Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/588

This page needs to be proofread.

5^6 GREAT BRITAIN AND AMERICA, terest of society. The two classes of virtues are prudence and benevolence. The latter is a natural, though not a disinterested affection : happiness enjoyed with others is greater than happiness enjoyed alone. Love is a pleasure- giving extension of the individual ; we serve others to be served by them. Associationalism has been reasserted by James Mill (1773- 1836 ; Analysis of the Phenomena of the Hutnan Muid, 1829), whose influence lives on in the work of his greater son. The latter, John Stuart Mill,* was born in London 1806, and was from 1823 to 1858 a secretary in the India House ; after the death of his wife he lived (with the exception of two years of service as a Member of Parliament) at Avignon ; his death occurred in 1873. Mill's System of Logic ap- peared in 1843, 9^h ed., 1875 ; his Utilitarianism, 1863, new ed., 1871 ; An Examination of Sir William Hamilton s Phil- osophy, 1865, 5th ed., 1878; his notes to the new edition of his father's work. Analysis of the Phenotnena of the Human Mind, 2d ed., 1878, also deserve notice. With the phenomenalism of Hume and the (somewhat corrected) asso- ciational psychology of his father as a basis. Mill makes expe- rience the sole source of knowledge, rejecting a priori And intuitive elements of every sort. Matter he defines as a " permanent possibility of sensation "; mind is resolved into " a series of feelings with a background of possibilities of feeling," even though the author is not unaware of the diffi- culty involved in the question how a series of feelings can be aware of itself as a series. Mathematical principles, like allothers, have an experiential origin — the peculiar certitude ascribed to them by the Kantians is a fiction — and induction is the only fruitful method of scientific inquiry (even in men- tal science). The syllogism is itself a concealed induction.

  • Cf. on Mill, Taine, Le Positivisme Anglais, 1864 fEnglish, by Have];

the obiections of Jevons {Contemporary Review, December, 1877 seq. , reprinted in Rure Logic and other Minor Works, 1890 ; cf. Mind, vol. xvi. pp. 106-I10) to Mill's doctrine of the inductive character of geometry, hie treatment of the rela- tion of resemblance, and his exposition of the four methods of experimental in- quiry in their relation to the law of causation ; and the finely conceived essay on utilitarianism, by C. Hebler, Philosophische Aufsiitze, 1869, pp. 35-66. [Also Mill's own Autobiography, 1873 : Bain's y<?A« Stuart Mill, a Criticism, 1882; and T. H. Green, Lectures on the Logic, Works, vol. ii. — Tr.]