Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/325

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MILL 307 "Law of Nations," "Education," "Beggar," "Benefit Societies," "Banks for Savings." In "Jurisprudence" and "Prisons" he was largely indebted to Bentham; in most of the others he was either altogether or in great part original. The article on " Government " will occupy a permanent position in English history. In 1818 was published the History of India, which had a great and speedy success. It was the means of changing the author s future position. The year following he was appointed an official in the India House, in the important department of the examiner of Indian correspondence. He gradually rose in rank till he was appointed, in 1830, head of the office. He introduced his eldest son into the same department in 1823. In 1824 Bentham projected the Westminster Revieiv, and Mill was a principal writer for three years. Some of his most vigorous writings are included among those contribu tions. The first was an elaborate criticism of the Edinburgh Review as a whole ; it was followed by an onslaught on the Quarterly. Other articles dealt with English history and with ecclesiastical establishments, which he severely im pugned. To a periodical of short duration, The Par liamentary History and Review, he contributed an elaborate political retrospect of the parliament of 1820-26. In 1829 appeared the Analysis of the Human Mind. From 1831 to 1833 he was largely occupied in the defence of the East India Company during the controversy attending the renewal of its charter, he being in virtue of his office the spokesman of the court of directors. In 1834 Sir William Molesworth projected the London Revieiv, and Mill con tributed to it during the last two years of his life. His most notable article was one entitled " The Church and its Reform," which was much too sceptical for the time, and injured the Review. His last published book was the Fragment on Mackintosh, which appeared in 1835. He died on the 23d June 1836. A considerable space would be required to do justice to Mill s character intellectual and moral as shown both in his writings and in his intensely active and influential career. He was an ex cellent scholar, in the sense of knowing the Greek and Roman classics. His other accomplishments included general history, the philosophy of politics in the most comprehensive acceptation, logic, ethics, and mental philosophy. The type of his intellect was logi cal in the highest degree; he was, above all things, clear and pre cise, an enemy of every form of looseness of reasoning, and a crusher of prevailing fallacies. This is the most notable feature in his writings throughout. His was also an original mind. Except in a few subjects, which had been so well elaborated by Bentham that he was content to be little more than an expounder of Bentham s views, he gave a fresh turn to whatever topic he took up. At a time when social subjects were subjected almost exclusively to an empirical handling, he insisted on bringing first principles to bear at every point; in this lay both his strength and his weakness. His greatest literary monument is the History of India. The materials for narrating the acquisition by England of its Indian empire were put into shape for the first time; a vast body of political theory was brought to bear on the delineation of the Hindu civiliza tion ; and the conduct of the actors in the successive stages of the i conquest and administration of India was subjected to a severe j criticism. The work itself, and the author s official connexion with India for the last seventeen years of his life, effected a complete change in the whole system of governing that country. Mill played a great part as a politician and political philosopher in English affairs as well. He was,, more than any other man, the founder of what was called philosophical radicalism. His writings on government and his personal influence among the Liberal poli ticians of his time determined the change of view from the French Revolution theories of the rights of man and the absolute equality of men to the claiming of securities for good government through a great extension of the electoral suffrage. Under this banner it was that the Reform Bill was fought and won. His work on Political Economy was intended as a text-book of the subject, and shows all the author s precision and lucidity. It followed up the views of Ricardo, with whom Mill was in habitual intimacy. It urged strongly the modern application of the prin ciple of population, and started the doctrine of taxing land for the unearned increment of value. By his Analysis of the Mind and his Fragment on Mackintosh Mill acquired a position in the history of psychology and ethics. Attached to the a posteriori school, he vindicated its claims with conspicuous ability. He took up the problems of mind very much after the fashion of the Scotch school, as then represented by Reid, Stewart, and Brown, but made a new start, due in part to Hartley, and still more to his own independent thinking. He carried out the principle of association into the analysis of the complex emotional states, as the affections, the aesthetic emotions, and the moral sentiment, all which he endeavoured to resolve into pleasurable and painful sensations. But the salient merit of the Analysis is the constant endeavour after precise definition of terms and clear state ment of doctrines. The Fragment on Mackintosh is a severe ex posure of the flimsiness and misrepresentations of Mackintosh s famous dissertation on ethical philosophy. It discusses, in a very thorough way, the foundations of ethics from the author s point of view of utility. Mill s influence on the young men of his time by his conversation has been especially celebrated. Among those that came under this influence were some of the greatest names in the generation that succeeded him. He had himself a very high ideal of public virtue, which he carried out, at the risk of sacrificing all his chances of worldly advancement, and he impressed this ideal on those that surrounded him, most of all on his own son, who has since eclipsed his father in fame, if not in genius. See J. S. Mill s Autobiography, Bain s Life of James Mill, G. S. Bower s Hartley and James Mill. (A. B. *) MILL, JOHN (c. 1645-1707), editor of an historically important critical edition of the New Testament, was born about 1645 at Shap in Westmoreland, entered Queen s College, Oxford, as a servitor in 1661, and took his master s degree in 1669. Soon afterwards he was chosen fellow and tutor of his college; in 1676 he became chaplain to the bishop of Oxford, and in 1681 he obtained the rectory of Blechingdon, Oxfordshire, and was made chaplain to Charles II. From 1685 till his death he held the appoint ment of principal of St Edmund s Hall; and in 1704 he was nominated by Queen Anne to a prebendal stall in Canterbury. He died on June 23, 1707, just a fortnight after the publication of his Greek Testament. Mill s Novum Testamentum Grtecum, cum lectionibus variantibus MSS. Exemplarium, Versionum, Editionum SS. Patrum ct Scrip- torum Ecclcsiasticorum, et in easdem notis (Oxford, fol. 1707), was undertaken by the advice and encouragement of Fell, his predecessor in the field of New Testament criticism ; it represents the labour of thirty years, and is admitted to mark a great advance on all that had previously been achieved. The text indeed is that of R. Stephanus (1550), but the notes, besides embodying all previously existing collections of various readings, add a vast number derived from his own examination of many new MSS. and Oriental versions (the latter unfortunately he used only in the Latin translations). He was the first to notice, though only incidentally, the value of the concurrence of the Latin evidence with the Codex Alexandrinus, the only representative of an ancient non-Western Greek text then sufficiently known ; this hint was not lost on Bentley (see Westcott and Hort, Introduction to New Testament). Mill s various readings, numbering about thirty thousand, were attacked by "Whitby in his Examen as destroying the validity of the text ; Antony Collins also argued in the same sense though with a different object. The latter called forth a reply from Bentley (Phileleutherus Lipsiensis). In 1710 Kuster reprinted Mill s Testament at Amsterdam with the readings of twelve additional MSS. MILL, JOHN STUART (1806-1873), son of JAMES MILL (q.v.), was born in London on the 20th May 1806. His education was from first to last undertaken by his father, and is likely long to remain a standing subject for wonder and discussion. Much of the wonder is no doubt due to his father s monstrous inversion of custom, the boy being set almost as soon as he could speak to work at our time- honoured subjects of secondary and higher education. He was taught the Greek alphabet at the age of three, and one of his earliest recollections, as he has recorded in his auto biography, was learning lists of common Greek words with their English meanings, written for him by his father on cards. By his eighth year he had gone through in the original a great many Greek books. " Of grammar," he says, " until some years later, I learnt no more than the inflexions of the nouns and verbs, but after a course of

vocables proceeded at once to translation ; and I faintly