The principle of utility, he says, understood and applied as it was by Bentham,

gave unity to my conception of things. I now had opinions; a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy; in one among the best senses of the word, a religion; the inculcation and diffusion of which could be made the principal outward purpose of a life.

Soon afterwards he formed a small "Utilitarian Society," and, for some few years, he was one of "a little knot of young men' who adopted his father's philosophical and political views "with youthful fanaticism." A position under his father in the India office had secured him against the misfortune of having to depend on literary work for his livelihood; and he found that office-work left him ample leisure for the pursuit of his wider interests.

He was already coming to be looked upon as a leader of thought when, in his twenty-first year, the mental crisis occurred which is described in his Autobiography. This crisis was a result of the severe strain, physical and mental, to which he had been subjected from his earliest years. He was "in a dull state of nerves"; the objects in life for which he had been trained and for which he had worked lost their charm; he had "no delight in virtue, or the general good, but also just as little in anything else"; a constant habit of analysis had dried up the fountains of feeling within him. After many months of despair, he found, accidentally, that the capacity for emotion was not dead, and "the cloud gradually drew off." But the experience he had undergone modified his theory of life and his character. Happiness was still to be the end of life, but it should not be taken as its direct end; "ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life." Further, he ceased to attach almost exclusive importance to the ordering of outward circumstances, and, "for the first time, gave its proper place, among the prime necessities of human wellbeing, to the internal culture of the individual." In this state of mind, he found, in the poems of Wordsworth-"the poet of unpoetical natures," as he calls him-that very culture of the feelings which he was seeking. From him he learned "what

would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed."

Mill's widened intellectual sympathies were shown by his reviews of Tennyson's poems and of Carlyle's French Revolution in 1835 and 1837. The articles on Bentham and on Coleridge, published in 1838 and 1840 respectively, disclose his modified philosophical outlook and the exact measure of his new mental independence. From the position now occupied he did not seriously depart throughout the strenuous literary work of his mature years. The influence of the new spirit, which he identified with the thinking of Coleridge, did not noticeably develop further; if anything, perhaps, his later writings adhered more nearly to the traditional views than might have been anticipated from some indications in his early articles.

These two articles provide the key for understanding Mill's own thought. He looks upon Bentham as a great constructive genius who had first brought light and system into regions formerly chaotic. No finer or juster appreciation of Bentham's work has ever been written. Mill agrees with Bentham's fundamental principle and approves his method. Bentham made morals and politics scientific; but his knowledge of life was limited. "It is wholly empirical and the empiricism of one who has had little experience.' The deeper things of life did not touch him; all the subtler workings of mind and its environment were hidden from his view. It is significant that Mill assumes that, for light on these deeper and subtler aspects of life, we must go not to other writers of the empirical tradition but to thinkers of an entirely different school. He disagrees with the latter fundamentally in the systematic presentation of their views-whether these be defended by the easy appeal to intuition or by the more elaborate methods of Schelling or Hegel. What we really get from them are half-lights— glimpses, often fitful and always imperfect, into aspects of truth not seen at all by their opponents. Coleridge represented this type of thought. He had not Bentham's great constructive faculties; but he had insight in regions where Bentham's vision failed, and he appreciated, what Bentham almost entirely overlooked, the significance of historical tradition.

The ideas which Mill derived from the writings of Coleridge, or from his association with younger men who had been

VOL. XIV-2

influenced by Coleridge, did not bring about any fundamental change in his philosophical standpoint, but they widened his horizon. And in nearly all his books we can trace their effect. He seems conscious that the analysis which satisfied other followers of Bentham is imperfect, and that difficulties remain which they are unable to solve and cannot even see.

Mill's System of Logic was published in 1843, and ran through many editions, some of which-especially the third (1850) and the eighth (1872)—were thoroughly revised and supplemented by the incorporation of new, mainly controversial, matter. It is probably the greatest of his books. In spite of Hobbes's treatise, and of the suggestive discussions in the third book of Locke's Essay, the greater English philosophers almost seem to have conspired to neglect the theory of logic. It had kept its place as an academic study, but on traditional lines; Aristotle was supposed to have said the last word on it, and that last word to be enshrined in scholastic manuals. English thought, however, was beginning to emerge from this stage. Richard Whately had written a text-book, Elements of Logic (1826), which, by its practical method and modern illustrations, gave a considerable impetus to the study, and Hamilton's more comprehensive researches had begun. From them Mill did not learn much or anything. What he set himself to work out was a theory of evidence in harmony with the first principles of the empirical philosophy; and this was an almost untouched problem. He may have obtained help from Locke; he acknowledges the value for his thinking of Dugald Stewart's analysis of the process of reasoning; he was still more indebted to his discussions with a society of friends. Thus he worked out his theory of terms, propositions and the syllogism; and then the book was laid aside for five years. When he returned to it, and proceeded to analyse the inductive process, he found rich material to hand not only in Sir John Herschel's Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830), but, also, in William Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences (1837). After his theory of induction was substantially complete, he became acquainted with, and derived stimulus and assistance from, the first two volumes of Comte's Cours de philosophie positive (1830). These were the chief influences upon his work, and their enumeration serves to bring out the originality of his per

formance. His work marks an epoch in logical enquiry, not for English philosophy only but in modern thought.

The reputation of Mill's Logic was largely due to his analysis of inductive proof. He provided the empirical sciences with a set of formulae and criteria which might serve the same purpose for them as the time-worn formulae of the syllogism had served for arguments that proceeded from general principles. In this part of his work he derived important material from Whewell, much as he differed from him in general point of view, and he found his own methods implicitly recognised in Herschel's Discourse. The importance and originality of Mill's contribution, however, cannot be denied. His analysis is much more precise and complete than any that had been carried out by his immediate predecessors. He seeks to trace the steps by which we pass from statements about particular facts to general truths, and also to justify the transition: though he is more convincing in his psychological account of the process than in his logical justification of its validity. When he is brought face to face with the fundamental problem of knowledge, as Hume had been before him, he does not show Hume's clearness of thought.

Mill's work is not merely a logic in the limited sense of that term which had become customary in England. It is a theory of knowledge such as Locke and Hume attempted. The whole is rendered more precise by its definite reference to the question of proof or evidence; but the problem is Hume's problem over again. The ultimate elements of knowledge are subjective entities "feelings or states of consciousness"-but knowledge has objective validity. The elements are distinct, though the laws of association bind them into groups and may even fuse them into inseparable wholes-but knowledge unites and distinguishes in an order which is not that of laws of association. The theory of knowledge, accordingly, has to explain how our thinking, especially in the transition from assertion to assertion which we call "proof," has validity for objective reality, and, in doing so, it has to give a tenable account of the universal principles postulated in these transitions. In Mill's case, as in Hume's, this has to be done on the assumption that the immediate object in experience is something itself mental, and that there are no à priori principles determining the connections of objects. In his doctrine of terms and pro

positions, Mill emphasises the objective reference in knowledge, although he cannot be said to meet, or even fully to recognise, the difficulty of reconciling this view with his psychological analysis. He faces much more directly the problem of the universal element in knowledge. He contends that, ultimately, proof is always from particulars to particulars. The general proposition which stands as major premiss in a syllogism is only a shorthand record of a number of particular observations, which facilitates and tests the transition to the conclusion. All the general principles involved in thinking, even the mathematical axioms, are interpreted as arrived at in this way from experience: so that the assertion of their universal validity stands in need of justification.

In induction the essential inference is to new particulars, not to the general statement or law. And here he faces the crucial point for his theory. Induction, as he expounds it, is based upon the causal principle. Mill followed Hume in his analysis of cause. Now the sting of Hume's doctrine lay in its subjectivity-the reduction of the causal relation to a mental habit. Mill did not succeed in extracting the sting; he could only ignore it. Throughout, the relation of cause and effect is treated by him as something objective: not, indeed, as implying anything in the nature of power, but as signifying a certain constancy (which he, unwarrantably, describes as invariable) in the succession of phenomena. He never hesitates to speak of it as an objective characteristic of events, but without ever enquiring into its objective grounds. According to Mill, it is only when we are able to discover a causal connection among phenomena that strict inductive inference is possible either to a general law or to new empirical particulars. But the law of universal causation, on his view, is itself an inference from a number of particular cases. Thus it is established by inductive inference and yet, at the same time, all inductive inference depends upon it. Mill seeks to resolve the contradiction by maintaining that this general truth, that is to say, the law of causation, is indeed itself arrived at by induction, but by a weaker form of induction, called per enumerationem simplicem, in which the causal law is not itself assumed. Such a bare catalogue of facts, not penetrating to the principle of their connection, would not, in ordinary cases, justify an inference