finds given, without reference to insensible implications of
doubtful validity and value. The upshot is a psychological
account of what from one aspect is evidence, from the other,
belief. So he explains “concepts or general notions”[1] by an
abstraction which he represents as a sort of alt-relief operated
by attention and fixed by naming, association with the name
giving to a set of attributes a unity they otherwise lack. This
is manifestly, when all is said, a particular psychological event,
a collective fact of the associative consciousness. It can exercise
no organizing or controlling function in knowledge. So again
in determining the “import” of propositions, it is no accident
that in all save existential propositions it is to the familiar rubrics
of associationism—co-existence, sequence, causation and resemblance—that
he refers for classification, while his general formula
as to the conjunctions of connotations is associationist through
and through. It follows consistently enough that inference is
from particular to particular. Mill holds even the ideas of
mathematics to be hypothetical, and in theory knows nothing of
a non-enumerative or non-associative universal. A premise that
has the utmost universality consistent with this view can clearly
be of no service for the establishment of a proposition that has
gone to the making of it. Nor again of one that has not. Its
use, then, can only be as a memorandum. It is a shorthand
formula of registration. Mill’s view of ratiocinative process
clearly stands and falls with the presumed impossibility of
establishing the necessity for universals of another type than his,
for what may be called principles of construction. His critics
incline to press the point that association itself is only intelligible
so far as it is seen to depend on universals of the kind that he
denies.
In Mill’s inductive logic, the nominalistic convention has, through his tendency to think in relatively watertight compartments,[2] faded somewhat into the background. Normally he thinks of what he calls phenomena no longer as psychological groupings of sensations, as “states of mind,” but as things and events in a physical world howsoever constituted and apprehended. His free use of relating concepts, that of sameness, for instance, bears no impress of his theory of the general notion, and it is possible to put out of sight the fact that, taken in conjunction with his nominalism, it raises the whole issue of the possibility of the equivocal generation of formative principles from the given contents of the individual consciousness, in any manipulation of which they are already implied. Equally, too, the deductive character, apparently in intention as well as in actual fact, of Mill’s experimental methods fails to recall the point of theory that the process is essentially one from particular to particular. The nerve of proof in the processes by which he establishes causal conjunctions of unlimited application is naturally thought to lie in the special canons of the several processes and the axioms of universal and uniform causation which form their background. The conclusions seem not merely to fall within, but to depend on these organic and controlling formulae. They follow not merely according to them but from them. The reference to the rule is not one which may be made and normally is made as a safeguard, but one which must be made, if thought is engaged in a forward and constructive movement at all. Yet Mill’s view of the function of “universal” propositions had been historically suggested by a theory—Dugald Stewart’s—of the use of axioms![3] Once more, it would be possible to forget that Mill’s ultimate laws or axioms are not in his view intuitions, nor forms constitutive of the rational order, nor postulates of all rational construction, were it not that he has made the endeavour to establish them on associationist lines. It is because of the failure of this endeavour to bring the technique of induction within the setting of his Humian psychology of belief that the separation of his contribution to the applied logic of science from his sensationism became necessary, as it happily was easy. Mill’s device rested special inductions of causation upon the laws that every event has a cause, and every cause has always the same effect. It rested these in turn upon a general induction enumerative in character of enormous and practically infinite range and always uncontradicted. Though obviously not exhaustive, the unique extent of this induction was held to render it competent to give practical certainty or psychological necessity. A vicious circle is obviously involved. It is true, of course, that ultimate laws need discovery, that they are discovered in some sense in the medium of the psychological mechanism, and that they are nevertheless the grounds of all specific inferences. But that truth is not what Mill expounds, nor is it capable of development within the limits imposed by the associationist formula.
It is deservedly, nevertheless, that Mill’s applied logic has retained its pride of place amid what has been handed on, if in modified shape, by writers, e.g., Sigwart, and Professor Bosanquet, whose theory of knowledge is quite alien from his. He prescribed regulative or limiting formulae for research as it was actually conducted in his world. His grasp of the procedure by which the man of science manipulated his particular concrete problems was admirable. In especial he showed clear understanding of the functions of hypothesis and verification in the investigations of the solitary worker, with his facts still in course of accumulation and needing to be lighted up by the scientific imagination. He was therefore enabled to formulate the method of what Bacon had tended to despise as merely the “first vintage.” Bacon spent his strength upon a dream of organization for all future discovery. Mill was content to codify. The difference between Bacon and Mill lies chiefly in this, and it is because of this difference that Mill’s contribution, spite of its debt to the Baconian tradition, remains both characteristic and valuable. It is of course possible to criticise even the experimental canons with some severity. The caveats, however, which are relevant within the circle of ideas within which Mill’s lesson can be learned and improved on,[4] seem to admit of being satisfied by relatively slight modifications in detail, or by explanations often supplied or easily to be supplied from points brought out amid the wealth of illustration with which Mill accompanied his formal or systematic exposition of method. The critic has the right of it when he points out, for example, that the practical difficulty in the Method of Agreement is not due to plurality of causes, as Mill states, but rather to intermixture of effects, while, if the canon could be satisfied exactly, the result would not be rendered uncertain in the manner or to the extent which he supposes. Again the formula of the Joint-Method, which contemplates the enumeration of cases “which have nothing in common but the absence of one circumstance,” is ridiculously unsound as it stands. Or, on rather a different line of criticism, the use of corresponding letters in the two series of antecedents and consequents raises, it is said, a false presumption of correlation. Nay, even the use of letters at all suggests that the sort of analysis that actually breaks up its subject-matter is universally or all but universally applicable in nature, and this is not the case. Finally, the conditions of the methods are either realized or not. If they are realized, the work of the scientist falls entirely within the field of the processes preliminary to the satisfaction of the canon. The latter becomes a mere memorandum or formula of registration. So is it possible “to have the enginer hoist with his own petar.” But the conditions are not realized, and in an experiential subject-matter are not realizable. Not one circumstance only in common but “apparently one relevant circumstance only in common” is what we are able to assert. If we add the qualification of relevance we destroy the cogency of the method. If we fail to add it, we destroy the applicability.
The objections turn on two main issues. One is the exaggeration of the possibilities of resolution into separate elements that is due to the acceptance of the postulate of an alphabet of nature. This so soon as noted can be allowed for. It is to the
- ↑ Mill, Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, cap. 17.
- ↑ Cf. Mill, Autobiography, p. 159. “I grappled at once with the problem of Induction, postponing that of Reasoning.” Ib. p. 182 (when he is preoccupied with syllogism), “I could make nothing satisfactory of Induction at this time.”
- ↑ Autobiography, p. 181.
- ↑ The insight, for instance, of F. H. Bradley’s criticism, Principles of Logic, II. ii. 3, is somewhat dimmed by a lack of sympathy due to extreme difference in the point of view adopted.
