52 ANALYSIS AND CRITICISM 



Defence of Abstraction: the Essay on Mill 



The positive side of abstraction was most fully developed in the 

 essay on Mill (1861), which belongs to the period following The 

 Classic Philosophers. Again, Taine finds it desirable to put his 

 argument in the form of a dialogue; this time the scene is laid at 

 Oxford, and Taine (assuming here the personality of M. Paul) 

 engages in a friendly discussion with a fictitious young English- 

 man who speaks for British Empiricism. 



A brief introduction sets the stage and introduces John Stuart 

 Mill as the great, original English thinker of the century, an ally 

 of 'Locke and Comte in the first rank; then Hume and Newton'. 22 

 The essay itself is divided into two parts headed: 'Experience' and 

 'Abstraction', corresponding roughly to the two essays 'On 

 Method' discussed in the previous chapter. 



The first part is a clear exposition by the young Englishman of 

 Mill's System of Logic, so sympathetic in its tone that Mill wrote to 

 Taine soon after its appearance 'that it would not be possible to 

 give in a few pages a more exact and complete notion of the con- 

 tents of his work, considered as a body of philosophic teaching'. 23 

 The key to Mill's thought is stated in a form which reminds us of 

 Taine's own essay on analysis: 'In all forms and all degrees of 

 knowledge, he has recognized only the knowledge of facts, and 

 of their relations. '^4 He then goes on to show how Mill applies 

 this principle to his theories of definitions, proof, axioms, and 

 induction. 



Mill's theory of induction is presented as his 'masterpiece', and 

 its discussion leads naturally into his notion of causation. Cause 

 and eflfect are names for sequences of phenomena, whose connec- 

 tions we discover by means of the famous four canons: the methods 

 of agreement, of diflference, of residues, and of concomitant 

 variations. 'These are the only ways by which we can penetrate 

 into nature. . . . And they all employ the same artifice, that is to 

 say, elimination', for, in fact, induction is nothing else. '25 Nor does 

 Taine overlook the importance of deduction in Mill's thought, 

 paying special attention to those sections in which he had ex- 

 plored its role in the sciences of life: physiology and history. A 

 footnote refers to Mill's chapter on 'The Physical, or Concrete 

 Deductive Method, as applied to Sociology' (Book VI, Chapter 

 IX) and concludes: 'A whole book is devoted to the logic of the 

 moral sciences; I know no better treatise on the subject. '26 



