John Stuart Mill
From Philosopedia
Mill, John Stuart (20 May 1806 - 8 May 1873)
The son of James Mill, John was so severely educated by his father that he read Greek at the age of seven. At the age of twelve, he was well acquainted with the classics and had begun to study logic. Becoming one of the most learned writers of his generation, he was respected throughout the country.
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Utilitarianism
A founder of utilitarianism along with Jeremy Bentham, Mill stressed the method of empiricism as the source of all knowledge. He was a strong advocate of proportional representation, labor unions, and farm cooperation. He favored women’s rights and was not averse to Comte’s religion of humanity. In 1856, his Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications (1848) was included on the index of prohibited reading. According to Delos B. McKown, Mill wished to win over to his skeptical position on religion only those of superior intelligence and character. He did not wish to deprive lesser mortals of their religion, hoping instead to improve their religious outlook through education. Neither did he suggest Nature as an alternative to supernatural religion, according to the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Vol. 5).
Mill wrote that “Christian morality (so-called) has all the characters of a reaction; . . . Its ideal is negative rather than positive; passive rather than active; Innocence rather than Nobleness; Abstinence from Evil, rather than energetic Pursuit of Good. . . . It holds out the hope of heaven and the threat of hell, as the appointed and appropriate motives to a virtuous life; in this falling far below the best of the ancients, and doing what lies in it to give to human morality an essentially selfish character. . . . It is essentially the doctrine of passive obedience; it inculcates submission to all authorities found established.” He also wrote,
- The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments - of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue - are complete skeptics in religion.
- It is conceivable that religion may be morally useful without being intellectually sustainable.
- God is a word to express, not our ideas, but the want of them.
- A large proportion of the noblest and most valuable teaching has been the work, not only of men who did not know, but of men who knew and rejected the Christian faith. (On Liberty)
Harriet Taylor
Mill, who was in his forties and after having loved her for twenty years, married Harriet Taylor in 1851 when her husband died. The two had met at a Unitarian church, which they then continued to attend.But she died in 1858 and, profoundly affected, he dedicated to her the famous On Liberty (1859), which they had worked on together. It is a major work revered by rationalists because of its pro-democratic, liberal stand.
On Religion
According to John M. Robertson, Mill’s Three Essays on Religion—“Nature,” “The Utility of Religion,” and “Theism” (1859, 1875, in Dissertations and Discussions)—exhibit not only that Mill was not a Christian but that he had never been one. Equally important, Mill “cleared the air of the hell-fire and the God who prospered on fear. More than any other event,” Berman maintains, Mill “shifted the onus of proof from the atheist to the believer.” With Viscount Morley, he agrees that “probably no English writer has done so much as Mr. Mill to cut at the root of the theological spirit.” What he believed in was a finite God, one who exists but is not as the traditionalists claim necessarily all-powerful, perfectly good, and entirely omniscient. Prof. Bain, his intimate friend and biographer, once said of Mill that “in everything characteristic of the creed of Christendom he was a thorough-going negationist. He admitted neither its truth nor its utility.” Bain also wrote that Mill “absented himself during his whole life from religious services.” Mill’s important philosophical work is the System of Logic (1843), in which he treats philosophy comprehensively and from the viewpoint of an empiricist.
In his Three Essays on Religion, Mill admittedly mellowed his agnosticism with a view of a finite and impersonal God. But, wrote Paul Edwards in Immortality, Mill remained agnostic concerning the subject of life after death, or immortality.
In 1871, accepting under great pressure the office of pall-bearer at Grote’s funeral, Mill on walking out of Westminster Abbey remarked to Bain, “In no very long time, I shall be laid in the ground with a very different ceremonial from that.” Bain then noted, “It so happened, however, that a prayer was delivered at his own interment by the Protestant pastor at Avignon, who thereby got himself into trouble, from Mill’s known scepticism, and had to write an exculpation in the local newspaper. The pastor, Bain found, was “a very intelligent and liberal-minded man.” However, when the Democratie du Midi announced that Mill had received “the last consolations of religion” on his death-bed, “M. Rey honourably denied the statement and said, “Il n’y avait point de pasteur pres du lit de M. Mill” (There was no clergyman at Mr. Mill’s bedside.)
Death
After a fall, Mill died of erysipelas. Three days before his death in 1873, he had walked fifteen miles. Dr. Gurney described his last hours:
- Mr. Mill suffered but little, except in swallowing, and from the heat and weight of the enormous swelling, which, by the time I arrived from Nice, had already spread over his face and neck; and yet he learned from me on my arrival the fatal nature of the attack with calmness and resignation. His express desire that he might not lose his mental faculties was gratified, for his great intellect remained clear to the last moment. His wish that his funeral might be quiet and simple, as indeed, his every wish, was attended to by his loving stepdaughter with devoted solicitude. (New York Daily News, 12 May 1873)
One English Christian journal, which itself went out of business soon afterwards, declared its opinion that Mill’s soul was burning in hell and expressed a hearty wish that his disciples would soon follow him.
Recent Changes in Critical Views About Mill
Alan Ryan, reviewing Richard Reeves's John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand, notes that his is the first full-scale biography in more than fifty years. Fifty years ago,
- Mill’s historical reputation as an icon of Victorian liberalism was unchallenged, but his intellectual reputation was low. It was thought that his moral philosophy had been destroyed by G.E. Moore’s attack in Principia Ethica. His logic and philosophy of science had been relegated to the cabinet of historical curiosities. His astonishing education—he learned Greek at three, Latin at eight, logic and economics at twelve—was regarded as barely short of child abuse. The disciples of F.R. Leavis cited it in their war against the so-called “technologico-Benthamite” deformation of English culture, and the figure of Gradgrind in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times was taken to be, if not drawn from James Mill, at any rate a satire on him.
- Today, things are very different. Richard Reeves never mentions Leavis or the war against “technologico-Benthamism.” Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens do not appear in their former roles as critics of the culture of the new industrial Britain, but as the racist defenders of slavery in Jamaica and the American South that they certainly were. The political climate has changed as dramatically as the cultural. Fifty years ago, Mill was attacked from the left in the name of socialist egalitarianism or proletarian insurrection; today, he is criticized by conservatives who fear the corrosive effect of uninhibited freedom of thought and expression, or by the politically correct who think respect for difference should trump the liberal defense of the open society. When Mill is attacked by radicals, it is by radical feminists who think that The Subjection of Women does not get to the heart of the oppression of women. Mill attacked the legal disabilities that handicapped Victorian women, within marriage and in the worlds of education and work; but he had nothing to say about the distinctively sexual forms of oppression that late twentieth-century feminists such as Andrea Dworkin wrote about.
- His philosophy of science and his utilitarian ethics are now treated with vastly more respect than they once were. Anyone who wants to know why philosophers still grapple with the problems in the philosophy of logic, mathematics, and science that Mill laid out in his System of Logic in 1843 can do no better than turn to John Skorupski’s John Stuart Mill of 1989. Skorupski is equally illuminating on Mill’s moral and political philosophy, but here he is in distinguished company—Nicholas Capaldi and Kwame Appiah on the side of those who think Mill has much to teach us and Gertrude Himmelfarb among his most effective critics.
Ryan comments,
- Mill as a member of Parliament from 1865 to 1865 wrote On Liberty in 1959 and The Subjection of Women in 1869, and almost everything he wrote was meant to strike a blow for progress as he conceived it. His book portrays Mill as a firebrand for our times as well as his own.
- He read [William Wordsworth]] for emotional sustenance and [Samuel Taylor Coleridge] to understand the ideas of thoughtful conservatives.
- To say that Mill was besotted with Harriet Taylor for the twenty-eight years between their first meeting and her death in 1858 entirely understates the case. Whatever one thinks of Harriet Taylor – and the hostile critics out-number the friendly ones – it is impossible not to feel for Mill. His father's determination that his astonishingly intelligent and well-educated offspring should not become conceited had succeeded all too well. He had been deprived of the company of other children, had been taught at an early age to despise his mother, and was all too prone to see himself as barely competent – and domestically he was. He was intellectually arrogant but otherwise wholly lacking in self-confidence.
Mill read the first volume of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. This led him to write Principles of Political Economy, "a masterly summary of the economic theory of the day, but went on to defend market socialism and workers' cooperatives, and came close to advocating the nationalization of land."
His 1865 work, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, is largely remembered for Mill's insistence that if anhyone wishes to argue that the world is ruled by a good God, that God must be good in a recognizably human sense. If a God who is not good in that sense can sentence us to Hell for not worshipping him, then, said Mill, "To Hell I will go." Conservative journalists, philosophers, and enraged clergymen well understood the agnosticism that underlay the view.
Ryan concludes that Reeves does an excellent job.
{BDF; CE; ER; EU, Delos B. McKown; FFRF; FO; FUK; HAB; ILP; HNS2; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; TRI; TSV; TYD}
