Mill, John Stuart

MILL, JOHN STUART. - Philosopher and economist, son of James, b. 20 May 1806 in London, d. 8 May 1873 at Avignon. He adopted the surname Stuart out of gratitude to the wealthy Sir John Stuart, who had subsidized his father.

Educated and instructed personally by his father, he was of an extraordinary precocity. At the age of 3 he began the study of Greek. Between the ages of 5 and 12 he covered a great part of Greek and Latin literature (Xenophon, Plato, Aesop, Herodotus, Plutarch, Diogenes Laertius, etc.), English authors (Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Campbell, etc.), besides the elements of arithmetic, geometry, algebra, and differential calculus. He then became acquainted with the Rhetoric and part of Aristotle's Organon, certain treatises on logic among which was Hobbes's Computatio sive logica, his father's History of British India, and the works of Ricardo and Smith. At the age of 14 his father's direct lessons ceased. M. substantially approves of his educational experiment, which allowed him "to start out, in intellectual production, with the advantage of a quarter of a century over his contemporaries" (Autobiography, 2nd ed., London 1873, pp. 30-31). Yet alongside his precocious intellectual development he lacked an equal cultivation of the body and of feeling; and though of a noble moral level, his education was, owing to his father's subsequent agnosticism, areligious: "I am among the very few, in this country, who have, I will not say abandoned, but rather never had a religious faith" (ibid., p. 43: the judgment is considerably tempered by A. Bain, J. S. M. A criticism, London 1882).

In 1820-21 M. was in France at the home of Bentham's brother (v.); there he continued his studies of science and came more intimately into contact with French culture. Having returned to England he came under the influence of Bentham's Traité de législation, then read Locke, Hartley, Berkeley, Hume, Reid, Dugald Stewart, Brown, Helvétius, Condillac. In 1822 he founded the small cultural society Utilitarian Society. In 1823 he entered the India House, in the office of "examiner" of the correspondence for India (in 1828 he was promoted to "Assistant Examiner" and from 1856 he succeeded his father as head of the office). Having founded the Speculative Debating Society in 1825 and having overcome a grave psychological and spiritual crisis (1826), he devoted himself to his vast production, already begun in 1822 with essays in newspapers and in the Westminster Review (later in the Examiner, Edinburgh Review, Monthly Repository, London and Westminster Review). Between 1830 and 1831 he wrote the 5 Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (London 1844). He then composed the 1st book of his principal work A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (completed in 1841, ed. there 1843); and between 1845 and 1847 the Principles of Political Economy (there 1848): both works met with prompt success (of the Principles, 3 editions in 4 years). There followed On Liberty (on liberty in the social and political sense, there 1859); Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (there 1859); Considerations on Representative Government (there 1860); The Subjection of Women (written in 1861, ed. there 1869); Utilitarianism (composed in 1861, first appeared in Fraser's Magazine, ed. separately, there 1863); A. Comte and Positivism (there 1865); An Examination of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy (there 1865: a thorough study of the philosophical problems treated by Hamilton and a mature restatement of his own thought); Three Essays on Religion (posthumous, there 1874). In 1859 he began the preparation of the Dissertations and Discussions, which gather almost all of his essays (I-II, there 1859; III, there 1867; IV, there 1876). Of the Autobiography (there 1873) the first part (down to 1859) was finished in 1861, the rest in 1870. Into M.'s scientific work there is inserted, in 1851, his marriage to the widow Taylor: M., with acknowledged exaggeration, affirms that he owes much to her collaboration, particularly with regard to the writings On Liberty and Subjection of Women. In 1865 he was elected to Parliament. Having fallen in the subsequent elections (1868), he retired to his villa at Avignon, where he spent, near the tomb of his consort and occupying himself with music and botanical research, the greater part of his last years. He was in contact with the most representative men of English thought of his time and with many others in France, particularly, for several years, with Comte. The two volumes of correspondence (H. Elliot, The Letters of J. S. M., London 1910) are almost indispensable for a full knowledge of his thought.

M. is among the most eminent thinkers of the 19th century. Even though he did not construct a system of his own and organically his own, he illuminated, with acute investigations, important problems of logic, psychology, ethics, and political economy. A characteristic note is the valuation of experience as the sole source and measure of the possibilities and limits of human thought. He takes up in depth, reacting against the parenthesis of the Scottish school and against every intuitionist and aprioristic tendency (Platonism, Cartesianism), the typical direction of English thought. Empiricism, positivism, associationism, and phenomenalism accordingly define Millian speculation; which is nevertheless vigilant, conscious of its own limits and difficulties, finely sensitive to problems. It is perhaps for this reason that, despite the narrowness and at times the poverty of the conclusions to which the positivist method constrained him, M.'s work had, at least in England, an important part in the spiritual development of his century.

Logic is not a simple "codification of the laws or rules of thought." It is "the science of the mental operations directed to the assessment of evidence" and to the validity of scientific inquiry: as such it "is the common ground on which the partisans of Hartley, Reid, Locke, Kant can meet and shake hands" (System, Introd., p. 13, § 7). Treating of the categories, M. judges the Aristotelian classification severely: "a mere catalogue of the rough distinctions of common language with little or no effort of analytical penetration from a philosophical point of view" (ibid., bk. I, ch. 3, vol. I, p. 50). His classification, informed by the subjectivist-phenomenalist viewpoint, distinguishes: a) states of consciousness, b) the consciousness or mind in which they are, c) the succession-coexistence, equality-diversity among states of consciousness, d) bodies as a real possibility beyond consciousness (ibid., p. 83, § 15). M.'s theory of the syllogism has remained famous for the acuteness of its analyses and of its criticism. Since every true reasoning proceeds only from experience, the syllogism is not an "instrument of reasoning" but "of proof." That "Wellington is mortal" is not in reality derived from the general principle "every man is mortal," but from the fact that Socrates, Plato... and Wellington's contemporaries have died. The general principle contains all the particulars; therefore, once one has reached it, the inference is finished: every actual inference is from particular to particular, and general propositions are "mere registrations of such inferences already performed" (ibid., p. 221, § 4). Reasoning is therefore entirely reduced by M. to induction-analogy: the syllogism (he claims this discovery for himself) brings about no true progress in thought and is valid only as a method of verifying inductive processes. The most original part of Millian logic is undoubtedly the theory of induction. Induction is the mental operation "by which we infer that what we know to be true of one or more particular cases is also true in all cases that resemble that one in certain definable respects" (ibid., bk. III, ch. 1, p. 328, § 2): it "is the operation of discovering and proving general propositions" (ibid., p. 333, § 1). Elsewhere (v. INDUZIONE) the essential elements of the Millian doctrine have been set forth; here the importance attributed by M. to causality must be noted. A cause is "the invariable and necessary antecedent of a fact," "a phenomenon or complex of phenomena that conditions the new fact" (ibid., III, ch. 5, pp. 367-77, § 2). The concept of cause therefore has a purely empirical foundation (Hume): every phenomenon of the universe manifests itself as having a necessary antecedent. This constancy of causality (from which M., albeit with oscillations of thought, does not exempt even free will), attested by the most universal experience, is the valid and sole foundation of induction. But, derived from experience, causality serves only within the limits of that experience; its value is uncertain already outside our universe (ibid., bk. III, ch. 21, vol. II, p. 108, § 4).

It is also the empiricist-phenomenalist viewpoint that led M. to define matter and bodies as "permanent possibility of sensations" or "groups of possible sensations" (Examination, ch. 10): the formula is his, but the concept is already substantially in Berkeley-Hume. From the phenomenalist point of view the definition is exact; but M. completely eluded the problem of the foundation of the "groups of possible sensations," which can only be placed in a permanent structure of material reality, as the cause of the sensations themselves. Regarding the ego or subject, however, he hesitated to shut himself within the Humean position: it presents "grave intrinsic difficulties," especially in relation to memory and the expectation of facts not yet real, for which it seems one must recognize in the ego, as a common and permanent element of psychic states, "a reality different from that granted to matter" (Examination, ch. 12, pp. 262-63).

In ethics M. attempts to elevate the utilitarianism of Bentham and of his father to a more fully human meaning. "An action is good to the extent that it promotes happiness, bad to the extent that it opposes it" (Utilitarianism, p. 9). The proof: nothing is desirable apart from happiness, which is therefore the sole end of human action (ibid., p. 58). The useful, however, must not be confused with individual self-interest, and, as in all things, so too in pleasures a qualitative discrimination is to be admitted. By an entirely extrinsic criterion M. appeals to the judgment of the competent and, in case of conflict, of the majority (ibid., pp. 12, 15). He places before them the pleasures of the intellect and of the imagination ("better a dissatisfied Socrates than a satisfied fool": ibid., p. 14) and the development of the sentiments of sympathy. If at bottom M.'s "useful" agrees, in part, with what is "fitting to human nature," there is nevertheless in him no absolute foundation of moral values. In particular, obligation is nothing but a sentiment arisen by association from the persuasion of the usefulness and necessity of a given action (ibid., ch. 3). Of religion M. did not have a serene vision. He recognized in it, in the end, a certain positive value, but simply "as a source of personal satisfaction and of elevated feelings" (Three essays, London 1885, p. 104). Of the existence of God (as an ordering Mind of nature, not as an infinite Being and omnipotence) and of the immortality of the soul, he admitted only a doubtful probability (ibid., p. 174): the whole supernatural realm lies within the limits of a desire and a "hope" which, however slight, is nevertheless not to be despised (ibid., p. 244).

In economics M. accepts and develops the system of Ricardo, Smith, Malthus. He is nevertheless influenced by Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, so that classical liberalism in him is tempered by pronounced socialist tendencies. Noteworthy is his critique of communism, to which is immanent "the danger of hindering every development of individuality, of extinguishing sources of progress..." and of depressing everything "into a tame uniformity of thoughts, feelings and actions" (Principles, popular ed., London 1873, p. 130 A 3). With regard to production, his four principles on capital should be remembered: 1) industry is limited by capital; 2) every increase of capital is apt to produce an increase of industry; 3) capital is the result of saving; 4) every capital is consumed (ibid., p. 35 ff.). As a remedy for low wages, M. defends the limitation of births: "not restrained by the prudent conduct of the individual and of the State, population is limited by famine and hardship" (ibid., l. II, ch. 11, p. 712 B 3). Rich in original reflections are books IV and V of the Principles, respectively on the dynamics of political economy (M. had faith in a progressive improvement of social conditions and advocated not a few of the later reforms) and on the intervention of public authority. M. had almost a cult of individual liberty (expressed politically in representative government through the vote, extended to women, and plural voting). The widest possible exercise of liberty in the speculative, scientific, practical, moral and religious field was for him the indispensable condition for the control, the progress and the truth of human opinions.

1st series, 12), ibid. 1851; Utilitarianism: E. Debenedetti, ibid. 1866; Representative Government (Bibl. of political sciences, 1st series, 2), ibid. 1885; On Socialism: G. Gioocchi-Viani, Milan 1880; The Subjection of Women: A. M. Mazzoni, Lanciano n.d., and G. Navelli, Turin 1883; Selected Pages, trans. and preface by P. Carbonel, Milan 1923. Studies: P. P. Alexander, Moral causation or notes on M.'s notes to the chapter on freedom in 3rd ed. of Examination of Hamilton, London 1868; P. E. Goggia, La mente di M.: saggio di logica positiva applicata specialmente alla Loria, Livorno 1869; J. Grote, Examination of the utilitarian philosophy, London 1870; L. A. Selby-Bigge, British moralist, Oxford 1887; W. L. Courtney, Life of J. S. M., London 1889; Th. Gompers, J. S. M., Ein Nachruf, Vienna 1889; S. Jevons, Examination of J. S. M.'s philosophy, London 1890; L. Ferri, La psicologia dell'associazione (part 2, ch. 3), Turin 1894; Ch. Douglas, J. S. M., a study of his ethics, Edinburgh and London 1895; id., The ethics of J. S. M., ibid. 1897; J. Watson, M., Comte and Spencer, Glasgow 1895; L. Stephen, The English utilitarians, III, London 1900; S. Saenger, J. S. M., Stuttgart 1901; A. L. Martinazzoli, La teoria dell'individualismo secondo J. S. M., Milan 1905; E. Thouverez, S. M., Blond 1906; J. Morley, J. S. M., in Miscellanies, London 1908; F. W. Witzker, Comte and M., ibid. 1909; M. Taylor, M.'s private life, s. voll., London 1910; A. Thiemeg, Die Sozialethik J. S. M.'s, Leipzig 1910; J. Archambault, S. M., Paris 1912; A. Graziani, Ricardo e J. S. M., Bari 1921; E. Veutscher, Das Problem des Empirismus dargestellt aus J. S. M., Bonn 1922; G. Zuccante, J. S. M. e l'utilitarismo, Florence 1922; A. Bernard, J. S. M. und der Empirismus, Munich 1927; G. Morlan, America's heritage from J. S. M., New York 1936; R. Jackson, Examination of deductive logic of J. S. M., Oxford 1941; R. Vaysset-Boutbien, S. M. et la sociologie française contemporaine, Paris 1941. Further indications of editions and recent studies in G. A. De Brie, Bibliographia philosophica 1934-45, Brussels 1950, p. 479.

Ugo Viglino