dubbed the ‘semi-circumgyratory.’ In addition to this, Helen has built me a herbarium, a little room fitted up with closets for my plants, shelves for my botanical books, and a great table whereon to manipulate them all. Thus, you see, with my herbarium, my vibratory, and my semi-circumgyratory, I am in clover; and you may imagine with what scorn I think of the House of Commons, which, comfortable club as it is said to be, could offer me none of these comforts, or, more perfectly speaking, these necessaries of life.” Mill was an enthusiastic botanist all his life long, and a frequent contributor of notes and short papers to the Phytologist. One of the things that he looked forward to during his last journey to Avignon was seeing the spring flowers and completing a flora of the locality. His delight in scenery frequently appears in letters written to his friends during his summer and autumn tours.
Yet he did not relax his laborious habits nor his ardent outlook on human affairs. The essays in the fourth volume of his Dissertations—on endowments, on land, on labour, on metaphysical and psychological questions—were written for the Fortnightly Review at intervals after his short parliamentary career. One of his first tasks was to send his treatise on the Subjection of Women (written 1861, published 1869, many editions) through the press. The essay on Theism was written soon after. The last public work in which he engaged was the starting of the Land Tenure Reform Association. The interception by the state of the unearned increment, and the promotion of co-operative agriculture, were the most striking features in his programme. He wrote in the Examiner and made a public speech in favour of the association a few months before his death. The secret of the ardour with which he took up this question probably was his conviction that a great struggle was impending in Europe between labour and capital. He regarded his project as a timely compromise.
Mill died at Avignon on the 8th of May 1873. He was a man of extreme simplicity in his method of life. Though occasionally irritable in speech, in his written polemics he was remarkable for courtesy to opponents and a capacity to understand their point of view. His references to his friends were always generous, and he was always ready to assist those whose work needed help. For example, he desired to guarantee the cost of the first books of Bain and Herbert Spencer. A statue in bronze was placed on the Thames Embankment, and there is a good portrait by Watts (a copy of which, by Watts himself, was hung in the National Gallery).
The influence which Mill’s works exercised upon contemporary English thought can scarcely be overestimated. His own writings and those of his successors (e.g. J. E. Cairnes and Alexander Bain) practically held the field during the third quarter of the 19th century and even later. In philosophy his chief work was to systematize and expound the utilitarianism of his father and Bentham (see Utilitarianism). He may, in fact, be regarded as the final exponent of that empirical school of philosophy which owed its impulse to John Locke, and is generally spoken of as being typically English. Its fundamental characteristic is the emphasis laid upon human reason, i.e. upon the duty incumbent upon all thinkers to investigate for themselves rather than to accept the authority of others. Knowledge must be based upon experience. In reasserting and amplifying the empirical conclusions of his predecessors, especially in the sphere of ethics, Mill’s chief function was the introduction of the humanist element. This was due, no doubt, to his revulsion from the sternness of his upbringing and the period of stress through which he passed in early manhood, but also to the sympathetic and emotional qualities which manifested themselves in his early manhood. We have seen, for example, that he was led to investigate the subject of logic because he found in attempting to advance his humanitarian schemes in politics an absence of that fundamental agreement which he recognized as the basis of scientific advance. Both his logical and his metaphysical studies were thus undertaken as the pre-requisites of a practical theory of human development. Though he believed that the lower classes were not yet ripe for socialism, with the principles of which he (unlike James Mill and Bentham) was in general agreement, his whole life was devoted to the amelioration of the conditions of the working classes. This fact, no doubt, should be taken into account in any detailed criticism of the philosophic work; it was taken up not as an end but as ancillary to a social and ethical system. Reference to the articles on Logic, Metaphysics, &c., will show that subsequent criticism, however much it has owed by way of stimulus to Mill’s strenuous rationalism, has been able to point to much that is inconsistent, inadequate and even superficial in his writings. Two main intellectual movements from widely different standpoints have combined to diminish his influence. On the one hand there has arisen a school of thinkers of the type of Thomas Hill Green, who have brought to bear on his metaphysical views the idealism of modern German thinkers. On the other hand are the evolutionists, who have substituted for the utilitarian ideal of the “greatest happiness” those of “race-preservation” and the “survival of the fittest” (see Ethics, ad. fin.; Spencer). In the sphere of psychology, likewise—e.g. in connexion with Mill’s doctrine of Association of Ideas (q.v.) and the phrase “Mental Chemistry,” by which he sought to meet the problems which Associationism left unsolved—modern criticism and the experimental methods of the psycho-physiological school have set up wholly new criteria, with a new terminology and different fields of investigation (see Psychology).
A similar fate has befallen Mill’s economic theories. The title of his work, Principles of Political Economy, with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy, though open to criticism, indicated a less narrow and formal conception of the field of the science than had been common amongst his predecessors. He aimed in fact at producing a work which might replace in ordinary use the Wealth of Nations, which in his opinion was “in many parts obsolete and in all imperfect.” Adam Smith had invariably associated the general principles of the subject with their applications, and in treating those applications had perpetually appealed to other and often far larger considerations than pure political economy affords. And in the same spirit Mill desired, whilst incorporating all the results arrived at in the special science by Smith’s successors, to exhibit purely economic phenomena in relation to the most advanced conceptions of his own time in the general philosophy of society, as Smith had done in reference to the philosophy of his century. This design he certainly failed to realize. His book is very far indeed from being a “modern Adam Smith.” It is an admirably lucid, and even elegant, exposition of the Ricardian economics, the Malthusian theory being of course incorporated with these; but, notwithstanding the introduction of many minor novelties, it is in its scientific substance little or nothing more.
With respect to economic method he shifted his position, yet to the end occupied uncertain ground. In the fifth of his early essays he asserted that the method a priori is the only mode of investigation in the social sciences, and that the method a posteriori “is altogether inefficacious in those sciences as a means of arriving at any considerable body of valuable truth.” When he wrote his Logic he had learned from Comte that the a posteriori method—in the form which he chose to call “inverse deduction”—was the only mode of arriving at truth in general sociology; and his admission of this at once renders the essay obsolete. But, unwilling to relinquish the a priori method of his youth, he tries to establish a distinction of two sorts of economic inquiry, one of which, though not the other, can be handled by that method. Sometimes he speaks of political economy as a department “carved out of the general body of the science of society;” whilst on the other hand the title of his systematic work implies a doubt whether political economy is a part of “social philosophy” at all, and not rather a study preparatory and auxiliary to it. Thus, on the logical as well as the dogmatic side, he halts between two opinions. Notwithstanding his misgivings and even disclaimers, he yet remained as to method a member of the old school, and never passed into the new “historical” school.
Bibliography.—Works: System of Logic (2 vols., 1843; 9th ed., 1875; “People’s” ed., 1884); Essays on some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (1844, ed. 1874); Principles of Political Economy (2 vols., 1848; many ed., especially ed. by W. J. Ashley, 1909); On Liberty (1859; ed. Courtney, 1892; W. B. Columbine, 1903; with introd. Pringle-Pattison, 1910); Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (1859); Dissertations and Discussions (i., ii., 1859; iii., 1867; iv., 1876); Considerations on Representative Government (1861; 3rd ed. 1865); Utilitarianism (1863); Examination of Sir W. Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865); Aug. Comte and Positivism (1865, ed. 1908); Inaugural Address at the University of St Andrews (1867); England and Ireland (1868); Subjection of Women (1869; ed. with introd. by Stanton Coit, 1906); Chapters and Speeches on the Irish Land Question (1870). The Autobiography appeared in 1873 (ed. 1908), and Three Essays on Religion (1874). Many of these have been translated into German, and there is a German edition by Th. Gomperz (12 vols., 1873–1880). A convenient edition in the New Universal Library appeared between 1905 and 1910.
Biographical and Critical.—Many of Mill’s letters are published in Mrs Grote’s life of her husband, in Duncan’s Life of Herbert Spencer, in the Memories of Caroline Fox, and in Kingsley’s letters. There are also editions of the correspondence with Gustave d’Eichtal and Comte (specially that of Lévy-Bruhl, 1899). By far the most illuminating collection is that of Hugh Elliott, Letters of John Stuart Mill (2 vols., 1910), which contains letters to John Sterling, Carlyle, E. Lytton Bulwer (Lord Lytton), John Austin, Alex. Bain, and many leading French and German writers and politicians. These letters are essential to an understanding of Mill’s life and thought. Besides the Autobiography and many references in the writings of
Mill’s friends (e.g. Alex. Bain’s Autobiography, 1904), see further