MILL 



197 



Mill, JOHN STUART, the eldest son of James 

 Mill, was l>orn in London on 20tli May 1806. He 

 was educated by liis father, by whom lie was sub- 

 jected from bis earliest years to a careful and 

 systematic training, wliicli was to (it him to carry 

 on the work and champion the opinions with which 

 the elder Mill was identilied. Almost from infancy 

 his intellect was on the strain. He is said to 

 have begun Greek at the age of three, and before 

 he was fourteen he had read extensively in Greek, 

 Latin, mathematics, and English, hail begun logic 

 and political economy, and already possessed the 

 intellectual acquirements of a well-educated man. 

 But he was secluded from companions of his own 

 age. As he himself says, he 'never was a boy.' 

 His nearest approach to recreation was the long 

 walks in reality peripatetic oral examinations for 

 which he was regularly taken by his father. In 

 1820 he went to France on a visit to the family of 

 Sir S. Bentham (Jeremy Bentham's brother), and 

 was thus removed for more than a year from his 

 father's immediate influence. His studies were 

 never intermitted. His residence in France not 

 only gave him a keen interest in French politics 

 MM social conditions, but stimulated his botanical 

 enthusiasm, and the love for scenery and travel, 

 which became the chief relaxations of his arduous 

 life. After his return home he worked at history 

 and law, and read the English ami French philo- 

 sophers. His first published writings appeared in 

 the Traveller newspaper in 1822. In the following 

 year a career was secured for him by an appoint- 

 ment nnder his father at the India Ollice, from 

 which he retired as head of his department in 1858, 

 on the transfer of the Company's government to 

 the crown. At the same time he declined a seat in 

 the new India Council offered to him by Lord 

 Derby. During the year* IK23-26 he was a menilicr 

 of a small Utilitarian society which met for the 

 purpose of discussion at Jeremy Beutham's house. 

 The name 'Utilitarian' was suggested by an 

 expulsion in one of Gait's novels, and seized upon 

 by him ' with a l>oy's fondness for a name and a 

 banner," to describe himself and others of like 

 opinions. In the Speculative Society, which was 

 founded in 1825, and of which he remained a 

 member till 1829, he met men of a greater variety 

 of rrci-ds, and formed an intimate friendship with 

 Maurice and Sterling, Lilierals of a different type 

 from those he had met at his father's house, and 

 influenced by Coleridge, not by Bentham. 



Me fore he was twenty, Mill was recognised as the 

 champion and future leader of what may be called 

 the Utilitarian School in philosophy and politics, 

 and had bMOBM the most frequent contributor to 

 the newly-established organ of the party, the 

 Westminster Revitw. Hut the ' mental crisis ' 

 through which he passed at this time (1826-27) 

 led to a modification of his attitude. Bentham's 

 '/',-,, it.V Leqil(ttion, which he had read four or 

 five years l>efore, formed the keystone of his 

 previous position. It gave him 'a creed, a 

 doctrine, a philosophy ; in one among the best 

 senses of the word, a religion ; the inculcation and 

 diffusion of which could lie made the principal out- 

 ward purpose of a life." The crisis under which his 

 enthusiasm for his old creed and opinions broke 

 down was attributed by himself not merely to a 

 dull state of nerves, but to the purely intellectual 

 education which weakened his sympathies at the 

 same time as it taught him to analyse and trace 

 them to their origin. He ultimately emerged from 

 the state of depression by discovering that feeling 

 was not dead within him. The experiences of this 

 period left, he tells us, two very marked effects on 

 lii* opinions and character. In the first place, they 

 led him to a new theory of life in relation to happi- 

 IWM- The conviction was forced upon him that 



happiness although the test of all rules of conduct 

 and the end of life was only to be obtained by not 

 making it the direct end, but by having one's mind 

 fixed on some such ideal end as the improvement of 

 mankind, or even some art or pursuit. His ' mental 

 crisis ' further led him to see the necessity for human 

 well-being of the internal culture of the individual. 

 He ceased to attach almost exclusive importance to 

 the ordering of outward circumstances, and to the 

 forced training of the human being for thought 

 and action. And soon after this time he found in 

 Wordsworth's poems 'the very culture of the feel- 

 ings ' he was in quest of. 



The wider appreciation of speculation and litera- 

 ture brought about by this new attitude may bo 

 seen in his reviews of Tennyson's poems ( 1835), and 

 of Carlyle's French Revolution ( 1837), as well as in 

 his article on Coleridge (1840). His article on 

 Bentham ( 1838) made clear the extent of his diverg- 

 ence from his inherited creed, and gave rise to the 

 ' admiration mixed with fear ' with which Grote 

 and others of the school regarded him. In this 

 article can lie traced the lines along which, in his 

 subsequent writings, he modified the traditional 

 creed of Bentham and James Mill. Perhaps the 

 reaction from Benthamism would have gone further 

 had it not l>een for the friendship with Mrs John 

 Taylor (whom he first met in 1830, and whom he 

 married in 1851 ), which formed the romance of his 

 life. It is indeed hardly possible to estimate her 

 influence so highly as Mill did himself. All his 

 leading opinions were formed before he made her 

 acquaintance, and some of his most important works 

 were completed without her assistance. But she 

 did exert great influence on the expression of his 

 views, and apparently had a steadying effect on his 

 philosophical position. 



Mill never forsook, though he modified, the lead- 

 ing principles of the philosophy in which he was 

 educated. He held that knowledge could be 

 analysed into impressions of sense, and that the 

 principle of association was the great construc- 

 tive force which combined these sensations and 

 their copies, or ideas, into systems of thought, 

 modes of feeling, and habits of acting. THis 

 System of Logic ( 1843) perhaps the most original 

 and important of his works traces, and gives a 

 rationale of, the way in which the real, disjointedly 



fiven in sensation, is combined into scientific 

 nowledge. Its treatment of the methods of 

 inductive science in which it owes much to Her- 

 schel, Whewell, and Comte has become classical. 

 His Examination of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy 

 ( 1865), and edition of Jaines Mill's Analysis of the 

 Phenomena of the Human Mind (1869), contain a 

 polemical defence and exposition of the association- 

 psychology, notable for their clear recognition of 

 the mental elements which that psychology assumes 

 without explanation. His essay on Utilitarian <XM 

 ( 1861 ) defends the greatest- happiness theory, but 

 suggests modifications inconsistent with it (see 

 ETHICS, p. 435 6.). He held that government was 

 to l>e purified and made into a utilitarian instru- 

 ment by means of representative institutions ; but 

 he had less confidence than Bentham and his father 

 had in the effect of reason and argument upon men, 

 disapproved of an equal suffrage, distrusted the 

 ballot, and argued eloquently for individual liberty 

 of thought and action against the tyranny of the 

 majority ( Considerations on Representative Govern- 

 ment, 1861 ; Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform, 

 1859; On Liberty, 1859). His Principles of Politi- 

 cal Economy ( 1848) is a systematic treatise, which 

 does not depart in its main teaching from the 

 theory laid down in abstract fashion by Kicardo ; 

 but it recognises more clearly the hypothetical 

 character of this theory, and it discusses the social 

 applications of economic doctrines. Mill was .M.I'. 



