William Minto and John Malcolm Mitchell

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From this oppressive feeling he found relief in the thought set forth in the opening of the second book of his Political Economy—that, while the conditions of production have the necessity of physical laws, the distribution of what is produced among the various classes of producers is a matter of human arrangement, dependent upon alterable customs and institutions. ”

“ Mill’s enthusiasm for humanity had been thoroughly reawakened, and had taken the definite shape of an aspiration to supply an unimpeachable method of search for conclusions in moral and social science. No mystic ever worked with warmer zeal than Mill. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Bentham’s Judicial Evidence produced little effect on the reviewers. His own reception at the Speculative Debating Society, where he first measured his strength in public conflict, was calculated to produce self-distrust. He found himself looked upon with curiosity as a precocious phenomenon, a “made man,” an intellectual machine set to grind certain tunes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He retired with a sense of relief to his cottage and his literary life at Avignon. His parliamentary duties and the quantity of correspondence brought upon him by increased publicity had absorbed nearly the whole of his time. The scanty leisure of his first recess had been devoted to writing his St Andrews rectorial address on higher education and to answering attacks on his criticism of Hamilton; of the second, to annotating in conjunction with Bain and Findlater, his father’s Analysis of the Mind. Now he looked forward to a literary life, and his letters show how much he enjoyed the change. ”

“ Among other things, he made a more thorough study of socialist writers, with the result that, though he was not converted to any of their schemes as being immediately practicable, he began to look upon some more equal distribution of the produce of labour as a practicability of the remote future, and to dwell upon the prospect of such changes in human character as might render a stable society possible without the institution of private property. ”

“ The Logic was published in 1843. In 1844 appeared his Essays on Some Unsettled Questions in Political Economy. These essays were worked out and written many years before, and show Mill in his first stage as a political economist. Four out of the five essays are elaborate and powerful solutions of perplexing technical problems—the distribution of the gains of international commerce, the influence of consumption on production, the definition of productive and unproductive labour, the precise relations between profits and wages. ”

“ He was especially anxious to make it clear that he included in “utility” the pleasures of the imagination and the gratification of the higher emotions, and to show how powerfully the good of mankind as a motive appealed to the imagination. His next treatise, The Subjection of Women, was not published till 1869. [2] His Examination of Hamilton’s Philosophy, published in 1865, had engaged a large share of his time for three years before.
While mainly occupied in those years with philosophical studies, Mill did not remit his interest in current politics. ”

“ He gained from the struggle a more catholic view of human happiness, at delight in the poetry of nature and the affections as well as the poetry of heroic unselfishness, a disposition to study more sympathetically the point of view of opponents, a more courteous style of polemic, a hatred of sectarianism, an ambition, no less noble and disinterested, but moderated to practical possibilities. ”

“ This he has called his third stage as a political economist, and he says that he was helped towards it by the lady, Mrs Taylor, [1] who became his wife in 1851. It is generally supposed that he writes with a lover’s extravagance about this lady’s powers when he compares her with Shelley and Carlyle. But a little reflection will show that he wrote with his usual accuracy and sobriety when he described her influence on him. He expressly says that he owed none of his technical doctrine to her, that she influenced only his ideals of life for the individual and for society ”

“ The essays on Bentham and Coleridge constituted the first manifesto of the new spirit which Mill sought to breathe into English Radicalism. But the reprinted papers give no just idea of the immense range of Mill’s energy at this time. His position in the India Office, where alone he did work enough for most men, cut him off from entering parliament ”

“ Gradually also he had the satisfaction of seeing the debates in the Speculative Society becoming famous enough to attract men with whom it was profitable for him to interchange opinions, among others Maurice and John Sterling. ”

“ Alex. Bain’s Autobiography, 1904) , see further A. Bain, John Stuart Mill, a Personal Criticism (1882) ; Fox Bourne, Life of J. S. Mill (1873) ; John (Viscount) Morley, Miscellanies (1877) , ii. 239-327; J. E. Cairnes, J. S. Mill (1873) , on economic theories; W. L. Courtney, Mataphysics of J. S. Mill (1879) and Life (1889) ; Douglas, John Stuart Mill, a Study of his Philosophy (1895) , and Ethics of J. S. Mill (1897) ; Albee, Hist. of Eng. Utilitarianism (1902) ; Sir Leslie Stephen, The English Utilitarians (1900) ; J. MacCunn, Six Radical Thinkers (1907) ; Fred. ”