ANALYSIS OF THE PHENOMENA OF THE HUMAN MIND
BY JAMES MILL
WITH NOTES ILLUSTRATIVE AND CRITICAL BY
ALEXANDER BAIN
ANDREW FINDLATER
AND GEORGE GROTE
EDITED WITH ADDITIONAL NOTES BY
JOHN STUART MILL
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I.
SECOND EDITION
LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, READER, AND DYER.
1878
“In order to prepare the way for a just and
comprehensive system of Logic, a previous survey of our nature, considered as a
great whole, is an indispensable requisite.” Philosophical Essays (Prelim.
Dissert.) p. Ixvii. by Dugald Stewart,
Esq.
“Would not Education be necessarily rendered more
systematical and enlightened, if the powers and faculties on which it operates
were more scientifically examined, and better under stood?” Ibid. p. xlviii.
PREFACE THE PRESENT EDITION.
IN the study of Nature, either mental or physical,
the aim of the scientific enquirer is to diminish as much as possible the
catalogue of ultimate truths. When, without doing violence to facts, he is able
to bring one phenomenon within the laws of another; when he can shew that a
fact or agency, which seemed to be original and distinct, could have been
produced by other known facts and agencies, acting according to their own laws;
the enquirer who has arrived at this result, considers himself to have made an
important advance in the knowledge of nature, and to have brought science, in that
department, a step nearer to perfection. Other accessions to science, however
important practically, are, in a scientific point of view, mere additions to
the materials: this is something done towards perfecting the structure itself.
The manner in which this scientific improvement takes
place is by the resolution of phenomena which are special and complex into
others more general and simple. Two cases of this sort may be roughly
distinguished, though the distinction between them will not be found on
accurate examination to be fundamental. In one case it is the order of the
phenomena that is analysed and simplified; in the other it is the phenomena
themselves. When the observed facts relating to the weight of terrestrial
objects, and those relating to the motion of the heavenly bodies, were found to
conform to one and the same law, that of the gravitation of every particle of
matter to every other particle with a force varying as the inverse square of the
distance, this was an example of the first kind. The order of the phenomena was
resolved into a more general law. A great number of the successions which take
place in the material world were shewn to be particular cases of a law of
causation pervading all Nature. The other class of investigations are those
which deal, not with the successions of phenomena, but with the complex
phenomena themselves, and disclose to us that the very fact which we are
studying is made up of simpler facts: as when the substance Water was found to be
an actual compound of two other bodies, hydrogen and oxygen; substances very
unlike itself, but both actually present in every one of its particles. By
processes like those employed in this case, all the variety of substances which
meet our senses and compose the planet on which we live, have been shewn to be
constituted by the intimate union, in a certain number of fixed proportions, of
some two or more of sixty or seventy bodies, called Elements or Simple
Substances, by which is only meant that they have not hitherto been found
capable of further decomposition. This last process is known by the name of
chemical analysis: but the first mentioned, of which the Newtonian generalization is the
most perfect type, is no less analytical. The difference is, that the one
analyses substances into simpler substances; the other, laws into simpler laws.
The one is partly a physical operation; the other is wholly intellectual.
Both these processes are as largely applicable, and as
much required, in the investigation of mental phenomena as of material. And in
the one case as in the other, the advance of scientific knowledge may be measured
by the progress made in resolving complex facts into simpler ones.
The phenomena of the Mind include multitudes of facts,
of an extraordinary degree of complexity. By observing them one at a time with
sufficient care, it is possible in the mental, as it is in the material world, to
obtain empirical generalizations of limited compass, but of great value for
practice. When, however, we find it possible to connect many of these detached generalizations
together, by discovering the more general laws of which they are cases, and to
the operation of which in some particular sets of circumstances they are due,
we gain not only a scientific, but a practical advantage; for we then first
learn how far we can rely on the more limited generalizations; within what
conditions their truth is confined; by what changes of circumstances they would
be defeated or modified.
Not only is the order in which the more complex mental
phenomena follow or accompany one another, reducible, by an analysis similar in
kind to the Newtonian, to a comparatively small number of laws of succession
among simpler facts, connected as cause and effect; but the phenomena
themselves can mostly be shewn, by an analysis resembling those of chemistry,
to be made up of simpler phenomena. “In the mind of man,” says Dr. Thomas
Brown, in one of his Introductory Lectures, “all is in a state of constant and
ever-varying complexity, and a single sentiment may be the slow result of
innumerable feelings. There is not a single pleasure, or pain, or thought, or
emotion, that may not, by the influence of that associating principle which is
afterwards to come under our consideration, be so connected with other
pleasures, or pains, or thoughts, or emotions, as to form with them, for ever
after, an union the most intimate. The complex, or seemingly complex, phenomena
of thought, which result from the constant operation of this principle of the
mind, it is the labour of the intellectual inquirer to analyse, as it is the
labour of the chemist to reduce the com pound bodies on which he operates,
however close and intimate their combination may be, to their constituent
elements. From the very instant of its first existence, the mind is constantly
exhibiting phenomena more and more complex: sensations, thoughts, emotions, all
mingling together, and almost every feeling modifying, in some greater or less
degree, the feelings that succeed it; and as, in chemistry, it often happens
that the qualities of the separate ingredients of a compound body are not
recognizable by us in the apparently different qualities of the compound
itself, so in this spontaneous chemistry of the mind, the compound sentiment that
results from the association of former feelings has, in many cases, on first
consideration, so little resemblance to these constituents of it, as formerly
existing in their elementary state, that it requires the most attentive
reflection to separate, and evolve distinctly to others, the assemblages which
even a few years may have produced. It is, therefore, scarcely possible to
advance even a single step, in intellectual physics, without the necessity of performing
some sort of analysis, by which we reduce to simpler elements some complex
feeling that seems to us virtually to involve them.”
These explanations define and characterize the task which
was proposed to himself by the author of the present treatise, and which he
concisely expressed by naming his work an Analysis of the Phenomena of the
Human Mind. It is an attempt to reach the simplest elements which by their
combination gene rate the manifold complexity of our mental states, and to
assign the laws of those elements, and the elementary laws of their
combination, from which laws, the subordinate ones which govern the compound
states are consequences and corollaries.
The conception of the problem did not, of course, originate
with the author; he merely applied to mental science the idea of scientific
inquiry which had been matured by the successful pursuit, for many generations,
of the knowledge of external nature. Even in the particular path by which he
endeavoured to reach the end, he had eminent precursors. The analytic study of
the facts of the human mind began with Aristotle; it was first carried to a
considerable height by Hobbes and Locke, who are the real founders of that view
of the Mind which regards the greater part of its intellectual structure as
having been built up by Experience. These three philosophers have all left
their names identified with the great fundamental law of Association of Ideas;
yet none of them saw far enough to perceive that it is through this law that
Experience operates in moulding our thoughts and forming our thinking powers. Dr. Hartley was the man of genius who first clearly discerned
that this is the key to the explanation of the more complex mental phenomena,
though he, too, was indebted for the original conjecture to an otherwise forgotten thinker, Mr. Gay. Dr. Hartley’s
treatise (“Observations on Man”) goes over the whole field of the mental
phenomena, both intellectual and emotional, and points out the way in which, as
he thinks, sensations, ideas of sensation, and association, generate and
account for the principal complications of our mental nature. If this doctrine
is destined to be accepted as, in the main, the true theory of the Mind, to
Hartley will always belong the glory of having originated it. But his book made
scarcely any impression upon the thought of his age. He incumbered his theory
of Association with a premature hypothesis respecting the physical mechanism of
sensation and thought; and even had he not done so, his mode of exposition was
little calculated to make any converts but such as were capable of working out
the system for themselves from a few hints. His book is made up of hints rather
than of proofs. It is like the production of a thinker who has carried his doctrines
so long in his mind without communicating them, that he has become accustomed
to leap over many of the intermediate links necessary for enabling other
persons to reach his conclusions, and who, when at last he sits down to write,
is unable to recover them. It was another great disadvantage to Hartley’s
theory, that its publication so nearly coincided with the commencement of the
reaction against the Experience psychology, provoked by the hardy scepticism of
Hume. From these various causes, though the philosophy of Hartley never died
out, having been kept alive by Priestley, the elder Darwin, and their pupils,
it was generally neglected, until at length the author of the present work gave
it an importance that it can never again lose. One distinguished thinker, Dr.
Thomas Brown, regarded some of the mental phenomena from a point of view similar
to Hartley’s, and all that he did for psycho logy was in this direction; but he
had read Hartley’s work either very superficially, or not at all: he seems to have
derived nothing from it, and though he made some successful analyses of mental
phenomena by means of the laws of association, he rejected, or ignored, the
more searching applications of those laws; resting content, when he arrived at
the more difficult problems, with mere verbal generalizations, such as his
futile explanations by what he termed relative suggestion.” Brown s psychology
was no outcome of Hartley’s; it must be classed as an original but feebler
effort in a somewhat similar direction.
It is to the author of the present volumes that the honour
belongs of being the reviver and second founder of the Association psychology.
Great as is this merit, it was but one among many services which he rendered to
his generation and to mankind. When the literary and philosophical history of
this century comes to be written as it deserves to be, very few are the names
figuring in it to whom as high a place will be awarded as to James Mill. In the
vigour and penetration of his intellect he has had few superiors in the history
of thought: in the wide compass of the human interests which he cared for and
served, he was almost equally remarkable: and the energy and determination of
his character, giving effect to as singleminded an ardour for the improvement
of mankind and of human life as I believe has ever existed, make his life a
memorable example. All his work as a thinker was
devoted to the service of mankind, either by the direct improvement of their
beliefs and sentiments, or by warring against the various influences which he
regarded as obstacles to their progress: and while he put as much conscientious
thought and labour into everything he did, as if he had never done anything
else, the subjects on which he wrote took as wide a range as if he had written without
any labour at all. That the same man should have been the author of the History
of India and of the present treatise, is of itself sufficiently significant.
The former of those works, which by most men would have been thought a
sufficient achievement for a whole literary life, may be said without
exaggeration to have been the commencement of rational thinking on the subject
of India: and by that, and his subsequent labours as an administrator of Indian
interests under the East India Company, he effected a great amount of good, and
laid the foundation of much more, to the many millions of Asiatics for whose
bad or good government his country is responsible. The same great work
is full of far-reaching ideas on the practical interests of the world; and while
forming an important chapter in the history and philosophy of civilization (a
subject which had not then been so scientifically studied as it has been since)
it is one of the most valuable contributions yet made even to the English
history of the period it embraces. If, in addition to the History and to the
present treatise, all the author’s minor writings were collected; the outline
treatises on nearly all the great branches of moral and political science which
he drew up for the Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica, and his countless
contributions to many periodical works; although advanced thinkers have
outgrown some of his opinions, and include, on many subjects, in their speculations,
a wider range of considerations than his, every one would be astonished at the
variety of his topics, and the abundance of the knowledge he exhibited
respecting them all. One of his minor services was, that he was the first to
put together in a compact and systematic form, and in a manner, adapted to
learners, the principles of Political Economy as renovated by the genius of Ricardo:
whose great work, it may be mentioned by the way, would probably never have
seen the light, if his intimate and attached friend Mr. Mill had not encouraged
and urged him, first to commit to paper his profound thoughts, and afterwards
to send them forth to the world. Many other cases might be mentioned in which
Mr. Mill’s private and personal influence was a means of doing good, hardly
inferior to his public exertions. Though, like all who value their time for higher
purposes, he went little into what is called society, he helped, encouraged,
and not seldom prompted, many of the men who were most useful in their
generation: from his obscure privacy he was during many years of his life the
soul of what is now called the advanced Liberal party; and such was the effect
of his conversation, and of the tone of his character, on those who were within
reach of its influence, that many, then young, who have since made them selves
honoured in the world by a valuable career, look back to their intercourse with
him as having had a considerable share in deciding their course through life.
The most distinguished of them all, Mr. Grote, has put on record, in a recent
publication, his sense of these obligations, in terms equally honourable to both.
As a converser, Mr. Mill has had few equals; as an argumentative converser, in
modern tunes probably none. All his mental resources seemed to be at his
command at any moment, and were then freely employed in removing difficulties
which in his writings for the public he often did not think it worth while to
notice. To a logical acumen which has always been acknowledged, he united a
clear appreciation of the practical side of things, for which he did not always
receive credit from those who had no personal knowledge of him, but which made
a deep impression on those who were acquainted with the official correspondence
of the East India Company conducted by him. The moral qualities which shone in
his conversation were, if possible, more valuable to those who had the
privilege of sharing it, than even the intellectual. They were precisely such
as young men of cultivated intellect, with good aspirations but a character not
yet thoroughly formed, are likely to derive most benefit from. A deeply rooted
trust in the general progress of the human race, joined with a good sense which
made him never build unreasonable or exaggerated hopes on any one event or
contingency; an habitual estimate of men according to their real worth as
sources of good to their fellow- creatures, and an unaffected contempt for the
weaknesses or temptations that divert them from that object, making those with
whom he conversed feel how painful it would be to them to be counted by him
among such backsliders; a sustained earnestness, in which neither vanity nor
personal ambition had any part, and which spread from him by a sympathetic
contagion to those who had sufficient moral preparation to value and seek the
opportunity; this was the mixture of quali ties which made his conversation
almost unrivalled in its salutary moral effect. He has been accused of asperity,
and there was asperity in some few of his writings; but no party spirit,
personal rivalry, or wounded amour-propre ever stirred it up. Even when he had
received direct personal offence, he was the most placable of men. The
bitterest and ablest attack ever publicly made on him was that which was the immediate
cause of the introduction of Mr. Macaulay into public life. He felt it keenly
at the time, but with a quite impersonal feeling, as he would have felt any thing
that he thought unjustly said against any opinion or cause which was dear to
him; arid within a very few years afterwards he was on terms of personal
friendship with its author, as Lord Macaulay himself, in a very creditable
passage of the preface to his collected Essays, has, in feeling terms,
commemorated.
At an early period of Mr. Mill’s philosophical life, Hartley’s
work had taken a strong hold of his mind; and in the maturity of his powers he
formed and executed the purpose of following up Hartley’s leading thought, and
completing what that thinker had begun. The result was the present work, which
is not only an immense advance on Hartley’s in the qualities which facilitate
the access of recondite thoughts to minds to which they are new, but attains an
elevation far beyond Hartley’s in the thoughts themselves. Compared with it, Hartley’s
is little more than a sketch, though an eminently suggestive one: often rather
showing where to seek for the explanation of the more complex mental phenomena,
than actually explaining them. The present treatise makes clear, much that
Hartley left obscure: it possesses the great secret for clearness, though a
secret commonly neglected it bestows an extra amount of explanation and
exemplification on the most elementary parts. It analyses many important mental
phenomena which Hartley passed over, and analyses more completely and
satisfactorily most of those of which he commenced the analysis. In particular,
the author was the first who fully understood and ex pounded (though the germs
of this as of all the rest of the theory are in Hartley) the remarkable case of
Inseparable Association: and inasmuch as many of the more difficult analyses of
the mental phenomena can only be performed by the aid of that doctrine, much had
been left for him to analyse.
I am far from thinking that the more recondite specimens
of analysis in this work are always successful, or that the author has not left
something to be corrected as well as much to be completed by his successors.
The completion has been especially the work of two distinguished thinkers in
the present generation, Professor Bain and Mr. Herbert Spencer; in the writings
of both of whom, the Association Psychology has reached a still higher
development. The former of these has favoured me with his invaluable
collaboration in annotating the present work. In the annotations it has been
our object not only to illustrate and enforce, but to criticise, where
criticism seemed called for. What there is in the work that seems to need
correction, arises chiefly from two causes. First, the imperfection of
physiological science at the time at which it was written, and the much greater
knowledge since acquired of the functions of our nervous organism and their
relations with the mental operations. Secondly, an opening was made for some
mistakes, and occasional insufficiency of analysis, by a mental quality which
the author exhibits not unfrequently in his speculations, though as a practical
thinker both on public and on private matters it was quite otherwise; a certain
impatience of detail. The bent of his mind was towards that, in which also his
greatest strength lay; in seizing the larger features of a subject the
commanding laws which govern and connect many phenomena. Having reached these,
he sometimes gives himself up to the current of thoughts which those
comprehensive laws suggest, not stopping to guard himself carefully in the minutiae
of their application, nor devoting much of his thoughts to anticipating all the
objections that could be made, though the necessity of replying to some of them
might have led him to detect imperfections in his analyses. From this cause (as
it appears to me), he has occasionally gone further in the pursuit of
simplification, and in the reduction of the more recondite mental phenomena to
the more elementary, than I am able to follow him; and has left some of his
opinions open to objections, which he has not afforded the means of answering.
When this appeared to Mr. Bain or myself to be the case, we have made such
attempts as we were able to place the matter in a clearer light; and one or
other, or both, have sup plied what our own investigations or those of others have
provided, towards correcting any shortcomings in the theory.
Mr. Findlater, of Edinburgh, Editor of Chambers Cyclopædia,
has kindly communicated, from the rich stores of his philological knowledge,
the corrections required by the somewhat obsolete philology which the author
had borrowed from Home Tooke. For the rectification of an erroneous statement
respecting the relation of the Aristotelian doctrine of General Ideas to the
Platonic, and for some other contributions in which historical is combined with
philosophical interest, I am indebted to the illustrious historian of Greece
and of the Greek philosophy. Mr. Grote’s, Mr. Bain’s and Mr. Findlater’s notes
are distinguished by their initials; my own, as those of the Editor.
The question presented itself, whether the
annotations would be most useful, collected at the end of the work, or appended
to the chapters or passages to which they more particularly relate. Either plan
has its re commendations, but those of the course which I have adopted seemed to
me on the whole to preponderate. The reader can, if he thinks fit, (and, if he
is a real student, I venture to recommend that he should do so) combine the
advantages of both modes, by giving a first careful reading to the book itself,
or at all events to every successive chapter of the book, with out paying any
attention to the annotations. No other mode of proceeding will give perfectly
fair play to the author, whose thoughts will in this manner have as full an
opportunity of impressing themselves on the mind, without having their
consecutiveness broken in upon by any other person s thoughts, as they would have
had if simply republished without comment. When the student has done all he can
with the author’s own exposition has possessed himself of the ideas, and felt,
perhaps, some of the difficulties, he will be in a better position for
profiting by any aid that the notes may afford, and will be in less danger of
accepting, without due examination, the opinion of the last comer as the best.
CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I. Sensation
SECTION
1. Smell
2. Hearing
3. Sight
4. Taste
5. Touch
6. Sensations of
Disorganization, or of the Approach to Disorganization, in any part of the Body
7. Muscular Sensations,
or those Feelings which accompany the Action of the Muscles
8. Sensations in the
Alimentary Canal
CHAPTER II. Ideas
CHAPTER III. The
Association of Ideas
CHAPTER IV. Naming
SECTION
1. Nouns Substantive
2. Nouns Adjective
3. Verbs
4. Predication
5. Pronouns
6. Adverbs
7. Prepositions
8. Conjunctions
CHAPTER V. Consciousness
CHAPTER VI. Conception
CHAPTER VII. Imagination
CHAPTER VIII. Classification
CHAPTER IX. Abstraction
CHAPTER X. Memory
CHAPTER XI. Belief
CHAPTER XII. Ratiocination
CHAPTER XIII. Evidence
APPENDIX
INTRODUCTION
“I shall inquire into the original of those ideas,
notions, or whatever else you please to call them, which a man observes and is
conscious to himself he has in his mind; and the ways whereby the understanding
comes to be furnished with them.” Locke,
i. 1, 3.
PHILOSOPHICAL inquiries into the human mind have for
their main, and ultimate object, the exposition of its more complex phenomena.
It is necessary, however, that the simple should be premised;
because they are the elements of which the complex are formed; and because a
distinct know ledge of the elements is indispensable to an accurate conception
of that which is compounded of them.
The feelings which we have through the external senses
are the most simple, at least the most familiar, of the mental phenomena. Hence
the propriety of commencing with this class of our feelings.
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