JOHN STUART MILL. 501 



JOHN STUAET MILL. 



By ALEXANDER BAIN, LL. D., 



PEOFESSOR OF LOGIC IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN. 



YI. 



CLOSELY connected both in date of composition and in subject- 

 matter is the " Utilitarianism." I find from a letter that it was 

 written in 1854. It was thoroughly revised in 1860, and appeared as 

 three papers in " Eraser's Magazine " in the beginning of 1801, I am 

 not aware that any change was made in reprinting it as a volume, not- 

 withstanding that it had a full share of hostile criticism as it came out 

 in " Fraser." 



This short work has many volumes to answer for. The amount of 

 attention it has received is due, in my opinion, partly to its merits, 

 and partly to its defects. As a powerful advocacy of utility, it threw 

 the intuitionists on the defensive ; while, by a number of unguarded 

 utterances, it gave them important strategic positions which they could 

 not fail to occupy. 



It is this last point that I shall now chiefly dwell upon. What I 

 allude to more particularly is the theory of pleasure and pain embodied 

 in the second chapter, or rather the string of casual expressions having 

 reference to pleasures and pains. I have already said that I consider 

 Mill's Hedonism weak. I do not find fault with him for not having 

 elaborated a Hedonistic theory ; that is a matter still ahead of us. My 

 objection lies to certain loose expressions that have received an amount 

 of notice from hostile critics out of all proportion to their bearing on 

 his arguments for utility. I think that, having opponents at every 

 point, his proper course was not to commit himself to any more specific 

 definition of happiness than his case absolutely required. 



It was obviously necessary that he should give some explanation of 

 happiness ; and on his principles happiness must be resolved into plea- 

 sure and the absence of pain. Here, however, he had to encounter at 

 once the common dislike to regarding pleasure as the sole object of 

 desire and pursuit — " a doctrine worthy only of swine," to which its 

 holders have both in ancient and in modern times been most profusely 

 likened. He courageously faces the difficulty by pronouncing in favor 

 of a difference in kind or quality among pleasures ; which difference 

 he expands through two or three eloquent pages, which I believe have 

 received more attention from critics on the other side than all the rest 

 of the book put together. My own decided opinion is, that he ought 

 to have resolved all the so-called nobler or higher pleasures into the 

 one single feature of including with the agent's pleasure the pleasure 

 of others. This is the only position that a supporter of utility can 

 hold to. There is a superiority attaching to some pleasures that are 



