The intense was with him a byword of scornful disapprobation." In respect of religion the son says: " I am thus one of the very few examples of one who has not thrown off religious belief, but never had it: I grew up in a negative state with regard to it." The father " looked forward to a considerable increase of freedom in the relations between the sexes, though without pretending to define exactly what would be or ought to be the precise conditions of that freedom." A writer in the " Quarterly "(July, 1873) says: " He was full of what we should call the fanaticism of Malthusianism; to such a degree that he risked his own fairly earned reputation {378} with decent people, and involved in the like discreditable danger the youth of his son, by running a Malay muck against what he called the superstitions of the nursery with regard to sexual relations, and giving the impulse to a sort of shameless propaganda of prescriptions for artificially checking population.We should not even have alluded to this grave offence against decency, on the part of the elder and younger Mill, had it not been forced on our notice by recent events." The result was what might have been expected.We can understand how the son's natural feelings, so repressed, should have been ready to flow forth towards a lady who entered thoroughly into his peculiar views on all subjects, and that he did not seek to restrain these feelings, and had no compunctions of conscience, though that lady was married to another man.I believe we can see the result of the training in a younger son, represented as an engaging youth, who went to a warm climate for his health, and when there insisted on the physician telling him whether there was any hope of his recovery, and, on receiving an unfavorable reply, went and shot himself to avoid a lingering death.
The work with which we have to do, is his " Analysis of the Human Mind." The title indicates the aim of the treatise.It is not an inductive observation of facts; it is not a classification of facts in a cautious and careful manner: it is a determined attempt to resolve the complex phenomena of the mind into as few elements as possible.
Mental analysis, called by When the decomposition of facts, is undoubtedly a necessary agent in all investigation: but it should be kept as a subordinate instrument; and it requires to be preceded, accompanied, and verified throughout, by a microscopic and conscientious inspection of facts, with particular attention to residuary phenomena and apparent exceptions; if this is neglected the whole process may lead to most fallacious results.Thomas Brown had proceeded very much in the method of analysis, and accomplished a great many feats in the way of decompounding the faculties enumerated by Reid and Stewart; and, encouraged by his success, Mill advances a great way further on the same route.Brown had stood up resolutely for the existence and validity of intuition, {379} maintaining in particular that we have an intuitive belief in cause and effect; had allotted a place, though an inadequate one, to judgment, under the name of "relative suggestion;" had poured forth a most eloquent exposition of the emotions, and defended the great truths of natural religion, including the existence of the deity and the immortality of the soul.Mill resolves all mental exercises into sensations and ideas, with laws of association connecting and combining them , and has left himself avowedly no religious belief whatever.
Dugald Stewart's teaching seems to have exercised little influence on his mind except to suggest the order in which he takes up his topics.I suspect he derived more from Hume than from Stewart.With Hume there is nothing in the mind but impressions and ideas; with Mill, only sensations and ideas; and both undermine our belief in the reality either of mind or body.He took advantage of all that has been done, in illustrating the influence Of association, by Hutcheson, Smith, Hume, Beattie, Alison, and Brown, and accounted by it for principles which these men reckoned original.He had also profoundly studied Hartley ("Observations on Man "), who had accounted for our complex mental feelings by sensations, ideas of sensations and association, connecting the whole with a theory of nerve vibrations, which Mill, following the Scottish school, abandoned.
Following the sensational school of France and Brown, he calls all the exercises of the mind " feelings." He begins with sensations, and goes over (Chap.I.) smell, hearing, sight, taste, touch, carefully separating from touch as Brown had done, and as Mr.Bain has since done, the feeling of resistance, extension, and figure, which he refers to muscular sensation; he also dwells fondly, as Mr.
