But at the same time his interest in clear thinking and logical method remained. His discovery of the valuable differences in individuals did not make him forget their valuable similarities. He was convinced that sound principles of morals and economics and social reform and government could be based only on sound philosophy. This was his fundamental objection to the philosophy based on intuition. He says: "The notion that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions. By the aid of this theory, every inveterate belief and every intense feeling, of which the origin is not remembered, is enabled to dispense with the obligation of justifying itself by reason, and is erected ifito its own all-sufficient voucher and justification. There never was such an instrument devised for consecrating all deep-seated prejudices." This is all very well as far as it goes. As an instrument for understanding and guiding social processes, the philosophy based on intuition was little better than a collection of pious wishes. But when Mill tries to go ahead and develop a closely articulated social philosophy of his own, he begins to get into trouble. There were two causes of confusion in the specific way in which Mill developed his scientific approach to social problems: in the first place he insisted on clinging to the principles of the association psychology, and in the second place he tried to use general principles not only in the study of conditions as they actually exist, but also in an intellectualistic fashion as rules for determining the path of social advance. Mill kept to the end his faith in the ultimate efficacy of the principles of the association psychology to give a satisfactory account of mental processes. His edition of his father's Analysis of the Human Mind published with elaborate notes in 1856 bears witness to this. It is to * Autobiography, p. 158. his mind high praise when he writes of Herbert Spencer in 1864, "I have read through his Principles of Psychology which is as much better than I thought as the First Principles are less good. ... He has great mastery over the obscurer applications of the associative principle." This allegiance got him into various kinds of trouble. It explains for one thing why he never made much progress with a project that he had much at heart for many years, namely the development of the science of Ethology. Psychology, Mill says, "ascertains the simple laws of mind in general." Ethology "traces their operations in complex combinations of circumstances." "Ethology stands to Psychology in a relation very similar to that in which the various branches of natural philosophy stand to mechanics. The principles of Ethology are properly the middle principles, the axiomata media (as Bacon would have said) of the science of mind, as distinguished, on the one hand, from the empirical laws resulting from simple observation, and on the other, from the highest generalizations.” The empirical laws here referred to include among other things "aphorisms" from which at one time Mill hoped to get much help. In his essay entitled Aphorisms Mill points out that "there are two kinds of wisdom," one kind dependent on long chains of reasoning, the other that "acquired by experience of life." This unsystematic wisdom is embodied in aphorisms. That they are unsystematic is no argument against them, because "truths, each of which rests on its own independent evidence, may surely be exhibited in the same unconnected state in which they were discovered." "These detached truths are at once the materials and the tests of philosophy itself; since philosophy is not called in to prove them, but may very justly be required to account for them." They are also, for practical purposes, the guides 'Letters, Vol. II. p. 7. •Logic, p. 603. of life. In the essay on Sedgwick he says: "Every one directs himself in morality, as in all his conduct, not by his own unaided foresight, but by the accumulated wisdom of all former ages embodied in traditional aphorisms." " But this does not mean that conduct should not be guided by systematic reason. "Moral doctrines," he says, "are no more to be received without evidence, nor to be sifted less carefully, than any other doctrines. An appeal lies, as on all other subjects, from a received opinion, however generally entertained, to the decisions of cultivated reason.' This is where the greatest happiness principle comes in. The importance of the principle lies precisely in this, that it gives us a standard whereby we can judge what maxims are good, and what are bad. Aphorisms were the immediate material from which the science of Ethology was to be constructed. Aphorisms or maxims are the empirical rules which result from "simple observation." Ethology was to have been the connecting link between the aphorisms (and similar conclusions based on direct observation and the experience of man) and the greatest happiness principle. But Mill never made much progress with Ethology. In a letter to Bain written as late as 1859 he speaks about the latter's forthcoming book on phrenology and on "the science of character," and says: "I expect to learn a good deal from it, and to be helped by it in anything I may hereafter write on Ethology—a subject I have long wished to take up, at least in the form of Essays, but have never yet felt myself sufficiently prepared." " But there is more than this to be said on Mill's failure to get ahead with the new science. He failed because the construction of the science of Ethology, as he conceived of it, was an impossible undertaking. It was to have been based Dissertations and Discussions, Vol. I. p. 172. on the general principles established by the association psychology, and it was impossible just because that psychology gave a faulty account of the working of men's minds. Aphorisms and maxims and the like represent insights into different and unique types of situations. And the association psychology was not rich enough to systematize them without leaving out that about them which was distinctive. This difficulty with Ethology is closely linked up with the other cause of confusion above referred to, namely, that Mill, in one of his moods, kept trying to bring the whole business of living under a few general principles, going back to the greatest happiness principle itself. The first chapter of Utilitarianism as well as the last Book of the Logic, make it clear that Mill thought that it was essential to discover some one principle to which all questions of the conduct of life could be referred. He states this very clearly at the end of the Logic: "There are not only first principles of Knowledge, but first principles of Conduct. There must be some standard by which to determine the goodness or badness, absolute and comparative, of ends, or objects of desire. And whatever that standard is, there can be but one; for if there were several ultimate principles of conduct, the same conduct might be approved by one of those principles and condemned by another; and there would be needed some more general principle, as umpire between them. "Accordingly, writers on Moral Philosophy have mostly felt the necessity not only of referring all rules of conduct, and all judgments of praise and blame, to principles, but of referring them to some one principle; some rule, or standard, with which all other rules of conduct were required to be consistent, and from which by ultimate consequence they could all be deduced. Those who have dispensed with the assumption of such a universal standard, have only been enabled to do so by supposing that a moral sense, or instinct, inherent in our constitution, informs us, both what principles of conduct we are bound to observe, and also in what order these should be subordinated to one another. "The theory of the foundations of morality is a subject which it would be out of place, in a work like this, to discuss at large, and which could not to any useful purpose be treated incidentally. I shall content myself, therefore, with saying, that the doctrine of intuitive moral principles, even if true, would provide only for that portion of the field of conduct which is properly called moral. For the remainder of the practice of life some general principle, or standard must still be sought; and if that principle be rightly chosen, it will be found, I apprehend, to serve quite as well for the ultimate principle of Morality, as for that of Prudence, Policy, or Taste." The scheme that he suggests would place every department of human action under one of these three heads. Philosophy, from this point of view, was the Science of Life. There was, corresponding to this, an Art of Life, related to the Science of Life as any art is to the science which underlies it, that is by the fact that it states the findings of science not (as science does) according to their causes, but with reference to the purpose for which, in any particular connection, the discoveries of science are to be used. The Art of Life has "three departments": "Morality, Prudence or Policy, and Aesthetics; the Right, the Expedient, and the Beautiful or Noble, in human conduct and works. To this art (which, in the main, is unfortunately still to be created), all other arts are subordinate; since its principles are those which must determine whether the special aim of any particular art is worthy and desirable, and what is its place in the scale of desirable things. Every art is thus a joint result of laws of nature disclosed by science, and of the general principles of what has been called Teleology, or the Doctrine of Ends." " And yet at other times Mill saw clearly enough that there was a certain incommensurability among values. His famous admission of qualitative distinction between pleasures, damaging as it was to his own system, is an indication of this. His classification of actions in the Essay on Bentham into their moral, aesthetic, and sympathetic aspects, while it points toward the later attempt at systematization suggested in the foregoing quotation from the Logic, shows, never Logic, pp. 657-8. Logic, p. 657. |