With Bentham the edifice of Utilitarianism is complete, and there is little more to say about the matter. Those who came afterwards were expositors, not founders; they employed themselves in explaining the doctrines of their master, sometimes also in explaining them away; for, while bound to maintain the honour of the sect, they were sometimes dimly conscious and more than half ashamed of the base element out of which it sprang. One { 328} of their foremost spokesmen was JAMES MILL, the father of the present distinguished logician and politician, John Stuart Mill. This gentleman, who is much respected by the school to which he belongs, in the year 1829 published a work entitled _An Analysis of the Human Mind_. This treatise I have read carefully, and am constrained to say that it appears to me an extremely meagre production; somewhat as if the mind of the author had been blasted and frosted by the arid and sharp east wind in the face of which--near Montrose--he was born. From his life it would appear that he studied at the University of Edinburgh in the days of the great metaphysical school there, and that he devoted considerable attention to Plato. I have not the slightest reason to believe that the great idealist was much known even to the best thinkers in our Scottish metropolis at that time; but if Mill did study Plato thoroughly, it must have been, as Grote has done in our time, for the purpose of not understanding him. Certainly in his book I have found nothing but the materialistic side of Locke and Hartley worked out into a monstrosity; a cold thin horror of all spiritual mystery, and the shallow conceit that the primary divine force, which we call MIND, can be explained by a laboriously minute dissection of a merely physical machinery. Whatever that great juggler Association can be made to do in order to explain knowledge out of sensation, mind out of matter, and unity generally out of multiplicity, has been done in this book. For the special ethics of Utilitarianism there is nothing in James Mill that the student of Hume and Bentham will be likely to think worth remembering.
Development Journal
Four Phases of Morals: Socrates, Aristotle, Christianity, Utilitarianism — Part 102
Tags