James (1773–1836), Scottish-born philosopher and social theorist. He applied the utilitarianism of his contemporary Bentham to such social matters as systems of education and government, law and penal systems, and colonial policy. He also advocated the associationism of Hume. Mill was an influential thinker in early nineteenth-century London, but his most important role in the history of philosophy was the influence he had on his son, J. S. Mill. He raised his more famous son as a living experiment in his associationist theory of education. His utilitarian views were developed and extended by J. S. Mill, while his associationism was also adopted by his son and became a precursor of the latter’s phenomenalism. See also MILL, J. S. A.N. John Stuart (1806–73), British empiricist philosopher and utilitarian social reformer. He was the son of James Mill, a historian of British India, a leading defender of Bentham’s utilitarianism, and an advocate of reforms based on that philosophy. The younger Mill was educated by his father in accordance with the principles of the associationist psychology adopted by the Benthamites and deriving from Hartley, and was raised with the expectation that he would become a defender of the principles of the Benthamite school. He began the study of Greek at three and Latin at eight, and later assisted his father in educating his younger brothers and sisters. At twenty he went to France to learn the language, and studied chemistry and mathematics at Montpellier. From 1824 to 1828 he wrote regularly for the Westminster Review, the Benthamite journal. In 1828 he underwent a mental crisis that lasted some months. This he later attributed to his rigid education; in any case he emerged from a period of deep depression still advocating utilitarianism but in a very much revised version. Mill visited Paris during the revolution of 1830, meeting Lafayette and other popular leaders, and was introduced to the writings of Saint-Simon and Comte. Also in 1830 he met Mrs. Harriet Taylor, to whom he immediately became devoted. They married only in 1851, when her husband died. He joined the India House headquarters of the East India Company in 1823, serving as an examiner until the company was dissolved in 1858 in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny. Mill sat in Parliament from 1865 to 1868. Harriet Mill died in 1858, and was buried at Avignon, where Mill thereafter regularly resided for half of each year until his own death.
Mill’s major works are his System of Logic, Deductive and Inductive (first edition, 1843), Political Economy (first edition, 1848), On Liberty (1860), Utilitarianism (first published in Fraser’s Magazine, 1861), The Subjection of Women (1869), An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865), and the posthumous Three Essays on Religion (1874). His writing style is excellent, and his history of his own mental development, the Autobiography (1867), is a major Victorian literary text. His main opponents philosophically were Whewell and Hamilton, and it is safe to say that after Mill their intuitionism in metaphysics, philosophy of science, and ethics could no longer be defended. Mill’s own views were later to be eclipsed by those of T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and the other British idealists. In the present century his views in metaphysics and philosophy of science have been revived and defended by Russell and the logical positivists, while his utilitarian ethics has regained its status as one of the major ethical theories. His social philosophy deeply infuenced the Fabians and other groups on the British left; its impact continues. Mill was brought up on the basis of, and to believe in, the strict utilitarianism of his father. His own development largely consisted in his attempts to broaden it, to include a larger and more sympathetic view of human nature, and to humanize its program to fit this broader view of human beings. In his own view, no doubt largely correct, he did not so much reject his father’s principles as fill in the gaps and eliminate rigidities and crudities. He continued throughout his life his father’s concern to propagate principles conceived as essential to promoting human happiness. These extended from moral principles to principles of political economy to principles of logic and metaphysics. Psychology. Mill’s vision of the human being was rooted in the psychological theories he defended. Arguing against the intuitionism of Reid and Whewell, he extended the associationism of his father. On this theory, ideas have their genetic antecedents in sensation, a complex idea being generated out of a unique set of simple, elementary ideas, through associations based on regular patterns in the presented sensations. Psychological analysis reveals the elementary parts of ideas and is thus the means for investigating the causal origins of our ideas. The elder Mill followed Locke in conceiving analysis on the model of definition, so that the psychological elements are present in the idea they compose and the idea is nothing but its associated elements. The younger Mill emerged from his mental crisis with the recognition that mental states are often more than the sum of the ideas that are their genetic antecedents. On the revised model of analysis, the analytical elements are not actually present in the idea, but are present only dispositionally, ready to be recovered by association under the analytical set. Moreover, it is words that are defined, not ideas, though words become general only by becoming associated with ideas.
Analysis thus became an empirical task, rather than something settled a priori according to one’s metaphysical predispositions, as it had been for Mill’s predecessors. The revised psychology allowed the younger Mill to account empirically in a much more subtle way than could the earlier associationists for the variations in our states of feeling. Thus, for example, the original motive to action is simple sensations of pleasure, but through association things originally desired as means become associated with pleasure and thereby become desirable as ends, as parts of one’s pleasure. But these acquired motives are not merely the sum of the simple pleasures that make them up; they are more than the sum of those genetic antecedents. Thus, while Mill holds with his father that persons seek to maximize their pleasures, unlike his father he also holds that not all ends are selfish, and that pleasures are not only quantitatively but also qualitatively distinct.
Ethics. In ethics, then, Mill can hold with the intuitionists that our moral sentiments are qualitatively distinct from the lower pleasures, while denying the intuitionist conclusion that they are innate. Mill urges, with his father and Bentham, that the basic moral norm is the principle of utility, that an action is right provided it maximizes human welfare. Persons always act to maximize their own pleasure, but the general human welfare can be among the pleasures they seek. Mill’s position thus does not have the problems that the apparently egoistic psychology of his father created. The only issue is whether a person ought to maximize human welfare, whether he ought to be the sort of person who is so motivated.
Mill’s own ethics is that this is indeed what one ought to be, and he tries to bring this state of human being about in others by example, and by urging them to expand the range of their human sympathy through poetry like that of Wordsworth, through reading the great moral teachers such as Jesus and Socrates, and by other means of moral improvement.
Mill also offers an argument in defense of the principle of utility. Against those who, like Whewell, argue that there is no basic right to pleasure, he argues that as a matter of psychological fact, people seek only pleasure, and concludes that it is therefore pointless to suggest that they ought to do anything other than this. The test of experience thus excludes ends other than pleasure. This is a plausible argument. Less plausible is his further argument that since each seeks her own pleasure, the general good is the (ultimate) aim of all. This latter argument unfortunately presupposes the invalid premise that the law for a whole follows from laws about the individual parts of the whole. Other moral rules can be justified by their utility and the test of experience. For example, such principles of justice as the rules of property and of promise keeping are justified by their role in serving certain fundamental human needs. Exceptions to such secondary rules can be justified by appeal to the principle of utility. But there is also utility in not requiring in every application a lengthy utilitarian calculation, which provides an objective justification for overlooking what might be, objectively considered in terms of the principle of utility, an exception to a secondary rule. Logic and philosophy of science. The test of experience is also brought to bear on norms other than those of morality, e.g., those of logic and philosophy of science. Mill argues, against the rationalists, that science is not demonstrative from intuited premises. Reason in the sense of deductive logic is not a logic of proof but a logic of consistency. The basic axioms of any science are derived through generalization from experience. The axioms are generic and delimit a range of possible hypotheses about the specific subject matter to which they are applied. It is then the task of experiment and, more generally, observation to eliminate the false and determine which hypothesis is true. The axioms, the most generic of which is the law of the uniformity of nature, are arrived at not by this sort of process of elimination but