out for myself.”12 And, in line with the famous monitorial method, the elder son was entrusted with passing the lessons on to his younger siblings. Still, the slant was on thinking or knowing more than doing (much less feeling), and the young Mill often felt that his father needed to provide a different form of guidance. Mill senior, for his part, was worried by John’s inattentiveness, angrily warning him that he might grow up to be an “oddity” and “unfit” for ordinary life, a prophecy that turned out to be somewhat accurate, given his son’s notorious ineptness, even as an adult, at such mundane tasks as tying his tie, buttoning his shirt, ordering food, etc., matters that Harriet Taylor would have to take in hand.
Yet the younger Mill made it abundantly clear in his Autobiography that his father was his world, devoting more space to him than to any other single figure, even Harriet Taylor. In the final version of the work, he moderated the harsher criticisms of his father, while leaving intact his more supportive statements. It was his father who gave him, among other benefits, his many-sidedness, his love of learning and love of Plato, his grounding in political economy, and much of his utilitarianism, but strangely enough, not his feeling for women’s equality, despite the profoundly important role played by his paternal grandmother. The son would claim that, although his father had not been directly involved in starting the Westminster Review, he was more truly the voice of the Philosophical Radicals than Bentham. James Mill’s associationist psychology, appreciation of Malthus, and other factors were more characteristic of their views, and above all he gave them “an almost unbounded confidence in the efficacy of two things: representative government, and complete freedom of discussion. So complete was my father’s reliance on the influence of reason over the minds of mankind, whenever it is allowed to reach them, that he felt as if all would be gained if the whole population were taught to read, if all sorts of opinions were allowed to be addressed to them by word and in writing, and if by means of the suffrage they could nominate a legislature to give effect to the opinions they adopted.”13 Bentham is dismissed—unfairly, to be sure—as more of an eccentric voice behind the scenes, one whose judgment was called into question by both father and son for his designation of Bowring as a favorite, a favorite to some degree displacing Mill senior as Bentham’s confidant. Bowring, who became not only Bentham’s literary executor but also the first editor of the Westminster Review, after James Mill declined Bentham’s offer to take that role, would be regularly excoriated in the younger Mill’s letters. For example, in an 1843 letter to Macvey Napier, Mill explained that the “reason why I took no notice of Bowring’s book was literally that I had not read it. I never attached sufficient value to anything Bowring could say about Bentham, to feel any curiosity on the subject. … My experience of the literary estimation in which Bowring is held, & of his reputation for judgment & accuracy, was not such as to make me believe that the loose talk of Bentham, reported by him, would excite general attention, or pass for more than it is worth.”14 Mill was complaining about the use made of Bowring’s account of the relations between his father and Bentham.
What, for his part, did James Mill think that he was doing, with his familial educational experiment? He considered himself something of a philosopher of education, writing two influential pieces on the subject, his essay “Schools for All,” first published in the Philanthropist in 1812, and his article on “Education,” which he wrote in 1815 for the Encyclopedia Britannica. The first was very much in line with Bentham’s attack on the Church of England’s appropriation of the Bell and Lancaster methods for purposes of a national society of schools using the Catechism—yes, the poor needed to be educated, but not by the Church of England. And it is clear from both pieces that Mill agreed with the monitorial system that figured so prominently in the systems of Bell, in Madras, and in Lancaster, closer to home. It was this system that held out the potential of a real extension of educational opportunities to the poor.
And both essays reveal a fairly determined utilitarianism, but especially the second, which begins, “The end of Education is to render the individual, as much as possible, an instrument of happiness, first to himself, and next to other beings.” Happiness depends partly on the condition of the body, partly on the condition of the mind, and it is the latter that, for Mill, is the distinctive concern of the educator, rather than of the physician. Ironically, when it comes to mind, he holds that “there are several things which we should include under the term our experience of mind, to which we should not extend the term I think. But there is nothing included under it to which we should not extend the term I feel. This is truly, therefore, the generic term.”15
In practice, Mill’s approach was, as previously observed, not quite what one would suppose, given these endorsements of individual happiness and feeling. He would advise Francis Place (who did much to advise and support him) that, in educating his daughter, he must “[a]bove all think of her happiness solely, without one jot of passion being allowed to step into the scale,” a remark suggestive of the severe subordination of the ordinary feelings to the prudent long-term pursuit of happiness. Again, as his son noted, “Temperance” was one of the ancient Greek virtues that his father endorsed in the Platonic extreme. For all practical purposes, achieving maximal pleasure for either the individual or humanity demanded something akin to a Platonic ordering of the soul:
The steady conception of the End must guide us to the Means. Happiness is the end; and we have circumscribed the inquiry, by naming Intelligence, Temperance, and Benevolence, of which the last two parts are Generosity and Justice, as the grand qualities of mind, through which this end is to be attained. The question, then, is how can those early sequences be made to take the place on which the habits, conducive to intelligence, temperance, and benevolence, are founded; and how can those sequences, on which are founded the vices opposite to those virtues, be prevented?16
The “sequences” in question are “those sequences among our sensations which have been so frequently experienced as to create a habit of passing from the idea of the one to that of the other”—that is, the sequences of mental associations that Mill took to be the building blocks of the mind. The associationist view, which he absorbed through such figures as Locke, Hume, and Hartley, would be spelled out at great length in his Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, but in its more practical applications, it meant an emphasis on nurture over nature to such a degree that the father was always drumming it into his eldest son that there was absolutely nothing special about him, and that any child could rival his accomplishments if only he had received the right education, in the widest sense, including political socialization.
There are of course a great many questions about the consistency of the senior Mill’s views, not the least of which is why he did not extend such egalitarian thinking to the case of women. It is not easy, to say the least, to marry a mechanistic account of the formation of associations and habits with a purposive or teleological account of action aimed at pleasure. As Burston has observed, “Pleasure is an end or goal, and an explanation of behaviour governed by pursuit of pleasure is in these terms. It is an explanation in which the ‘cause’ of human behaviour lies in an intention or motive, which people are free to have and to pursue as they like. It is sharply different from scientific or mechanistic explanation, for instance in not looking at preceding factors but rather at results or consequences as the explanation of actions.”17 Setting aside the many complexities of the reasons v. causes literature, it can at least be said that there is some difference between what is in effect a simple mental conditioning model and a purposive or rational actor model, and that Mill did not get very far in setting out how the two models could be reconciled, something that his son would come to realize in an all too painful way, as he worked toward a better reconciliation of freedom and necessity, a task that was arguably the greatest challenge to his system.18
But it would seem that, as with Bentham, although the generic emphasis on nurture was very important, most of the heavy theoretical lifting was in fact done by a heavily qualified psychological egoism that allowed that people certainly could sometimes act, on principle, for the sake of the general happiness at some cost to their own, but that this would be a shaky basis for designing social and political institutions. But more to the point, it is plain that for James Mill, as for Bentham, people did need to be taught how best to pursue both their own happiness and the general happiness. This was not something that could simply be left to chance socialization, which could be every bit as evil as Bentham claimed.
Sadly, this turned out to be the one big thing that James Mill’s home schooling failed to do—teach his son how to effectively pursue his own happiness, much less that of others. To be sure, Mill junior valued, and bent over backwards to make it clear that he valued, many of the educational gifts that his father had bestowed upon him. And his finishing in France, which in part took place while staying with Samuel Bentham, did help round him out, giving him among other things his enduring love of mountains, rural or natural scenery, and France, as well as the model of a strong, independently-minded woman in Lady Bentham. He became, after his reading of Bentham, the great utilitarian hope, something his education had always been designed to achieve, and through his discussion and debating societies and such friends and allies as Charles and John Austin, George Grote, John Roebuck, and George ‘John’ Graham (the latter two not quite to his father’s liking), he took to championing the cause. Despite his distaste for Bowring, he contributed to the Westminster Review and other publications, and defended utilitarianism—a term he mistakenly believed had originated in Galt’s “Annals of the Parish”—against a wide array of opponents, from Tories and Whigs to Owenites and anyone who dared to criticize Ricardo’s economics or its Malthusian premises. Thus, as Richard Reeves has put it, by “his late teens … Mill had a creed, comrades and a career.”19
Le Crise Nécessaire
But they did not sustain him for long. In 1826, when he was twenty, it all came crashing down. At least on the inside:
It was in the autumn of 1826. I was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasing at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent; the state, I should think, in which converts to Methodism usually are, when smitten by their first ‘conviction of sin.’ In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself, ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, ‘No!’ At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.20
The “cloud of dejection” did not pass over—“A night’s sleep, the sovereign remedy for the smaller vexations of life, had no effect on it.” He awoke to “a renewed consciousness of the woeful fact” and indeed for “some months the cloud seemed to grown thicker and thicker,” evoking to him Coleridge’s lines from “Dejection”: “A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear, / A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief, / Which finds no natural outlet or relief / In word, or sigh, or tear.” Nothing helped, not even his favorite books, and he became convinced that his “love of mankind, and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself out.”
But he kept all this to himself. Like so many of that age, his troubles struck him as uniquely his own and incapable of eliciting any understanding or sympathy from others, his father least of all. “My education, which was wholly his work, had been conducted without any regard to the possibility of its ending in this result; and I saw no use in giving him the pain of thinking that his plans had failed, when the failure was probably irremediable, and at all events, beyond the power of his remedies.” After all, his father’s associationist psychology was the culprit:
I had always heard it maintained by my father, and was myself convinced, that the object of education should be to form the strongest possible associations of the salutary class: associations of pleasure with all things beneficial to the great whole, and of pain with all things hurtful to it. This doctrine appeared inexpugnable; but it now seemed to me on retrospect, that my teachers had occupied themselves but superficially with the means of forming and keeping up these salutary associations. They seemed to have trusted altogether to the old familiar instruments, praise and blame, reward and punishment. Now I did not doubt that by these means, begun early and applied unremittingly, intense associations of pain and pleasure, especially of pain, might be created, and might produce desires and aversions capable of lasting undiminished to the end of life. But there must always be something artificial and casual in associations thus produced. The pains and pleasures thus forcibly associated with things, are not connected with them by any natural ties; and it is therefore, I thought, essential to the durability of these associations, that they should have become so intense and inveterate as to be practically indissoluble, before the habitual exercise of the power of analysis had commenced. For I now saw, or thought I saw, what I had always before received with incredulity—that the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings: as indeed it has when no other mental habit is cultivated, and the analyzing spirit remains without its natural complements and correctives. The very excellence of analysis (I argued) is that it tends to weaken and undermine whatever is the result of prejudice; that it enables us mentally to separate ideas which have only casually clung together: and no associations whatever could ultimately resist this dissolving force, were it not that we owed to analysis our clearest knowledge of the permanent sequences in nature; the real connexions between Things . …21
Mill was doubtless right in concluding that teaching the Socratic elenchus or the greatest happiness principle was a task that called for a more sophisticated approach than the methods used to condition a rat to run a maze. Coming to understand the arbitrariness of one’s social conditioning, when it is not backed up by insight into intrinsic rewards and punishments, can indeed be very disheartening, especially when it concerns views that one is championing as the salvation of humanity. For that matter, such debunking can be carried even further, as in evolutionary arguments exposing various moral beliefs as explainable in terms of their survival value rather than their truth.22 Perhaps the larger point here is that the force of the utilitarian principle, as lending meaning to one’s life, requires making it one’s own in reasoned terms, rather than regarding it as an arbitrary piece of one’s psychology, the result of so many mechanical processes of socialization and evolution. To recognize this was to recognize the value of autonomy, of uncoerced, reasoned self-direction.
For Mill’s part, he carried on through “the melancholy winter of 1826–7” in his usual ways, but mechanically, from “mere force of habit.” He frequently asked himself if he “was bound to go on living when life must be passed in this manner,” something he could not envision doing for more than a year. But, as fortune would have it, the darkness broke:
When, however, not more than half that duration of time had elapsed, a small ray of light broke in upon my gloom. I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel’s Memoirs, and came to the passage which relates his father’s death, the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be everything to them—would supply the place of all that they had lost. A vivid conception of the scene and its feelings came over me, and I was moved to tears. From this moment my burthen grew lighter. The oppression of the thought that all feeling was dead within me, was gone. I was no longer hopeless: I was not a stock or a stone. I had still, it seemed, some of the material out of which all worth of character, and all capacity for happiness, are made. Relieved from my ever present sense of irremediable wretchedness, I gradually found that the ordinary incidents of life could again give me some pleasure; that I could again find enjoyment, not intense, but sufficient for cheerfulness, in sunshine and sky, in books, in conversation, in public affairs; and that there was, once more, excitement, though of a moderate kind, in exerting myself for my opinions, and for the public good.23
Worth underscoring is that Mill’s crisis was precipitated by the question he put to himself of whether the realization of the ends of the Philosophical Radicals would “be a great joy and happiness” to himself, not whether it would be a great happiness and joy in general. The crisis was framed in terms of the first aim of his father’s philosophy of education, achieving one’s own happiness, which of course leaves open the possibility that the two goals are simply incompatible, mirroring the incompatibility of rational egoism and utilitarianism. Or better, that the latter cannot really be rendered effective without the former, without the individual being able to taste the very happiness that he or she is dedicated to promoting on behalf of all sentient creatures. Just as one must be able to form loving attachments in order to fully appreciate the value of love, so too one must have some experience of happiness, some glimpse of the promised land, in order to see the point of promoting it generally. It is not enough merely to have an abstract grasp of the idea.
Paradoxically enough, there was something of a concession to Benthamism in Mill’s articulation of his mental crisis—utilitarian self-sacrifice is hard, and the utilitarian result is better guaranteed by an approach that speaks to the individual’s happiness. James Mill’s “Temperance,” when applied to his son’s education, was suitable to a Platonic guardian, but not to an ordinary child. A truly utilitarian education, it would seem, needs to carry the student along with the hope that some appropriate share of the general happiness will be his or hers. And what credibility can the utilitarian educator possess whose personality offers no evidence of the very thing that forms the end of the educational enterprise? Bentham himself might, at least in later life, provide a passable example of the happiness sought, but not James Mill, despite his son’s best efforts to soften his profile.
Mill himself saw his crisis as a case of the microcosm within the macrocosm: “Though my dejection, honestly looked at, could not be called other than egotistical, produced by the ruin, as I thought, of my fabric of happiness, yet the destiny of mankind in general was ever in my thoughts, and could not be separated from my own. I felt that the flaw in my life, must be a flaw in life itself; that the question was, whether, if the reformers of society and government could succeed in their objects, and every person in the community were free and in a state of physical comfort, the pleasures of life, being no longer kept up by struggle and privation, would cease to be pleasures.” That is, if he could see some “better hope than this for human happiness in general” then he might be able to “look on the world with pleasure; content as far as I was myself concerned, with any fair share of the general lot.”24 This intimate entangling of egoism and utilitarianism, such that the former takes on the aspect of one’s “fair share” of the general happiness, and the views converge in subtle ways, is in truth one of the leading themes of classical utilitarianism, and one that, as the following chapter will show, would undergo significant further development in the life and work of Henry Sidgwick, Mill’s greatest successor.25 In practice, and possibly in principle, purity promised the convergence of personal and general happiness.
Given the texture of Mill’s crisis, it is not all that surprising that so much of the cure came in the form of Romanticism, of Wordsworth and the cultivation of the self, the feeling self. Mill senior’s taste in poetry extended only so far as Milton, whose cottage Bentham had generously placed at his disposal. Mill junior, whose remarkable education had always been at some remove from modern developments, took to the new poetry of his era with all the alacrity that he had brought to the Philosophical Radicals. He defended Wordsworth against all comers, even such old friends as Roebuck, who began to despair of him. He later developed, thanks to Harriet Taylor, a deep passion for Shelley, and even helped establish Tennyson’s early reputation, with his remarkable 1835 essay “Tennyson’s Poems.” If Bentham had been Mill’s spirit of the age, now Bentham was set alongside Coleridge, as the essential complement providing the depth of self-cultivation that the age so needed. By his own report he “now began to find meaning in the things which I had read or heard about the importance of poetry and art as instruments of human culture,” though this turn took some time to mature, since as with Bentham, the “only one of the imaginative arts in which I had from childhood taken great pleasure, was music.”26
Music meant a lot. Its “best effect,” surpassing “perhaps every other art,” “consists in exciting enthusiasm; in winding up to a high pitch those feelings of an elevated kind which are already in the character, but to which this excitement gives a glow and a fervor, which though transitory at its utmost height, is precious for sustaining them at other times.” But in his dull state he was “tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of musical combinations,” and he needed a new tonic. He tried Byron, to no effect (Byron was too like him in having “worn out all pleasures,”27), but when in autumn of 1828 he picked up Wordsworth’s miscellaneous poems, they “proved to be the precise thing for my mental wants at that particular juncture.”
What, exactly, did Wordsworth do for him, at this “particular juncture”?
What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connexion with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence. There have certainly been, even in our own age, greater poets than Wordsworth; but poetry of deeper and loftier feeling could not have done for me at that time what his did. I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in, the common feelings and common destiny of human beings. And the delight which these poems gave me, proved that with culture of this sort, there was nothing to dread from the most confirmed habit of analysis.28
In fact, the coming out of the new Mill took the form of a debate in the Society over the merits of Wordsworth versus Byron, a debate with none other than Roebuck, who dismissed the former as all “flowers and butterflies.” It marked the opening of a schism that would grow steadily with the years. And as Mill grew more distanced from his early Philosophical Radical friends, he “fell more and more into friendly intercourse with our Coleridgeian adversaries in the Society, Frederick Maurice and John Sterling, both subsequently so well known, the former by his writings, the latter through the biographies by Hare and Carlyle.” Maurice, Mill observed, “was the thinker, Sterling the orator,” and it was the passionate Sterling who was destined to become Mill’s closest friend, next to Harriet Taylor.29
The effect of these shifting allegiances was profound, insuring that Mill would become something of an honorary “Cambridge Apostle.” The Apostles discussion group, or, more formally, the Cambridge Conversazione Society, was founded in 1820 by a number of St. John’s undergraduates, including George Tomlinson (later bishop of Gibraltar), and it quickly evolved into a secret, select discussion group for Cambridge’s best and brightest, drawn primarily from Trinity and King’s. It would, in its first one hundred years, include such notable and influential members as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Arthur Hallam, Erasmus Darwin, James Fitzjames Stephen, Henry Sumner Maine, Henry Sidgwick, John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, and G. E. Moore, but two singularly influential early members were Maurice and Sterling. They were the ones who gave the Apostles the animating spirit of the pursuit of truth that was so vividly described in later years by Sidgwick: “[T]he spirit, I think, remained the same, and gradually this spirit … absorbed and dominated me. I can only describe it as the spirit of the pursuit of truth with absolute devotion and unreserve by a group of intimate friends who were perfectly frank with each other, and indulged in any amount of humorous sarcasm and playful banter, and yet each respects the other, and when he discourses tries to learn from him and see what he sees. Absolute candour was the only duty that the tradition of the society enforced. No consistency was demanded with opinions previously held—truth as we saw it then and there was what we had to embrace and maintain, and there were no propositions so well established that an Apostle had not the right to deny or question, if he did so sincerely and not from mere love of paradox.”30
John Frederick Denison Maurice, Apostle number thirty, was recruited in 1823, but as Arthur Hallam would write to Gladstone, the effect that Maurice “has produced on the minds of many at Cambridge by the single creation of that society, the Apostles, (for the spirit though not the form was created by him) is far greater than I can dare to calculate, and will be felt both directly and indirectly in the age that is before us.”31 It was Maurice who was primarily responsible for the “spirit” of which Sidgwick wrote, the spirit of absolute candor and sincerity in the pursuit of truth and willingness to learn from others. As Mill himself appreciated, this was the very Coleridgean spirit that provided an effective counter to Benthamism, as he understood it. Indeed, Maurice was superior to Coleridge himself, since the latter mostly just plagiarized various works of German philosophy. Much of the Romanticism that led Mill to qualify and humanize Benthamism came to him via Maurice, and it was just such an outlook that made Maurice chief of the “Mystics”—the Romantic opponents of the Philosophical Radicals, Whigs, and Tories—who dominated the Saturday evening discussions of the Apostles. The Mystics adored soul-searching dialogue, and they appropriated Coleridge’s notion of a “clerisy,” an elite set of opinion leaders who could substitute for the traditional clergy and lead the work of spiritual regeneration that society needed. This regeneration was to occur through modern literature, the works of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, rather than via mere political reform. Wordsworth could “make men look within for those things in which they agree, instead of looking without for those in which they differ.” As Maurice put it: “Truth, I hold, not to be that which every man troweth, but to be that which lies at the bottom of all men’s trowings, that in which these trowings have their only meeting point.”32
Maurice would hold a series of ecclesiastical and academic positions over the course of his life, returning to Cambridge again, in 1866, as the Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy, when as a very senior Apostle and member of the Grote Club33 he would have a direct influence on such younger figures as Sidgwick. But his influence was much broader than that of an academic—he became one of the most influential Broad Church theologians of his day and a founding father of Christian Socialism, one who also championed, like Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick, higher education for women. His attempt to move Anglicanism forward via a very progressive theology that had no place for hell or damnation led Mill to complain that “there was more intellectual power wasted in Maurice than in any other of my contemporaries. … Great powers of generalization, rare ingenuity and subtlety, and a wide perception of important and unobvious truths, served him not for putting something better into the place of the worthless heap of received opinions on the great subjects of thought, but for proving to his own mind that the Church of England had known everything from the first.”34
Still, when it came to what Mill deemed the lasting effects of his crisis, the impact of Maurice, the thinker and channel for the mystic, Coleridgean alternative, is plain:
The other important change which my opinions at this time underwent, was that I, for the first time, gave its proper place, among the prime necessities of human well-being, to the internal culture of the individual. I ceased to attach almost exclusive importance to the ordering of outward circumstances, and the training of the human being for speculation and for action. I had now learnt by experience that the passive susceptibilities needed to be cultivated as well as the active capacities, and required to be nourished and enriched as well as guided. I did not, for an instant, lose sight of, or undervalue, that part of the truth which I had seen before; I never turned recreant to intellectual culture, or ceased to consider the power and practice of analysis as an essential condition both of individual and of social improvement. But I thought that it had consequences which required to be corrected, by joining other kinds of cultivation with it. The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties, now seemed to me of primary importance. The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed. And my thoughts and inclinations turned in an increasing degree towards whatever seemed capable of being instrumental to that object.35
The impact was evident, too, in Mill’s new recognition that, although “happiness is the test of all rules of conduct, and the end of life,” it was an end that “was only to be attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some objects other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.” One must, as Carlyle (another friend, and a huge direct influence on Mill) urged, “[l]et your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation, exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal questioning. This theory now became the basis of my philosophy of life.”36
In this connection, it should also be noted that the role of poetry in Mill’s life and work is illustrative of the inseparability of his life and his work. In a brilliant essay, “Morality, Virtue, and Aesthetics in Mill’s Art of Life,” Wendy Donner shows how Mill’s turbulent poetic therapy had him in short order shifting his allegiances from Wordsworth to Shelley to some middle ground, in an effort to determine the right balance between reason and spontaneous feeling and imagination. There was, of course, no reliance on Wordsworth’s nature mysticism or transcendentalism in Mill: “Mill’s fluctuating evaluations of the relative merits of Wordsworth versus Shelley move upward and downward in accordance with his corresponding estimations of the contributions of the natural faculties of emotion and reason to the creation of poetry.” But the enduring effect of this period, evident even in Mill’s late writings, was to highlight the importance of virtue and “aesthetic education,” which was what would, Mill hoped, carry humanity forward and improve the content of, help reform, common morality, which was the sphere of rules enforceable by blame and/or punishment. “The capacities to be cultivated are emotional sensibility, sympathetic imagination, empathy, selflessness, and compassion. These capacities are components of moral agency. They are essential for moral conduct as well as the practice of virtues and nobility: ‘It brings home to us all those aspects of life which take hold of our nature on its unselfish side, and lead us to identify our joy and grief with the good or ill of the system of which we form part’ (CW I: 254).” Thus, for Mill, “the unifying theme of the entire period is that in the realm of aesthetic education and experience, the philosopher-poet is the prime model and exemplar, the source of the uplifting and ennobling experiences and inspiration.”37 The aesthetic was the driving force in Mill’s Art of Life. It was what made the utilitarian clerisy a clerisy. Such supererogation, such moral heroism, was above and beyond the call of moral duty as it stood, but was nonetheless vital to the progress of civilization.
Now, this perspective was, for Mill, still consistent with hedonism—happiness was a complex, with parts, analogous to health, as Aristotle had famously held. And one desired the parts for their own sake, just as one valued friends for their own sake. But what made them desirable was, ultimately, the pleasure afforded by them. To subtract that would be to subtract such goodness as they have, as parts of happiness or means to it.38 As he so memorably put it in Utilitarianism, “the ultimate end, with reference to and for the sake of which all other things are desirable (whether we are considering our own good or that of other people), is an existence exempt as far as possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments, both in point of quantity and quality. … This, being … the end of human action, is necessarily also the standard of morality; which may accordingly be defined as the rules and precepts for human conduct, by the observance of which an existence such as has been described might be, to the greatest extent possible, secured to all mankind; and not to them only, but, so far as the nature of things admits, to the whole sentient creation.”39 True, in advancing happiness, the philosopher-poet has reasons running rather ahead of concern about what calls for moral censure; but then, there is more to the Art of Life than moral censure.
Thus, the lessons Mill learned from his crisis, with the help of his new friends, were somewhat paradoxical, demanding the cultivation of one’s feeling self while at the same time freeing that self from a morbid self-consciousness, with analysis trained on the other “ideal ends,” and happiness for both self and others coming as a by-product of the pursuit of those ends. Perhaps this was taking utilitarian indirect strategies to a new level, inverting at the psychological level Benthamite reliance on invisible or visible hands at the level of social institutions. It was not the self-conscious and intelligent pursuit of one’s own interests that would, under the right conditions, yield the optimal utilitarian social result. One’s happiness would come from an intelligent appreciation that one’s own interests called for some larger ideal or ideals than one’s own small self, and that the general happiness would be best served by cultivating individuals with just such larger concerns, which was the work of the clerisy.40
As various discerning commentators have suggested, Mill’s construction of the causes and cures of his breakdown reflects, is in fact embedded in, his construction of the views of Bentham and his father. His various direct assessments of Bentham, from his obituary of him in 1832, to his “Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy” in 1833, to his somewhat more moderated “Bentham” of 1838, amount to so many embroiderings on what went wrong with his education and life, and what was needed to repair the damage. Bentham is made out as the villain, and his father is to an astonishing degree exonerated, credited with having given him that interest in learning from others and seeing all sides of a question that, on his reckoning, were conspicuously absent in Bentham. Bentham was “one-eyed,” could not learn from others, was cold and mechanical, failed to appreciate the significance of poetry and discussions of taste, had no sense of history or cultural particularity, no appreciation of human honor or dignity, no serious appreciation of how the principle of utility should be understood, no recognition of the importance of “national character” in explaining human action, and so on and on. That his own perspective on Bentham and the “business side” of life might have been limited or skewed seems never to have occurred to Mill. But as the evidence of the previous chapter indicates, Mill may well have missed much.
And he may have hidden or suppressed much. Janice Carlisle has argued forcefully that Mill’s Autobiography was something of a grief lesson, composed during periods when Mill was worried about his and Harriet’s health or grieving her loss, and that in it he actually masked a deeper crisis, which occurred following the death of his father in 1836, a bleak, anxious, sickly period of exhaustion that Mill’s friends definitely noticed and that left him with a permanent facial tic, a more or less constant twitching of his left eye. Unable to come to terms with the many parts of his life that derived directly from his father—not least the “principling” or genial nepotistic corruption that led to his position at India House—the Autobiography was, as Mill seemed to admit, an attempt to resuscitate his father’s reputation when it was in decline, yet another go at giving him proper credit, especially for his work on associationist psychology.41
At any rate, through it all, Mill insisted that he was advancing the truer and deeper form of utilitarianism, freeing it from the limitations and aberrations of the Philosophical Radicals, who, as noted, charged him with going over to the side of German Mysticism. No doubt his corrective enthusiasms were a shock to such figures as Place, and no doubt he at moments went somewhat overboard in celebrating even such anti-utilitarian notions as “intuition” (the dogmatic pillar of all the anti-utilitarian forces in both morality and science) in ways that were bound to provoke. But he recovered his balance—or rather, found it for the first time—soon enough, and it is perhaps not so surprising that with the discovery of his feelings came the discovery of love, not simply for humanity at large, but for one representative of it in particular—Harriet Taylor. For Mill, she was the higher pleasures personified. But a full appreciation of her would come only after a good deal of political economy and logic.
The Love of Logic
Although Mill never devoted an essay or a treatise solely to the study of character, it constituted the principal subject of his long career as a writer. Whether he was writing on economics or education, politics or philosophy, whether he was reviewing a work of fiction or formulating a system of logic, his inquiries almost invariably declared their psychological and social orientation and his preoccupation with character, not as a literary concept or phenomenon, but as the central fact of human experience. According to Mill, diverse disciplines join in a common pursuit of this subject. The philosopher, more a psychologist than a theorist of abstract principles, attempts to understand the complexity of human behavior and establish those laws of character that might lead to its reformation.
—JANICE CARLISLE, JOHN STUART MILL
AND THE WRITING OF CHARACTER
Mill would claim in his Autobiography that his crisis was the only really big turning point in his mental life, the only serious turning of his worldview. And it is true that the ripples spreading out from his conversion to Romantic self-cultivation affected his thoughts in endless ways. Rejecting what he saw as the deductive or a priori rational actor approach of his father, so clearly on display in the latter’s “Essay on Government,”42 he now fell in with the Saint-Simonians and Comte, with their views of different phases of historical progress, from organic periods to transitional or critical ones, from theology to metaphysics to positive knowledge, and so on. Historical and cultural sensitivity and particularity were heralded everywhere, in Carlyle’s work on the French Revolution and heroes, in the work of his father’s great antagonist Macaulay, and, above all, in Tocqueville’s brilliant Democracy in America, a work that profoundly affected Mill, despite his resistance to Tocquevillian concerns about the dangers of government “centralization.”43 He was now less the reflexive democrat in the mode of his father, more the ethical socialist who worried about democracy moving too fast in advance of cultural development and civilized education. The tyranny of the majority, so worrisome to Tocqueville, was a very real concern for Mill as well, and the tyranny of a possible ruling elite of Comtean scientist philosophers was not a cure that he found attractive. The progress of civilization was the progress of that general self-cultivation, in freedom, of character that was mirrored in his crisis. It was the advance of a comprehensive liberal individualism, one that would afford the individuals involved the many-sidedness and higher pleasures that Mill celebrated, and as such, it was, to his mind, a refounding of utilitarianism rather than a rejection of it. The “Germano-Coleridge” view had given him, in Skorupski’s formulation, the method of “thinking from within”:
Thinking from within requires imaginative understanding of other people and other times, a lesson Mill drew from Coleridge. About other people’s ideas, Mill says, Bentham’s only question was, were they true? Coleridge, in contrast, patiently asked after their meaning. To pin down the fundamental norms of our thinking calls for careful psychological and historical inquiry into how people think, and also into how they think they should think—what kind of normative attitudes they display in their actions and their reflection. These must be engaged with to be understood. So thinking from within is inherently dialogical. And it always remains corrigible. Both points are significant in Mill’s argument for liberty of thought and discussion.44
Indeed, for Mill, “character” was simply a matter of making one’s life one’s own—it was the achievement of an active, self-directed life, largely through dialogue. There was an undeniable element of liberal bootstrapping involved in this notion. As Carlisle put it:
Ultimately, Mill’s associationism was more important as the source of foregone conclusions than as a repository of methods suited to the study of character … because Mill could not accept the conclusion inherent in such associationist principles, he tried to use ethology as a way to grant to the individual the opportunity for choice and the power of will that associationism denies. The Irish do not have to remain the lazy, improvident, ill-educated savages that their conditions have made them. The laboring classes can rise above their appetites and choose a life of self-restraint and self-improvement. Women do not always have to remain merely weak, sycophantic witnesses to male power. If nothing else, Mill’s unwritten ethology allowed him to recognize and perhaps encouraged his contemporaries to see with him that none of the characteristics customarily accepted by society as the inalterable nature of a group was immune to change.45
However unselfconscious Mill may have been about the personal pursuit of happiness, he was quite self-conscious about his role in refounding utilitarianism, though prior to his father’s death in 1836, he often had to be rather subtle about just what he was up to. Still, from 1834 until about 1840, Mill worked to insinuate new ideas into the Westminster Review and took a leading role in the early development of the London Review, which soon swallowed up the former to become the London and Westminster Review. In 1837 the journal was taken over by Mill himself (at a loss), when the original owner, Molesworth, tired of the enterprise. Mill had already resolved to “give full scope to my own opinions and modes of thought, and to open the Review widely to all writers who were in sympathy with Progress as I understood it.”46 It was in this context that so much of the work that would shape the future reception of Benthamism was produced, including not only Mill’s pieces on Bentham, but his piece on Coleridge and the very telling essay on “Civilization,” “into which I threw many of my new opinions, and criticized rather emphatically the mental and moral tendencies of the time, on grounds and in a manner which I certainly had not learnt from him [his father].” 47
The essay on “Civilization” is indeed illuminating, highlighting in short compass so many of the distinctively Millian themes of his later and better-known works. Addressing chiefly a narrower notion of “civilization” as opposed to barbarism, Mill observes that “by the natural growth of civilization, power passes from individuals to masses, and the weight and importance of an individual, as compared with the mass, sink into greater and greater insignificance.”48 The cost that this exacts on character, on such individual qualities as heroism and spirit (and ability to tolerate pain) is described in terms evoking Carlyle, and the English upper classes, in particular, are treated with some scorn for their want of energy and spirit, not to mention their “effeminacy.” The growing insignificance of the individual is, however, yet more corrupting, contributing to “the growth, both in the world of trade and in that of intellect, of quackery, and especially of puffing,” though “nobody seems to have remarked, that these are the inevitable fruits of immense competition; of a state of society where any voice, not pitched in an exaggerated key, is lost in the hubbub.”49 In an age of reading, people, Mill charges, now read too quickly and shallowly, with few good indicators of quality. Overall, the age is witnessing “the decay of individual energy, the weakening of the influence of superior minds over the multitude, the growth of charlatanerie, and the diminished efficacy of public opinion as a restraining power.”50 That is, the “evils are, that the individual is lost and becomes impotent in the crowd, and that individual character itself becomes relaxed and enervated.”
Still, there are remedies consistent with the direction of civilization: “For the first evil, the remedy is, greater and more perfect combination among individuals; for the second, national institutions of education, and forms of polity, calculated to invigorate the individual character.”51
Better combination, for example in professional guilds or associations, could help counter the destructive impact of competition on such professions as medicine, and such organizations as the “Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge” might serve as a crude model for a collective guild of authors. But Mill is mostly concerned with “the regeneration of individual character among our lettered and opulent classes, by the adaptation to that purpose of our institutions, and, above all, of our educational institutions,” which “is an object of more urgency, and for which more might be immediately accomplished, if the will and the understanding were not alike wanting.”52 To be sure, Mill stresses that he is “at issue equally with the admirers of Oxford and Cambridge, Eton and Westminster, and with the generality of their professed reformers. We regard the system of those institutions, as administered for two centuries past, with sentiments little short of utter abhorrence. But we do not conceive that their vices would be cured by bringing their studies into a closer connexion with what it is the fashion to term ‘the business of the world;’ by dismissing the logic and classics which are still professedly taught, to substitute modern languages and experimental physics. We would have classics and logic taught far more really and deeply than at present, and we would add to them other studies more alien than any which yet exist to the ‘business of the world,’ but more germane to the great business of every rational being—the strengthening and enlarging of his own intellect and character.”53
Here is the theme that Mill would warm to for the rest of his life—better education producing better, more independent thinking, the key component of character. To illustrate the point, he cites in corroboration a passage from the novel Eustace Conway: “‘You believe’ (a clergyman loquitur) ‘that the University is to prepare youths for a successful career in society: I believe the sole object is to give them that manly character which will enable them to resist the influences of society …; is it wonderful that a puny beggarly feeling should pervade the mass of our young men? That they should scorn all noble achievements, should have no higher standard of action than the world’s opinion, and should conceive of no higher reward than to sit down amidst loud cheering, which continues for several moments?”54
The author of these lines was none other than that founding spirit of the Apostles, F. D. Maurice, and the remainder of Mill’s essay is in fact something of mission statement for the Apostles:
Nothing can be more just or more forcible than the description here given of the objects which University education should aim at: we are at issue with the writer, only on the proposition that these objects ever were attained, or ever could be so, consistently with the principle which has always been the foundation of the English Universities; a principle, unfortunately, by no means confined to them. The difficulty which continues to oppose either such reform of our old academical institutions, or the establishment of such new ones, as shall give us an education capable of forming great minds, is, that in order to do so it is necessary to begin by eradicating the idea which nearly all the upholders and nearly all the impugners of the Universities rootedly entertain, as to the objects not merely of academical education, but of education itself. What is this idea? That the object of education is, not to qualify the pupil for judging what is true or what is right, but to provide that he shall think true what we think true, and right what we think right—that to teach, means to inculcate our own opinions, and that our business is not to make thinkers or inquirers, but disciples. This is the deep-seated error, the inveterate prejudice, which the real reformer of English education has to struggle against. Is it astonishing that great minds are not produced, in a country where the test of a great mind is, agreeing in the opinions of the small minds? . … That provided he adhere to these opinions, it matters little whether he receive them from authority or from examination; and worse, that it matters little by what temptations of interest or vanity, by what voluntary or involuntary sophistication with his intellect, and deadening of his noblest feelings, that result is arrived at; that it even matters comparatively little whether to his mind the words are mere words, or the representatives of realities—in which sense he receives the favoured set of propositions, or whether he attaches to them any sense at all. Were ever great minds thus formed? Never.55
Mill in this passage is of course working his way to an attack on the requirement of subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, but his point is more general. True, a first step in reform must be to “unsectarianize” the universities. But more positively, the “very corner-stone of an education intended to form great minds, must be the recognition of the principle, that the object is to call forth the greatest possible quantity of intellectual power, and to inspire the intensest love of truth: and this without a particle of regard to the results to which the exercise of that power may lead, even though it should conduct the pupil to opinions diametrically opposite to those of his teachers.” The most distinguished minds should be recruited to teach and given the freedom to do so. The classics and history (including literature) will provide models of greatness and nobility, and reminders of “the infinite varieties of human nature.” But in “the department of pure intellect, the highest place will belong to logic and the philosophy of mind: the one, the instrument for the cultivation of all sciences; the other, the root from which they all grow.” Of course, “the former ought not to be taught as a mere system of technical rules, nor the latter as a set of concatenated abstract propositions. The tendency, so strong everywhere, is strongest of all here, to receive opinions into the mind without any real understanding of them, merely because they seem to follow from certain admitted premises, and to let them lie there as forms of words, lifeless and void of meaning. The pupil must be led to interrogate his own consciousness, to observe and experiment upon himself: of the mind, by any other process, little will he ever know.”56
But all the other sciences have their place in Mill’s encompassing vision, and of course, the “philosophy of morals, of government, of law, of political economy, of poetry and art, should form subjects of systematic instruction, under the most eminent professors who [can] be found; these being chosen, not for the particular doctrines they might happen to profess, but as being those who [are] most likely to send forth pupils qualified in point of disposition and attainments to choose doctrines for themselves.” Even religion might be included, if so taught. And all this is trained on “regenerating the character of the higher classes,” which, it is hoped, the progress of democracy will advance by putting an end to “every kind of unearned distinction.”
The vision is breathtaking, rather elitist, deeply Apostolic, and the set-up for On Liberty, the glimmerings of which are unmistakable. Was it really entirely the new Mill? Was it really entirely Mill? Intriguingly, of his father, Mill would allow that he had “frequently observed that he made large allowance in practice for considerations which seemed to have no place in his theory,” and even admired Tocqueville’s work. His “high appreciation of a book which was at any rate an example of a mode of treating the question of government almost the reverse of his—wholly inductive and analytical, instead of purely ratiocinative—gave me great encouragement,” as did his father’s approval of “Civilization.” It was, after all, an age of transition, and as the next section will demonstrate, Mill was at this time in a very transitional state, bringing Harriet Taylor into his life in the years just before his father’s exit from life.
But Mill certainly felt, too, that he had to keep up the side in supporting the Philosophical Radicals, who now for the first time figured in Parliament. Among them was his old friend Roebuck, who took the opportunity to initiate a Parliamentary movement for National Education, as well as for self-government for the colonies. There was still much to admire and support in the forces of Benthamism, even if the hopes for establishing a Radical party were to be disappointed by the somewhat lackluster performances of Buller, Roebuck, et al. As Donald Winch has explained, the “1830s for Mill were a decade of intense involvement in party politics. Denied more overt forms of participation by his position as a civil servant at East India House, he used his journalistic skills to support reform causes and the activities of the large group of radical MPs elected after passage of the Reform Bill in 1832. This activist phase came to an abrupt end in 1839 with the break-up of the Parliamentary radicals and the shattering of any hope of founding a party that could contest political space with Whigs, Tories, and the new extra-Parliamentary forces in British politics represented by the Chartist movement and Cobden’s Anti-Corn Law League.”57 At the level of practical politics, then, there was also much continuity, and if Mill was by the end of the thirties thinking of himself more as a writer than a politician, that was something of a grudging admission. For him, the Parliamentary platform was, in an age of organization, one of the best means for making one’s voice heard.
Not surprisingly, through it all, Mill was engaged as always with the all important topics of logic (both deductive and inductive) and political economy, returning whenever time allowed to the research that would ultimately yield those great pillars of his reputation, the System of Logic and the Principles of Political Economy. Both works, substantial as they are, were designed—at least according to Mill’s later recollection—to showcase key elements of the new utilitarianism he was championing. And in some cases this meant emphasizing points that were actually more in sync with the old utilitarianism than Mill’s Mystic period seemed to allow, such as a deep aversion to sentimentality in political economy (on which subject the spirit of the age, Coleridge, was dismissed as a “driveller”) and to intuition in logic. He described the point of the Logic in his Autobiography accordingly:
I have never indulged the illusion that the book had made any considerable impression on philosophical opinion. The German, or a priori view of human knowledge, and of the knowing faculties, is likely for some time longer (though it may be hoped in a diminishing degree) to predominate among those who occupy themselves with such enquiries, both here and on the Continent. But the System of Logic supplies what was much wanted, a text-book of the opposite doctrine—that which derives all knowledge from experience, and all moral and intellectual qualities principally from the direction given to the associations. I make as humble an estimate as anybody of what either an analysis of logical processes, or any possible canons of evidence, can do by themselves, towards guiding or rectifying the operations of the understanding. Combined with other requisites, I certainly do think them of great use; but whatever may be the practical value of a true philosophy of these matters, it is hardly possible to exaggerate the mischiefs of a false one. The notion that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions. By the aid of this theory, every inveterate belief and every intense feeling, of which the origin is not remembered, is enabled to dispense with the obligation of justifying itself by reason, and is erected into its own all-sufficient voucher and justification. There never was such an instrument devised for consecrating all deep seated prejudices. 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: and because this had never been effectually done, the intuitive school, even after what my father had written in his Analysis of Mind, had in appearance, and as far as published writings were concerned, on the whole the best of the argument. In attempting to clear up the real nature of the evidence of mathematical and physical truths, the System of Logic met the intuition philosophers on ground on which they had previously been deemed unassailable; and gave its own explanation, from experience and association, of that peculiar character of what are called necessary truths, which is adduced as proof that their evidence must come from a deeper source than experience.58
There are no kind words for intuition in this work, which Mill would always regard as his most serious effort. Beyond, that is, the praise for William Whewell for having provided such perfect targets for his attack with History of the Inductive Sciences and The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, the foils (and sourcebooks) that Mill had desperately needed. Whewell, whose philosophical orientation might seem to put him in the company of Maurice, Julius Hare, and others with an a priori bent, was not one of the Cambridge Apostles. His spirit was too dogmatic, too hostile, and too lacking the Apostolic spirit of being willing to learn from others, from the band of brothers whose principles were appreciated as reflections of their personalities and experiences. Whewell, a working class youth who had advanced in status and now celebrated the system that had allowed him to do so, was in older age no reformer of the educational system, lacking that spirit of personal growth that the Apostles and their friends put at the very heart of true education. He was, therefore, both personally and professionally just the counterpoint that Mill needed on all fronts, from logic to morals. He was not an Apostle, but he was a polymath, furnishing the requisite opposition on even more counts than Mill could count. The famously witty Rev. Sydney Smith quipped of Whewell, “Science is his forte, and omniscience his foible.”59
The battle joined, Mill proved himself to be, as Stefan Collini has observed, “a good hater.”60 More Public Moralist than Public Intellectual, Mill nonetheless pinned the moral reform and advance of civilization on winning the battle against intuitionism, even in its stronghold of mathematics. Yet it must be allowed that the Logic does not itself always read like an all-out assault on the dominant ideology. Mill, especially in the first edition, was at some pains to urge that he was trying to find common ground, the shared truth behind the mystery of how one could get from one set of truths to another. The links between deduction and induction could be tricky. As the Collected Works edition has it:
For Mill there were in logic two sets of rules: the rules of the syllogism for deduction, and the four experimental methods for induction. The former he considered to be available in the ‘common manuals of logic.’ The latter he considered himself to be formulating explicitly for the first time. The question as to how these rules of art can be viewed as grounded in the science of valid thinking must be brought under the larger question as to how rules of art in general are grounded in science. For Mill, the way in which they are grounded is universally the same for all arts in which there are rules. He distinguishes two kinds of practical reasoning. One is typified in the reasoning of a judge, the other in that of a legislator. The judge’s problem is to interpret the law, or to determine whether the particular case before him comes under the intention of the legislator who made the law. Thus the reasoning of the judge is syllogistic, for syllogism or deduction consists in the interpretation of a formula. The legislator’s problem, on the other hand, is to find rules. This depends on determining the best means of achieving certain desired ends. It is science alone which can determine these means, for the relation between means and ends is the relation between causes and effects. In this second kind of practical reasoning, art prescribes the end, science provides the theorem which shows how it is to be brought about, and art then converts the theorem into a rule. In this way propositions which assert only what ought to be, or should be done, are grounded on propositions which assert only matters of fact.
The task of finding the rules of logic, whether of deduction or of induction, is of the same type as the legislator’s. Knowledge of what ought to be done, as expressed in the rules of art, must be grounded on knowledge of what is the case, as expressed in the theorems of science.61
Thus, for Mill, “must” implies “ought,” a point that will be important when considering his so-called proof of the principle of utility. People must make inferences, and therefore they ought to do so. Indeed, if there is a fundamental normative principle in Mill rivaling the principle of utility, it is that of generalizing from the particulars of experience.
The famous four methods can be briefly summarized. For Mill, and in his words as he formulates the five “Canons,” these methods yield: 1. “If two or more instances of the phenomenon under investigation have only one circumstance in common, the circumstance in which alone all the instances agree, is the cause (or effect) of the given phenomenon.” 2. “If an instance in which the phenomenon under investigation occurs, and an instance in which it does not occur, have every circumstance save one in common, that one occurring only in the former; the circumstance in which alone the two instances differ, is the effect, or cause, or a necessary part of the cause, of the phenomenon.” 3. “If two or more instances in which the phenomenon occurs have only one circumstance in common, while two or more instances in which it does not occur have nothing in common save the absence of that circumstance; the circumstance in which alone the two sets of instances differ, is the effect, or cause, or a necessary part of the cause, of the phenomenon.” 4. (which is not truly an independent method) “Subduct from any phenomenon such part as is known by previous inductions to be the effect of certain antecedents, and the residue of the phenomenon is the effect of the remaining antecedents.” And 5. “Whatever phenomenon varies in any manner whenever another phenomenon varies in some particular manner, is either a cause or an effect of that phenomenon, or is connected with it through some fact of causation.” As Mill sums it up: “The four methods which it has now been attempted to describe, are the only possible modes of experimental inquiry—of direct induction à posteriori, as distinguished from deduction: at least, I know not, nor am able to imagine, any others. And even of these, the Method of Residues, as we have seen, is not independent of deduction; though, as it also requires specific experience, it may, without impropriety, be included among methods of direct observation and experiment.”62
These may seem straightforward enough, but still, the Logic can be a difficult work to untangle, particularly if one is working with the common notions of contemporary symbolic logic. As various commentators have noted, Mill is more concerned with inference than with formal implication, and though inference is a psychological process, his “psychologism” really amounts only to a kind of naturalism that in many respects he shares with such recent figures as W. V. Quine. Like Quine, Mill holds that all necessity is a matter of language, rather than objective or metaphysical necessity. There is no necessary connection binding subject or substance to property or attribute. The structure of the world is radically contingent. But unlike Quine, Mill tends to think of deductive logic in syllogistic and subject/predicate terms, failing to deal with relations in any satisfactory way. Also, as John Skorupski has observed, there “is no suggestion in Mill that a naturalistic philosophy must eschew intentional states—beliefs, purposes, sentiments, etc. Rather, Mill is a naturalist in the sense that he thinks (i) that beliefs, purposes, sentiments are genuine properties of the human being seen as a natural entity and (ii) that the normative can be grounded in them—nothing beyond them is required.”63
On Mill’s account, the meaning of a proposition is a matter of the denotations and connotations of its terms, but the truth of a proposition is a matter of its denotations rather than its connotations, and all propositions are either true or false, either correctly attributing an attribute to a subject or not (e.g., Socrates is mortal, but not Socrates is a fish). Mill denies that deductive or syllogistic logic is genuinely informative—it deals in verbal rather than real propositions, apparent rather than real inferences. He denies that it affords “ampliative” truths, new truths, since the general premises in syllogistic arguments—e.g., All Men are Mortal—are simply shorthand statements of long conjunctions of particulars—e.g., X is mortal, Y is mortal, Z is mortal, etc. Thus, in the case of All Men are Mortal / Socrates is a Man / Therefore Socrates is Mortal, the conclusion really is just a repetition of one bit of the first premise, a move from particular to particular, and begging of the question.
Interestingly, no one was more scornful of Mill’s account of deductive logic than his secular (but literal) godson, or ungodson, Bertrand Russell, whose parents, Lord and Lady Amberly, were among Mill’s disciples. As Russell, following Frege, observed:
Everything that Mill has to say in his Logic about matters other than inductive inference is perfunctory and conventional. He states, for example, that propositions are formed by putting together two names, one of which is the subject and the other the predicate. This, I am sure, appeared to him an innocuous truism; but it had been, in fact, the source of two thousand years of important error. On the subject of names, with which modern logic has been much concerned, what he has to say is totally inadequate, and is, in fact, not so good as what had been said by Duns Scotus and William of Occam. His famous contention that the syllogism in Barbara is a petitio principia, and that the argument is really from particulars to particulars, has a measure of truth in certain cases, but cannot be accepted as a general doctrine. He maintains, for example, that the proposition ‘all men are mortal’ asserts ‘the Duke of Wellington is mortal’ even if the person making the assertion has never heard of the Duke of Wellington. This is obviously untenable: a person who knows the meaning of the words ‘man’ and ‘mortal’ can understand the statement ‘all men are mortal’ but can make no inference about a man he has never heard of; whereas, if Mill were right about the Duke of Wellington, a man could not understand this statement unless he knew the catalogue of all the men who ever have existed or ever will exist. His doctrine that inference is from particulars to particulars is correct psychology when applied to what I call ‘animal induction,’ but is never correct logic. To infer, from the mortality of men in the past, the mortality of those not yet dead, can only be legitimate if there is a general principle of induction. Broadly speaking, no general conclusion can be drawn without a general premise, and only a general premise will warrant a general conclusion from an incomplete enumeration of instances. What is more, there are general propositions of which no one can doubt the truth, although not a single instance of them can be given. Take, for example, the following: ‘All whole numbers which no one will have thought of before the year A.D. 2000, are greater than a million.’ You cannot attempt to give me an instance without contradicting yourself, and you cannot pretend that all the whole numbers have been thought of by someone. 64
Russell was also among the first to point out that Mill’s notion of causation scarcely captures the etiolated notion of causality, if it can be called that, in twentieth-century physics.
At any rate, for Mill, as far as truth is concerned, the real action comes with inductive logic, which he thinks captures the real logic of science—namely, eliminative induction, or the systematic (abductive) effort to eliminate rival causal hypotheses, as in the Canons, though ultimately this is built upon enumerative induction. He advances something like a nomological-deductive or covering law model, in which explanation is a matter of determining the law that best accounts for the phenomenon. But his big differences with the rationalist or intuitionist approach of Whewell come in how he denies that the progressive development of such explanations is in any way a matter of deploying a priori concepts to discover metaphysical necessities, the laws of God, in Whewell’s view. Again, Mill emphasizes the radical contingency and relativity (to the perceiver) of knowledge. Even higher-order principles or laws—such as the law that every event has a cause, or that the best hypothesis is available—are but laws of laws and ultimately grounded in the same way, as inductive generalizations, albeit enumerative ones. They may work well enough during periods of normal science, but they can be overthrown during more revolutionary intellectual times. Certainty is simply not to be had.
There are clearly many points on which Mill anticipates later philosophical pragmatists—in his naturalism, embrace of uncertainty but resistance to skepticism, and emphasis on the public sphere and experimental modes of critical thinking that are really but extensions of ordinary or common-sense inference.65 It is true that at times his account of “experience” seems more reductive or phenomenalist, defining the objects of the external world in terms of the structure of the “permanent possibilities of sensation,” as in his most ambitious work of fundamental philosophy, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865). But he also uses the term in a more general way, and in his application of his methods to psychology to defend a revised account of associationism, he did make it clear that, as Fred Wilson has put it, “new sorts of mental unity emerge from associational processes and have properties which are not among the properties that appear in the genetic antecedents. Analysis of ideas is still possible, but it is not the simplistic sort of thing, a literal taking apart, that his father would have it be.”66 Mill would in fact edit a new edition of his father’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, making it clear through his notes that his own version of associationism went further in recognizing how mental parts can combine and fuse. But for all of his efforts, it cannot be said that he succeeded in giving anything like a compelling account of the self and personal identity. This was a matter that he uncharacteristically left wrapped in mystery and enigma. Character, it seems, involving the desire to think for oneself, also had the job of unifying the self out of so many mental sequences. Will, Mill is clear, is not the same as mere desire, and the self that wills is a unified agent. But the self that did the unifying was scarcely explained in Mill’s work, a point that later Idealist philosophers would deploy to good effect.
It is worth recapitulating here how aspects of the outlook that went into the Logic and these other works (and, for that matter, The Principles of Political Economy and all of his other major works) were related to the insights that he felt he had achieved through his crisis. The revision of his father’s associationism to better account for agency and self-direction is a case in point. Again, as Wilson has put it, in an especially insightful passage:
Mill’s psychology also includes an account of motivation and action. On this theory, pleasure is the prime motivator, the primary end in itself, and the anticipation of pleasure serves as an immediate cause of bodily motions which in turn bring about that pleasure. Through regular success in attaining pleasure, anticipations of pleasure become associated with the sorts of action that bring about that pleasure. When Mill asserts that people seek pleasure, what he is to be taken to mean is that people seek things other than pleasure but that they seek it because pleasure has become associated with it, and that when the desire is fulfilled they experience the pleasure of satisfied desire. In this sense human welfare consists in satisfied desire. … This new account of psychological association and analysis was important in Mill’s thinking about ethics. Thus, where his father (and Bentham) had a simple notion that pleasures are all of a piece, and distinctions among them merely quantitative, one bit added to another bit, Mill came to see that there are qualitative distinctions among pleasures: the ‘higher’ pleasures do result from association but they are different in kind from the ‘lower’ pleasures out of which they arise, and as a matter of fact turn out to be more satisfying forms of pleasure. So Mill could say, where his father could not, that it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.
It is evident that it was during his mental crisis that Mill came to be clear on the existence of, and importance for personal development, of these higher forms of mental unity in our conscious experience of the world. It was reading Wordsworth, it seems, that gave him this sense that there were forms of human being that were hardly part of his father’s scheme of things. These feelings, to be obtained through poetry and human intercourse, were subsequently encouraged through his relationship with Harriet Taylor. These feelings, and their cultivation, came to form an important part of Mill’s idea of the good that shaped his thought and his efforts towards social reform and progress.
Given the account of association and of action, it is evident that various means to pleasure will become associated with feelings of pleasure. But on Mill’s view, this will not be a mere conjunction; to the contrary, as the association becomes strong enough the two parts will fuse into a new sort of emergent whole. The means will not simply be conjoined to pleasure but will become part of pleasure. And so money, for the miser, becomes not just a means to pleasure but for him part of pleasure, an end in itself.
This account of human action presupposes the acceptance of determinism, which Mill vigorously defends in the System of Logic, where he outlines the idea of a naturalistic science of human being. Freedom, Mill argues in Book Six, Ch. 2, which he thought the best in the work, is not the absence of causation but rather the absence of coercion. In fact the whole point of education is to determine the future free actions of the individual: it aims through the associative processes to determine the person’s motives and actions. … Among the motives that one could acquire is the motive of self-improvement or self-realization. There are irresistible motives; for these we are not as persons responsible. But there are also resistible motives, and these we can shape and determine. … The free person is one who is sensitive to good reasons for behaving as he or she does. The second-order ends that lead one to shape one’s motives and to develop as an individual became the central feature of Mill’s social thinking, and this marks a major break in detail, though, to be sure, not in principle, with the utilitarianism of Bentham and his father. In the Examination of Hamilton’s Philosophy, Mill vigorously defends the notion of human beings as active in their own self-determination.67
Perhaps the operative line in the above account is the one about this marking “a major break in detail, though, to be sure, not in principle, with the utilitarianism of Bentham and his father.” For it should be transparently clear that, at least by the time that he was ready to publish his major works, in the 1840s, Mill was struggling to fit the Mystic or Coleridgean or Romantic notions of freedom, self-culture, and personal growth into the naturalistic, deterministic, and associationist worldview that he had inherited from his father and Bentham. Intuitionism, Rationalism, and all forms of a priorism are identified as the opposition, the deeper forces behind the religious, political, and social prejudices reining in progress. Mill evinces no deep sympathy for Kantian or Idealist accounts of noumenal freedom, or for a morality or politics grounded on any such notion. However, as John Skorupski has acutely summed it up:
It is important to remember here that Mill was no more a Humean in epistemology than he was an eighteenth-century philosophe in his political thought. His version of naturalistic empiricism was not a rehearsal of Hume, just as Hegel’s version of idealism was not a rehearsal of Kant. He did not have an instrumentalist conception of reason. He believed that autonomy as a capacity, or in his words ‘moral freedom’, was a matter of mastery of the passions by the rational self. He made the German ideal of self-development his own.
Not that Mill succeeded in showing how reason can be naturalized, any more than Hegel succeeded in showing how nature can be an objectification of Reason. We cannot go back to Mill or to Hegel, but the question remains: whether classical liberalism, with its belief in rational autonomy, and in the historical progress towards it of all human traditions, can flourish in a naturalistic (de Geisted) framework.68
Skorupski is as appreciative as anyone of what he calls (alluding to the Rawlsian “Aristotelian Principle”) the “Mill Principle,” namely, that “only the fullest self-development of one’s potential gives access to the highest forms of human happiness.”69 (This could, of course, just as well have been called the “Godwin Principle”). Indeed, in various works, he has gone far to mount a sympathetic defense of Millian liberalism, as has Alan Ryan. Yet both to some degree share the worry voiced by Bertrand Russell, to the effect that the superstructure of Mill’s moral and political views cannot fully be supported by its foundations. This is, to be sure, of a piece with the standard take on Mill’s syncretic efforts. Supposedly, Mill failed to reconcile the very disparate pieces of his worldview, failed to reconcile naturalism with Romanticism, determinism with agency, hedonism with perfectionism, utilitarianism with individualistic liberalism, altruism with egoism, utilitarian criticism with common-sense moral rules, and so forth, much as he tried. By trying, like Locke, to capture the more persuasive parts of the opposition, he ended up a nest of inconsistencies, however ennobling the various sides of his many-sidedness may have been. J. B. Schneewind has even argued that Mill’s great influence came from these inconsistent syncretic efforts, in that Mill went further in making utilitarianism respectable, more accommodating of common-sense morality, not that one would ever guess this from the malign reception of his collaboration with Harriet Taylor.70
More will be said in the next chapter about the enormous controversies swirling around the contest between naturalism and its alternatives. Again, one of the great ironies in the history of utilitarianism is that its most formidable philosophical defenses have come from those who ground it on something closer to Whewellian intutionism rather than Millian naturalism. In the remainder of this chapter, however, the concern will be more with the moral, political, and political economical superstructure that Mill built, however unsteadily, on his naturalistic foundations. Mill himself, as we have seen, thought the larger worldview was crucial to the defense of utilitarianism and progressive liberalism. And he regarded the final book of his Logic, emphasizing the importance of the science of ethology, as hammering home a key point: “There is, then, a Philosophia Prima peculiar to Art, as there is one which belongs to Science. There are not only first principles of Knowledge, but first principles of Conduct. There must be some standard by which to determine the goodness or badness, absolute and comparative, of ends, or objects of desire. And whatever that standard is, there can be but one: for if there were several ultimate principles of conduct, the same conduct might be approved by one of those principles and condemned by another; and there would be needed some more general principle, as umpire between them.”71
But the defense of the principle of utility in this role, as “the ultimate Principle of Teleology” undergirding “the Right, the Expedient, and the Beautiful,” would “be out of place, in a work like this,” and (in later editions) he refers the reader to his “Utilitarianism.”72 Still, he deems it important to add the following crucial caveat regarding the Art of Life, lest the reader be left with a misleading impression:
I do not mean to assert that the promotion of happiness should be itself the end of all actions, or even of all rules of action. It is the justification, and ought to be the controller, of all ends, but is not itself the sole end. There are many virtuous actions, and even virtuous modes of action … by which happiness in the particular instance is sacrificed, more pain being produced than pleasure. But conduct of which this can be truly asserted, admits of justification only because it can be shown that on the whole more happiness will exist in the world, if feelings are cultivated which will make people, in certain cases, regardless of happiness. I fully admit that this is true: that the cultivation of an ideal nobleness of will and conduct, should be to individual human beings an end, to which the specific pursuit either of their own happiness or of that of others (except so far as included in that idea) should, in any case of conflict, give way. But I hold that the very question, what constitutes this elevation of character, is itself to be decided by a reference to happiness as the standard. The character itself should be, to the individual, a paramount end, simply because the existence of this ideal nobleness of character, or of a near approach to it, in any abundance, would go further than all things else towards making human life happy; both in the comparatively humble sense, of pleasure and freedom from pain, and in the higher meaning, of rendering life, not what it now is almost universally, puerile and insignificant—but such as human beings with highly developed faculties can care to have.73
This passage, like the essay “Civilization,” points up how closely Mill linked his Logic with the views expressed in his most enduringly popular works, On Liberty, Utilitarianism, and The Subjection of Women. That on his understanding utilitarianism was global, a standard applicable to all departments of conduct, including acts, rules, and institutions, and indirect, involving a happiness in which noble ideals had fused with pleasure and were sought for their own sake, is manifest. Ethology, the science of character formation and development, would develop in tandem with psychology to “determine, from the general laws of mind, combined with the general position of our species in the universe, what actual or possible combinations of circumstances are capable of promoting or preventing” those qualities of interest to us. Of course, this was but a promissory note, and the clerisy had a big task ahead. Much work needed to be done, and many experiments in living. And as mentioned, Mill was at this time, in the 30s and 40s, engaged in an experiment that would illustrate his character like no other.74