No More Learning

L. XIV.
CH. I.
1


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29
[CH.
Philosophers
6
immediately preceding. Hamilton and Mill were the leaders of
a marked revival of interest in speculative topics, which rein-
stated philosophy in its due place in the national culture; and
this revival took two different directions connected with their
diverse views and training.
Philosophy, however, had not merely to overcome the public
indifference referred to by John Stuart Mill; it had also to
contend against itself, or, at least, against its dominant form.
The Benthamite creed, which was in the ascendant, was not
favourable to speculative enquiry. "The great problem of man's
nature and life' was regarded as solved in a sense which made
metaphysics and theology alike impossible ; ethical principles
were held to be finally settled by Bentham, so that nothing
remained but their application to different situations; even
political and social theory, the field of the chief triumphs of the
utilitarians, was divorced from history and from every ethical
idea save that of utility ; psychology, however, remained in need
of more adequate treatment than Bentham could give it, and
James Mill supplied the school with a theory of mind which was
in harmony with their other views.
II. JAMES MILL AND OTHERS
The economic doctrines which are characteristic of the utilitarian
school were elaborated by a writer who cannot be regarded as a
member of it and who, indeed, was not interested in philosophy
or even in the larger questions of social theory. This was David
Ricardo, the son of a Dutch Jew who had settled in London and
become a member of the Stock Exchange. Thrown on his own re-
sources, Ricardo soon made a fortune as a stockbroker, retired
from business at an early age and devoted his leisure to economics.
It was not until he had already made his mark as a writer on the
currency that he became acquainted with James Mill, by whose
encouragement, as well as by that of other friends, he was induced,
in 1817, to publish his chief work, Principles of Political Economy
and Taxation. Ricardo received his impetus towards economic
study from Adam Smith. He did not share the latter's breadth of
social outlook or his psychological insight; but he had a masterly
power of abstract reasoning which enabled him to present
economic doctrines in the form of a deductive science. He was
concerned not so much with the nature and causes' as with the
distribution of wealth. This distribution has to be made between


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1] The Economics of Ricardo 3
the classes concerned in the production of wealth, namely, the
landowner, the capitalist, and the labourer; and Ricardo seeks
to show the conditions which determine the share of each. Here,
his theory of rent is fundamental. He did not claim originality
for this theory, which goes by his name, but attributed it to
Malthus's Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent and
Edward West's Essay on the Application of Capital to Land,
both of which appeared in 1815; while his editor, J. R. McCulloch,
discovered the same doctrine in a work by James Anderson,
entitled Enquiry into the Nature of Corn-Laws and published
in 1777. But Ricardo made the doctrine his own.
Rent, he
argued, does not enter into the cost of production; it varies on
different farms according to the fertility of the soil and the
advantages of their situation. But the price of the produce
is the same for all and is fixed by the conditions of production
on the least favourable land which has to be cultivated to meet
the demand ; and this land pays no rent. Rent, therefore, is the
price which the landowner is able to charge for the special
advantages of his land; it is the difference between its return
to a given amount of capital and labour and the similar return
of the least advantageous land which has to be cultivated.
Consequently, it rises as the margin of cultivation spreads to
less fertile soils. Obviously, this doctrine leads to a strong
argument in favour of the free importation of foreign goods,
especially corn. It also breaks with the economic optimism of
Adam Smith, who thought that the interest of the country
gentleman harmonised with that of the mass of the people, for
it shows that the rent of the landowner rises as the increasing
need of the people compels them to have resort to inferior land
for the production of their food.
The value of an article is determined, according to Ricardo,
by the amount of labour required to produce it under the least
favourable conditions; and this value has to be shared between
wages and profits (interest on capital and earnings of business
management not being distinguished in his analysis). Wages
depend on the price of necessaries (that is, chiefly, of food); the
law of population (which he takes over from Malthus) prevents
any further rise. On the other hand, profits depend on high or
low wages. Thus, in the progress of society, the 'natural
tendency of profits is to fall, until 'almost the whole produce
of the country, after paying the labourers, will be the property
of the owners of land and the receivers of tithes and taxes. '
1-2


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4
Philosophers
[CH.
There is, therefore, an opposition of interests within the body
economic; and this opposition is held to be the result of natural
and inevitable law—happily checked, however, at repeated
intervals, by improvements and discoveries. For their effect
Ricardo made allowance. But he took no account of other
than economic motives in human conduct; he may be said to
have invented the fiction of the economic man,' though he did
not use the phrase. And he regarded the economic structure
of society as rigid, though his doctrines often read like satires
upon it, and they became, in the hands both of contemporary
and of later socialist writers, a powerful argument for fundamental
social changes.
Ricardo's method was to proceed from a few very general
propositions about society and human nature, and to draw out
their consequences deductively. That his premisses were one-sided
generalisations, and that his conclusions at best had only hypo-
thetical validity, he did not recognise. This method was also
characteristic of the Benthamite reasoning in political theory
generally. Thus it was that, in economics, James Mill professed
himself Ricardo's disciple. Mill's Political Economy (1821) re-
duces Ricardo's doctrines to text-book form, and states them with
the concise and confident lucidity which distinguished the author.
For Mill, however, unlike Ricardo, economics was only one
amongst a large number of topics, social and philosophical, which
were open to the same general method of treatment, and which
appealed to his interest. Mill was closely associated with Bentham
-at any rate, from 1808 onwards—and it is difficult to find any
originality in the fundamental doctrines of his creed. At the
same time, he had certain points of superiority. Much inferior
to Bentham in jurisprudence and all that concerned the details
of law, he had, perhaps, a clearer view of political theory and
certainly a wider knowledge of historical conditions. He was,
of course, a whole-hearted adherent of the greatest happiness
principle, and added nothing to its statement; but he was better
equipped for its defence on philosophical grounds and he could
supplement Bentham's deficiencies as a psychologist. But the
necessity of making an income by literary work and, afterwards,
the demands of official employment, as well as, always, the
engrossing interest of public affairs, left him little leisure for
philosophy.
1 See the bibliography by Foxwell, H. S. in appendix 11 (pp. 191—267) of the English
translation of A. Menger's Right to the Whole Produce of Labour (1899).


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1]
James Mill
5
Mill's systematic work in political theory is contained in certain
articles, especially an article on government, contributed to the
supplement of The Encyclopaedia Britannica, edited by Macvey
Napier (1820). In these articles, the author proceeds, methodically,
to determine the best form of political order by deductive
reasoning; and his method was the object of severe criticism
by Macaulay in an article contributed to The Edinburgh Review
in 1829, but not republished in his collected Essays. This article
contained also an attack on the utilitarians generally; and Mill's
rejoinder, so far as he made any, is to be found in A Fragment on
Mackintosh (1835). This consists of 'strictures on some passages
of A Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy which
Sir James Mackintosh had contributed to the seventh edition
of The Encyclopaedia Britannica. Like Mill, Mackintosh was
keenly interested in philosophy, although his career gave him
little time for its pursuit. In this, his only contribution to the
subject, he reviewed the work of the English moralists with
appreciation and insight. It contained criticisms of the utili-
tarians and of their intellectual predecessors which aroused Mill's
hostility, and its occasional lack of precision of thought laid it
open to attack. Mill's 'strictures are limited to a few points
only, and expose the weaknesses of his antagonist's positions in
a manner which would have been more effective if it had been
less violent—although his friends had induced him to moderate its
tone before making it public.
Mill's chief philosophical work was, however, his Analysis of
the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829). In this he laid the
foundation in psychology for the utilitarian superstructure. It
is a compact statement of a theory of mind elaborated on the same
method as that by which any department of nature might be studied.
Mental phenomena are reduced to their simplest elements, and
the association of these into groups and successions is investi-
gated, all association being reduced by him to one law—that
of contiguity. In general, Mill follows: Hume and Hartley—but
Hartley much more than Hume. He disregards, however, the
physiological side of Hartley's theory, so that his own doctrines
are purely psychological. To the psychological school of a later
date, whose leading representatives were John Stuart Mill and
Alexander Bain, his chief positive contribution was the doctrine
of inseparable association; in addition, he marked out afresh
the lines to be followed by a theory which attempts to explain
the facts of consciousness from the association' of ultimate


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6
[CH.
Philosophers
elements called 'sensations'-assumed as themselves not in need
of explanation.
A position intermediate between the associationism of Mill
and the traditional doctrines of the Scottish school was taken
by Thomas Brown, professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh
from 1810 till his death in 1820. By the time he was twenty
years of age Brown had published Observations on the Zoonomia
of Erasmus Darwin (1798), which was recognised as a mature
criticism of that work. Seven years afterwards, in 1805, an
ecclesiastico-academical controversy drew from him a small volume
entitled Observations on the Nature and Tendency of the Doctrine
of Mr Hume concerning the Relation of Cause and Effect, of
which a second enlarged edition was published in 1806 and a
third edition, further enlarged and modified in arrangement and
title, in 1817. In this book, he maintained the view that causation
means simply uniform antecedence, 'to whatever objects, material
or spiritual, the words may be applied'; but he held, also, that
there was an intuitive or instinctive belief that, 'when the previous
circumstances in any case are exactly the same, the resulting
circumstances also will be the same. '
Brown's work on causation certainly showed him to be possessed
of an intellect of penetrating philosophical quality; and it may be
noted that, in his preface to the second edition of it, he already laid
down two principles which distinguished his subsequent writing.
One was that the philosophy of mind' is to be considered as a
science of analysis ; the other was the implicit rejection of the
doctrine of mental faculties as it had figured in previous academic
philosophies. Functions such as memory or comparison, he says,
are merely names for the resemblances among classes of mental
facts. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1820),
published after his death, these principles were applied to the details
of perception and cognition. He made the important distinction
between the muscular sense and touch proper, resolved knowledge
of extension into a succession of muscular sensations, and knowledge
of the external world into a number of constituent sensations, but
held, nevertheless, to the real existence of the physical object on the
ground that it was implied in the intuitive belief in causality. In
these doctrines, and in his analysis of 'relative suggestion,' he made
contributions to psychology which were largely original, although
he was considerably indebted to De Tracy and other predecessors.
The eloquence of his style, as well as the subtlety of his analyses,


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1]
Sir William Hamilton
7
made his lectures famous during his lifetime and, in their printed
form, for many years after his death. They were written hastily,
each lecture to meet the demand of the following day, and they
are too ornate in style for scientific purposes. The shortness
of the author's life, and his own unfortunate preference for his
poetical works over his philosophical, prevented a thorough
revision of what he had written or a consistent and adequate
development of his views.
III. SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AND OTHERS
Hamilton's reputation has not withstood the test of time; but,
in his own day and for a number of years afterwards, his was one
of the two names which stood for the revival of philosophical
thought in Great Britain. His pre-eminence was not altogether
undisputed, however. Even from his younger contemporaries who
did most for Scottish metaphysics, different opinions regarding his
merit may be gathered. Ferrier regarded him, morally and intel-
lectually, as ‘amongst the greatest of the great? ’: whereas Hutchison
Stirling found in him 'a certain vein of disingenuousness that,
cruelly unjust to individuals, has probably caused the retardation of
general British philosophy by, perhaps, a generation? ' The truth
lies somewhere between these extreme views, and it is important
to arrive at a correct estimate of Hamilton's work in order to
understand the course of British philosophy.
Sir William Hamilton was born in 1788, in the old college of
Glasgow, where his father was a professor. He was educated there
and at Oxford, was called to the Scottish bar and, in 1836,
appointed to the chair of logic and metaphysics at Edinburgh.
In 1844 he had a stroke of paralysis, and, although he was able to
continue the work of his professorship until his death in 1856, he
never recovered his physical strength. His published work began
with a number of articles in The Edinburgh Review, republished
in 1852 as Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, Education
and University Reform. The most important of these were three
articles on the Philosophy of the Unconditioned,' the Philosophy
of Perception' and 'Logic,' which appeared between 1829 and
1833. He afterwards devoted himself to the preparation of an
edition of Reid's Works, which he illustrated with elaborate
appended 'Notes,' chiefly historical in character. This work was
i Ferrier, J. F. , Scottish Philosophy: the old and the new (1856), pp. 15, 16.
* Stirling, J. H. , Sir W. Hamilton : being the Philosophy of Perception (1865), p. vii.
:
:


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8.
[CH.
Philosophers
published in 1846; but the 'Notes' were never completed and are
of the nature of material rather than of literature. After his
death, his Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic were published in
four volumes (1858–60).
Hamilton's positive contributions to philosophy are connected
with the topics of the three articles already named. Indeed, except
as regards logic, these articles contain almost all that is essential
and original in his work. But other points have to be taken into
account in estimating his influence upon philosophical thought.
Since the time of Descartes, continental thought had had little
effect upon English philosophy. Leibniz and even Spinoza were
hardly more than names. Helvétius had influenced Bentham, and
De Tracy Thomas Brown; but Helvétius and De Tracy themselves
worked on lines laid down in England—the lines of Locke. The
doctrines of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, together with the ideas
of the deistical movement, had entered into the European tradition;
but the reaction which they produced, and which began with Kant,
was for long ignored in England. One or two enthusiasts tried to
make Kant known, but their efforts were without result; an article
on Kant by Thomas Brown in the second number of The Edin-
burgh Review (1803) only showed the poverty of the land.
Coleridge, indeed, was a much more important medium; he
brought into English literature ideas which had been derived from
Kant and his successors, and he was recognised by John Stuart
Mill as representing a type of thought, antagonistic to the dominant
Benthamism, which had to be reckoned with. But the teaching
of Coleridge was prophetic rather than scientific, and the philo-
sophical student had to be approached in his own language and by
a master who had the command of traditional learning as well as
fresh doctrines to teach. It was here that Hamilton's cosmopolitan
learning broke in upon British philosophy and lifted it out of the
narrow grooves into which both the Scottish academic teachers
and the English Benthamites had fallen. Hamilton's learning struck
most of his contemporaries as almost superhuman; it was certainly
vast, and, as certainly, without precedent at the time. It made
possible a new orientation in philosophy. The special problems to
which discussion had become restricted were seen as part of a
larger field of enquiry which extended over the whole of western
thought from ancient Greece to modern Germany. Hamilton,
however, had the defects of his qualities. He never obtained easy
mastery of his own learning; he would summon a 'cloud of
witnesses' when a single good argument would have been more to


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6
>
1] Hamilton's Logical Theory 9
the purpose; and his selection of authorities' was often ill-judged:
they were numbered instead of weighed ; and he would spend time
over third-rate schoolmen or equally third-rate modern Germans
which would have been better spent if devoted to a sympathetic
understanding of Kant and Hegel. Nevertheless, Hamilton's work
in this respect is important. He overcame the provincialism of
English thought and he brought it into connection with the
greatest of the new German philosophers. It may have been an
imperfect Kant that he revealed; Fichte, Schelling and Hegel
were brought forward as objects of criticisms only. But the
traditional circle of English thought was broken, and new ideas
were brought within it.
Hamilton came forward as a reconciler of Scottish and German
thought of Reid with Kant. It was only an imperfect synthesis
-
that he worked out, but the enterprise was notable. His logical
work, indeed, stands to some extent apart. He followed Kant in
his strictly formal treatment, and he devoted a large amount of
time, and no little ingenuity, to the elaboration of a modification of
the formal doctrine of the traditional logic. This modified doctrine
made a great stir for many years, and was even hailed as the
greatest logical discovery since the time of Aristotle? It is known
as 'the Quantification of the Predicate. ' Hamilton's own exposi-
tions of it are incomplete and are contained in appendixes to his
Discussions and to his Lectures. The clearest accounts of his
views have to be sought in An Essay on the New Analytic of
Logical Forms (1850), by his pupil, Thomas Spencer Baynes, and
in An Outline of the Laws of Thought (the first edition of which
was published in 1842), by William Thomson, afterwards arch-
bishop of York. But the gist of the matter can be put very
shortly. According to the traditional view, in a judgment or
proposition, an assertion is made about something ; that is to say,
the subject is said to possess or not to possess the quality signified
by the predicate. When made not about an individual thing, but
about a group or class, then the assertion may be meant to apply
to every member of the class or only to some of them ; it is, there-
fore, necessary to indicate this, or to express the quantity of the
subject. The predicate is not similarly quantified. But a quality
is always potentially a class—the class of things which possess that
quality. The most elementary of logical operations implies that
it can be treated as such and assigned a quantity as the subject
of a new proposition. Hamilton's ‘new analytic' depends upon
1 Baynes, T. S. , Essay on the New Analytic (1850), p. 80.


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IO
Philosophers
[ch.
6
the contention that the quantity thus implied should be always
explicitly stated, and consists in following out the changes in
formal procedure which seem to him to result from this being
done. But Hamilton was not thorough enough in the elaboration
of his theory. He did not see that it implied a change from the
predication view' to the class view of the proposition and that
this would lead to a very different classification of propositions
from his, and, in general, to a much more radical revision of logical
forms than he contemplated. Two contemporary mathematicians
-Augustus de Morgan and George Boole—went further than he
did; and the latter's treatise entitled The Laws of Thought (1854)
laid the foundations of the modern logical calculus.
Hamilton's article on the Philosophy of Perception' is both a
defence of Reid and, at the same time, a relentless attack npon
Thomas Brown. It is also an attempt to formulate and justify the
doctrine of natural realism' or natural dualism' in a form less
ambiguous than that in which it had been stated by Reid. 'In
the simplest act of perception,' says Hamilton, 'I am conscious
of myself as the perceiving subject and of an external reality as
the object perceived. ' As regards the latter factor what we
have is said to be an immediate knowledge of the external
reality. This clear view almost disappears, however, in the
process of discussion and elaboration which it underwent in
Hamilton's later thought. In the course of his psychological
analysis, he distinguished sharply and properly between the sub-
jective and the objective factors in the act of cognising external
reality; the former he called sensation proper and the latter
perception proper; and he even formulated a “law' of their inverse
ratio. He elaborated, also, the old distinction of primary and
secondary qualities of matter, to which, more suo, he added an
intermediate class of secundo-primary qualities. As a result of
these distinctions the doctrine of 'immediate knowledge of the
external reality' is transformed. The object of perception proper,
it is said, is either a primary quality or a certain phase of a
secundo-primary. But we do not perceive the primary qualities
of things external to our organism. These are not immediately
known but only inferred; the primary qualities which we do
perceive ‘are perceived as in our organism. ' That is to say, when
,
we perceive a table, we do not perceive the shape or size of the
table; knowledge of these is got by inference; the shape and size
which we perceive are in our own bodies. The existence of an
extra-organic world is apprehended through consciousness of


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1]
а
The Philosophy of the Conditioned II
resistance to our muscular energy, which Hamilton calls a 'quasi-
primary phasis of the secundo-primary' qualities? From this
view it follows that no immediate knowledge of external reality is
given by sight; and yet it would be hard to show that the
'testimony of consciousness,' to which Hamilton constantly and
confidently appeals, makes any such distinction between things
seen and things touched.
The value of Hamilton's philosophy of the conditioned,' as he
called it, is not easy to estimate, chiefly owing to the difficulty of
stating the exact sense in which he held his favourite doctrine of
the relativity of human knowledge. His most striking production
is the first article he published—that on the Philosophy of the
Unconditioned. ' It is a review not directly of Schelling or Hegel,
but of the eclectic system of his French contemporary, Victor
Cousin. The unconditioned, in his use of the term, is a genus of
which the infinite (or unconditionally unlimited) and the absolute
(or unconditionally limited) are the species ; and his contention is
that it is not an object of thought at all, but ‘merely a common
name for what transcends the laws of thought. ' His argument
follows lines similar to those used by Kant in exhibiting the
antinomies of rational cosmology, though it is applied to the con-
clusions of post-Kantian speculation. According to him, there
cannot be any knowledge of that which is without conditions,
whether it is called infinite or absolute; knowledge lies between two
contradictory inconceivables, one of which must be true though
neither can be conceived; all true philosophy is a philosophy of
the conditioned. "To think,' he says, “is to condition. This state-
ment, however, involves two positions which he does not take care
to keep distinct. It implies that we cannot know the infinite or
whole, which in its nature must be without any conditions ; and it
may also be taken as implying that our knowledge of the finite parts
is not a knowledge of them as they truly exist, but only as they are
modified by our way of knowing. This latter position, though very
definitely stated by Hamilton, is not clearly carried out. He follows
Kant by laying chief stress on space and time as the forms under
which we know objects ; but he departs from Kant in holding that
these forms are also modes of things as actually existing. It would
therefore appear that the fact of their being (as Hamilton calls
them) à priori 'forms of thought' does not interfere with the
objective truth of our spatio-temporal knowledge ; it is a know-
ledge, under the forms of space and time, of things which really
1 Reid's Works, ed. Hamilton, Note D*, pp. 881, 882.


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I 2
[CH.
Philosophers
exist in space and time. Hamilton's doctrine of immediate per-
ception necessitates some such view. He saw, moreover, that some
kind of reconciliation was required; but a parenthetical paragraph
in his article on the Philosophy of Perception’exhausts what he
has to say on this important problem. "To obviate misappre-
hension,' he asserts that all that we know is 'those phases of being
which stand in analogy to our faculties of knowledge. ' This vague
phrase may mean little more than that we cannot know what we
are incapable of knowing. Because the nature of a thing is 'in
a
analogy to our faculties' may be the reason why we are able to
know it; it cannot show that we do not know it as it is or in its
actual nature. But Hamilton's mind seemed to work in two
distinct compartments belonging respectively to the philosophy of
perception and to the philosophy of the conditioned.
The two
lines of thought seldom met, and when they did meet the result
was sometimes curious. Rerumque ignarus, imagine gaudet is the
taunt he flings at Brown and the representationists; but when he
poses as the philosopher of the conditioned, he takes the same tag
as his own motto—rerumque ignarus, imagine gaudet.
As regards our supposed knowledge of the absolute or of the
infinite, that, he holds, is merely a negative conception. On this
topic he can hardly be said to have set forth anything substantially
new, though his arguments were novel and striking to the English
reader of the day. Nor, even here, on this fundamental point,
can his view be said to be free from ambiguity. His doctrine
seems to lead logically to a form of positivism; he will not even
allow that the moral consciousness or practical reason' has the
significance assigned to it by Kant; but yet he asserts emphatically
that what cannot be known can be and ought to be believed.
What then is belief? By classifying it as a form or 'faculty' of
cognition, Hamilton strikes at the root of his doctrine that thought
excludes the notion of the absolute or infinite. When on the
war-path against the unconditioned, the ‘imbecility' of human
knowledge is asserted to the fullest extent; when religious belief
is in question, the unknown God’ is represented as somehow the
object of consciousness; and sometimes it would even appear as if
his view were simply that knowledge of the highest object which
consciousness can apprehend, cannot, like our knowledge of par-
ticular things, imply a reference to some higher concept.
The theological results of the philosophy of the conditioned
were worked out thoroughly and with effective logic by Henry


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I]
John Stuart Mill
13
Longueville Mansel, an Oxford professor who was dean of St Paul's
for the three years preceding his death in 1871. Mansel was a
scholar of less miscellaneous learning than Hamilton, and his
thinking was less original; but his thought was not obscured by his
learning. In the notes and appendixes to his edition of Aldrich's
Artis Logicæ Rudimenta (1849), and in his Prolegomena Logica
(1851), he defined and defended a formal view of the science
similar to Hamilton's. His Metaphysics (1860), originally con-
tributed to The Encyclopaedia Britannica, is the best connected
exposition of the philosophy that may be called Hamiltonian;
and, in his Philosophy of the Conditioned (1866), the doctrine was
defended against the criticisms of Mill. He was also the author
of a brilliant brochure, in the form of an Aristophanic comedy,
entitled Phrontisterion (republished in Letters, Lectures and
Reviews, 1873), in which academic reformers and German philo-
sophers are satirised. But his wider fame came from his Bampton
lectures, The Limits of Religious Thought (1858). This work is
a Christian apologetic founded on the doctrine of agnosticism
(to use the modern term) which he shared with Hamilton.
Since knowledge of God, in His absolute existence, is self-con-
tradictory, since 'absolute morality' is equally beyond human
knowledge and since our moral conceptions can only be relative
and phenomenal,' he seeks to disallow any criticisms of theological
doctrine which are based upon human conceptions of good and
evil. The indignation with which this doctrine was repudiated by
John Stuart Mill formed one of the most striking, but not one of
the most important, features of his criticism of the philosophy of
Hamilton.
IV. JOHN STUART MILL AND OTHERS
John Stuart Mill is, on the whole, the most interesting and
characteristic figure in English philosophy in the nineteenth
century. He was successively the hope and the leader, sometimes,
also, the despair, of the school of thought which was regarded as
representative of English traditions. He was born in London on
20 May 1806, and was the eldest son of James Mill. He was
educated entirely by his father and was deliberately shielded from
association with other boys of his age. From his earliest years he
was subjected to a rigid system of intellectual discipline. As a
result of this system, knowledge of what are considered the higher
branches of education was acquired by him in childhood, and he


## p. 14 (#44) ##############################################

14
[ch.
Philosophers
started on his career, according to his own account, with an advan-
tage of a quarter of a century over his contemporaries. This
is probably an overstatement of a very remarkable intellectual
precocity; and John Mill recognised, in later life, that his father's
system had the fault of appealing to the intellect only and that
the culture of his practical and emotional life had been neglected,
while his physical health was probably undermined by the strenu-
ous labour exacted from him. James Mill's method seems to
have been designed to make his son's mind a first-rate thinking
machine, so that the boy might become a prophet of the utilitarian
gospel. In this he succeeded. But the interest—one may almost
say, the tragedy—of the son’s life arose from the fact that he
possessed a much finer and subtler nature than his father's—a
mind which could not be entirely satisfied by the hereditary creed.
He remained more or less orthodox, according to the standards of
his school ; but he welcomed light from other quarters, and there
were times when Grote and others feared that he might become
a castaway. 'A new mystic' was Carlyle's judgment upon some
of his early articles. Mill never became a mystic; but he kept an
open mind, and he saw elements of truth in ideas in which the
stricter utilitarians could see nothing at all.
He had no doubts at the outset of his career. On reading
Bentham (this was when he was fifteen or sixteen) the feeling
rushed upon him that all previous moralists were superseded. '
The principle of utility, he says, understood and applied as it was
by Bentham,
gave unity to my conception of things. I now had opinions; a creed, a
doctrine, a philosophy; in one among the best senses of the word, a religion;
the inculcation and diffusion of which could be made the principal outward
purpose of a life.
Soon afterwards he formed a small ‘Utilitarian Society,' and, for
some few years, he was one of 'a little knot of young men who
adopted his father's philosophical and political views 'with youth-
ful fanaticism. ' A position under his father in the India office
had secured him against the misfortune of having to depend on
literary work for his livelihood; and he found that office-work left
him ample leisure for the pursuit of his wider interests.
He was already coming to be looked upon as a leader of
thought when, in his twenty-first year, the mental crisis occurred
which is described in his Autobiography. This crisis was a result
of the severe strain, physical and mental, to which he had been
subjected from his earliest years. He was in a dull state of
6


## p. 15 (#45) ##############################################

1]
Mill's Early Writings
15
nerves'; the objects in life for which he had been trained and for
which he had worked lost their charm; he had ‘no delight in
virtue, or the general good, but also just as little in anything
else'; a constant habit of analysis had dried up the fountains of
feeling within him. After many months of despair, he found,
accidentally, that the capacity for emotion was not dead, and “the
cloud gradually drew off. ' But the experience he had undergone
modified his theory of life and his character. Happiness was still
to be the end of life, but it should not be taken as its direct end;
' ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The
only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to
it, as the purpose of life. Further, he ceased to attach almost
exclusive importance to the ordering of outward circumstances,
and, 'for the first time, gave its proper place, among the prime
necessities of human well-being, to the internal culture of the
individual. ' In this state of mind, he found, in the poems of
Wordsworth— the poet of unpoetical natures,' as he calls him,
that very culture of the feelings which he was seeking. From him
he learned 'what would be the perennial sources of happiness,
when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed. '
Mill's widened intellectual sympathies were shown by his
reviews of Tennyson's poems and of Carlyle's French Revolution
in 1835 and 1837. The articles on Bentham and on Coleridge,
published in 1838 and 1840 respectively, disclose his modified
philosophical outlook and the exact measure of his new mental
independence. From the position now occupied he did not
seriously depart throughout the strenuous literary work of his
mature years. The influence of the new spirit, which he identified
with the thinking of Coleridge, did not noticeably develop further;
if anything, perhaps, his later writings adhered more nearly to the
traditional views than might have been anticipated from some
indications in his early articles.
These two articles provide the key for understanding Mill's
own thought. He looks upon Bentham as a great constructive
genius who had first brought light and system into regions for-
merly chaotic. No finer or juster appreciation of Bentham's work
has ever been written. Mill agrees with Bentham's fundamental
principle and approves his method. Bentham made morals and poli-
tics scientific; but his knowledge of life was limited. “It is wholly
empirical and the empiricism of one who has had little experience. '
The deeper things of life did not touch him; all the subtler work-
ings of mind and its environment were hidden from his view. It


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16
Philosophers
[CH.
is significant that Mill assumes that, for light on these deeper and
subtler aspects of life, we must go not to other writers of the
empirical tradition but to thinkers of an entirely different school.
He disagrees with the latter fundamentally in the systematic
presentation of their views—whether these be defended by the
easy appeal to intuition or by the more elaborate methods of
Schelling or Hegel. What we really get from them are half-lights-
glimpses, often fitful and always imperfect, into aspects of truth
not seen at all by their opponents. Coleridge represented this
type of thought. He had not Bentham's great constructive
faculties; but he had insight in regions where Bentham's vision
failed, and he appreciated, what Bentham almost entirely over-
looked, the significance of historical tradition.
The ideas which Mill derived from the writings of Coleridge, or
from his association with younger men who had been influenced
by Coleridge, did not bring about any fundamental change in his
philosophical standpoint, but they widened his horizon. And in
nearly all his books we can trace their effect. He seems conscious
that the analysis which satisfied other followers of Bentham is
imperfect, and that difficulties remain which they are unable to
solve and cannot even see.
Mill's System of Logic was published in 1843, and ran through
many editions, some of which—especially the third (1850) and the
eighth (1872)—were thoroughly revised and supplemented by the
incorporation of new, mainly controversial, matter. It is probably
the greatest of his books. In spite of Hobbes's treatise, and of
the suggestive discussions in the third book of Locke's Essay, the
greater English philosophers almost seem to have conspired to
neglect the theory of logic. It had kept its place as an academic
study, but on traditional lines; Aristotle was supposed to have
said the last word on it, and that last word to be enshrined in
scholastic manuals. English thought, however, was beginning to
emerge from this stage. Richard Whately had written a text-
book, Elements of Logic (1826), which, by its practical method and
modern illustrations, gave a considerable impetus to the study,
and Hamilton's more comprehensive researches had begun. From
them Mill did not learn much or anything. What he set bimself
to work out was a theory of evidence in harmony with the first
principles of the empirical philosophy; and this was an almost
untouched problem. He may have obtained help from Locke; he
.
acknowledges the value for his thinking of Dugald Stewart's
analysis of the process of reasoning; he was still more indebted to


## p. 17 (#47) ##############################################

E
3
1] Mill's System of Logic 17
his discussions with a society of friends. Thus he worked out his
theory of terms, propositions and the syllogism; and then the book
was laid aside for five years. When he returned to it, and pro-
ceeded to analyse the inductive process, he found rich material
to hand not only in Sir John Herschel's Discourse on the Study of
Natural Philosophy (1830), but, also, in William Whewell's History
of the Inductive Sciences (1837). After his theory of induction
was substantially complete, he became acquainted with, and derived
stimulus and assistance from, the first two volumes of Comte's
Cours de philosophie positive (1830). These were the chief in-
fluences upon his work, and their enumeration serves to bring out
the originality of his performance. His work marks an epoch
in logical enquiry, not for English philosophy only but in modern
thought.
The reputation of Mill's Logic was largely due to his analysis
of inductive proof. He provided the empirical sciences with a set
of formulae and criteria which might serve the same purpose for
them as the time-worn formulae of the syllogism had served for
arguments that proceeded from general principles. In this part
of his work he derived important material from Whewell, much as
he differed from him in general point of view, and he found his
own methods implicitly recognised in Herschel's Discourse. The
importance and originality of Mill's contribution, however, cannot
be denied. His analysis is much more precise and complete than
any that had been carried out by his immediate predecessors. He
seeks to trace the steps by which we pass from statements about
particular facts to general truths, and also to justify the transition:
though he is more convincing in his psychological account of the
process than in his logical justification of its validity. When he is
brought face to face with the fundamental problem of knowledge,
as Hume had been before him, he does not show Hume's clearness
of thought.
Mill's work is not merely a logic in the limited sense of that
term which had become customary in England. It is a theory of
knowledge such as Locke and Hume attempted. The whole is
rendered more precise by its definite reference to the question of
proof or evidence; but the problem is Hume's problem over again.
The ultimate elements of knowledge are subjective entities-
'feelings or states of consciousness'—but knowledge bas objective
validity. The elements are distinct, though the laws of association
bind them into groups and may even fuse them into inseparable
wholes—but knowledge unites and distinguishes in an order which
2
E. L. XIV.
CH. I.


## p. 18 (#48) ##############################################

18
[CH.
Philosophers
is not that of laws of association. The theory of knowledge,
accordingly, has to explain how our thinking, especially in the
transition from assertion to assertion which we call “proof,' has
validity for objective reality, and, in doing so, it has to give a
tenable account of the universal principles postulated in these
transitions. In Mill's case, as in Hume's, this has to be done on
the assumption that the immediate object in experience is some-
thing itself mental, and that there are no à priori principles
determining the connections of objects. In his doctrine of terms
and propositions, Mill emphasises the objective reference in
knowledge, although he cannot be said to meet, or even fully to
recognise, the difficulty of reconciling this view with his psycho-
logical analysis. He faces much more directly the problem of
the universal element in knowledge. He contends that, ultimately,
proof is always from particulars to particulars. The general
proposition which stands as major premiss in a syllogism is only
a shorthand record of a number of particular observations, which
facilitates and tests the transition to the conclusion. All the
general principles involved in thinking, even the mathematical
axioms, are interpreted as arrived at in this way from experience:
so that the assertion of their universal validity stands in need of
justification.
In induction the essential inference is to new particulars, not
to the general statement or law. And here he faces the crucial
point for his theory. Induction, as he expounds it, is based upon
the causal principle. Mill followed Hume in his analysis of cause.
Now the sting of Hume's doctrine lay in its' subjectivity—the
reduction of the causal relation to a mental habit. Mill did not
succeed in extracting the sting; he could only ignore it. Through-
out, the relation of cause and effect is treated by him as something
objective: not, indeed, as implying anything in the nature of
power, but as signifying a certain constancy (which he, unwarrant-
ably, describes as invariable) in the succession of phenomena. He
never hesitates to speak of it as an objective characteristic of
events, but without ever enquiring into its objective grounds.
According to Mill, it is only when we are able to discover a causal
connection among phenomena that strict inductive inference is
possible either to a general law or to new empirical particulars.
But the law of universal causation, on his view, is itself an inference
from a number of particular cases. Thus it is established by
inductive inference and yet, at the same time, all inductive
inference depends upon it. Mill seeks to resolve the contradiction


## p. 19 (#49) ##############################################

1] Mind and the External World
19
by maintaining that this general truth, that is to say, the law
of causation, is indeed itself arrived at by induction, but by
a weaker form of induction, called per enumerationem simplicem,
in which the causal law is not itself assumed. Such a bare
catalogue of facts, not penetrating to the principle of their
connection, would not, in ordinary cases, justify an inference that
can be relied on. But Mill thinks that the variety of experience
that supports it in this case, its constant verification by new
experience and the probability that, had there been any exception
to it, that exception would have come to light, justify our confidence
in it as the ground of all the laws of nature. He does not
recognise that these grounds for belief-whatever their value
may be—all assume the postulate of uniformity which he is
endeavouring to justify.
A later and more comprehensive discussion of his philosophical
views, especially in a psychological regard, is given in his Exami-
nation of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy and of the principal
philosophical questions discussed in his writings. This work was
published in 1865; and, as his habit was, the author amplified it
greatly in subsequent editions by replies to his critics. In this
case the criticisms were exceptionally numerous. The book focused
the whole controversial energy of the period belonging to the two
opposed schools, the intuitional and the empirical; and, in spite of
its controversial character, it became the leading text-book of that
psychological philosophy which had been adumbrated by Hume.
It is a work which shows Mill's powers at their most mature stage.
He criticises with severity the theory which he sets out to examine;
but he is alive to the awkward places in his own position. Among
the numerous doctrines on which he left the impress of his work-
manship, none excited more attention at the time of the book's
publication, or are of greater permanent importance, than his
doctrines of the external world and of the self. There is nothing
fundamentally original about his views on these topics; but
his discussion of both illustrates his ability to see further into the
facts than his predecessors, and his candour in recording what he
sees, along, however, with a certain disinclination to pursue an
enquiry which might land him definitely on the other side of
the traditional lines. Mill's doctrine is essentially Humean, though,
as regards the external world, he prefers to call it Berkeleyan; and
here he is the inventor of a phrase: matter is 'permanent possi-
bility of sensation. ' The phrase is striking and useful; but a
possibility of sensation is not sensation, and the permanence which
2-2


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20
Philosophers
[CH.
he attributes to the possibility of sensation implies an objective
order: so that the reduction of matter to sensation is implicitly
relinquished when it appears to be affirmed in words. Mind, in
somewhat similar fashion, is reduced to a succession of feelings or
states of consciousness. But the fact of memory proves a stumbling-
block in his way; he cannot explain how a succession of feelings
should be conscious of itself as a succession; and he implicitly
admits the need of a principle of unity. Thus, he almost relin-
quishes his own theory and only avoids doing so explicitly by
falling back on the assertion that here we are in presence of the
final inexplicability in which ultimate questions always merge.
In spite of the prominence of the ethical interest in his mind
and in spite, also, of numerous ethical discussions in his other
writings, Mill's sole contribution to the fundamental problem of
ethical theory was his small volume Utilitarianism, which first
appeared in Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and wa reprinted in book-
form in 1863. Perhaps, he regarded the fundamental positions of
Benthamism as too secure to need much elaboration. What he offers
is a finely conceived and finely written defence of utilitarian ethics,
into which his own modifications of Bentham's doctrine of life are
worked. He holds that the sanctions of this doctrine are not weaker
than those of any other doctrine, and that, in its own nature, it is
neither a selfish nor a sensual theory. It is not selfish, because it
regards the pleasures of all men as of equal moment; it is not
sensual, because it recognises the superior value of intellectual,
artistic and social pleasures as compared with those of the senses.
But Mill fails in trying to establish a logical connection between
the universal reference of the ethical doctrine and the egoistic
analysis of individual action to which his psychology committed him.
And he is so determined to emphasise the superiority of the pleasures
commonly called 'higher,' that he maintains that, merely as
pleasures, they are superior in kind to the pleasures of the senses,
irrespective of any excess of the latter in respect of quantity. In
so doing he strikes at the root of hedonism, for he makes the
ultimate criterion of value reside not in pleasure itself but in that
characteristic—whatever it may turn out to be—which makes one
kind of pleasure superior to another.
Mill's social and political writings, in addition to occasional
articles, consist of the short treatise Considerations on Repre-
sentative Government (1860), Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform
(1859), the essays On Liberty (1859) and on the Subjection of
Women (1869), Essays on some Unsettled Questions of Political


## p. 21 (#51) ##############################################

1]
Political and Economic Theory
21
Economy (1831, 1844) and Principles of Political Economy (1848).
The method appropriate to these topics had been already discussed
in the chapters on 'the Logic of the Moral Sciences' included in
his Logic. He sought a via media between the purely empirical
method and the deductive method. The latter, as employed by his
father, was modelled on the reasonings of geometry, which is not a
science of causation. The method of politics, if it is to be deductive,
must belong to a different type, and will (he holds) be the same
as that used in mathematical physics. Dynamics is a deductive
science because the law of the composition of forces holds ;
similarly, politics is a deductive science because the causes with
which it deals follow this law: the effects of these causes, when
conjoined, are the same as the sum of the effects which the same
causes produce when acting separately. Like his predecessors,
Mill postulated certain forces as determining human conduct:
especially, self-interest and mental association. From their working
he deduced political and social consequences. He did not diverge
from the principles agreed upon by those with whom he was
associated. Perhaps, he did not add very much to them. But he
saw their limitations more clearly than others did: the hypo-
thetical nature of economic theory, and the danger that democratic
government might prove antagonistic to the causes of individual
freedom and of the common welfare. To guard against these
dangers he proposed certain modifications of the representative
system. But his contemporaries, and even his successors of the
same way of thinking in general, for long looked upon the dangers
as imaginary, and his proposals for their removal were ignored.
The essay On Liberty—the most popular of all his works—is an
eloquent defence of the thesis that the sole end for which
mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering
with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection,'
but, as an argument, it meets everywhere with the difficulty of
determining the precise point at which the distinction between
self-regarding and social (even directly social) activity is to be
drawn. Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, accepting Mill's utilitarian
criterion, raked his positions with a fire of brilliant and incisive, if
unsympathetic, criticism in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873).
Mill's Political Economy has been variously regarded as an
improved Adam Smith and as a popularised Ricardo. Perhaps
the latter description is nearer the mark. Its essential doctrines
differ little, if at all, from those of Ricardo; the theory of the
'wages fund, for example, is formulated quite in the spirit of
a


## p. 22 (#52) ##############################################

22
[CH.
Philosophers
Ricardo, though this theory was afterwards relinquished or modi-
fied by Mill in consequence of the criticisms of William Thomas
Thornton. But the work has a breadth of treatment which
sometimes reminds one of Adam Smith: the hypothetical nature
of economic theory was not overlooked, and the applications to
social philosophy' were kept in view. In spite of his adherence
to the maxim of laissez faire, Mill recognised the possibility of
modifying the system of distribution, and, with regard to that
system, he displayed a leaning to the socialist ideal, which grew
stronger as his life advanced. His methodical and thorough
treatment of economics made his work a text-book for more than
a generation, and largely determined the scope of most of th
treatises of his own and the succeeding period, even of those
written by independent thinkers.
Mill died at Avignon in 1873. After his death, were published
his Autobiography (1873) and Three Essays on Religion: Nature
the Utility of Religion and Theism (1874). These essays were
written between 1850 and 1870 and include the author's latest
thoughts on ultimate questions. He had been educated in the
belief that speculation on ultimate questions is futile; in his works
he had always maintained the attitude afterwards called agnosticism,
for which he was willing to adopt Comte's term positivism; he
accepted, also, in general, Comte's doctrine on this point, though
always dissociating himself from the latter's political and social
theories. But, even while, in his book Auguste Comte and
Positivism (1865), accepting the view that the essential nature
and ultimate causes of things are inscrutable, he holds that this
'positive mode of thought is not necessarily a denial of the super-
natural,' but only throws it back beyond the limits of science. His
posthumous essays show a further development. In that on nature
(the earliest of the series), he dwells upon the imperfections of the
cosmic order as showing that it cannot have been the creation of a
being of infinite goodness and power; in the last essay of the
volume, he approaches a tentative and limited form of theism
the doctrine of a finite God.
a
For more than a generation Mill's influence was dominant in
all departments of philosophical and political thought; he had
the initiative, and set the problems for his opponents as well as
for his adherents ; and his works became university text-books.
This holds of politics, economics, ethics, psychology and logic.
A striking reaction against his influence is shown in the work of


## p. 23 (#53) ##############################################

1]
Alexander Bain
23
William Stanley Jevons, professor at Manchester and afterwards
in London, whose economic and logical writings are distinguished
by important original ideas. In his Theory of Political Economy
(1871), he introduced the conception of final (or marginal) utility,
which, subsequently, has been greatly developed in the analytic
and mathematical treatment of the subject. In logic, also, he laid
the foundations for a mathematical treatment in his Pure Logic
(1864) and Substitution of Similars (1869); and, in his Principles
of Science (1874), he fully elaborated his theory of scientific infer-
ence, a theory which diverged widely from the theory of induction
expounded by Mill. As time went on, Jevons became more and
more critical of the foundations of Mill's empirical philosophy,
which he attacked unsparingly in discussions contributed to Mind.
George Grote, the historian of Greece, an older contemporary
and early associate of Mill, deserves mention here not only for his
works on the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, but, also, for some
independent contributions to ethics, published together under
the title Fragments on Ethical Subjects (1876). He had little
sympathy with Mill’s approximations to types of thought opposed
to the traditional utilitarianism. In this respect he agreed with
Alexander Bain, professor at Aberdeen, a writer of far greater
importance in a philosophical regard. Bain was younger than
Mill and long outlived him; he assisted him in some of his works,
especially the Logic; he wrote numerous works himself; but his
pre-eminence was in psychology, to which his chief contributions
were two elaborate books, The Senses and the Intellect (1855) and
The Emotions and the Will (1859). The psychology of James Mill
and of J. S. Mill was, in the main, derived from Hartley; but
it was Hartley as expurgated by Priestley, Hartley with the
physiology left out? Bain reinstated the physiological factor, not
in Hartley's rather speculative manner, but by introducing facts of
nerve and muscle whenever they could serve to elucidate mental
process. That came to be, as a rule, whenever the mental
process itself was obscure or difficult.