I. THOMAS BROWN

The politicians and economists, of whom I have spoken, took first principles for granted.  The intellectual temperament, which made certain methods congenial to them, would no doubt have led them to an analogous position in philosophy.  Bentham had touched upon philosophical points in a summary way, and James Mill, as we shall see, gave a more explicit statement.  But such men as Ricardo and Malthus had no systematic philosophy, though a certain philosophy was congenial to their methods.  Desire to reach a solid groundwork of fact, hearty aversion to mere word-juggling, and to effeminate sentimentalism, respect for science and indifference to, if not contempt for, poetry, resolution to approve no laws or institutions which could not be supported on plain grounds of utility, and to accept no theory which could not be firmly based on verifiable experience, imply moral and intellectual tendencies, in which we may perhaps say that the Utilitarians represent some of the strongest and most valuable qualities of the national character.  Taking these qualities for granted, let us consider how the ultimate problems presented themselves to the school thus distinguished.

I have already observed that the Scottish philosophy, taught by Reid and Dugald Stewart, represented the only approach to a living philosophical system in these islands at the beginning of the century.  It held this position for a long period.  Mill, who had heard Dugald Stewart’s lectures, knew nothing of German thought.  He was well read in French philosophers, and in harmony with one leading sect.  The so-called ideologues, who regarded Condillac as representing the true line of intellectual progress, were in France the analogues of the English Utilitarians.  Destutt de Tracy and Cabanis were their most conspicuous leaders in this generation.  The philosophy of Reid and Stewart crossed the channel, and supplied the first assailants of the ideologues with their controversial weapons.  Thus, until the German influence came to modify the whole controversy, the vital issue seemed to lie between the doctrine of Reid or ‘intuitionism’ on the one hand, and the purely ‘experiential’ school on the other, whether, as in France, it followed Condillac, or, as in England, looked back chiefly to Hartley.  Both sections traced their intellectual ancestry to Locke and Hobbes, with some reference to Bacon, and, by the French writers, to Descartes.  Stewart, again, as I have said, was the accepted Whig philosopher.  It is true that the Whig sat habitually in the seat of Gallio.  Jeffrey, whether he fully realised the fact or not, was at bottom a sceptic in philosophy as in politics.  John Allen, the prophet of Holland House, was a thorough sceptic, and says that Horner, one of Stewart’s personal admirers, was really a follower of Hume.  The Whigs were inclined to Shaftesbury’s doctrine that sensible men had all one religion, and that sensible men never said what it was.  Those who had a more definite and avowable creed were content to follow Stewart’s amiable philosophising.  Brougham professed, let us hope, sincerely, to be an orthodox theist, and explained the argument from design in a commentary upon Paley.  Sydney Smith expounded Reid and Stewart in lectures which showed at least that he was still a wit when talking ‘philosophy’ at the Royal Institution; and, though he hated ‘enthusiasm’ in dissenters, evangelicals, and tractarians, and kept religion strictly in its place a place well outside of practical politics managed to preach a wholesome, commonplace morality in terms of Christian theology.  The difference between the Whig and the Radical temper showed itself in philosophical as in political questions.  The Radical prided himself on being logical and thoroughgoing, while the Whig loved compromise, and thought that logic was very apt to be a nuisance.  The systematic reticence which the Utilitarians held to be necessary prevented this contrast from showing itself distinctly on the surface.  The Utilitarians, however, though they avoided such outspoken scepticism as would startle the public, indicated quite sufficiently to the initiated their essential position.  It implied what they fully recognised in private conversation a complete abandonment of theology.  They left the obvious inferences to be drawn by others.  In philosophy they could speak out in a well-founded confidence that few people were able to draw inferences.  I will begin by considering the doctrine against which they protested; for the antagonism reveals, I think, the key to their position.

When Stewart was obliged by infirmity to retire from the active discharge of his duties, he was succeeded by Thomas Brown (1778-1820).  Brown had shown early precocity, and at the age of fifteen had attracted Stewart’s notice by some remarks on a psychological point.  He published at twenty a criticism of Darwin’s Zoonomia, and he became one of the Edinburgh Review circle.  When the Review was started he contributed an article upon Kant.  In those happy days it was so far from necessary to prepare oneself for such a task by studying a library of commentators that the young reviewer could frankly admit his whole knowledge to be derived from Villers’ Philosophie de Kant (1801). Soon afterwards he took an important share in a once famous controversy.  John Leslie, just elected to the mathematical chair at Edinburgh, was accused of having written favourably of Hume’s theory of causation.  Whigs and Tories took this up as a party question, and Brown undertook to explain in a pamphlet what Hume’s theory was, and to show that it did not lead to atheism.  Leslie’s friends triumphed, though it does not appear how far Brown’s arguments contributed to their success.  The pamphlet was rewritten and enlarged, and a third edition of 1818 gives a full exposition of his theory.  Brown had meanwhile become Stewart’s leading disciple, and in 1810 was elected to be his colleague.  Brown held the position, doing all the active duties, until his premature death in 1820.  Brown, according to his biographer, wrote his lectures immediately before delivery, and completed them during his first two years of office.  His theories, as well as his words, were often, according to the same authority, extemporised.  Brown found that he could not improve what he had written under ’very powerful excitement.’  Moreover, he had an unlucky belief that he was a poet.  From 1814 till 1819 he brought out yearly what he supposed to be a poem.  These productions, the Paradise of Coquets and the rest, are in the old-fashioned taste, and have long passed into oblivion.

The lectures, published posthumously, became a text-book for students, and reached a nineteenth edition in 1851.  Their faults, considered as philosophical treatises, are palpable.  They have the wordiness of hasty composition, and the discursive rhetoric intended to catch the attention of an indolent audience.  Brown does not see that he is insulting his hearers when he apologises for introducing logic into lectures upon metaphysics, and indemnifies them by quotations from Akenside and the Essay on Man.  Brown, however, showed great acuteness and originality.  He made deviations, and took pains to mark his deviations, from Reid, though he spoke more guardedly of his own friend, Stewart.  Stewart, who had strongly supported Brown’s election, was shocked when, on the publication of the lectures, he came to discover that his colleague had been preaching heresy, and wrote with obvious annoyance of Brown’s hastiness and dangerous concessions to the enemy. Brown, however, impressed his contemporaries by his ability.  Sydney Smith is probably reporting the current judgment of his own circle when he says that in metaphysics Stewart was a ‘humbug’ compared with Brown.  I certainly think that Stewart, whom I should be sorry to call a humbug, shows less vigour and subtlety.  Brown, at any rate, impressed both the Mills, and his relation to them is significant.

Brown’s essay upon Causation indicates this relation.  In this, indeed, there is little, if any, divergence from Stewart, though he attacks Reid with considerable asperity.  He urges that Reid, while really agreeing with Hume, affected to answer him under cover of merely verbal distinctions. The main point is simple.  Hume had asserted that all events seem to be ‘entirely loose and separate,’ or, in other words, ‘conjoined but never connected.’  Yet he points out that, in fact, when we have found two events to be ‘conjoined,’ we call one cause and the other effect, and assume a ‘necessary connection’ between them.  He then asks, What is the origin of this belief, and what, therefore, is the logical warrant for its validity?  Brown entirely accepts Hume’s statement of the facts.  The real meaning of our statements is evaded by appealing to the conception of ‘power.’  When the loadstone (in his favourite illustration) attracts the iron, we say it has a ‘power’ of attracting iron.  But to speak thus of a power is simply to describe the same facts in other words.  We assert this, and nothing more than this, that when the loadstone comes near the iron, each moves towards the other.  ‘Power’ is a word which only covers a statement of ‘invariable antecedence.’  Brown traces the various confusions which have obscured the true nature of this belief.  He insists especially that we can no more discover power in mental than in physical sequences.  The will had been supposed to be the type of causal power; but volition, according to Brown, reveals simply another succession of desires and bodily actions.  The hypothesis of ‘power’ has been really the source of ‘illusion.’  The tendency to personify leads us to convert metaphor into fact, to invent a subject of this imaginary ‘power,’ and thus to create a mythology of beings to carry on the processes of nature.  In other words, Brown here follows Hume or even anticipates Comte.  As J. S. Mill remarks, this erroneous identification of ‘power’ with ‘will’ gives the ‘psychological rationale of Comte’s great historical generalisation’; and, so far, Brown, as a follower of Hume, is clearly on the way to positivism.

The world, then, is a vast aggregate of ‘loose’ phenomena.  A contemplation of things reveals no reason for one order rather than another.  You may look at your loadstone as long as you please, but you will find no reason for its attracting iron.  You may indeed interpolate a number of minute intervening sequences, and the process often suggests a vague something more than sequence; but this is a mere illusion. Could we, in fact, see all the minute changes in bodies we should actually perceive that cause means nothing but ’the immediate invariable antecedence of an event.’ Brown especially argues against the attempts of d’Alembert and Euler to deduce the first laws of motion from the principle of ’sufficient reason.’ That, as he argues in detail, is merely begging the question, by introducing the principle of causation under an alias.

What, then, is the principle?  We believe, he says, that ’every event must have a cause,’ and that circumstances exactly ’similar must have results exactly similar.’  This belief, though applicable to all events, does not give us the ‘slightest aid’ to determining, independently of experience, any particular event.  We observe that B follows A, but, for all we can say, it might as well follow any other letter of the alphabet.  Yet we are entitled to say in general that it does uniformly follow some particular letter.  The metaphor which describes cause and effect as a ‘bond’ tying A and B together is perfectly appropriate if taken to express the bare fact of sequence; but we fall into error if we fancy there is really any bond whatever beside the events themselves.

The belief, then, in causation has precisely the same import according to Hume and Brown; and both agree that it is not produced by ‘reasoning.’  The proposition ‘B has once succeeded A,’ or ’has succeeded A a thousand times,’ is entirely different from the proposition ’B will for ever succeed A.’ No process of logical inference can extract one from the other.  Shall we, then, give up a belief in causation?  The belief in any case exists as a fact.  Hume explains it by custom or association.  Brown argues, and I think with much force, that Hume’s explanation is insufficient.  Association may explain (if it does more than restate) the fact that one ‘idea’ calls up another idea, but such association may and often does occur without suggesting any belief.  The belief, too, precedes the association.  We begin by believing too much, not too little, and assume a necessary connection of many phenomena which we afterwards find to be independent.  The true answer is therefore different.  There are three sources of belief, ‘perception,’ ‘reasoning,’ and ’intuition.’ Now, we cannot ‘perceive’ anything but a present coincidence; neither can we establish a connection by any process of ‘reasoning,’ and therefore the belief must be an ‘intuition.’  This, accordingly, is Brown’s conclusion.  ‘There are principles,’ he says, ’independent of reasoning, in the mind which save it from the occasional follies of all our ratiocinations’; or rather, as he explains, which underlie all reasoning.  The difference, then, between Hume and Brown (and, as Brown argues, between Hume and Reid’s real doctrine) is not as to the import, but as to the origin, of the belief.  It is an ‘intuition’ simply because it cannot be further analysed.  It does not allow us to pass a single step beyond experience; it merely authorises us to interpret experience.  We can discover any actual law of connection between phenomena only by observing that they occur in succession.  We cannot get beyond or behind the facts and therefore intuitionism in this sense is not opposed to empiricism, but a warrant for empirical conclusions.  An ‘intuition,’ briefly, is an unanalysable belief.  Brown asserts that a certain element of thought has not been explained, and assumes it to be therefore inexplicable or ultimate.  Brown’s account of causation had a great influence upon both the Mills, and especially affected the teaching of the younger Mill.

Another point is important.  Reid, as I have said, had specially prided himself upon his supposed overthrow of Berkeley’s idealism.  He was considered to have shown, in spite of sceptics, that the common belief in an external world was reasonable.  Brown in his lectures ridiculed Reid’s claim.  This ‘mighty achievement,’ the ’supposed overthrow of a great system,’ was ’nothing more than the proof that certain phrases are metaphorical, which were intended by their authors to be understood only as metaphors.’ The theory was dead before Reid slew it, though the phrases were still used as a mere ‘relic,’ or survival of an obsolete doctrine. The impossibility of constructing extension out of our sensations is the experimentum crucis upon which Reid was ready to stake his case.  If the attempt at such a construction could succeed, he would ’lay his hand upon his mouth’ and give up the argument. Brown takes up the challenge thus thrown out.  He holds that our knowledge of an external world is derived from a source which Reid overlooked.  He modifies the Scottish psychology by introducing the muscular senses.  His theory is that the infant which has learned to move discovers that on some occasions its movements are modified by a sense of ’impeded effort.’ The sudden interruption to a well-known series excites in its mind the notion of ‘a cause which is not in itself.’  This is the source of our belief in an external world.  That belief is essentially the belief in some cause which we know to be other than our own mental constitution or the series of ‘internal’ phenomena, and of which we can know nothing else.  It is enough to indicate a theory which has been elaborated by later psychologists, and plays a great part (for example) in the theories of Mill, Bain, and Mr. Herbert Spencer.  It shows the real tendency of Brown’s speculations.  In the first place, it must be noticed that the theory itself had been already emphatically stated by Destutt de Tracy.  Hamilton accuses Brown of plagiarism. Whether his accusation be justifiable or not, it is certainly true that Brown had in some way reached the same principles which had been already set forth by a leading ‘ideologist.’  Brown, that is, though the official exponent of the Scottish philosophy, was in this philosophical tenet at one with the school which they regarded as materialistic or sceptical.  The path by which he reaches his conclusions is also characteristic.

Brown has reversed the interpretation of Reid’s experimentum crucis.  I will give up my case, says Reid, if you can make the external world out of sensations.  That, replies Brown, is precisely what we can do.  How from sensations do we get what Berkeley called ‘outness’?  We get it, says Brown, from the sense of resistance or ‘impeded effort.’  That reveals to us the fact that there is something independent of ourselves, and the belief in such a something is precisely what we mean, and all that we mean, by the belief in an external world.  Consistently with this, Brown rejects Reid’s distinction between the primary and secondary qualities.  The distinction corresponds no doubt to some real differences, but there is no difference of the kind suggested by Reid.  ’All [the qualities] are relative and equally relative our perception of extension and resistance as much as our perception of fragrance and bitterness.’ We ascribe the sensations to ‘external objects,’ but the objects are only known by the ‘medium’ of our sensations.  In other words, the whole world may be regarded as a set of sensations, whether of sight, smell, touch, or resistance to muscular movement, accompanied by the belief that they are caused by something not ourselves, and of which something we can only say that it is not ourselves.

Once more, the analysis of the process by which the belief is generated is significant.  From resistance, or the sensation produced when something ‘resists our attempts to grasp it,’ we get the ‘outness.’  Then perception is ’nothing more than the association of this complex notion with our other sensations the notion of something extended and resisting, suggested by these sensations, when the suggestions themselves have previously arisen, and suggested in the same manner and on the same principle as any other associate feeling suggests any other associate feeling.’ The odour or colour of a rose recalls the sensation of touching and of resistance to our grasp.  Thus we regard the whole group of sensations as due to the external cause which produces the sensation of resistance.  Brown seems to hesitate a little as to whether he shall appeal to an ‘intuition’ or to ‘association,’ but ‘as I rather think,’ he says, the belief is founded ’on associations as powerful as intuition.’

Whatever, then, may be the origin of the belief ’intuition’ or ’association’ it is clear that it can give us no knowledge except such as is derived from sensations.  Moreover, Brown is thus led, as in the doctrine of causation, to accept a really sceptical position.  He declares that he is in this respect at one with both Reid and Hume.  They both accept two propositions:  first, that we cannot ’by mere reasoning’ prove the existence of an external world; secondly, that it is ‘absolutely impossible for us not to believe’ in its existence.  Hume, he says, pronounces the first proposition in a ’loud tone of voice’ and ‘whispers’ the second.  Reid, conversely, passes over the first rapidly and ’dwells on the second with a tone of confidence.’ Brown accepts both statements.  He has already said that there is no argument against Berkeley’s denial of matter any more than against the ‘infinite divisibility of matter.’  But he adds, it is ‘physically impossible’ for us to admit the conclusion, at least without ’an instant dissent from a momentary logical admission.’ This, indeed, is but a version of Hume’s familiar statement that Berkeley’s arguments admit of no reply and produce no conviction.

Another essential doctrine of the Mills, the ‘association’ theory, is treated differently by Brown.  Brown, as we have seen, both in his theory of causation and in his theory of our belief in an external world, speaks of principles in the mind which somehow override ‘ratiocination.’  In the first case, he speaks of ‘intuition,’ but in the other, as I have said, he seems to prefer association.  The difference is remarkable because the belief in an external world is upon his showing simply a case of causation.  It means essentially the reference of our sensations as to an external cause.  Now, in the argument upon causation, he has insisted upon the insufficiency of association to generate the belief; and he would have found it difficult to meet his own arguments if applied to the belief in an external world.  Yet it does not seem to occur to him that there is any difficulty in explaining this belief in an external world as a case of what Mill called ‘indissoluble association.’  Brown, as Mill thought, was not sufficiently aware of the power of this principle, and the difference between them is marked by this divergence.  Brown had a great deal to say about association, though he chose generally to substitute the word ‘suggestion,’ previously familiar to Reid and Berkeley. He considers it, however, mainly in another relation.  He proposes to trace the order in which ‘trains’ of ideas succeed each other in our minds.  He does not dwell upon the influence of association in producing belief.  His question is not primarily as to the logic, but as to the actual succession of our thoughts.  He explains that he uses the word ‘suggestion’ in order to avoid the hypothesis that the sequence of two ideas necessarily implies a previous state of mind in which they were brought together; and endeavours to explain various cases (as, for example, association by ‘contrast’ as well as by ‘likeness’ or ‘continuity’) by a more ‘subtile’ analysis. He then works out an elaborate theory of ‘simple’ and ‘relative’ suggestion.  Simple ’suggestion’ corresponds mainly to ordinary association, as when a friend’s name or his book calls up the thought of the man himself.  ’Relative suggestion’ arises when two or more objects are perceived and suggest various relations of likeness and so forth. This provides a scheme for working out the whole doctrine of the sequences of ideas so far as the sequences depend upon the mind itself and not upon external causes.  It thus leads to problems of abstraction and generalisation and to his whole theory of what he calls the ‘intellectual states.’  He again closely coincides with the French ideologists.  He starts by examining Locke and Condillac.  He of course professes to hold that Condillac’s version of Locke is illegitimate, and ridicules the famous formula penser c’est sentir.  He is, however, equally unwilling to admit Reid’s ’variety of powers.’ In fact, his criticism of Condillac shows more affinity than contrast.  Condillac erred, he says, in holding that thoughts are ‘transformed sensations.’  This was a false simplification into which he considers Condillac to have been led partly by the ambiguity of the word sentir. Condillac applied to the mind the theory, true in ’the chemistry of the material chemists,’ that the ’compounds are the elements themselves.’ He errs when he infers from the analogy that a feeling which arises out of others can be resolved into them.  ‘Love and hate’ and other emotions are fundamentally different from the sensations by which they are occasioned, not mere ‘transformations’ of those sensations.  We, on the other hand (that is to say, Reid and Stewart), have erred by excessive amplification.  Instead of identifying different things, we have admitted a superfluous number of ‘ultimate principles.’

The result is that besides the original sensations, we have to consider a number of feelings, which, while essentially different, are ‘suggested’ or caused by them.  These are parts of the whole intellectual construction, and, though not transformed sensations, are still ‘feelings’ arising in consequence of the sensations.  They are parts of the ‘trains’ or sequences of ‘ideas.’  It is accordingly characteristic of Brown that he habitually describes an intellectual process as a ‘feeling.’  The statement of a mathematical proportion, for example, is a case of ‘relative suggestion.’  When we consider two numbers together we have a ’feeling of the relation of proportion.’ The ‘profoundest reasonings’ are ’nothing more than a continued analysis of our thought,’ by which we resolve the ’complex feelings of our minds’ into the simpler conceptions out of which they were constructed. In other words, Brown, it would seem, really accepts the penser c’est sentir, only that he regards the sentir as including separate classes of feeling, which cannot be regarded as simple ‘transformations’ of sensation.  They are ’states of the mind’ caused by, that is, invariably following upon, the simpler states, and, of course, combining in an endless variety of different forms.  Reasoning is nothing more than a series of relative ’suggestions of which the separate subjects are felt by us to be mutually related.’ Hence, too, arises his theory of generalisation.  He is, he says, not a ‘nominalist’ but a ‘conceptualist,’ and here, for once, agrees with Reid as against Stewart. The ‘general term,’ according to him, expresses the ‘feeling or general notion of resemblance,’ which arises upon a contemplation of two objects.  ‘In Nature,’ as he observes elsewhere, ‘there are no classes,’ but the observation of a number of particular cases and a certain feeling to which we give a name.  Here, again, Brown’s view coincides with that of his French contemporaries.

We may then say briefly that Brown carries out in his own fashion the conception of psychology which makes it an inductive science parallel to the physical sciences, and to be pursued by the same methods.  We have to do with ‘feelings’ instead of atoms, and with mental instead of ‘material’ chemistry.  Our sole method is still an analysis such as guides us in unravelling complex physical phenomena.  We have, indeed, to admit certain first truths the belief in our own identity is one of them which are necessary to our very existence, although the assertion of such principles was carried to an extravagant and ridiculous length ‘by Reid and some of his friends.’  When, however, we come to ask what these principles are, it must be admitted that they are very innocent.  They are not dangerous things, like ‘innate ideas,’ capable of leading us to a transcendental world, but simply assertions that we are warranted in trusting our sensations and applying a thoroughly inductive and empirical method.  They are the cement which joins the feelings, and which, as Mill thought, could be supplanted by ‘indissoluble associations.’  The indefinite power thus attributed to association became, as we shall see, Mill’s most characteristic doctrine.  Meanwhile, I will only mention one inference which illustrates Brown’s philosophical tendencies.  Stewart had spoken doubtfully of the ontological argument for theology.  Brown throws it over altogether.  He does not even change it into an ‘intuition.’  He has always, he says, regarded it as ‘absolutely void of force’ unless it tacitly assumes the ‘physical argument.’  Nay, it is one proof of the force of this physical argument that it has saved us from doubts which would be rather strengthened than weakened by the ’metaphysical arguments.’ The ‘physical argument’ means the argument from design, which thus becomes the sole support of theology.

Hamilton naturally regards Brown as a mere sceptic in disguise.  His theory of perception destroys his theory of personal identity.  He has refused to accept our intuitive belief in one case, and cannot appeal to it in the other.  He leaves no room for ‘liberty of will,’ and advances ’no argument in support of this condition of our moral being.’ Indeed, as Stewart complained, Brown, by identifying ‘will’ and ‘desire,’ has got rid of the will altogether.  It is only natural that a man who is making a scientific study of the laws of human nature should find no room for an assertion that within a certain sphere there are no laws.  A physiologist might as well admit that some vital processes are uncaused.

Brown thus illustrates the gravitation of the ‘common-sense’ philosophy to pure empiricism.  He was the last in the genuine line of Scottish common-sense philosophers.  When after what may be called the unphilosophical interregnum which followed Brown’s death, Hamilton became professor, the Scottish tradition was blended with the very different theories derived from Kant.  Upon Brown’s version, the Scottish philosophy had virtually declared itself bankrupt.  The substance of his teaching was that of the very school which his predecessors had attempted to confute, carefully as the fact might be hidden by dexterous rhetoric and manipulation of technical terms.  He agrees with Hume’s premises, and adopts the method of Condillac.  This was perceived by his most remarkable hearer.  Carlyle went to Edinburgh at the end of 1809.  Brown, ’an eloquent, acute little gentleman, full of enthusiasm about simple suggestions, relative, etc.,’ was ’utterly unprofitable’ to him, disspiriting ’as the autumn winds among withered leaves.’ In Signs of the Times (1829) Carlyle gave his view of the Scottish philosophy generally.  They had, he says, started from the ‘mechanical’ premises suggested by Hume.  ’They let loose instinct as an indiscriminatory bandog to guard them against (his) conclusions’:  ’they tugged lustily at the logical chain by which Hume was so coldly towing them and the world into bottomless abysses of Atheism and Fatalism.  But the chain somehow snapped between them, and the issue has been that nobody now cares about either any more than about Hartley’s, Darwin’s, or Priestley’s contemporaneous doings in England.’ The judgment goes to the root of the matter.  The method of Reid inevitably led to this result.  Consider the philosophy as based upon, if not identical with, an inductive science of psychology, and the end is clear.  You may study and analyse the phenomena as carefully as you please; and may, as the Scottish professors did, produce, if not a scientific psychology, yet a mass of acute prolegomena to a science.  But the analysis can only reveal the actual combinations, chemical or mechanical, of thought.  The ultimate principles which the teachers profess to discover are simply provisional; products not yet analysed, but not therefore incapable of analysis.  It was very desirable to point them out:  an insistence upon the insufficiency of Hume’s or Condillac’s theories was a most valuable service; but it was valuable precisely because every indication of such an unresolved element was a challenge to the next comer to resolve it by closer analysis.  And thus, in fact, the intuitions, which had played so great a part with Reid, come in Brown’s hands to be so clearly limited to the materials given by sensation or experience that any show of ‘philosophy,’ meaning an independent theory of the universe, was an illusory combination of fine phrases.

II.  JAMES MILL’S ‘ANALYSIS’

James Mill’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind is on the one hand an exposition of the principles implied in Bentham’s writings, and, on the other hand, a statement of the position from which the younger Mill started.  J. S. Mill discussed the book with his father during its composition, and in 1869 he published a new edition, with elaborate notes by himself, George Grote, Professor Bain, and Andrew Findlater. The commentary is of great importance in defining the relation between the two successors to the throne of Bentham.

Mill’s Analysis, though not widely read, made a deep impression upon Mill’s own disciples.  It is terse, trenchant, and uncompromising.  It reminds us in point of style of the French writers, with whom he sympathised, rather than of the English predecessors, to whom much of the substance was owing.  The discursive rhetoric of Brown or Stewart is replaced by good, hard, sinewy logic.  The writer is plainly in earnest.  If over confident, he has no petty vanity, and at least believes every word that he says.  Certain limitations are at once obvious.  Mill, as a publicist, a historian, and a busy official, had not had much time to spare for purely philosophic reading.  He was not a professor in want of a system, but an energetic man of business, wishing to strike at the root of the superstitions to which his political opponents appealed for support.  He had heard of Kant, and seen what ‘the poor man would be at.’  Later German systems, had he heard of them, would have been summarily rejected by him as so much transcendental moonshine.  The problem of philosophy was, he held, a very simple one, if attacked in a straightforward, scientific method.

Mill, like his Scottish rivals, applies ‘Baconian’ principles.  The inductive method, which had already been so fruitful in the physical sciences, will be equally effective in philosophy, and ever since Locke, philosophy had meant psychology.  The ‘philosophy of the mind’ and the philosophy of the body may be treated as co-ordinate and investigated by similar methods.  In the physical sciences we come ultimately to the laws of movement of their constituent atoms.  In the moral sciences we come in the same way to the study of ‘ideas.’  The questions, How do ideas originate? and how are they combined so as to form the actual state of consciousness? are therefore the general problems to be solved.  Hume had definitely proposed the problem.  Hartley had worked out the theory of association of ideas which Hume had already compared to the universal principle of gravitation in the physical world; and had endeavoured to show how this might be connected with physiological principles.  Hartley’s followers had been content to dwell upon the power of association.  Abraham Tucker, Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, and Belsham represented this tendency, and were the normal antagonists of Reid and Stewart.  In France the ‘ideologists’ mainly followed Condillac, and apparently knew nothing of Hartley.  Mill, as his son testifies, had been profoundly influenced by Hartley’s treatise the ‘really master-production,’ as he esteemed it, ’in the philosophy of mind.’ Hartley’s work, as the younger Mill thought, and the elder apparently agreed, was very superior to the ‘merely verbal generalisation of Condillac.’  James Mill, however, admired Condillac and his successors.  In his article upon education, Mill traces the association theory to Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, the last of whom, he says, was succeeded by the two ‘more sober-minded’ philosophers, Condillac and Hartley; while he especially praises Erasmus Darwin, Helvetius, and Cabanis.  Mill, therefore, may be regarded as an independent ally of the ideologists whose influence upon Brown has been already noticed.  Mill had not read Brown’s Lectures when he began his Analysis, and after reading them thought Brown ’but poorly read in the doctrine of association.’ He had, however, read the essay upon causation, which he rather oddly describes as ’one of the most valuable contributions to science for which we are indebted to the last generation.’ He accepted Brown’s view minus the ‘intuition.’

The pith of Mill’s book is thus determined.  His aim is to give a complete analysis of mental phenomena, and therefore to resolve those phenomena into their primitive constituent atoms.  Here we have at once a tacit assumption which governs his method.  Philosophy, speaking roughly, is by some people supposed to start from truths, and thus to be in some way an evolution of logic.  According to Mill it must start from facts, and therefore from something not given by logic.  To state clearly, indeed, the relation between truth and fact may suggest very intricate problems.  Mill, at any rate, must find a basis in fact, and for him the ultimate facts must be feelings.  The reality at least of a feeling is undeniable.  The Penser c’est sentir, or the doctrine that all ‘ideas’ are transformed sensations is his starting-point.  The word ‘feeling,’ according to him, includes every ‘phenomenon of the mind.’  ‘Think,’ he says elsewhere, does not include all our experience, but ‘there is nothing to which we could not extend the term “I feel."’ He proceeds to infer that our experience is either a knowledge of the feelings separately, or ’a knowledge of the order in which they follow each other; and this is all.’  We may add that the knowledge is the feeling.  Reid, Kant, and the Germans have indeed tried to show that there are feelings not derived from the sensations, but this, as Hartley and Condillac have shown, is a mistake.  This is his first principle in a nutshell, and must give a clue to the various applications.

The next step is familiar.  Hume had distinguished impressions and ideas.  ‘Ideas’ are copies of previous ‘impressions.’  It is for psychology to say what are the laws by which they are related to their originals.  The ultimate origin cannot be explained by psychology alone.  Impressions are caused by the outward world acting in some way upon the mind; and the psychologist can only classify the various modes in which they present themselves.  Mill therefore begins by the usual account of the five senses, through which comes all knowledge of the external world.  He adds to Reid’s list muscular sensations, and those derived from the internal organs, to which last Cabanis in particular had called attention.  So far he is following the steps of his predecessors.  He is, he says, simply asserting an ‘indisputable’ fact. We have sensations and we have ideas, which are ’copies of sensations.’  We may then consider how far these facts will enable us to explain the whole series of mental phenomena.  ‘Ideation,’ which he suggests as a new word the process by which a continuous series of thoughts goes on in our minds is the general phenomenon to be considered.  Without, as yet, pronouncing that sensations and copies of sensations will turn out to form the whole contents of our consciousness, he tries to show for what part of those contents they will account.

Here we come to the doctrine which for him and his school gave the key to all psychological problems.  It was James Mill’s real merit, according to his son, that he carried the principle of association of ideas further than it had been carried by Hartley or other predecessors. The importance of the doctrine, indeed, is implied in the very statement of the problem.  If it be true, or so far as it is true, that our consciousness reveals to us simply a series of ‘sensations’ and ‘ideas,’ the question must be how they are combined.  ’Thought succeeds thought, idea follows idea incessantly,’ says Mill; and this phrase assumes ‘thoughts’ and ‘ideas’ to be separable atoms.  How, then, do they come to coalesce into an apparently continuous stream?  The mind is a stream of ‘ideas.’  If the stream is composed of drops, we must, of course, consider the drops as composing the stream.  The question is, What laws can we assign which will determine the process of composition?  The phrase ‘association’ admittedly expresses some general and very familiar truths.  Innumerable connections may be established when there is no assignable ground of connection in the ideas themselves other than the fact of a previous contact.  One idea not only calls up the other, but in some way generates a belief in an independent connection.  We hear thunder, for example, and think of lightning.  The two ideas are entirely distinct and separate, for they are due to different senses.  Yet we not only think of lightning when we hear thunder, but we have no doubt that there is a causal connection.  We believe in this connection, again, though no further explanation can be given of the fact.  Thunder and lightning have occurred together, and we infer that they will, and even must, occur together.  When we examine our whole structure of belief, we find such ‘arbitrary’ associations pervade it in every direction.  Language itself is learned simply by association.  There is no connection whatever between the sound of the word ‘man’ and the ‘ideas’ which the word excites, beyond the fact that the sound has been previously heard when the ideas were excited.  Here, then, is a phenomenon to be explained or generalised.  We have in countless cases a certain connection established for which no further reason can be assigned than the fact of its previous occurrence.  On such a ground, we believe that fire burns, that bread is wholesome, that stones fall; and but for such beliefs could know nothing of the outside world.  ‘Contingent’ truth, therefore, or truth derived from mere contact, pervades, if it does not constitute, the whole fabric of our whole knowledge.  To prove that all our knowledge is derived from experience is, according to Mill, to prove that in some sense or other association of ideas lies at the base of all intellectual processes.  When Locke introduced a chapter upon ‘Association of Ideas’ into the fourth edition of his essay, he treated it as the exceptional case.  Some ideas had a connection traceable by reason; others were only connected by ‘chance and custom.’  Association does not explain reasoning, only the deviations from reasoning.  But with Hume and Hartley the relation is inverted.  The principle, instead of being an exceptional case, is simply the universal rule from which logical connection may be deduced as a special case.

The facts upon which Mill relied, and the account of them which he gave, require notice and embodiment in any sound psychology.  In some shape or other they form the starting-point of all later systems.  Mill’s vigorous application of his principle, worked out with imperfect appreciation and with many oversights, had therefrom, at least, the merit of preparing the ground for a more scientific method.  In any case, however, his conclusions, so far as sound, must be placed in a different framework of theory.  It becomes necessary to dwell chiefly upon the curious defects of his theory, if taken as he wished it to be taken, for an ultimate scientific statement.  The fact that there is a synthesis and an analysis is expressed by ‘association.’  But what more can we say?  What are the ‘laws’ of association?  Unless some rule can be given, we shall get nothing that can be called a theory.  One idea is not suggested by the other through any logical process.  They are still ‘conjoined’ but not ‘connected.’  The connection, therefore, must be given by something different from the ideas themselves.  Now the order of the original ‘sensations’ depends upon the ‘objects of nature,’ and is therefore left to ’physical philosophy.’ They occur, however, either in ‘synchronous’ or in ‘successive’ order.  Then ‘ideas’ spring up in the order of ‘sensations,’ and this is the ’general law of association of ideas.’ The synchronous sensations produce synchronous ideas and the successive sensations successive ideas.  Finally, the strength of the association between the ideas depends upon ’the vividness of the associated feelings, and the frequency of the association.’ Hume had said that association depended upon three principles, ’contiguity in time and place,’ ‘causation,’ and ‘resemblance.’  Contiguity in time corresponds to the successive, and contiguity in place to the synchronous, order.  Causation, as Brown had finally proved, means simply antecedence and consequence.  ‘Resemblance’ remains and is, as Mill afterwards says, a most important principle; but in an unlucky moment he is half inclined to reduce even ‘resemblance’ to ’contiguity.’ Resemblance is, he even suggests, merely ’a case of frequency,’ because we generally see like things together.  When we see one tree or sheep, we generally see several trees or sheep.  J. S. Mill mildly remarks upon this quaint suggestion as the ’least successful simplification’ in the book.  He argues the point gravely.  Sheep, it is clear, are not seen to be like because they often compose a flock, but are considered to be a flock because they are seen to be like.  To do James Mill justice, he drops the argument as soon as he has struck it out.  It is only worth notice as showing his aim.  ‘Likeness’ seems to imply a relation dependent on the ideas themselves; not purely external and arbitrary.  If we could get rid of likeness, all association would ultimately be ‘contiguity.’  ’The fundamental law of association,’ as he says elsewhere, ’is that when two things have been frequently found together, we never perceive or think of the one without thinking of the other.’  The two ideas are associated as two balls are associated when they are in the same box.  So far as they are themselves concerned, they might be separated without any alteration in their own properties.  What, then, corresponds to the ‘box’?  Association depends upon relations of time and space.  Things are associated by occurring in succession or together; the red colour of a rose is in the same place with the shape of the leaf; the scent is perceived at the same time with the colour.  The thunder follows the lightning.  What, then, he might ask, are ‘time’ and ‘space’?  Are they ‘ideas’ or ‘sensations’ or qualities of the objects? or, in any case, as supplying the ultimate principle of association, do they not require investigation?  Before coming to that problem, however, we have to settle other knotty points.  We must clear away illusions which seem to introduce something more than association.  Elements of thought not at first sight expressible simply in terms of sensations and ideas must be analysed to show that they are only disguises for different combinations of the facts.  Reasoning, according to most logicians, supposes, first, concepts, and therefore some process of classification of the objects of thought; and, secondly, some process of combining these concepts to bring out hitherto unknown truths.  What, then, is the meaning of the general or abstract symbols employed in the process?  Mill’s provision of raw materials consists so far of sensations and ideas, which are worked up so as to form ‘clusters’ (the word is taken from Hartley) and ‘trains.’  This corresponds to synchronous and successive associations.  How does the logical terminology express these ‘clusters’ and ‘trains’?  Mill answers by a theory of ‘naming.’  Language fulfils two purposes; it is required in order to make our ideas known to others; and in order to fix our own ideas.  Ideas are fluctuating, transitory, and ’come into the mind unbidden.’  We must catch and make a note of these shifting crowds of impalpable entities.  We therefore put marks upon the simple sensations or upon the ‘clusters.’  We ticket them as a tradesman tickets bundles of goods in his warehouse, and can refer to them for our own purposes or those of others.  As the number of objects to be marked is enormous, as there are countless ideas and clusters and clusters of clusters of endless variety to be arranged in various ways, one main object of naming is economy.  A single word has to be used to mark a great number of individuals.  This will account for such general names as are represented by noun-substantives:  man, horse, dog, and so forth.  Mill then proceeds, with the help of Horne Tooke, to explain the other grammatical forms.  An adjective is another kind of noun marking a cross division.  Verbs, again, are adjectives marking other sets of facts, and enabling us to get rid of the necessity of using a new mark for every individual or conceivable combination into clusters.  J. S. Mill remarks that this omits the special function of verbs their ’employment in predication.’ James Mill, however, has his own view of ‘predication.’  ‘Man’ is a mark of John, Peter, Thomas, and the rest.  When I say ‘John is a man,’ I mean that ’man is another mark to that idea of which John is a mark.’ I am then able to make a statement which will apply to all the individuals, and save the trouble of repeating the assertion about each.  ‘Predication,’ therefore, is simply a substitution of one name for another.  So, for example, arithmetic is simply naming.  What I call two and two, I also call four.  The series of thoughts in this case is merely ’a series of names applicable to the same thing and meaning the same thing.’ This doctrine, as J. S. Mill remarks, is derived from Hobbes, whom Leibniz in consequence called plus quam nominalis. My belief that two and two make four explains why I give the same name to certain numbers; but the giving the name does not explain the belief.  Meanwhile, if a class name be simply the mark which is put upon a bundle of things, we have got rid of a puzzle.  Mill triumphs over the unfortunate realists who held that a class meant a mysterious entity, existing somewhere apart from all the individuals in which it is embodied.  There is really nothing mysterious; a name is first the mark of an individual, the individual corresponding to a ‘cluster’ or a set of ’simple ideas, concreted into a complex idea.’ Then the name and the complex idea are associated reciprocally; each ‘calls up’ the other.  The complex idea is ‘associated’ with other resembling ideas.  The name becomes a talisman calling up the ideas of an indefinite number of resembling individuals, and the name applied to one in the first instance becomes a mark which calls up all, or, as he says, is the ‘name of the whole combination.’  Classification, therefore, ’is merely a process of naming, and is all resolvable into association.’ The peculiarity of this theory, as his commentators again remark, is that it expressly omits any reference to abstraction.  The class simply means the aggregate of resembling individuals without any selection of the common attributes which are, in J. S. Mill’s phrase, ‘connoted’ by the class-name.  Abstraction, as James Mill explains, is a subsidiary process, corresponding to the ’formation of sub-species.’

Mill has now shown how the various forms of language correspond to ideas, formed into clusters of various orders by the principle of association.  The next step will naturally be to show how these clusters are connected in the process of reasoning.  Here the difficulty about predication recurs.  J. S. Mill remarks that his father’s theory of predication consistently omits ’the element Belief.’  When I say, ‘John is a man,’ I make an affirmation or assert a belief.  I do not simply mean to call up in the mind of my hearer a certain ‘cluster’ or two coincident clusters of ideas, but to convey knowledge of truths.  The omission of reference to belief is certainly no trifle.  Mill has classified the various ideas and combinations of ideas which are used in judgment, but the process of judgment itself seems to have slipped out of account.  He may have given us, or be able to give us, a reasoned catalogue of the contents of our minds, but has not explained how the mind itself acts.  It is a mere passive recipient of ideas, or rather itself a cluster of ideas cohering in various ways, without energy of its own.  One idea, as he tells us, calls up another ’by its own associating power.’ Ideas are things which somehow stick together and revive each other, without reference to the mind in which they exist or which they compose.  This explains his frequent insistence upon one assertion.  As we approach the question of judgment he finds it essential.  ’Having a sensation and having a feeling,’ he says, ‘are not two things.’  To ’feel an idea and be conscious of that feeling are not two things; the feeling and the consciousness are but two names for the same thing.’ So, again, ’to have a sensation and to believe that we have it, are not distinguishable things.’ Locke’s reflection thus becomes nothing but simple consciousness, and having a feeling is the same as attending to it. The point is essential.  It amounts to saying that we can speak of a thought as though it were simply a thing.

Thus belief not only depends upon, but actually is association.  ’It is not easy,’ he says, ’to treat of memory, belief, and judgment separately.’ As J. S. Mill naturally asks, ’How is it possible to treat of belief without including in it memory and judgment?’ Memory is a case of belief, and judgment an ’act of belief.’ To James Mill, however, it appears that as these different functions all involve association, they may be resolved into varying applications of that universal power.  Memory involves ‘an idea of my present self’ and an ‘idea of my past self,’ and to remember is to ’run over the intervening states of consciousness called up by association.’ Belief involves association at every step.  The belief in external objects is, as ‘all men admit’ ... ’wholly resolvable into association.’ ’That a cause means and can mean nothing to the human mind but constant antecedence’ (and therefore ’inseparable association,’ as he thinks) ’is no longer a point in dispute.’ Association, it is true, may produce wrong as well as right beliefs; right beliefs when ’in conformity with the connections of things,’ and wrong beliefs when not in conformity.  In both cases the belief is produced by ‘custom,’ though, happily, the right custom is by far the commonest.  The ’strength of the association follows the frequency.’  The crow flies east as well as west; but the stone always falls downwards. Hence I form an ‘inseparable association’ corresponding to a belief in gravitation, but have no particular belief about the direction of a crow’s flight.

This gives the doctrine of ’indissoluble association’ the pivot of the whole scheme the doctrine, says J. S. Mill, which, ’if it can be proved, is the greatest of all the triumphs of the Association Philosophy.’ The younger Mill always insisted upon the vast importance of the principle; but he here admits a difficulty.  In a long note upon James Mill’s chapter on ‘Belief,’ conspicuous for his usual candour, he confesses the inadequacy of his father’s view.  The comment indicates the point of divergence and yet shows curiously the ground common to both.  James Mill’s theory states facts in some sense undeniable.  Our ‘ideas’ cohere and combine to form a tissue:  an imagery or series of pictures which form the content and are somehow the ground of our beliefs.  The process of formation clearly involves ‘association.’  The scent of the rose is associated with the colour:  both with the visible form and so forth.  But is this process the same thing as believing, or have we to explain the belief by some mental activity different from, however closely connected with, the imagination, or in his phrase the ‘ideation’?  Here J. S. Mill finds a difficulty.  The statement, ’I believe that thunder will follow lightning,’ is something more than the statement, ’the sight suggests or calls up the sound.’  The mental picture considered by itself may be described as a fact, without considering what belief, or whether any belief, is implied.  J. S. Mill therefore makes a distinction intended to clear up his father’s confusion.  There is a difference, he says, between remembering ‘a real fact’ and remembering a ’thought.’ He illustrates this by the difference between the idea of Lafayette and the idea of Falstaff.  Lafayette was real, and had been seen by the rememberer.  Falstaff is a figment who, having never existed, can never have been seen.  Yet the idea of Falstaff may be quite as vivid as the idea of Lafayette.  What, then, is the difference between the two states of mind?  One, says J. S. Mill, is a belief about ‘real facts’; the other about ‘thoughts.’  This, he observes, corresponds to James Mill’s distinction between a ‘sensation’ and an ’idea,’ a difference which he had admitted to be ‘primordial.’  Then, says J. S. Mill, we may as well admit that there is an ‘element’ in the remembrance of a real fact not implied in the remembrance of a thought and not dependent on any difference in the ‘ideas’ themselves.  It, too, may be taken as ‘primordial,’ or incapable of further analysis.  This doctrine becomes important in some of Mill’s logical speculations, and is connected with his whole theory of belief in an external world.  It has an uncomfortable likeness to Reid’s ‘common-sense’ view, and even to the hated ‘intuitionism’; and Mill deserves the more credit for his candour.

Meanwhile it seems clear that the criticism implies an important confusion.  The line of distinction is drawn in the wrong place.  So far as the simple ‘imagination’ is concerned, there may be no question of belief or disbelief.  The picture of Falstaff or of Lafayette, a horse or a centaur, arises equally, and is put together, let us suppose, by simple association.  But as soon as I think about either I believe or disbelieve, and equally whether I judge the object to be a thought or to be a ‘real fact,’ whether I say that I could have seen Lafayette, or that I could not have seen Falstaff.  It is not a question between reality or unreality, but between two classes of reality.  A dream is a real dream, just as a man is a real man.  The question is simply where or how it exists, not whether it exists.  The picture is, in one case, put together by my mind; in the other, due to a stimulus from without; but it exists in both cases; and belief is equally present whether I put it in one class of reality or the other:  as we form a judgment equally when we pronounce a man to be lying, and when we pronounce him to be speaking the truth.  J. S. Mill seems to suppose that association can explain the imagination of a centaur or a Falstaff, but cannot explain the belief in a horse or Lafayette.  The imagination or ‘ideation,’ he should have said, accounts in both cases for the mere contents of the thought; but in neither case can it by itself explain the judgment as to ‘reality.’  That is to say, James Mill may have described accurately a part of the process by which the mental picture is constructed, but has omitted to explain the action of the mind itself.  Belief, we may agree, is a ‘primordial’ or ultimate faculty; but we must not interpret it as belief in a ’real fact’ as distinguished from belief in ‘a thought’:  that is a secondary and incidental distinction.

This confusion, as I have said, apparently prevents J. S. Mill from seeing how deeply his very frank admissions cut into the very structure of his father’s system.  He has, as I have said, remarked upon the singular absence of any reference to ‘belief,’ ‘abstraction,’ and so forth; but he scarcely observes how much is implied by the omission.  His criticism should have gone further.  James Mill has not only omitted a faculty which enables us to distinguish between ‘thoughts’ and ‘things,’ images of fancy and pictures of reality, but also the faculty which is equally present whenever we properly think instead of simply seeing images passively; and equally whether we refer an image to fact or fancy.  His ‘analysis of the mind’ seems to get rid of the mind itself.

The omission becomes important at the next step.  ’Under the modest title of an explanation of the meaning of several names,’ says his son, James Mill discusses ’some of the deepest and most intricate questions in all metaphysics.’  A treatise on chemistry might almost as well be ’described as an explanation of the names, air, water, potass, sulphuric acid, and so forth.’ Why does the chapter come in this place and in this peculiar form?  Probably because James Mill was partly conscious of the inadequacy of his previous chapters.  The problems which he has been considering could not be adequately treated by regarding ideas as ‘things’ bound together by association.  What, after all, is a proposition?  What is meant by ‘true’ or ‘false,’ as distinguished from real and unreal?  If an association actually is a truth, what is the difference between right and wrong associations?  Both are facts, and the very words ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ that is, true and false, apply not to facts but to propositions. The judgment is tested in some way by correspondence to the ‘order of Nature,’ or of our sensations and ideas.  What precisely is meant by this order?  So far as we have gone, it seems as if ideas might be combined in any order whatever, and the most various beliefs generated in different minds.  Perhaps, however, the principle of association itself may reveal something as to the possible modes of coalescence.  Mill makes contiguity an ultimate ground of association; and contiguity implies that things have certain relations expressible in terms of space and time and so forth.  These primitive relations now come up for consideration, and should enable us to say more precisely what kind of order is possible.  In fact, Mill now endeavours to analyse the meanings of such words as relation in general, time, space, number, likeness, personal identity and others.  The effect of his analysis is that the principles, whatever they may be, which might be supposed to underlie association appear to be products of association.  He begins by asking what is the meaning of ‘relative terms.’  Their peculiarity is that they ‘always exist in pairs,’ such as ‘father and son,’ ’high and low,’ ‘right and left.’  ’If it is asked, Why do we give names in pairs? the general answer immediately suggests itself; it is because the things named present themselves in pairs, that is, are joined by association.’ J. S. Mill thinks that no part of the Analysis is more valuable than the ‘simple explanation’ which follows.  There is no ‘mystical bond called a relation’ between two things, but ’a very simple peculiarity in the concrete fact’ marked by the names.  In ’ordinary names of objects, the fact connoted by a name ... concerns one object only’; in the case of relative names, ’the fact connoted concerns two objects, and cannot be understood without thinking of them both.’  A ‘fact concerning an object’ is a curiously awkward expression; but one point is clear.  If the two objects concerned are the same, whether considered apart or together, the ‘relation’ must be something more than the facts, and therefore requires to be specified.  If they are, in fact, one thing, or parts of a continuous process, we must ask how they come to be distinguished, and what ground there is for speaking of association.  James Mill, by considering the problem as a mere question of ‘names,’ seems to intimate that the relation is a mere figment.  In fact, as J. S. Mill perceives, the ‘explanations’ become nugatory.  They simply repeat the thing to be explained.  He begins with ‘resemblance.’  To feel two things to be alike is, he says, the same thing as to have the two feelings.  He means to say, apparently, that when there are two ‘ideas’ there is not also a third idea of ‘likeness.’  That would be what Bentham called a ’fictitious entity.’  But this cannot ‘explain’ the likeness of the ideas.  ’Their being alike,’ as his son interprets, ’is nothing but their being felt to be alike which does not help us.’ So ’antecedence and consequence’ are ‘explained’ by saying that one of two feelings calls up the other; or, as the son again remarks, antecedence is explained by antecedence, and succession by succession.  Antecedence and consequence, like likeness and unlikeness, must therefore, according to J. S. Mill, be ’postulated as universal conditions of Nature, inherent in all our feelings whether of external or internal consciousness.’ In other words, apparently, time is an ultimate form of thought.  Time and space, generally, as James Mill thinks, are the ‘abstract names’ respectively of successive and simultaneous order, which become ’indissolubly associated with the idea of every object.’ Space, of course, is said to be a product of touch and muscular sensations, and the problem as to how these varying sensations and these alone give rise to apparently necessary and invariable beliefs is not taken into consideration.  Mill is here dealing with the questions which Kant attempted to answer by showing how the mind imposes its forms upon sense-given materials, forms them into concepts, and combines the concepts into judgments and reasoning.  Mill evades the mysterious and transcendental at the cost of omitting reason altogether.  He represents the result of accepting one horn of a dilemma, which presses upon philosophies of loftier pretensions.  Those who accept the other horn speak of a ‘fact’ as though it were a truth, and argue as though the world could be spun out of pure logic, or a tissue be made of relations without any things to be related.  Mill, with scarcely a glance at such doctrines, tries systematically to speak of a truth as if it were a fact.  The world for him is made up of ideas sticking together; and nothing else exists.  The relation is the fact; belief is the association; consciousness and reflection, considered apart, are nothing but the sensations, ideas, clusters, and trains.  The attempt to base all truth upon experience, to bring philosophy into harmony with science was, as I hold, perfectly right.  Only, upon these assumptions it could not be carried out.  Mill had the merit which is implied even by an unsuccessful attempt to hold by fact.  He raises a number of interesting questions; and I think that it is more remarkable that so many of his observations have still an interest for psychologists than that so much is obviously wrong.  Mill, it may be said, took an essay upon association for a treatise upon psychology in general.  He was writing what might be one important chapter in such a treatise, and supposes that he has written the whole, and can deduce ‘philosophy’ from it, if, indeed, any philosophy can be said to remain.  Meanwhile, I may observe, that by pushing his principles to extremes, even his ‘association’ doctrine is endangered.  His Analysis seems to destroy even the elements which are needed to give the simplest laws of association.  It is rather difficult to say what is meant by the ‘contiguity,’ ‘sequence,’ and ‘resemblance,’ which are the only conditions specified, and which he seems to explain not as the conditions but as the product of association.  J. S. Mill perceived that something was wanting which he afterwards tried to supply.  I will just indicate one or two points, which may show what problems the father bequeathed to the son.  James Mill, at one place, discusses the odd problem ’how it happens that all trains of thought are not the same.’ The more obvious question is, on his hypothesis, how it happens that any two people have the same beliefs, since the beliefs are made of the most varying materials.  If, again, two ideas when associated remain distinct, we have Hume’s difficulty.  Whatever is distinguishable, he argued, is separable.  If two ideas simply lie side by side, as is apparently implied by ‘contiguity,’ so that each can be taken apart without change, why should we suppose that they will never exist apart, or, indeed, that they should ever again come together?  The contiguity does not depend upon them, but upon some inscrutable collocation, of which we can only say that it exists now.  This is the problem which greatly occupied J. S. Mill.

The ‘indissoluble’ or ‘inseparable’ association, which became the grand arcanum of the school, while intended to answer some of these difficulties, raises others.  Mill seems to insist upon splitting a unit into parts in order that it may be again brought together by association.  So J. S. Mill, in an admiring note, confirms his father’s explanation (’one of the most important thought in the whole treatise’) of the infinity of space. We think space infinite because we always ‘associate’ position with extension.  Surely space is extension; and to think of one without the other implies a contradiction.  We think space infinite, because we think of a space as only limited by other space, and therefore indefinitely extensible.  There is no ‘association,’ simply repetition.  Elsewhere we have the problem, How does one association exclude another?  Only, as J. S. Mill replies, when one idea includes the idea of the absence of the others. We cannot combine the ideas of a plane and a convex surface.  Why?  Because we have never had both sets of sensations together.  The ‘commencement’ of one set has always been ’simultaneous with the cessation of another set,’ as, for instance, when we bend a flat sheet of paper.  The difficulty seems to be that one fact cannot be contradictory of another, since contradiction only applies to assertions.  When I say that A is above B, however, I surely assert that B is below A; and I cannot make both assertions about A and B at the same time without a contradiction.  To explain this by an association of simultaneous and successive sensations seems to be a curiously roundabout way of ‘explaining.’  Every assertion is also a denial; and, if I am entitled to say anything, I am enabled without any help from association to deny its contradictory.  On Mill’s showing, the assertion and the denial of its contradiction, instead of being identical, are taken to be two beliefs accidentally associated.  Finally, I need only make one remark upon the fundamental difficulty.  It is hard to conceive of mere loose ‘ideas’ going about in the universe at large and sticking accidentally to others.  After all, the human being is in true sense also an organised whole, and his constitution must be taken into account in discovering the laws of ‘ideation.’  This is the point of view to which Mill, in his anxiety to get rid of everything that had a savour of a priori knowledge about it, remains comparatively blind.  It implies a remarkable omission.  Mill’s great teacher, Hartley, had appealed to physiology in a necessarily crude fashion.  He had therefore an organism:  a brain or a nervous system which could react upon the external world and modify and combine sensations.  Mill’s ideas would have more apparent connection if they could be made to correspond to ‘vibratiuncles’ or physical processes of some kind.  But this part of Hartley’s hypothesis had been dropped:  and all reality is therefore reduced to the whirl of vagrant and accidentally cohering ideas in brains and clusters.  His one main aim is to get rid of everything that can be called mystical and to trace all mental processes to ‘experience,’ as he understands experience to show that we are never entitled to assert that two ideas may not be joined in any way whatever.

The general tendency of the ‘Association Philosophy’ is sufficiently clear.  It may be best appreciated by comparing it to the method of the physical sciences, which it was intended to rival.  The physicist explains the ‘laws of nature’ by regarding a phenomenon as due to the varying arrangements of an indefinite multitude of uniform atoms.  I need not ask whether these atoms are to be regarded as realities, even the sole realities, or, on the other hand, as a kind of logical scaffolding removable when the laws are ascertained.  In any case, the assumption is necessary and most fruitful in the search for accurate and quantitative formulae.  Mill virtually assumes that the same thing can be done by breaking up the stream of consciousness into the ideas which correspond to the primitive atoms.  What precisely these atoms may be, how the constantly varying flow of thought can be resolved into constituent fractions, is not easy to see.  The physicist at least supposes his atoms to have definite space relations, but there is nothing clearly corresponding to space in the ‘ideas.’  They are capable of nothing but co-existence, sequence, and likeness; but the attempt to explain the meaning of those words ends in nothing but repeating them.  One result is the curious combination of the absolute and the indefinitely variable.  We get absolute statements because the ultimate constituents are taken to be absolutely constant.  We have indefinite variability because they may be collocated in any conceivable or inconceivable way.  This becomes evident when we have to do with organisms of any kind:  with characters or societies an organism varies, but varies along definite lines.  But, on Mill’s showing, the organic relations correspond to the indefinitely variable.  Education is omnipotent; state constitutions can be manufactured at will, and produce indefinite consequences.  And yet he can lay down laws of absolute validity, because he seems to be deducing them from one or two formulae corresponding to the essential and invariable properties of the ultimate unit whether man or ideas.  From this follows, too, the tendency to speak as if human desires corresponded to some definite measurable things, such as utility in ethics, value in political economy, and self-interest in politics.  This point appears in the application of Mill’s theories to the moral sciences.

III.  JAMES MILL’S ETHICS

James Mill in his ethical doctrine follows Bentham with little variation; but he shows very clearly what was the psychology which Bentham virtually assumed.  I may pass very briefly over Mill’s theory of conduct in general.  The ‘phenomena of thought,’ he says, may be divided into the ‘intellectual’ and the ‘active’ powers.  Hitherto he has considered ‘sensations’ and ‘ideas’ merely as existing; he will now consider them as ’exciting to action.’ The phenomena consist in both cases of sensations and ideas, combined into ‘clusters,’ and formed into trains ‘according to the sense laws.’  We have now to consider the ideas as active, and ’to demonstrate the simple laws into which the phenomena of human life, so numerous and apparently so diversified, may all be easily resolved.’

A desire is an ‘idea’ of a pleasant sensation; an ‘aversion’ an idea of painful sensation.  The idea and the sensation are not two things, but two names for the same thing.  Desire, again, has a ’tacit reference to future time’ when applied to a given case.  We associate these pains and pleasures with the causes; and in the important case our own actions are the causes.  Thus the association produces the motive, and the readiness to obey the motive is, as Bentham says, the ‘disposition.’  Then, following Hartley, Mill explains the will.  Bodily actions are muscular contractions, which are slowly co-ordinated by habit association, of course, acting at every stage of the process.  Now, it is a plain fact that muscular contractions follow ‘ideas.’  It is easy, then, to see how the ’idea of a pleasure should excite the idea of the action which is the cause of it; and how, when the idea exists, the action should follow.’ An ‘end’ is a pleasure desired, and gives the ‘motive.’  When we start from the motive and get the pleasure the same association is called ‘will.’  ‘Free-will’ is of course nonsense.  We have a full account of the human mechanism, and can see that it is throughout worked by association, admitting the primary fact of experience that the idea causes the muscular contraction.

This, and the ethical conclusions which follow, substantially coincide with Bentham’s doctrine, or supply the first principles from which Bentham might be deduced.  A fuller exposition of the ethics is given in the Fragment on Mackintosh.  Mackintosh, in 1829, wrote a Dissertation upon ‘Ethical Philosophy,’ for the Encyclopædia Britannica. The book stirred Mill’s ’indignation against an evil-doer.’ He wrote a Fragment on Mackintosh, which was suppressed for a time in consequence of his antagonist’s death in 1832, but published in the year of his own death, 1835. According to Professor Bain, the book was softened in consequence of remonstrances from Bickersteth.  It would be curious to see the previous version.  Professor Bain says that there are ‘thousands’ of books which contain ‘far worse severities of language.’  I confess that I cannot remember quite ‘a thousand.’  It is at least difficult to imagine more unmitigated expressions of contempt and aversion.  Mackintosh, says Mill, uses ‘macaroni phrases,’ ‘tawdry talk,’ ‘gabble’; he gets ‘beyond drivelling’ into something more like ‘raving’; he ‘deluges’ us with ‘unspeakable nonsense.’  ‘Good God!’ sums up the comment which can be made upon one sentence. Sir James, he declares, ’has got into an intellectual state so thoroughly depraved that I doubt whether a parallel to it is possible to be found.’ There is scarcely a mention of Mackintosh without an insult.  A partial explanation of Mill’s wrath may be suggested by the chapter upon Bentham.  Mackintosh there accused the Utilitarians generally of ’wantonly wounding the most respectable feelings of mankind’; of ‘clinging to opinions because they are obnoxious’; of taking themselves to be a ‘chosen few,’ despising the multitude, and retorting the dislike which their arrogance has provoked by using still more exasperating language. He suggested that they should do more justice to ‘the Romillys and the Broughams,’ who had been the real and judicious reformers; and he illustrated the errors of Bentham by especial reference to Mill’s arguments upon government and education.  There had long been an antipathy.  Mackintosh, said Mill in 1820, ’lives but for London display; parler et faire parler de lui in certain circles is his heaven.’

Mackintosh would have been most at home in a professorial chair.  He was, indeed, professor at Haileybury from 1818 to 1824, and spoken of as a probable successor to Brown at Edinburgh.  But he could never decidedly concentrate himself upon one main purpose.  Habits of procrastination and carelessness about money caused embarrassment which forced him to write hastily.  His love of society interfered with study, and his study was spread over an impossible range of subjects.  His great abilities, wasted by these infirmities, were seconded by very wide learning.  Macaulay describes the impression which he made at Holland House. He passed among his friends as the profound philosopher; the man of universal knowledge of history; of ripe and most impartial judgment in politics; the oracle to whom all men might appeal with confidence, though a little too apt to find out that all sides were in the right.  When he went to India he took with him some of the scholastic writers and the works of Kant and Fichte, then known to few Englishmen.  One of Macaulay’s experiences at Holland House was a vision of Mackintosh verifying a quotation from Aquinas. It must have been delightful.  The ethical ‘dissertation,’ however, had to be shortened by omitting all reference to German philosophy, and the account of the schoolmen is cursory.  It is easy to see why the suave and amiable Mackintosh appeared to Mill to be a ‘dandy’ philosopher, an unctuous spinner of platitudes to impose upon the frequenters of Holland House, and hopelessly confused in the attempt to make compromises between contradictory theories.  It is equally easy to see why to Mackintosh the thoroughgoing and strenuous Mill appeared to be a one-sided fanatic, blind to the merits of all systems outside the narrow limits of Benthamism, and making even philanthropy hateful.  Had Mackintosh lived to read Mill’s Fragment, he would certainly have thought it a proof that the Utilitarians were as dogmatic and acrid as he had ever asserted.

Mackintosh’s position in ethics explains Mill’s antagonism.  Neither Aquinas nor Kant nor Fichte influenced him.  His doctrine is the natural outcome of the Scottish philosophy.  Hutcheson had both invented Bentham’s sacred formula, and taught the ‘Moral Sense’ theory which Bentham attacked.  To study the morality from the point of view of ‘inductive psychology’ is to study the moral faculty, and to reject the purely ‘intellectual’ system.  To assign the position of the moral faculty in the psychological system is to show its utility.  On the other hand, it was the very aim of the school to avoid the sceptical conclusions of Hume in philosophy, and in ethics to avoid the complete identification of morality with utility.  There must be a distinction between the judgments, ‘this is right,’ and ‘this is useful’; even ‘useful to men in general.’  Hence, on the one hand, morality is immediately dictated by a special sense or faculty, and yet its dictates coincide with the dictates of utility.  I have spoken of this view as represented by Dugald Stewart; and Brown had, according to his custom, moved a step further by diminishing the list of original first principles, and making ‘virtue’ simply equivalent to ‘feelings’ of approval and disapproval. Virtue, he said, is useful; the utility ’accompanies our moral approbation; but the perception of that utility does not constitute our moral approbation, nor is it necessarily presupposed by it.’ He compares the coincidence between virtue and utility to Leibniz’s pre-established harmony. The position is familiar.  The adaptation of an organism to its conditions may be taken either as an explanation of its development or as a proof of a creative purpose.

Mackintosh takes nearly the same position.  Ethical inquiries, he says, relate to ‘two perfectly distinct subjects.’  We have the problem of the ‘criterion’ (What is the distinction between right and wrong?) and the problem of the ‘moral sentiments’ (What are the feelings produced by the contemplation of right and wrong?).  In treating of the feelings, again, we must avoid the confusion caused in the older philosophy by the reduction of ‘feeling’ to ’thought.’ Reason and sensation are distinct though inseparably combined; and hence, he argues, it is a fallacy to speak with Clarke as if reason could by itself be a motive.  An argument to influence conduct must always be in the last resort an appeal to a ’feeling.’ It is idle to tell a man that conduct is infamous unless he feels infamy to be painful.  We have then to ask what are the feelings which prompt to morality.  So far as the criterion is concerned, Mackintosh fully agrees with Hume, whose theory that ’general utility constitutes a general ground of moral distinctions can never be impugned until some example can be produced of a virtue generally pernicious or a vice generally beneficial.’ Hume, however, overlooks the ’rightful supremacy of the moral faculty over every other principle of human action.’  Mackintosh thought that his best service, as he told Macvey Napier, had been his ’endeavour to slip in a foundation under Butler’s doctrine of the supremacy of the conscience, which he left baseless.’  To slip in a foundation is a very delicate operation in logical as in material architecture; and the new foundation seems here to be in danger of inverting the edifice.  The ’supremacy of conscience’ means with him that the ‘moral sentiments’ form a separate class.  They are the feelings with which we contemplate voluntary actions in general, and therefore those aroused by the character and conduct of the agent.  Mackintosh thus takes an aesthetic view of morality.  We have a ‘moral taste’ or perception of beauty.  The same qualities which make a horse beautiful make him also swift and safe, but we perceive the beauty without thinking of the utility, or rather when we do not think of it.  So we admire a hero or martyr for the beauty of his character without reference to his services to us. This moral taste, though not identical with the conscience, becomes ‘absorbed into it.’  The conscience differs from the ’moral taste’ because it acts upon the will.  But its supremacy seems to be this quality which it shares with or derives from the taste its immediate and spontaneous operation.  It is, he seems to mean, a direct perception of beauty in character applied to the regulation of conduct.  Virtue corresponds to an instinctive and so far ultimate appreciation of beauty of character.  Mackintosh insists upon this intrinsic charm of virtue in the language which struck Mill as simply foppish affectation.  The pleasure of ‘benevolence’ itself, says Mackintosh, is infinitely superior to the pleasures to which it may lead.  Could it become ‘lasting and intense,’ it would convert the heart into a heaven. To love virtue, you must love it ’for its own sake.’ The delights of being virtuous (as he interprets the phrase) are greater than any delight from the consequences of virtue.  And he holds up as a model Fletcher of Saltoun, who would ’lose his life to serve his country, but would not do a base thing to save it.’

How, then, is this view to be reconciled with the unreserved admission of ‘utility’ as the ‘criterion’ of right and wrong?  One answer is that Mackintosh fully accepts Hartley’s doctrine of association.  He even criticises previous philosophers for not pushing it far enough.  He says that association, instead of merely combining a ‘thought’ and a ‘feeling,’ ’forms them into a new compound, in which the properties of the component parts are no longer discoverable, and which may itself become a substantive principle of human virtue.’ The question of origin, therefore, is different from the question of nature.  He follows Hartley in tracing the development of various desires, and in showing how the ‘secondary desires’ are gradually formed from the primitive by transference to different objects. We must start from feelings which lie beneath any intellectual process, and thus the judgment of utility is from the first secondary.  We arrive at the higher feelings which are ’as independent as if they were underived,’ and yet, as happiness has been involved at every stage as an end of each desire, it is no wonder that the ultimate result should be to make the general happiness the end.  The coincidence, then, of the criterion with the end of the moral sentiments is ‘not arbitrary,’ but arises necessarily from ’the laws of human nature and the circumstances in which mankind are placed.’ Hence we reach the doctrine which ’has escaped Hartley as well as every other philosopher.’ That doctrine is that the moral faculty is one; it is compound, indeed, in its origin; but becomes an independent unit, which can no longer be resolved even in thought into its constituent elements.

The doctrine approximates, it would seem, to Mill’s; but was all the more unpalatable to him on that account.  The agreement implies plagiarism, and the difference hopeless stupidity.  To Mill Bentham was the legitimate development of Hartley, while to Mackintosh Bentham was the plausible perverter of Hartley.  Mill regarded Mackintosh as a sophist, whose aim was to mislead honest Utilitarians into the paths of orthodoxy, and who also ignored the merits of Mill himself.  ’It was Mr. Mill,’ he says, ’who first made known the great importance of the principle of the indissoluble association’; ‘Mr. Mill’ who had taken up Hartley’s speculations and ’prosecuted the inquiry to its end’; ‘Mr. Mill’ who explained affections and motives and dispositions; and ‘Mr. Mill’ who had cleared up mistakes about classification which ’had done more to perpetuate darkness on the subject of mind than any other cause, perhaps than all other causes taken together.’ Sir James blundered because he had not read Mill’s book, as he pretended to have done.  Mill does not say all this from vanity; he is simply stating an obvious matter of fact.

Mill’s polemic against the Moral Sense theory, even against a moral sense produced by association, reveals the really critical points of the true Utilitarian doctrine.  Mill would cut down the moral sense root and branch.  The ‘moral sense’ means a ‘particular faculty’ necessary to discern right and wrong.  But no particular faculty is necessary to discern ’utility.’ Hence the distinction between the ‘criterion’ and the ‘moral sentiments’ is absurd.  The utility is not the ‘criterion’ of the morality but itself constitutes the morality.  To say that conduct is right, according to the Utilitarians, is the same thing as to say that it produces happiness.  If the moral sense orders conduct opposed to the criterion, it is so far bad.  If it never orders such conduct, it is superfluous.  Happiness, as with Bentham, is a definite thing a currency of solid bullion; and ‘virtue’ means nothing except as calculated in this currency.  Mill, again, like Bentham, regards the ‘utility’ principle as giving the sole ‘objective’ test.  The complaint that it sanctions ‘expediency’ is a simple fallacy.

If you do not love virtue ‘for its own sake,’ said Mackintosh, you will break a general law wherever the law produces a balance of painful consequences.  Mill replies with great vigour. All general rules, it is true, imply exceptions, but only when they conflict with the supreme rule.  ‘There is no exception to a rule of morality,’ says Mill, ’but what is made by a rule of morality.’ There are numerous cases in which the particular laws conflict; and one law must then be broken.  The question which to break must then be decided by the same unequivocal test, ‘utility.’  If a rule for increasing utility diminishes utility in a given case, it must be broken in that case.  Mackintosh’s Fletcher of Saltoun illustrates the point. What is the ‘base’ thing which Fletcher would not do to save his country?  Would he not be the basest of men if he did not save his country at any cost?  To destroy half a population and reduce the other half to misery has been thought a sacrifice not too great for such an end.  Would not Mackintosh himself allow Fletcher, when intrusted with an important fortress, to sacrifice the lives and properties of innocent people in defence of his position? What, then, does the love of virtue ‘for its own sake’ come to?  If you refuse to save your country, because you think the means base, your morality is mischievous, that is, immoral.  If, on the other hand, you admit that the means cease to be base, the supposed supremacy is an empty brag.  The doctrine is then verbally maintained, but interpreted so as to conform to the criterion of utility.  In other words, Mackintosh cannot reconcile his admission of utility as a ‘criterion’ with his support of a moral sense entitled to override the criterion.  Mackintosh’s moral sense is meant to distinguish the moral motive from ‘expediency.’  To this, again, Mill has a very forcible answer.  A man is blameable who makes exceptions to laws in his own private interest.  But if a man consistently and invariably acted for the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number,’ and paid no more attention to his own happiness than to other people’s, he would certainly have a very lofty and inflexible test, assuming as we must allow Mill to assume that we can calculate the effect of conduct upon happiness at large.  Again, upon the assumption that ‘moral’ is equivalent to ‘felicific,’ we get a general rule entitled to override any individual tastes or fancies, such as Mill supposes to be meant by the ‘Moral Sense.’  The rule is derived from the interests of all, and gives an ultimate ‘objective criterion.’  J. S. Mill, describing his father’s system, observes that the teaching of such a man was not likely to err on ’the side of laxity or indulgence.’ It certainly did not.  And, in fact, his criterion, however obtained, had in his eyes the certainty of a scientific law.  This or that is right as surely as this or that food is wholesome.  My taste has nothing to do with it.  And, moreover, the criterion certainly gives a moral ground.  If I know that any conduct will produce more happiness than misery that is a moral reason for adopting it.  A ‘moral sense’ which should be radically inconsistent with that criterion, which should order me to inflict suffering as suffering, or without some ulterior reason, would be certainly at fault.  Mackintosh indeed would have agreed to this, though, if Mill was right, at the expense of consistency.

Mill, however, deduces from his criterion doctrines which involve a remarkable paradox.  The mode in which he is led to them is characteristic of the whole method.  Mill, like Bentham, puts morality upon the same plane with law.  Conduct is influenced either by the ’community in its conjunct capacity’ that is, by law; or by ’individuals in their individual capacity’ that is, by morality. The sanction of one, we may infer, is force; of the other, approval and disapproval.  With this we must take another Benthamite doctrine, of which I have already spoken. ‘Mr. Bentham demonstrated,’ says Mill, ‘that the morality of an act does not depend upon the motive,’ and, further, that it ’is altogether dependent on the intention.’ Upon this he constantly insists.  Mackintosh’s view that virtue depends upon motive will be ’scorned by every man who has any knowledge of the philosophy of the human mind....  The virtue does not depend upon the motive.  There is no bad motive.  Every motive is the desire of good; to the agent himself or to some one else.’ He gives an analysis of action to put the point beyond doubt.  Action supposes a ‘motive,’ a ‘volition,’ and an ‘external act’ or muscular contraction.  So far there is nothing moral.  But then an act has consequences, good or bad, to human beings, which constitute its utility.  To make it moral, the agent must anticipate ‘beneficial consequences,’ and must have no reason to anticipate a balance of evil consequences.  Intention means the calculation of consequences, and without that calculation there can be no morality. Hence the morality is equivalent to a ‘conviction of the general utility’ of the action. ‘All this,’ he concludes, ’is settled by universal consent.  It is vain, therefore, to think of disputing it.’  One may, however, ask what it means.  I have already observed that the view of the non-moral character of motive was a natural corollary from the purely legal point of view.  I must now consider the results of applying it unreservedly in the inappropriate sphere of ethics.

In the first place, the denial of any moral quality in motive seems to be inconsistent with Mill’s own principles.  The Utilitarian, according to him, holds that the moral law is essentially the statement that certain conduct produces general happiness.  If, then, we ask, Who is a good man? we first reply that he is a man whose conduct produces happiness.  Another conclusion is obviously necessary, and is implied in Mill’s statement that the ‘intention’ is essential to morality.  The man, that is, must foresee that his conduct will produce happiness.  The ‘calculation’ is precisely what makes an action moral as well as accidentally useful.  In other words, the man is good to whom the knowledge that an act will produce happiness is the same thing as a command to perform the act.  The ‘intention’ could not affect conduct without the corresponding motive, and Mill can at times recognise the obvious consequence.  The ‘physical law’ (meaning the law enforced by physical coercion), he says incidentally, has ‘extrinsic’ sanctions; the moral law is different, because it sanctions good actions for their goodness.  ‘Moral approval’ must therefore include approval of character.  A man, to be moral, must be one who does useful things simply because they are useful.  He must then, it would seem, be at least benevolent.  The same thing is implied by the doctrine of ‘intention’ or ‘calculation.’  An action may be useful or the reverse without being moral when the consequences are unknown to the agent.  To make it moral he must know the consequences for otherwise he is merely acting at random; and the foreseen consequences constitute the ‘intention.’  To this Mill adds that he must have taken into account the consequences which ’might have been foreseen.’ Otherwise we should have to excuse a man because he had neglected to calculate, whereas to calculate is the very essence of virtue.  A man who fired a gun down a crowded street would not be excusable because he had not thought of the result.  He ‘ought’ to have thought of it.  The question of moral approval of any given action turns upon these questions.  Did a man foresee evil consequences and disregard them?  He is then cruel.  Did he neglect to consider them?  He is then culpably careless, though not actually malignant.  Were the consequences altogether beyond the powers of reasonable calculation?  Then he may be blameless.  The whole moral question, therefore, depends upon the character indicated; that is, upon the motives which induce a man to calculate consequences and which determine his conduct when the calculation is made.

The truth is, I think, and it is characteristic of Mill’s modes of analysis, that he is making an impossible abstraction.  He is separating parts of a single process and treating them as independent.  If actions are bad because they have bad consequences, motives are bad because they are causes of bad actions.  You cannot suppress the effect without suppressing the cause, and therefore the cause of the cause.  Mill relies chiefly upon one argument.  The same conduct will produce the same consequences whatever the motives.  That is undeniable.  It is the same to me whether I am burnt because the persecutor loves my soul or because he hates me as a rebel to his authority.  But when is conduct ‘the same’?  If we classify acts as the legislator has to classify them by ‘external’ or ‘objective’ relations, we put together the man who is honest solely from fear of the gallows and the man who is honest from hatred of stealing.  So long as both act alike, the ‘consequences’ to their neighbours are alike.  Neither is legally punishable.  But if acts are classified by their motives, one is a rogue and the other virtuous; and it is only then that the question of morality properly arises.  In that case, it is idle to separate the question of motive and consequences, because the character determines the motive and therefore the action.  Nobody should have seen this more clearly than Mill as a good ‘determinist.’  Conduct and character are related as the convex and concave of the curve; conduct is simply the manifestation of character, and to separate them is absurd.

Why did he not see this?  For reasons, I think, which illustrate his whole method.  From a scientific point of view, the ethical problem raises the wide questions, What are the moral sentiments? and, What functions do they discharge in regard to the society or to its individual members?  We might hold that morality is justified by ‘utility’ in the sense that the moral rules and the character which they indicate are essential to the welfare of the race or its individual constituents.  But to Mill this proposition is interpreted as identical with the proposition that conduct must be estimated by its ‘consequences.’  We are to consider not the action itself, but its effects; and the effects are clearly independent of the motive when once the action has been done.  We may therefore get a calculus of ‘utility’:  general rules stating what actions will be useful considered abstractedly from their motives.  The method, again, might be plausible if we could further assume that all men were the same and differed only in external circumstances.  That is the point of view to which Mill, like Bentham, is always more or less consciously inclining.  The moral and the positive law are equally enforced by ‘sanctions’; by something not dependent upon the man himself, and which he is inclined to suppose will operate equally upon all men.  Such language could be justifiable only of an average and uniform ‘man,’ a kind of constant unit, whose varying behaviour must always be explained by difference in circumstance.  We have sufficiently seen the results elsewhere, and in this ethical doctrine they are especially manifest.

Mackintosh recognised the fact that morality is essentially a function of character.  Mill cannot fully admit that, because he virtually assumes all character to be the same.  Regarding morality as something co-ordinate with law, he does not perceive that the very possibility of law implies the moral instincts, which correspond to the constitution of character, and belong to a sphere underlying, not on the same plane with, the legislative sphere.  They are the source of all order; not themselves the product of the order.  It is impossible to deduce them, therefore, from the organisation which presupposes them.  Now, in one direction, Mill’s theory leads, as his son remarked, not to laxity but to excessive strictness.  The ‘criterion’ is laid down absolutely.  The ‘moral sense’ is rejected because it means an autocratic faculty, entitled to override the criterion by its own authority.  To appeal to ‘motives’ is to allow the individual to make his own feeling the ultimate test of right and wrong.  If we follow Mill in this we are not really assuming the moral neutrality of motive or the indifference, but an impossible profession of character.  Men are not governed by abstract principles but by their passions and affections.  The emotions, as Mackintosh rightly said, cannot be resolved into the mere logic.  Utility may give the true criterion of morality, but it does not follow that the perception of utility is implied in moral conduct.  The motives are good which in fact produce useful conduct, though the agent does not contemplate the abstract principle.  It is impossible that men should be moved simply by a desire for the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number.’  What does and always must guide men is their personal relation to the little circle which they actually influence.  The good man is the man so constituted that he will spontaneously fulfil his duties.  The moral law, that is, will be also the law of his character and conduct.  The mother is good because she loves her child, not because she sees that care of her child is dictated by the general maxim of utility.  The ‘utility’ of character means the fitness of the agent to be an efficient member of the social structure to which he belongs.  In particular cases this may lead to such problems as that of Fletcher of Saltoun.  His sense of honour and his general benevolence, though both useful, might come into collision; and the most difficult of all questions of casuistry arise from such conflicts between private and public affections.  Mill is justified in holding that a sense of honour cannot give an ultimate and autocratic decision.  Under some pretext or other, we shall have to ask the Utilitarian question whether on the whole it may not be causing more misery than the virtuous action is worth.  But that only means that the character must be so balanced as to give due weight to each motive; not that we can abstract from character altogether, as though human beings could be mere colourless and uniform atoms, embodying abstract formulae.

Mill is following Bentham, and only brings out more clearly the psychological assumptions.  A man, he says, acts from the ‘same motive’ whether he steals five shillings or earns it by a day’s labour.  The motive, in this sense, regards only one consequence, whereas the ‘intention’ regards all.  The ‘motive,’ that is, is only one of the motives or a part of the character, and this way of speaking is one of the awkward results of turning ‘motives’ into ‘things.’  The obvious answer is that which Mill himself makes to Mackintosh.  Mackintosh and Butler, he thinks, personify particular ’appetites.’ It is not really the ‘conscience’ which decides, but the man.  That is quite true, and similarly it is the whole man who steals or works, not the ‘personified’ motive; and it is accordingly from the whole character that we judge.  We have to consider the relation of the love of five shillings to the other qualities of industry and honesty.  The same view appears in Mill’s characteristic dislike of ‘sentimentalism.’  Wishing to attack Mackintosh’s rhetoric about the delight of virtuous feeling, he for once quotes a novel to illustrate this point.  When Parson Adams defined charity as a ’generous disposition to relieve the distressed,’ Peter Pounce approved; ’it is, as you say, a disposition, and does not so much consist in the act as in the disposition to do it.’ When, therefore, Mackintosh says that he finds it difficult to separate the virtue from the act, Mill replies that nothing is easier.  The virtue is ‘in the act and its consequences’; the feeling a mere removable addition.  Apparently he would hold that the good Samaritan and the Pharisee had the same feeling, though it prompted one to relieve the sufferer and the other to relieve himself of the sight of the sufferer.  They had, of course, a feeling in common, but a feeling which produced diametrically opposite effects, because entering into totally different combinations.

If Mill’s doctrine leads to an impossible strictness in one direction, it leads to less edifying results in another.  We have omitted ‘motive’ and come to the critical question, How, after all, is the moral code to be enforced?  By overlooking this question and declaring ‘motive’ to be irrelevant, we get the paradox already accepted by Bentham.  His definition of virtue is action for the good of others as well as of ourselves.  In what way is the existence of such action to be reconciled with this doctrine?  What are the motives which make men count the happiness of others to be equally valuable with their own? or, in the Utilitarian language, What is the ‘sanction’ of morality?  After all Bentham’s insistence upon the ‘self-preference principle’ and Mill’s account of selfishness in his political theory, we are suddenly told that morality means a lofty and rigid code in which the happiness of all is the one end.  Here again Mill is entangled by the characteristic difficulty of his psychology.  To analyse is to divide objects into separate units.  When he has to do with complex objects and relations apparently reciprocal, he is forced to represent them by a simple sequence.  The two factors are not mutually dependent but distinct things somehow connected in time.  One result is his account of ‘ends’ or ‘motives’ (the two, as he observes, are synonymous). The end is something to be gained by the act, the ‘association’ of which with the act constitutes a ‘desire.’  This, we have seen, always refers to the future. In acting, then, I am always guided by calculations of future pleasures or pains.  I believe this to be one of the most unfortunate because one of the most plausible of Utilitarian fallacies.  If we are determined by pains and pleasures, it is in one sense as contradictory to speak of our being determined by future pains and pleasures as to speak of our being nourished to-day by to-morrow’s dinner.  The ‘future pleasure’ does not exist; the anticipated pleasure acts by making the present action pleasant; and we then move (as it is said) along the line of least resistance.  Certain conduct is intrinsically pleasurable or painful, and the future pleasure only acts through the present foretaste.  When, however, we regard the pleasure as future and as somehow a separable thing, we can only express these undeniable facts by accepting a purely egoistic conclusion.  We are, of course, moved by our own feelings, as we breathe with our own lungs and digest with our own stomachs.  But when we accept the doctrine of ‘ends’ this harmless and self-evident truth is perverted into the statement that our ‘end’ must be our own pleasure; that we cannot be really or directly unselfish.  The analysis, indeed, is so defective that it can hardly be applied intelligibly.  Hume observes that no man would rest his foot indifferently upon a stool or a gouty toe.  The action itself of giving pain would be painful, and cannot be plausibly resolved into an anticipation of an ‘end.’  This, again, is conspicuously true of all the truly social emotions.  Not only the conscience, but the sense of shame or honour, or pride and vanity act powerfully and instantaneously as present motives without necessary reference to any future results.  The knowledge that I am giving pain or causing future pain is intrinsically and immediately painful to the normal human being, and the supposed ‘analysis’ is throughout a fiction.  Mill, however, like Bentham, takes it for granted, but perceives more clearly than Bentham the difficulty to which it leads.  How, from a theory of pure selfishness, are we to get a morality of general benevolence?  The answer is given by the universal ‘association.’  We are governed, he holds, by our own emotions; our end is our own pleasure, and we have to consider how this end dictates a desire for general happiness.  He expounds with great vigour the process by which the love of friends, children and parents and country may be gradually developed through the association of our pleasures with the fellow-creatures who caused them.  J. S. Mill regards his exposition as ’almost perfect,’ and says that it shows how the ’acquired sentiments’ the moral sentiments and so forth may be gradually developed; may become ’more intense and powerful than any of the elements out of which they may have been formed, and may also in their maturity be perfectly disinterested.’  James Mill declares that the analysis does not affect the reality of the sentiments analysed.  Gratitude remains gratitude, and generosity generosity, just as a white ray remains white after Newton had decomposed it into rays of different colours. Here once more we have the great principle of indissoluble association or mental chemistry.

Granting that the emotions so generated may be real, we may still ask whether the analysis be sufficient.  James Mill’s account of the way in which they are generated leaves a doubt.  Morality is first impressed upon us by authority.  Our parents praise and blame, reward and punish.  Thus are formed associations of praise and blame with certain actions.  Then, we form further associations with the causes of praise and blame and thus acquire the sentiments of ‘praiseworthiness’ and ‘blameworthiness.’  The sensibility to praise and blame generally forms the ‘popular sanction,’ and this, when praiseworthiness is concerned, becomes the moral sanction. Here we see that morality is regarded as somehow the product of a ‘sanction’; that is, of the action of praise and blame with their usual consequences upon the individual.  His sensibility causes him through association to acquire the habits which generally bring praise and blame; and ultimately these qualities become attractive for their own sake.  The difficulty is to see where the line is crossed which divides truly moral or altruistic conduct from mere prudence.  Admitting that association may impel us to conduct which involves self-sacrifice, we may still ask whether such conduct is reasonable.  Association produces belief in error as well as in truth.  If I love a man because he is useful and continue to love him when he can no longer be useful, am I not misguided?  If I wear a ragged coat, because it was once smart, my conduct is easily explained as a particular kind of folly.  If I am good to my old mother when she can no longer nurse me, am I not guilty of a similar folly?  In short, a man who inferred from Mill’s principles that he would never do good without being paid for it, would be hardly inconsistent.  Your associations, Mill would say, are indissoluble.  He might answer, I will try it is surely not so hard to dissolve a tie of gratitude!  Granting, in short, that Mill gives an account of such virtue as may be made of enlightened self-interest, he does not succeed in making intelligible the conduct which alone deserves the name of virtuous.  The theory always halts at the point where something more is required than an external sanction, and supposes a change of character as well as a wider calculation of personal interest.

The imperfection of this theory may be taken for granted.  It has been exposed by innumerable critics.  It is more important to observe one cause of the imperfection.  Mill’s argument contains an element of real worth.  It may be held to represent fairly the historical development of morals.  That morality is first conceived as an external law deriving its sanctity from authority; that it is directed against obviously hurtful conduct; and that it thus serves as a protection under which the more genuine moral sentiments can develop themselves, I believe to be in full accordance with sound theories of ethics.  But Mill was throughout hampered by the absence of any theory of evolution.  He had to represent a series of changes as taking place in the individual which can only be conceived as the product of a long and complex social change.  He is forced to represent the growth of morality as an accretion of new ‘ends’ due to association, not as an intrinsic development of the character itself.  He has to make morality out of atomic sensations and ideas collected in clusters and trains without any distinct reference to the organic constitution of the individual or of society, and as somehow or other deducible from the isolated human being, who remains a constant, though he collects into groups governed by external sanctions.  He sees that morality is formed somehow or other, but he cannot show that it is either reasonable or an essential fact of human nature.  Here, again, we shall see what problem was set to his son.  Finally, if Mill did not explain ethical theory satisfactorily, it must be added in common justice that he was himself an excellent example of the qualities for which he tried to account.  A life of devotion to public objects and a conscientious discharge of private duties is just the phenomenon for which a cluster of ‘ideas’ and ‘associations’ seems to be an inadequate account.  How, it might have been asked, do you explain James Mill?  His main purpose, too, was to lay down a rule of duty, almost mathematically ascertainable, and not to be disturbed by any sentimentalism, mysticism, or rhetorical foppery.  If, in the attempt to free his hearers from such elements, he ran the risk of reducing morality to a lower level and made it appear as unamiable as sound morality can appear, it must be admitted that in this respect too his theories reflected his personal character.