Mill's Logic
I.Intuitionism and Empiricism
Mill's System of Logic may be regarded as the most important manifesto of Utilitarian philosophy.It lays down explicitly and in their ripest form the principles implicitly assumed by Bentham and the elder Mill.It modifies as well as expounds.It represents the process by which J.S.Mill,on becoming aware of certain defects in the Utilitarians'philosophy,endeavoured to restate the first principles so as to avoid the erroneous conclusions.The coincidence with his predecessors remains far closer than the divergence.The fundamental tenets are developed rather than withdrawn.The Logic thus most distinctly raises the ultimate issues.It has the impressiveness which belongs in some degree to every genuine exertion of a powerful mind.Mill is struggling with real difficulties;not trying to bolster up a theory commended to him by extraneous considerations.He is doing his best to give an answer to his problem;not to hide an evasion.His honourable candour incidentally reveals the weakness as frankly as the strength of his position.He neither shirks nor hides difficulties,and if we are forced to admit that some of his reasoning is fallacious,the admission scarcely adds to the statement that he is writing a treatise upon philosophical problems.His frankness has made the task of critics comparatively easy.It takes so many volumes to settle what some philosophers have meant that we scarcely reach the question whether their meaning,or rather any of their many possible meanings,was right.In the case of Mill,that preparatory labour is not required.His book,too,has been sufficiently tested by time to enable us to mark the points at which his structure has failed to stand the wear and tear of general discussion.I must try to bring out the vital points of the doctrine.
Mill,I have said,had a very definite purpose beyond the purely philosophical.'Bad institutions,'he says,(1)are supported by false philosophy.The false philosophy to which he refers is that of the so-called 'intuitionist school.'Its 'stronghold,'he thought,lay in appeals to the mathematical and physical sciences.To drive it from this position was to deprive it of 'speculative support';and,though it could still appeal to prejudice,the destruction of this support was an indispenSable step to complete victory.Mill wished to provide a logical armoury for all assailants of established dogmatism,and his success as a propagandist surprised him.The book was read,to his astonishment,even in the universities.Indeed,I can testify from personal observation that it became a kind of sacred book for students who claimed to be genuine Liberals.It gave the philosophical creed of an important section of the rising generation,partly biassed,it may be,by the application to 'bad institutions.'Mill's logic,that is,fell in with the one main current of political opinion.His readings in logic with Grote and other friends enabled him to fashion the weapons needed for the assault.Thus in its origin and by its execution the task was in fact an attempt to give an organised statement of sound philosophy in a form applicable to social and political speculations.
Mill considered that the school of metaphysicians which he attacked had long predominated in this country.(2)When Taine called his view specially English,Mill protested.The Scottish reaction against Hume,he said,which 'assumed long ago the German form,'had ended by 'prevailing universally'in this country.When he first wrote he was almost alone in his opinions,and there were still 'twenty a priori and spiritualist philosophers for every partisan of the doctrine of Experience.'(3)The philosophical world,he says elsewhere,(4)is 'bisected'by the line between the 'Intuitional'and the 'Experiential'schools.Mill's conviction that a majority of Englishmen were really 'intuitionists'in any shape is significant,I think,of his isolated position.Undoubtedly most Englishmen disliked Utilitarians,and respectable professors of philosophy were anxious to disavow sympathy with covert atheism.
Yet the general tendency of thought was,I suspect,far more congenial to Mill's doctrine than he admitted.Englishmen were practically,if not avowedly,predisposed to empiricism.In any case,he was carrying on the tradition which Taine rightly,as Ishould say,regarded as specifically English.Its adherents traced its origin back through James Mill to Hartley,Hume,Locke,Hobbes,and Francis Bacon,and perhaps it might even count among its remoter ancestors such men as William of Ockham and Roger Bacon.The series of names suggests some permanent congeniality to the national character.(5)Although,more over,this tradition had in later times been broken by Reid and his followers,their condemnation did not really imply so fundamental an antithesis of thought as Mill supposed.They and the empiricists had,in their own opinion at least,a common ancestor in Bacon,if not in Locke.But,however this may be,the Scottish school had maintained the positions which Mill thought himself concerned to attack;and for him represented the rejection of 'experience.'
