ENGLISH PHILOSOPHERS HARTLEY JAMES MILL BY GEORGE SPENCER BOVVER, B.A. ii OF THE INNER TEMPLE, BARRISTER AT- LAW ; LATE SCHOLAR OF NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD Uonioti SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE, & RIVINGTQN CROWN BUILDINGS, 188, FLEET STREET l88l [All rights reserved] LONDON : GILBERT AND RIVINGTON, PRINTERS, ST. JOHN'S SQUARE. B 1571 7£ CONTENTS. PART I. Their Lives. pagk . Ch. I. David Hartley 1 i Ch. II. James Mill ' 8 PART II. Theie Philosophical Systems and Opinions. : ; Ch. I. Preliminary remarks on the Theory of Association of Ideas — The Physical Groundwork of the Theory — Hartley's Vibrations — James Mill and Hartley on Sensations — Ideas as copies of Sensations ... 24 Ch. II. The Elementary Postulates, and Eirst Propositions, of the Theory of Association as laid down by Hartley and James Mill 37 r ; Ch. III. The Communication of Ideas — Language — Naming . 46 -> Ch. IV. The Theory of Association, as applied to explain the more important processes and operations of the mind . 65 Ch. V. Belief, as interpreted by the laws of Association . . 79 Ch. VI. Leading metaphysical conceptions, forms, and rela- tions, as accounted for on the theory of Association — Sameness — Similarity — Succession — Causality — Ex- tension — Motion — Quantity — Quality — Analogy — In- duction . . . . . . . . .111 Ch. VII. The Active Powers of the Human Mind . . . 136 Ch. VIII. The Will, as explained by Hartley and Mill . . .164 431G60 iv CONTENTS. Ch. IX. The Practical Laws of Ethics, as resulting from the prin- ciples of Association and Utility . . . .178 Ch. X. The Esthetic Doctrines of Hartley and Mill . . . 191 Ch. XI. The Principles of Utilitarianism and Association, as ap- plied by Hartley and James Mill to special depart- ments of Practical Life — Politics — Legislation — Edu- cation — International Law 198 PART III. The Value and Influence or theie Opinions . . . 214 Bibliographical Appendix 247 HAETLET & JAMES MILL. $art h THEIR LIYES. CHAPTER L DAVID HARTLEY. David Hartley, the son of a clergyman residing- at Arraley in Yorkshire, was born on the 30th of August, 1705. He was educated at a private school, and, in 1720, entered at Jesus College, Cambridge, of which society he subsequently became a fellow. Owing to conscientious scruples with reference to the Thirty-nine Articles, he abandoned his preparation for the clerical profession, for which he was originally intended ; and thenceforth applied himself to the study of medicine. Com- mencing practice at Newark, he afterwards removed to Bury St. Edmund's, and thence to London. In the later years of his life, he took up his residence at Bath. In the exercise of his functions as a physician, he was sympathetic, assiduous, and skilful. He especially devoted himself to the study and cure of the stone, and was the author of several medical pamphlets on Mrs. Stephens' medicine for that disease, 1 besides 1 " Observations made jm_the persons who have taken the medicament of Mrs/ Stephens," 1738. " View of the p'resent evidence for and against Mrs. Stephens' medicine as a solvent for the stone, containing loo cases" 2 II. 1 R TL E Y A XI) J A MILS MIL L . being the matmttieni of finally procuring for her the reward of 50002. offered by Parliament.* He is said to have written against Dtt'yjTf&ieja m ajfifen?e of inoculation for smallpox; and several oilier of his inedieal disquisitions are to be found in the Philosophical Transactions of the. time. He was twice married, and had issue by both marriages. lie died on the 28th of August, L757, at Bath, of the disease which he had so patiently investigated in his lifetime. Both the philosophical and the moral character of Hartley were no less conspicuous in his life than in his writing . Philosophically, he was remarkable for patience of research, variety of study, thorough scientific candour, and a constant readiness to receive new impressions and ideas. Morally, he was distinguished by modesty, unaffected openness, and bene- volence. In the one case, his inquisitiveness of intellect well qualified him for a writer on the connexion between body and mind, and their reciprocal influence on one another, — a kind of inquiry where alertness in the seizing of analogies is above all things requisite; in the other, his sympathy of heart was of eminent service 1" him in the observation and appreciation of moral phenomena. His great work On Man occupied sixteen years of slow thought and toil in maturing (1780 — 1710); and even for some years before ] 780, " the seeds of this work were lying in latent germination/' as he himself used to tell his friends. One cannot fail to notice the results of this steady and per- sistent investigation, (extending over so long a period, and [of which bis own was one], "with some experiments and observations," 1739. "Directions for preparing and administering Mrs. Stephens' medicine in a solid form," 1710 (in the Gentleman's Magazine). A large ingredient in this medicine was soap, of which the unfortunate Hartley was said to have himself consumed 200 lbs. before lie eventually died ot tlie disease. - Gazclli -, June, 17;)'.). DAVID HARTLEY. into so many different fields), in the astonishing" wealth of illustrative matter by which the principles laid down in his book are confirmed. It was first published in two volumes in 1749. Another edition by Dr. Priestley with elucidatory dissertations appeared in 1775. In this the vibration theory, and most of the Second Part on theological questions, were omitted. But the book was, notwithstanding, practically almost ignored till 1791. In 1801, Hartley's son published the entire work, in three volumes, from the German of the Itev. Dr. Herman Andrew Pistorius, rector of Poseritz, in the island of Riigen, accompanied with the latter's notes and essays. 3 Hartley himself was not at all sanguine as to the chances of the immediate acceptance of his novel theory. " He did not expect that it would meet with any general or imme- diate reception in the philosophical world, or even that it would be much read or understood ; neither did it happen otherwise than as he had expected. But at the same time he did entertain an expectation that, at some distant period, it would become the adopted system of future philosophers. That period " [writes his son in 1801] "seems now to be approaching," — and by this time it has arrived, and a formi- dable and industrious school of philosophy, known as the Association Psychology, has been constituted on the lines sketched out by him. From a very early age, Hartley had a fancy for natural science, experimental philosophy, and mathematics, which he studied under the tuition of a celebrated man in his day, Professor Saunderson. To optics, statics, and other special' departments of science, he devoted himself in company with Dr. Hales, Dr. Smith (then Master of Trinity College, Cam- bridge), and some other members of the Itoyal Society. lie 3 This is the edition to which the references throughout this work are made. 4 HA R TL EY AND J A MRS MIL L . was a keen observer, in the exereise of his professional duties, of physical peculiarities and habits, and mental diseases and defects ; and acquired early the habit of sound and rapid gene- ralization, which proved so useful to him in the construction of his philosophical system. Historical and chronological researches also claimed a large portion of his spare time ; and he was on intimate terms with N. Hooke, the Roman his- torian. In chronology, so far as physical science could be brought to bear on its numerous problems, as indeed in all kinds of natural science, he was an ardent admirer and dis- ciple of Newton, whose Prlncipia and other works first suggested to him the theory of vibrations. He was much interested in all schemes for the reformation of language, either as written, (e.g. methods of short-hand), or as written and spoken both; and welcomed proposals of universal and philosophical languages and dictionaries, and similar fresh ideas. But it was to mental science, ethics, and theology that Hartley's tastes were principally drawn. In regard to these subjects, the intellectual atmosphere in which he lived was that of Edmund Law, Warburton, Butler, and Jortin, who were his intimate associates and fellow-labourers both in these fields and in that of ecclesiastical history. It was, however — as he himself acknowledges, with his usual candour — from one Mr. Gay that he derived the germ of his association theory — at all events, as applied to morals. It was only the germ, however, that he obtained ; and how fruitful Gay's two short treatises became in Hartley's hands it only needs a comparison of them with the latter philosopher's second volume to show. In the latter part of his life he corresponded very much with Dr. Priestley on their common subject. Nor did Hartley neglect the more distinctly humanizing studies of history, poetry, and art. Of the first of these DA VI D HA R TLE Y. 5 means of cultivation he was especially fond. He was a great admirer of some of the poets of his own country, such as Pope, whom he respected not only as a man of genius,, but also, and chiefly, because he was a poet who " moralized his song," and pursued by a different road the same goal as himself. On similar grounds he was interested in Dr. Young, and also in Hawkins Browne, the author of a Latin poem, Be Animl ImmortaUtate. It must be confessed, however, that Hartley does not seem to have been a very enthusiastic lover of poetry, except as a veil for philosophy, and that he was disposed to regard the exercise of the imagination too much in a didac- tical light. Owing to this latter attitude of mind, he even took offence at the Essay on Man, which he thought inspired by Bolingbroke, and calculated to weaken the force and inviolability of the moral law, of which — though charac- teristically charitable in judging individual instances of its perversion in practice — he was extremely jealous. To the " lewd " poets, who discoursed of love and beauty, entirely unmoved by the puzzles of metaphysics and morals, he felt — and frequently displayed in his works — a hearty aversion. In music he took a passionate delight. He was also a fair classical scholar; and the first prelimi- nary sketch of his system — a little treatise, Be Sensu, Mol/r, et Idearum Generatione, which he published in the form of an appendix to a medical tractate on the stone — was written in elegant Latin. With Hebrew he seems to have been at all events moderately well acquainted. All these varied tastes were reflected in the pages of his work, as we shall have occasion to remark below. 4 So, also, 4 See Part. III. Cp. the Life by Hartley's son, Observations on JJ(tn, vol. ii. p. ix. '' It was from the union of talents in the moral sciences with natural pliilosoph}', and particularly from the professional knowledge of the human frame, that Dr. Hartley was enabled to bring into one view 6 HA RTLEY A ND J A MES MIL L . was his personal character. His amiability, — no pen was ever freer from gall than his, and in the whole of his work we do not find a single harsh criticism of a personal nature, while his kindly appreciation and recognition of the labours of his precursors is abundant and marked — his openness, and his easy-going laissez-faire tendencies, — all these are mani- fest in the tone of his recorded opinions, and the style of his writing. As his son says, " it may with peculiar propriety be said of him, that the mind was the man." His philo- sophical character was only his personal character in one of its aspects. Hartley's was a quiet, useful, unromantic life, — unromantic in all respects, except in that steady devotion to truth and fact which tinges the most uneventful life with a hue of romance, — too often of pathos. Eminently typical of the century in which he lived, — comfortable, and ready to com- fort others, — disposed to ponder and wait, not very prone to action, unambitious, — he was always in a mood to make allowances for the frailty of others, and to take things as they came, while he was utterly destitute of the " passion for reforming the world/'' which possessed James Mill. On the other hand, if his life was not lit up by such noble aims as that of his great successor, he had all the compensating advantages incidental to a lack of enthusiasm. While he was not to the same extent as Mill the cause of good to unseen masses of men, he made far more friends and intimates out of those whom he did know. The bitterness and violence, which in Mill's case were engendered by consuming earnestness, were unknown to him. No zeal could eat him up. His philo- sophical system was not converted by him into a dogma or the various arguments for his extensive system, from the first l-udiinents of sensation through the maze of complex affections and passions in the path of life, to the final, moral end of man," DAVID HARTLEY. discipline; by thus having* no practical reference, while it won him no partisans, it made him no enemies. Though accurate and precise in his reasoning-, and metho- dical in his daily habits, Hartley was far removed alike from pedantry and fussiness. He was polished and gay in societyy and eloquent in conversation, without becoming importunate or a bore; and he was entirely without the vices of pride, selfishness, sensuality, or disingenuousness. In the endeavour to suggest the proper associations of ideas to the minds of others, and to form their habits on the lines, and with the help, of their position and previous circumstances, he was " the faithful disciple of his own theory/' He did what some one has said should always be done by every man, whether Libertarian or, like Hartley, an advocate of the doctrines of Necessity : in actual life he regarded himself alone as free, and all other men as determined. " His person was of the middle size and well proportioned : his complexion fail', his features regular and handsome; his countenance open, ingenuous, and animated. He was pecu- liarly neat in his person and attire. He was an early riser, and punctual in the employments of the day ; methodical in the order and disposition of his library, papers, and writings, as the companions of his thought/' [Observations on Ma0 {Life), vol. ii., pp. xvii, xviii]. During the nine years that elapsed between the completion of his book and his death, Hartley, though reposing from active work and collection of materials in reference to it, continued to keep his mind open to any further suggestions or discoveries that might have the effect of destroying or modifying any of his doctrines. None such, however, were made of any materiality sufficient to render an alteration of his Observations necessary. HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. CHAPTER II. JAMES MILL. James Mill was born at Northwater Bridge, in the parish of Logie Pert, in the county of Angus, on the 6th of April, 1773. His father, a shoemaker, lived in one of the little two- roomed clay-built cottages, some dozen of which made up a hamlet of the parish. Industry, soberness, and piety, with- out any remarkable gifts of intellect, distinguished the elder James Mill in his life and vocation. The mother, Isabel Fenton, was a woman of a somewhat different stamp. She was proud — (being the daughter of a substantial farmer, who had been in very good circumstances before he joined in the Stuart rising of 1745, she probably felt her marriage to have been something of a descent, and was not slow in manifesting her feelings to her neighbours, and in domineering over their wives) — but, together with her pride, possessed some of the good qualities which usually spring out of it. She was most ambitious for her eldest son James, and soon determined to rear him to some destiny higher than his father's workshop. Her influence over her husband was successfully exerted for this purpose, for we find no record of James having ever been required by his parents to assist in his father's trade, or indeed, engage in any manual labour; while there are " emphatic assurances/' as Professor Bain l tells us, to the 1 Life of James Mill, Hind, vol. i. p. 101. JAMES MILL. contrary. William/ the second son, took to the family business, but the tender hand of his mother reserved James exclusively for study. So that it must be remembered that to her pride and motherly interest we, in some degree, owe the Analysis and the History of British India. At Montrose Academy, one of the Scotch grammar-schools, James acquired the rudiments of a good classical education, and meanwhile received kindly and constant encouragement in his studies and aspirations from the minister of his parish, Mr. Peters. At about the age of eighteen he came under the notice of Sir John Stuart, of Fettercairn, one of the Barons of the Exchequer in Scotland, a man who, though reputed in the neighbourhood to have been haughty and morose, must always command our respect for his fidelity to his young friend. By Sir John and Lady Jane Stuart's influence James Mill was sent, in the year 1790, to the University of Edinburgh, under the following circumstances : — " Some pious ladies/' writes Mr. Bisset, 3 "amongst whom was Lady Jane Stuart (she was then ' Belsches'), "having established a fund for educating one or two young men for the Church, Lady Jane applied to the Rev. Mr. Foote, minister of Fetter- cairn, to recommend some one. Mr. Foote applied to Mr. Peters of Logie Pert, who recommended James Mill, both on account of his own abilities, and the known good character of the parents." It was a great advantage to Mill to be able to go to Edinburgh at a mature age (for a Scotch university), instead of receiving his education as a boy at Aberdeen, as, without the intervention of the Stuarts, he would in the ordinary course have been compelled to do. Being at this period destined for the Church, he was bound to frame his 2 Besides the two sons there was a daughter, Mary, who was the youngest child. 3 In the article on James Mill, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. io HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. course of study accordingly. Moral philosophy in the first place was required; nor, had it not been, can we imagine Mill neglecting it, more especially as the professor and lec- turer was Stewart, of whose discourses on this subject he ever afterwards spoke with the greatest enthusiasm, even declaring that their eloquence was superior to that of the most admired speeches of Pitt and Fox. He is recorded in the registers of the university as having attended the Greek, Latin, natural philosophy, and logic classes, between 1790 and 1792. There is no mention of mathematics, but it is probable that he attended this class, because of Playfair's reputation, and also because he could scarcely have otherwise begun natural phi- losophy and Newton's Priricijpia under Robison. John Stuart Mill [Autobiography) supposes that he may have also studied in the medical classes at this time. During his residence at Edinburgh James Mill became acquainted with a variety of men, who subsequently became distinguished in their different walks of life, and some of whom kept up their intimacy with him to the last. Among these were Brougham, who probably then commenced a friendship which did not terminate with his Chancellor- ship, Professor Wallace, Thomas M'Crie, John Leyden, Jeffrey, and Mountstuart Elphinstone. Mill's divinity studies proper began in 1791, and lasted for four winters. Professor Bain gives a curious list of the works which he took out from the Theological Library at this period, which shows very fairly the bent of his mind. A large proportion of these are philosophical, such as Alison on Taste, of which he afterwards made considerable use in the Analysis, Cudworth's Morality, Smith's Theory of Moral Sen- timents (to which he also refers in the Analysis), Locke, Beid, Hume, Rousseau, Bolingbroke, Ferguson, Jortin (a friend of Hartley's), and especially Plato, of whose influence (strange JAMES MILL. ii as it may seem) many trace&-are_jLo Jbe f ound ia_.tlie method, and even sometimes in the tone, of his philosophy. In other departments of literature, we find him reading" Rousseau's Emile and Diseours, Massillon's Sermons, Karnes's Sketches, HakewelPs Apology, Campbell on Rhetoric, (Euvres de Fene- lon, Maupertuis, Abernethie's Sermons, Whitby on the Fire Points, &c. He must, therefore, have become by this time a very fair French scholar. But one sees that divinity was not occupying- a very large share of his time. However, on the 1st of February, 1797, he is introduced by Mr. Peters to the Presbytery of Brechin, with his proper certificates, to be licensed as a preacher. After the due amount of "questioriary trials/' probationary sermons, lectures, homilies, and the like, he is formally licensed on the 4th of October, 1798. He began to preach in the church of Logie Pert. Those who heard him said that his voice was "loud and clear," but we are told that " the generality of the hearers complained of not being able to understand him ;" and we may easily imagine that his discourses were somewhat over the heads of the good people of Logie Pert. He also preached in Edinburgh, where Sir David Brewster heard him. From 1790 to 1802, Mill acted as private tutor in the Fettercairn family, (where, during the vacations of his Edinburgh course, he instructed Miss Stuart, 1 for whom he always preserved the warmest affection), and also in the family of Mr. Burnet at Aberdeen, (this tutorship he is reported to have given up, owing to an insult put upon him at a dinner-party), and in some others. The tradition as to his having been tutor to the Marquis of Tweeddale does not appear to be substantiated. These tutor- 4 This was the lady who married the son of the banker, Sir William Forbes, and was the mother of a distinguished Edinburgh Professor of Natural Philosophy, James David Forbes. Sir Walter Scott was vehe- mently, but fruitlessly, devoted to her before her marriage. 12 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL, ships were his first source of income. Meanwhile his parents were becoming' somewhat reduced in circumstances. James Mill generally spent what time was spared him from his university studies and tutorial engagements at his home, of which we have the following picture by Professor Bain : " The best room of the house contained two beds along the right hand wall ; in that room the mother hung up a canvas curtain ('cannas' it was called, being what is laid on the threshing-floor to keep the corn together) ; thus cutting off from the draught and from the gaze, the further end of the room, including James's bed, the fire, and the gable window. This was his study. . . . Here he had his book-shelves, his little round table and chair, and the gable window-sill for a temporary shelf. He had his regular pedestrian stretches; one secluded narrow glen is called ' James Mill's walk/ He avoided people on the road ; and was called haughty, shy, or reserved, according to the point of view of the critic. . . . His meals were taken alone in his screened study ; and were pro- vided by his mother, expressly for his supposed needs." Cer- tainly it cannot be said that James Mill was not appreciated by his parents, at all events by his mother. Nor did he lack sympathetic friends in David Barclay, Peters, and others, at Logie Pert, besides his little knot of associates in Edin- burgh. In the beginning of 1803 all preaching and tutorial work was given up, and James Mill went up to London in company with Sir John Stuart. Now commenced his journalistic career, into which he entered with zeal and energy. Imme- diately on his arrival in London we find him recounting in a letter to his Edinburgh friend, Thomas Thomson (a well- known devotee of science, and especially chemistry), his literary adventures and prospects. He was delighted with the large scope which London life afforded to an ambitious JAMES MILL. 13 spirit, as compared, with the life of his "over-cautious country- men at home/'' where " everybody represses you, if you but propose to step out of the beaten track/'' He obtained intro- ductions from Thomas Thomson to Dr. Robert Bisset, and Dr. GifFord, editor of the Anti-Jacobin Review. Besides this, he takes the greatest interest in politics, and often goes to the House of Commons to hear the speeches of Pitt, Fox, and Sheridan. Of the eloquence of the other members whom he heard he had the lowest possible opinion. He has an idea of starting- a class of jurisprudence, and of entering one of the Inns of Court, for that purpose, but subsequently abandons it. It may be inferred that he had studied law, or at all events the philosophy of law, at Edinburgh, and had perhaps begun to study Bentham in Dumont's translation. His first few weeks in London were thus full of hopes and schemes and enthusiasm. He soon gets into harness as a journalist. Dr. Bisset first of all tried him as an occasional writer on politics. For Dr. GifFord's Anti-Jacobin Revieiv he writes his first philosophical production, a review of Belsham's Elements of Logic and Mental Philosophy, which is very interesting as containing an attack on Hartley's theory of vibrations, and also on the selfish theory of morals, which " imposes an obligation to be vicious, removes the moral character of the Deity, and. renders it im- possible to prove a future state." An argument appears in this connexion, which seems to reflect a turning-point in the history of his religious belief. He contends that till the moral attributes of God are proved, it is useless to offer proofs of revelation. " Unless I know that God is true, how do I know that His Word is true ? " Another article from his pen followed shortly after this in the same Review — on his friend Thomson's System of Chemistry. Besides reviewing for Dr. Gilford, he is now writing articles 14 HARTLEY AND J A MES MILL . for the JEncyclopadia Britannica, on which he hopes to be able to support himself at least for a year. " I am willing- to labour hard and live penuriously," he writes to Thomson in May, "and it will be devilish hard, if a man, good for any- thing, cannot keep himself alive hereon these terms." The rewriting and rearrangement for Dr. Hunter of a work called Nature Delineated, brought him in some more money, besides making him known to the booksellers ; so that at the end of May he was able to take rooms by the year in Surrey Street, with an old pupil of Thomson's. Meanwhile he was attending the debates in the House of Commons with the keenest interest. In November Mill had an opportunity of showing his powers not only as a contributoi', but as an editor as well. Together with Baldwin he projected a new periodical, to be " devoted to the dissemination of liberal and useful know- ledge," called the Literary Journal. It was to embrace Physics, Literature, Manners, Politics, to commence in January, 1803, and to be issued weekly in shilling numbers. Mill was to be editor and contributor for four years. He corresponded extensively with all his friends, in order to get assistance in the various departments, and especially took counsel with Thomson, whose brother James was to undertake the Literature and Philosophy of the Mind. Thomas Brown, the metaphysician, was also thought of; but, whether he accepted the offer or not, we are not told. Most of the Edin- burgh contributions were very good, but those from London quite the reverse. " His energies and his hopes," Professor Bain tells us, "were concentrated in the success of his bold design. It was no small achievement for a young man to have induced a publisher to make the venture. But he had the power of getting people to believe in him. He was also cut out for a man of business, and shows it now as an editor." The first year of the Literary Journal contains some curious JAMES MILL. 15 articles either written or inspired by Mill, such as an essay on the structure of the Platonic dialogue (he always maintained his admiration for the Platonic mode of philosophical pro- dnre), another (curiously enough) to prove that Utility is not the foundation of virtue, and another on Stewart's Life of Reid, wherein some of his well-known opinions on the neces- sity of bringing 1 early influences systematically to bear on children are for the first time expressed. In the yea*- 1801 Mere produced (amongst others) a thoroughly characteristic paper on religious feeling as distinguished from action/ and several reviews of apologetic treatises in theology, most of which he is inclined to discourage. In 1805 Mill continues the Journal, and also publishes his translation of Villers' work on the Reformation, adding very copious notes of his own, in which he quotes largely from, and refers to, Dugald Stewart, Robertson, George Campbell, &c, expresses here and there his poor opinion of Voltaire, who "used not only lawful but poisoned arms against religion and liberty," and warmly defends the books of the Bible as comprising " the extraordi- nary code of laws communicated by a benevolent divinity to man." Villers' Kantism is also thrown in his teeth : conse- quently, since Mill was a conscientious man, we must presume that he had made himself acquainted with the writings and arguments of Kant (probably in some French translation) : also that he was as yet far from having reached the purely negative standpoint in religion. In this year Mill further commenced his editorship of the St. James's Clironicle, about which unfortunately little is known. The proprietor was Baldwin, his co-adventurer in the Journal. The paper lasted for at least two or three years, possibly more. In 1806 the 6 "Religion," he says in it, "without reason may be feeling, it may be the tremors of the religious nerve, hut it cannot be piety towards God, or love towards man." 16 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. form of the Literary Journal was altered. Henceforth it was announced that a Second Series would come out monthly, and that the plan of the contents would be somewhat varied. This year contains an article on Tooke's Diversions qfPurley, which is a book well-known in connexion with the obsolete philology of the Analysis, a severe one on Payne Knight's Principles of Taste, and some reviews on works of Political Economy. In one of the articles a reviewer, whether with or without the editor's sanction, takes the side of the clergy against Dugald Stewart and Leslie. Soon after its transformation, however, the Literary Journal had to be given up. Apparently, it had not succeeded. The Chronicle, as we have said, was also abandoned not very long alter this date. By these steps a large portion of Mill's income was withdrawn. His burdens, moreover, were increasing*, since his marriage had taken place in the preceding year to Harriet Burrow, a lady of considerable beauty and grace, but to whose lack of the necessary intellectual requirements he was at the time quite blind. She, on her side, was soon dis- appointed with the union, which she expected to be productive of more material benefit to herself than it turned out to be. Consequently Mill in this year, to meet the growing demands of his situation, commenced his famous History of British India, which he fondly anticipated would only take three years in the writing. It eventually took twelve ! His steady friend Sir John Stuart ceased in 1807 to come up to London regularly for the Parliamentary sessious, and one more support in his uphill career was, not indeed withdrawn, but necessarily rendered less available. Mill's connexion with the Edin- burgh Review (1S08 — 1813) bad not yet commenced. A variety of circumstances therefore combined to render the year 1807 one of the gloomiest in his life. After such a brilliant start, everything now seemed to be working against JAMES Ml j 7 him. In strong- contrast with his early fetters to David Barclay, we find this of the 7th of February, 1 were the cause of a demand being* made upon him for 50/., which not a little distressed him; and altogether the futu looked decidedly dark. During- all this period he is recorded to have enjoyed the society of an extensive literary circle, but not to have made many friendships in London, owing- to the strong dislikes which he used with great rapidity to conceive, and his unpopularity on other ground's. 6 But in 1808 came better things. In this year, which was a notable one in Mill's career, commenced his friendships with Bentham, with Ricardo, with General Miranda, and with William Allen, the Quaker and chemist of Plough Court. In this year also his intimacy with Brougham — he had been acquainted with him previously in Edinburgh — was formed, as also his connexion with the Edinburgh Review, under the editorship of Jeffrey. Each of these friendships and con- From tins point we may pass much more rapidly over the remaining ground, both because Mill's subsequent career was of a more public nature, and the works which record it (such as J . S. Mill's Autobiography) are more generally known ; and also because Part III. in some measure deals with it. IL IRTI >■ y ' ND J A MES MIL L . nex j on ■■■■ and distinguishable colour to Mill's habits of thinking and aims in life, at least during the years I si,. >me of them influenced him much ],., , P . During all this time the History of British India y pressing. And in the earlier part of this period his views on religion were becoming fixed, and approaphing more and more nearly to absolute negation. YIi-' connexion with Bentham was of course the pre- dominating influence of his life. Mill used to stay with short periods at his house (called Barrow Green) • t Oxted, in the Surrey hills,, during the years 1807 — 1811; and afterwards, during much longer portions of the year, at Bentham's new house, Ford Abbey, in Devonshire, during the 1811 — 1817. When in London, Bentham lived in n's Square, which was some distance from Mill's house at Pentonville. Being anxious that Mill should live nearer himself, in 1810 he gave him Milton's house, which was almost adjoining his own. After a few months, however, Mill removed to Newington Green, where he stayed for four years. But in 1811 Bentham leased a house in Queen's Square to Mill, who thus finally became his neighbour in London. The intimacy between the two philosophers was not with- out those little breaks and pauses — those unphilosophical squabbles — which are familiar to us from such well-known histories as that of the intellectual communion of Voltaire and Frederick the Great. In later life Bentham used to apply harsh expressions to his old admirer and disciple, such as " selfishness, coldness," &c. One day in 1814 we read that Bentham was offended because James Mill had left off taking his walk with him for a time, and the latter writes to suggest that they are in the habit of seeing too much of one another. On a later occasion Bentham surrep- JAMES MILL. 19 titiously sent over to Mill's house, while the latter was engaged in the India Office, to take away from it all the books out of his library which he had allowed him to keep there and use, solely owing to some offence which he had taken at his friend's neglect. On the whole, however, their sympathy — personal and intellectual — was most cordial. Ricardo's friendship of course to some extent determined Mill's interest in political economy. Miranda's influence is important, since it is said to have contributed to the formation of Mill's religious scepticism, in conjunction with the authority of Bentham, of whom Miranda was an enthusiastic admirer even to the point of desiring to introduce into his native country, Spain, a Benthamic code. Mill's connexion with Allen, and the joint efforts of the philosopher on the one side, and the practical philanthropist and man of science, on the other, to ameliorate the education of the poor, are worthy of some notice, as they help to explain the former's views on education, about which it is evident from all his works, and from his son's Autobiography, that he felt very strongly indeed. Mill co-operated with Allen in the quarterly journal called the Philanthropist, and with Allen, Zachary Macaulay, and others, in agitating their various educational projects. Among- the proposed methods of educating the poor discussed in the pages of the Philanthropist were the rival systems of Dr. Bell and Mr. Lancaster (a Quaker). Mill, together with Allen, espoused the cause of the latter. The battle between the Bellites.and the Lancastrians, as they called themselves, waged long and fiercely in the columns of this journal ; and in the course of the controversy a great many interesting educational questions were threshed out. The best means of civilizing barbarous tribes were also largely considered, as well as the systems in use at home for the reformation of criminals by means of penitentiary houses, and the like, in connexion with c % 20 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. which Bentham's Panopticon was examined and approved. These and similar subjects, connected with the improvement of the condition of the poor in body or in mind all over the world, justified the description of the Philanthropist by its editor as "a repository for hints and suggestions calculated to promote the comfort and happiness of man." In connexion with Brougham, we may presume that Mill became interested in questions of legal reform. The defects of the English penal system are pointed out even in the Philanthropist, while the Edinburgh Review for these years contains several articles from Mill's pen on subjects connected with law and codification, English and foreign, mainly in relation to speculations and proposed improvements issuing from Bentham. The younger Mill always thought that P>mugham exercised a much stronger fascination on his father than was just, and that certain defects of character — such as disingenuousness — were far from being compensated for by his attractive manner. James Mill's contributions to the Edinburgh Review, under Jeffrey's editorship, extended over some years (1808—1815). Jeffrey used to hack his articles about remorselessly ; and Mill often, like other contributors, complained bitterly of this treat- ment, but was met with apologies, accompanied, however, by steady persistence in the line of conduct reprobated. Jeffrey was continually urging Mill to soften his tone of writing, and on comparing the Fragment on Mackintosh, for instance, with some of the articles by Mill in the Edinburgh Review, as altered by Jeffrey, we cannot help feeling that Jeffrey may have been in the right. The contributions of Mill during the above- mentioned years embraced the following subjects : Political Economy [article on Money and Exchange, Oct. 1808] , Law and Codification [Review of Bexon's Code de la Legislation Penale — the first of his articles on Bentham's theories — Oct. 1809; JAMES MILL. 21 article on the part of the Code Napoleon referring" to criminal procedure, Nov. 1810], Education [the Lancastrian system is discussed in the Feb. number of 1813], Indian Affairs [April 1810, article on the government of the East India Company; July 1812, review of Malcolm's Sketch of the Political History of India; Nov. 1812, article attacking- the commercial mono- poly of the Company; July 1813, review of Malcolm's Sketch of the Sikhs], Religious Toleration [August 1810] ; Politics [review of a French treatise, Sur la Souverainete, by M. Chas, Feb. 1811], the Liberty of the Press [May, 1811] ; and the Emancipation and Condition of Spanish America [two articles in Jan. and July, 1809, evidently inspired by General Miranda] . During the years 1815 to 1824, Mill furnished the articles to the Encyclopedia Britannica which were afterwards reprinted in a separate volume, and have now attained some celebrity. In 1817 the History of British India went through the press, and on its appearance, at the beginning of 1818, met with a rapid success. A second edition was demanded in 1819. Meanwhile Mill was gradually rising in the India House, and in 1820 he was drawing" a salary of 800^ a year from the Company, with promotion in store. At this time his old friend, Dr. Thomson, the professor of chemistry in Glasgow, wrote to inform him of a vacancy in the Greek chair at that university. Mill is said to have seriously thought of entering himself as a candidate ; but was prevented by considerations of the probable opposition of the Tories at the election, the necessity of signing" the Confession of Faith, his possible advancement to the India Office, and the pecuniary loss which such a change in his circumstances, even if successfully brought about, would entail. By gradual advancements, Mill rose in the India House till he became chief examiner, in 1830, at a salary of ]200/., HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. which was finally fixed at 2000/. in 1836, a few months before his death. From 1819 to 1830 he was in the revenue depart- ment of the Company, and (as J. S. Mill tells us) introduced several important reforms into the administration of India, more through his larg-e unofficial influence with the directors. than by the use of any immediate opportunities afforded him by his position. The remaining- points of interest during- this last stage of Mill's life [1819—1836] are his connexion with the West- minster Revieio (beginning- in 1823), his composition of the Analysis during six summer holidays at his country house in Dorking (1822—1829), the production in 1821 of the Elements of Political Economy, his electioneering efforts in Westminster on behalf of philosophical radicalism, his part in the institution of the London University (afterwards Univer- sify College) for unsectarian education, and his quarrel 7 and subsequent reconciliation with Maeaulay, whose appointment to India he afterwards strongly supported with the directors of the Company. 8 One of the most extraordinary educations of modern times, familiar to all from the pages of J. S. Mill's Autohiograpliy, was being concluded during the first two or three years of this period. Meanwhile Mill kept up some of his old intimacies, as those with Brougham, Dr. Thomson, and Allen, and formed some fresh friendships, as those with Grote, the historian, Mrs. Grote, Henry Bickersteth (afterwards Lord Langdale and Master of the Bolls, who advised him as to the toning down' of the Fragment on Mackintosh), John Romilly, and Charles Buller. In 1830 Mill left his house in Queen's Square and took one in Church Street, Kensington, where, as well as at his summer residence in Surrey, he spent 7 Re Maeaulay 's Review of the Essay on Government. 8 Before setting out for India, Maeaulay was earnestly counselled by Mill (as J. S. Mill tells us) to keep to the line of an "honest politician." JAMES MILL. 23 the remaining six years of his life in comfort and prosperity. He had now become chief of the India Office. His nine children were all gathered round him in his house, and were one after the other being educated in the same way as J. S. Mill, the eldest, then twenty-four years old, had been trained. "For twenty years/' says Professor Bain, "the house had been a school, and it continued so while he lived." In the latter years of his life he was troubled with disease of the chest, which began to affect him seriously in April, 183G. He gradually became worse, and expired on the 23rd of June. Mill's character was in some aspects grand, but scarcely in any lovable. His absolute honesty, his unswerving devotion to the cause or opinion which he considered right, however unpopular it might be, his indomitable energy in overcoming apparently insuperable difficulties, his philanthropy — all these are beyond praise ; but his narrowness, his impatience/ his want of tenderness and sympathy for minds differently con- stituted from his own — these defects were unfortunately equally conspicuous, and should qualify our judgment on his merits. Part if. THEIR PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEMS AND OPINIONS. CHAPTER I. PRELIMINARY REMARKS ON THE THEORY OF ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS ■ THE PHYSICAL GROUNDWORK OF THE THEORY HARTLEY'S VIBRATIONS JAMES MILL AND HARTLEY ON SENSATIONS IDEAS AS COPIES OF SENSATIONS. The theory of Association of I deas, now so familiar to us as applied to the different practical fields of language, law, morals, politics, education, religion, and sociology, was first formulated as a philosophical system, and made the serious study of a life- time, by Hartley. Obvious enough it seems when stated, and it is only when the question of the extent of its application comes in, that the widest divergency of opinion is manifested. Some sort of belief in it has always been tacitly recognized as the ground of prediction in the common affairs of life, and has been at the root of most of the proverbial philosophy and folk- lore of ages. Nor were more formal, though isolated, admis- sions of its validity wanting in the works of pre-Hartleian philosophers in different countries. Aristotle and Hobbes had noticed the principle (the latter under the name of Mental HISTORY OF THE ASSOCIATION THEORY. 25 Discourse). In France, Condillac ( Haiti ey's contemporary) worked out similar results. The name had been invented by Locke. 1 One Gay had very briefly, but in a lucid and agree- able manner, sketched out his ideas on the subject, and applied the doctrine chiefly to moral phenomena, both in a disserta- tion prefixed to Edmund Law's translation and edition of Archbishop King's " Origin of Evil/' and (probably) in an anonymous " Enquiry into the Origin of the Human Appe- tites and Affections " (1747), printed in Dr. Parr's "Meta- physical Tracts of the 18th Century " [pp. 48—170] . Edmund Law, in his prefatory observations to King's work [pp. lvi, lvii], dwells with enthusiasm on "the power of Association which was first hinted at by Mr. Locke, but applied to the present purpose more directly by the author of the foregoing Dissertation •" [the Eev. Mr. Gay] , " and from him taken up and considered in a much more general way by Dr. Hartley, who has from thence solved many of the principle appearances in Human Nature, the sensitive part of which, since Mr. Locke's essay, has been very little cultivated, and is perhaps yet to the generality a terra incognita, how interesting soever and entertaining such inquiries must be found to be : on which account it is much to be lamented that no more thoughtful persons are induced to turn their minds that way, since so very noble a foundation for improvements has been laid by both these excellent writers, especially the last, whose work is, I beg leave to say, in the main, notwithstanding all its abstruse- ness, well worth studying, and would have been sufficiently clear and convincing had he but confined his observations to the plain facts and experiments, without ever entering minutely into the Physical Cause of such Phenomena." He speaks, too, with some impatience of the principle of Association being 1 Locke's Essay, — Conduct of the Understanding, § 40, 4th ed., 1690. See J. S. Mill's note on p. 377 of vol. i. of the Analysis of James Mill. 26 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. often slighted as vague and confused by later writers, particu- larly Dr. Hutcheson, 2 and expresses [p. lvii] his own convic- tion that c: it will not appear of less extent or influence in the Intellectual World than that of Gravity is found to be in the Natural." 3 This theory, then, of the Association of Ideas, propounded by Gay, ushered in by Edmund Law with the exuberant hopefulness which has always characterized the Columbuses of philosophy, elaborated by Hartley, and kept alive by Priestley, the elder Darwin, and Brown, was that which subsecpuently attracted the attention of James Mill, who added to it from the richer scientific stores then at his disposal, while stripping it of certain excrescences not necessary to the vindication and establishment of its truth, and solely due to the physical tastes of Hartley. Let us first find a statement of the doctrine in its very simplest terms. So far Hartley and James Mill are perfectly at one; we will take the definition given by the latter. " Our ideas," he says [Analysis, vol. i. p. 78] , 4 "spring up, or exist, in the order in which the sensations existed, of which they are copies. This is the general law of the Association of Ideas, by which term, let it be remembered, nothing is here meant to be expressed but the order of occurrence." Next, what was that physical hypothesis with which, to Edmund Law's regret, Hartley encumbered his theory, and which James Mill, as we shall see, cast aside? Hartley, like many another theorist, strained every nerve to evolve some grand and comprehensive law which should - 1 Science of Morals, p. 55, sqq. :i J. S. Mill uses the same comparison in speaking of the theory. " That which the Law of Gravitation is to Astronomy .... the Law of the Association of Ideas is to Psychology." Comic and Positivism, p. 53. 4 Throughout this work the references are to J. S. Mill's edition of The Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, 1869. VIBRA TIONS. 27 interpret all the phenomena. His bias towards simplifica- tion was excessive ; and the consequence was that his foun- dations were not wide enough to support the superstructure. Not content with showing- how large a variety of our mental processes are merely instances of the general law of Associa- tion as stated above, and how many of our complex ideas are, on analysis, reducible to simple ideas (the copies, in his language, of sensations), he endeavoured to prove that the primary law itself was nothing but the experience of a phy- sical change in first, the nerves, and then the brain, produced in the first instance by the impression on the senses of external objects. For this purpose he assumed, on certain (chiefly pathological and medical) analogies, that, when sensations are experienced, vibrations in the infinitesimal particles of the medullary substance of the brain are set going by external objects ; and surmised that, on the removal of these objects, the vibrations survive in the form of miniature vibrations or vibratiuncules which represent or cause what, from the sub- jective point of view, we call ideas. The ideas (or diminu- tive vibrations) would necessarily be of the same nature and constitution, and have the same arrangement and sequence of their elements as the original vibrations (or sensations) themselves. The vibration theory was suggested, as Hartley tell us, by Newton's hints as to the relation between motion and sen- sation, just as, on the intellectual side, the association theory was suggested by Locke and Gay ; and, as a medical man and student of physical science, Hartley saw no reason why an ingenious combination of the two should, not be effected. It is easy now to see why such a hypothesis in his time could be nothing but the merest guesswork, since, even at the present day, its lineal successor, the doctrine of " neural tremors" and groupings, under the auspices of such able exponents as Gr. II . 2 8 HA R TLB Y AND J A MES MIL L . Lewes and Dr. Maudsley, does not advance the Association theory much, which is far better left to stand on its own legs as the expression of an ultimate psychological law. In his system of vibrations Hartley had to assume both the causal nexus and the existence of the alleged cause. The theory was doubly hypothetical. Granting the existence of vibra- t ions at all, and, further, their activit} r to the extent and under the conditions postulated by him, there still remains unproved their operation in giving birth to sensations and ideas: he at must shows the probability of the concomitance of the physical and mental conditions in a large number of cases. His vibra- tions are like the French chemists' substance X,in being undis- covered and unproved, though unlike it in the fact that, even if their existence were proved, it could not be shown that they caused the phenomena to be accounted for and interpreted. Hartley, at the outset, anticipates that his readers may see little connexion between vibrations and the association of i i leas, and modestly expresses his fear that he will be able to do but little in the way of combining the two theories, " on account of the great intricacies, extensiveness, and novelty of the subject/'' {Observations on Man, vol. i. p. 6. 5 ] " How- ever/' he sa} r s — and in these words he betrays the weak point in his attempt — ' ' if these doctrines be found in fact to contain the laws of the bodily and mental powers respectively, they must.be related to each other, since the body and mind are." In the reason thus naively assigned the whole cmestion is begged. Starting from Newtonian principles, he first lays down that the immediate instrument of sensation and motion is to be found in the medullary substance of the brain, spinal marrow, and nerves j and, furthermore, that the medullary substance of . 5 Our references throughout are to the edition of Hartley's works, in 3 vols.) by his son [1801 1. VIBRA TIONS. 29 the brain is the immediate instrument of ideas, so that a change in the former works a corresponding- change in the latter. But sensations notoriously persist after the removal or disappearance of the external phenomena which occasioned them. Now, no motion can persist of itself in any space or part of a physical body, except a vibratory one. Therefore, he argues, these surviving sensations must be the result of vibra- tory motions communicated first to the nerves, and then to the brain, by sensible objects. Then, as if not quite sure of the efficacy of his reasoning, he adds, that if the vibrations could be proved independently by physical arguments, the persistence of sensation after disappearance of the object might be proved from vibrations, instead of vice versa. This latter task he then sets himself to do, and assumes (without proving) certain probable exciting causes, conditions, and media of the vibrations, such, for instance, as a very subtle and elastic fluid or aether, which he holds to be " of great use in performing sensation, thought, or motion." [Vol. i. p. 32.] He speaks also of the infinitesimal character of the particles of the medullary substance operated upon, arid their uniformity, continuity, softness, and active powers, as favour- ing his hypothesis. Here again he is taking hints from Sir Isaac Newton. He also brings forward analogies and illus- trations derived from the exercise of his own profession, 6 and attempts to show how the phenomena of pleasure and pain, of sleep, and of light, are agreeable to his theory, and how muscular contractions and motions (automatic, semi-volun- tary, and voluntary, according to his division) are all satis- torily explained by it. The general conclusion is, that vibrations and association mutually support one another. 6 He has a section (vol. i. pp. 264 — 2GS) on the Relation of the Art of Physic to, and the improvements which it is capable of receiving from, the Vibration Theory, judiciously applied. 3 o HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. " One may expect that vibrations should infer association as their effect, and association point to vibrations as its cause." Ultimately, however, he leaves us somewhat in the dark as to which is to be held the cause of the other, and seems to con- tent himself with placing the two laws in juxtaposition, expounding their correspondence and parallelism, and drawing* the inference that the agreement of the doctrines, "both with each other and with so great a variety of the phenomena of the body and mind, may be reckoned a strong argument of their truth." [Vol. i. p. 114.] He even appears to give up the idea of a definite causal relation in the assertion that " as in physics, we may make the quantity of the matter the exponent of the gravity, or the gravity the exponent of it/' so, in inquiries into the human mind, "if that species of motion which we term vibrations can be shown by probable arguments to attend upon all sensations, ideas, and motions, and to be proportioned to. them, then we are at liberty either to make vibrations the exponent of sensations, ideas, and motions, or these the exponents of vibrations, as best suits the inquiry, however impossible it may be to discover in what w r ay vibrations cause, or are connected with, sensations or ideas/' [Olserv. on Man, vol. i. p. 32.] And he then abandons himself for a moment to a wild search for a cause behind the cause, for a hypothetical substance on which to rest a hypothetical kind of motion, and suggests an infinitesimal elementary one, intermediate between the soul and the body. As his work proceeds, however, we find him merely placing side by side with each law of Association successively enun- ciated the corresponding law of the vibration theory, by sub- stituting vibration for sensation, vibratiuncules for simple ideas of sensation (that is, vestiges or images of sensations left behind in the brain), and complex miniature vibrations (compounded of simple miniature vibrations running into one another) for THE ELEMENTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 31 complex (or the more intellectual) ideas, compounded of simple ideas- of sensation running- into one another. These laws of the association, both of vibrations (on the physical or external side), and of sensations and ideas (on the subjective or psy- chical side), Hartley (as stated above) believed to apply also to the association of muscular contractions. Consequently, he expresses his vibration-association theory in its complete shape and threefold application in the following- formula or theorem : — 1. Tf any Sensation A. Idea B. or Muscular Motion C. be associated for a suffi- cient number of times with any other Sensation r>. 1 d, the simple idea belong- it will at last, ing to D. Idea E. , when occur- ring alone, / The very idea IE. Muscular excite The very Motion P. 1 Muscular 1 Motion Pi By a comparison of the first branch of this law with the second, it will be seen to express the obvious fact that the recurrence of one of two orig-inally associated sensations does not guarantee the recurrence of the other sensation itself, because such a result depends on the disposition of external phenomena, independent of subjective conditions, but only of the ideas corresponding to it : that is, in any case of asso- ciation, as Mills puts it, the antecedent may be either a sen- sation or an idea, but the consequent must be always an idea. \_Anal. i. 81.] The elements or materials of all our mental states, according- to both Hartley and James Mill, may be represented by the following scale or psychological spectrum : — 1. Sensations (impressed by external objects, in most cases, though not in all). 2. Ideas of Sensations, or Simple Ideas (Ideas surviving- Sensations after the objects have been removed, or the Ideas most nearly allied to, and indistinguishable from, Sensations). 32 HA R TL E V AND JAMES MILL. 3. Complex Ideas (the more purely intellectual Ideas, com- pounded of the above) . It is natural, therefore, that both philosophers should com- mence with some account of the prime data, Sensations, of which they conceive all ideas to be either copies, or com- binations (according- to the laws of association) of such copies, and into which, by analysis, they may ultimately be resolved. James Mill does not originate any startling physical theory of the senses : this, indeed, was not his object. He merely wished the student to accustom himself to reflect on the different classes of simple sensations, and learn to discriminate them not only from one another, but from all other feelings or states of mind with which, from their very familiarity, they were in danger of being confused. This was, in his opinion, a necessary step by way of preparing the ground for an examination of " the more mysterious phenomena." He accordingly gives a short account of the five senses of Smell, Taste, Hearing, Touch, and Sight, to which he adds two fresh classes of sensations, viz., those which accompany the muscular actions of the body, and those which have their seat in the alimentary canal, or the feelings associated with digestion. In discussing each of these in order, Mill points out that three conditions are requisite to sensation, — first, its organ, next, the actual feeling itself, and, lastly, the antecedent of sensation, or the external object to which it is referred as effect to cause. "With regard to the muscular sensibilities, he expresses his surprise at the extent to which this part of our consciousness had, up to his day, been neglected by all philoso- phical inquirers in this country except Hartley, Erasmus Dmwin, and Brown (all of them, it is noticeable, physicians). He explains this neglect on the ground that they are feelings in the main leading up to more interesting states of mind, to THE CLASSES OF SENSATIONS. 33 which the attention is immediately called off, to the swallowing up of any interest in the former which might otherwise have been taken. In discussing the sensations of the alimentary canal, Mill justly (and somewhat dolefully) observes that i( when they become acutely painful they are precise objects of attention to everybody," though, in their ordinary form, they too, as being merely productive of, or preliminary to, more interesting sensations, are lost sight of and forgotten as soon as the latter supervene. 7 Hartley's description of the classes of sensations [Observ. on Man, vol. i. pp. 115 — 268], as coming from a physician, is fuller and more elaborate ; but, notwithstanding that it is replete with valuable and striking suggestions, its scope and aim is far more indetinite, and it forms a far less coherent and integral part of the general theory, than that given by Mill. In speaking of the various senses and sensations, he seems to have no very determinate object before him. Mill's purpose, on the contrary, was very plain and intelligible. His # theory being that ideas are copies, or combinations of copies, of sensations, he begins with sensations, as being the primary element to which all intel- lectual operations are reducible, and the most simple and primitive of all our natural states, no less properly than Euclid begins with his definitions, and then proceeds to his postu- lates, axioms, and theorems. And he dwelt on them just long enough for purposes of definition, and no longer. Hartley, on the other hand, though he began with sensation, could not confine himself within proper limits. In his long second chapter on " the application of the doc- 7 Besides these, Mill notices the Sensations of Disorganization, or of the approach thereto in any part of the body (such as painful cuts, wounds, &c, and similar feelings) though here there is neither a specific organ nor external object of the sensation. Some of his remarks throw light on Kant's dictum that " pain is the sense of that which destroys life." D 34 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. trines of vibration and association to each of the sensations and motions in particular," Hartley seems to have had at least three objects indistinctly before him at various times : — (1) a division and classification of the senses (though he brings forward no very satisfactory fundamenliim divisionis, and often puts species on the same level as genera) ; (2) to show that the vibra- tions accompanying the special sensations propagated diminutive vibrations representing the simple ideas of those sensations; and (3) to explain how the special sensations contribute to form our intellectual pleasures and pains " in the way of association ;" which latter qualification exhibits a certain con- fusion in his mind, since the inquiry into the tones of mind produced by sensations is properly a physical, almost a medical, inquiry, and has nothing to do with Association, which pro- fesses to interpret the sequences of ideas as dependent upon, or related to, the sequences of sensuous impressions. 8 . On the whole, then, we may take Mill's classification of the senses and sensations to be quite sufficient as a necessary introduc- tion to the theory of association ; and the many interesting observations scattered up and down the corresponding part of Hartley's work need not detain us at present. Ideas are, as we have seen (when simple), copies, or (when complex) combinations of copies, of sensations. We have noticed Mill's succinct account of sensations, the originals : let us now see what he has to tell us, by way of definition and explanation, about the copies, images, or ideas, the other material of consciousness. Like Hartley, Mill first of all examines the idea in its simplest form : and, to both philosophers, the idea in its simplest form 8 James Mill falls occasionally into the same mistake, as, for instance, where he talks of dismal ideas heing associated with (instead of being, as they are, produced, through direct physical agency, by) intestinal sensa- tions of discomfort [Anal. vol. i. pp. 101, 102]. SIMPLE IDEAS. 35 is that vestig-e or trace of a sensation which remains in the mind after the external phenomenon which occasioned the sen- sation has been removed. Hartley, indeed, at times seems to be so taken up with this aspect of the simple idea that he apparently disregards the other and far more important points of view from which it may be looked at. He confuses, for instance, the images before the retina of the eye immediately after the disappearance of a bright-coloured object, with the thought of that object at any time after its disappearance — a purely physical with a purely intellectual state or operation. And even Mill does not distinguish quite sharply enough between the mere persistence of a sensuous impression in the mind immediately after the vanishing of- the external object, and the reproduction or recollection by the mind of such an impression long afterwards. " When our sensations cease, by the absence of their objects, something remains. This something is a feeling which, though distinguishable from the sensation itself, is yet more like it than anything else, and therefore may not inaptly be called a copy, trace, or representation of the sensation/'' To this latter class of feelings — to every feeling, that is, other than a sensation in immediate relation to its exciting object — Mill gives the generic name, Ideas, as opposed to sensations in the above sense ; and as opposed to Sensation in its other sense of the mental process, of which each specific sensation is an example, he proposes with some hesitation a term, which has since been taken up by Dr. Maudsley and others, Ideation. In this way we may be said to have Ideas of Sight, Ideas of Hearing, Ideas of Touch, of Smell, of Muscular Contraction, of Dis- organization, &c. In each of these classes, we' experience " something which remains with us after the sensation" [of Sight, Hearing, Touch, &c, as the case maybe] "is gone, and which, in the train of thought, we can use as its repre- D 2 36 HARTLEY AND J A MES MIL L . sentativc." The sound of thunder, for example, the sensation, is the primary state of consciousness; the thought of it, when it is gone, is the secondary state of consciousness. Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory : Violets when they die and sicken, Live still in the sense they quicken. Here again we have cases of the secondary state of con- sciousness, as Mill calls it. Up to this point the idea has been regarded solely in the light of a remnant of sensation, and ideation as a sort of dis- solving view, in which the idea represents the fading outline of the figures which were just now distinct and vivid. But Mill soon begins to introduce the discriminative or retentive powers of the mind, though he expresses their operations in his own peculiar language. On tasting a wine, or observing a colour, we often have at the same time a. secondary con- sciousness of other sensations of the same class as, but speci- fically unlike, the sensations of which we then have a primary consciousness; we distinguish the two feelings in a train of thought ; and we say that the former sensations of which we have equivalents or images in our minds differ from those of which we have a present experience. Here we see the original conception of an idea as a mere remnant of sensation, a sort of weaker impression on the senses, considerably enlarged. And we shall notice, in the next two chapters, still further amplifications, when Mill comes to divide the ideas into classes corresponding in the main with those of Hartley. 37 CHAPTER II. THE ELEMENTARY POSTULATES AND FIRST PROPOSITIONS OP THE THEORY OF ASSOCIATION, AS LAID DOWN BY HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. After noticing the persistence of sensations (notably visible and audible sensations) in the sensorium, fancy, or mind — which he takes for his purpose to be equivalent expressions — after their exciting causes have been removed, and then ap- parently feeling conscious that this proposition does not carry us very far, since it merely represents a well-known physical law. Hartley in his eighth Proposition (vol. i. p. 56) begins to introduce us to the Association theory proper, and lays down that " sensations, by being often repeated, leave certain Types or Images of themselves which may be called Simple Ideas of Sensation " [of Sensation, because, as Mill too says, more like sensations than anything else; and simple, as contrasted with complex ideas, to be noticed presently]. He compares this proposition with the foregoing one [Prop. III.] , and points out that, whereas, 'according to the latter law, the single im- pression produces " a perceptible effect, trace or vestige " for a short time, the repetition, in the former case, produces a more permanent effect, and generates an idea " which shall recur occasionally at long distances of time from the impression of the corresponding sensation/' So, too, Mill remarks the con- stant interchange of sensations and ideas in our mental experience, sensations suggesting ideas ; and those ideas sug- 431660 3 8 HA RTLEY A ND J A MES MIL L . gesting still further ideas more and more remotely connected with the sensation which set the train of thought in motion, and more and more nearly allied to sensations long past, till the sequence of ideas is broken in upon by some sensation impressed by an external cause independent of us, and a fresh train is constituted. Then do our ideas follow one another at hazard, or according to law ? The latter as'suredly ; and the law of their succession is determined by the order of suc- cession or the order of co-existence of the corresponding sensa- tions. Hartley and Mill agree that there are two orders of sensations — the successive order, or the order which answers ■usually, but not always, to a sequence in time of their objects ; and the synchronous order, or the order which answers to the relation of the corresponding objects to one another in space. When the sensations have been synchronous, the ideas of these sensations are synchronous; and wdien the sensations have been successive, the ideas of those sensations spring up suc- cessively, though not necessarily, of course, in exactly the same order of succession. From a stone, for example, several sensations are simultaneously derived — those of hardness, weight, roundness, colour, size, &c. When, therefore, the idea of any one of those sensations springs up in the mind afterwards, the ideas of all the others spring up, says Mill, simultaneously with it. 1 The sensation of hearing- the thunder, on the contrary, follows the sensation of seeing the lightning- flash : when the idea, therefore, of one of these is recalled, the idea of the other follows in succession, and not simultaneously. The latter branch of the law is also most aptly exemplified by the case of committing passages to memory, where each word in succession suggests the following* word. Of course a far 1 This hypothesis is obviously crude and ill-founded, as Professor Bain points out [Analysis, vol. i. p. 79, note], since the same individual sensation has generally a place in many different groupings or clusters. " ORDERS OF SENSATIONS AND IDEAS. 39 greater number of our sensations, and therefore also of our ideas, occur in the successive than in the synchronous order. Also nearly all the sensations occurring either simultaneously or successively occur very frequently in their respective orders, and the frequent repetition tends to rivet more firmly the corresponding sequences and associations of the ideas. The above doctrines are expressed by Hartley in a somewhat different way, but to the same effect, in two of the propositions into which he delights to pack up his philosophy, namely, (1) the proposition, already noticed, that sensations, by being often repeated, leave types or images of themselves, called Simple Ideas of Sensation : this would include Mill's per- petuation of the synchronous order of sensations in subsequent ideation, e. g. in the case of the simultaneous sensations excited by a rose through its different sensible qualities : (2) any sensations, A, B, C. &c, by being associated with one another a sufficient number of times, get such a power over the. cor- responding ideas, a, b, c, &c, that any one sensation, A, when impressed alone, shall be able to excite in the mind, b, c, &c, the ideas of the rest. [Prop. X., vol. i., p. 65], This asso- ciation would include both the case of simultaneity and that of succession. Hartley gives us the physical counterpart of the latter of these two laws as follows : Any vibrations, A, B, C, &c, by being associated together often enough, get such a power over a, b, c, &c, the corresponding miniature vibrations, that any one vibration, A, when impressed alone, shall be able to excite b, c, &c, the miniatures of the rest. [Prop. XI.]. The former he translates into vibration lan- guage thus : Sensory vibrations, by being often repeated, beget in the medujlary substance of the brain a disposition to diminutive vibrations, or vibratiuncules. Having explained that sensations associated often enough tend to generate similarly associated ideas, Mill goes on to 4 o HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. show that there are degrees of strength in the associative link itself, as there are degrees of clearness in the associated ideas. The symptoms or criteria of the relative strength of such links are, in the rnain, their relative permanence, and the relative certainty and facility with which they are formed. This may be seen by comparing the bond of association be- tween names and ideas in a well-known language, science or art, on the one hand, and an imperfectly known one on the other. The causes of strength of association of ideas are two : the vividness of the associated sensations, and the frequency of their association. This Hartley expresses as usual in terms of vibrations. [Vol. i., pp. 30, 31]. That vividness and frequency are two completely distinct •causes of strong and intimate associations is shown by the fact that a single instance of a connexion of a highly pleasurable or painful sensation with one which would other- wise have been indifferent, will often be sufficient to forge an almost indissoluble link between the latter sensation, when recurring, or the idea of it, when subsequently springing up in the mind, and the idea of the pleasurable or painful sensa- tion. The sight of a surgical operator, or of a place connected with a delightful meeting, will respectively suggest painful and pleasurable ideas long afterwards to the patient and to the friend, although only once coupled with the sensations corresponding to those ideas. So, too, recently-associated sensations will, as compared with those associated at more distant dates, generate a strong association between the corresponding ideas, or between one of the sensations and the idea of the other, by reason of the vividness and pro- minence in the memory of the original sensations, irrespective of frequency. Conversely, a word frequently associated with a sensation, or the sight of a particular class of citizen frequently associated with the sight of a particular kind of CAUSES OF STRONG ASSOCIATIONS. 41 dress, will create an equally strong- association between the corresponding- ideas, though any one of the associations of the original sensations, taken by itself, would have left no impress on the mind at all. The next primary law of the association theory is a very important one. It is that, when several simple ideas are frequently united together in the mind, they gradually merge into a complex whole, the several parts of which are practically indistinguishable, only distinguishable, that is, by a conscious effort of analysis : or, as Hartley puts it shortly, simple ideas will run into a complex idea by means of association, in which case, according to the vibration hypothesis, " we are to suppose " that simple miniature vibrations run into a complex miniature vibration. Mill compares the analogous physical effect of a rapidly revolving wheel, on seven parts of which the seven prismatic colours are painted, and which appears to a spectator white ; and Hartley characteristically instances the apparently simple flavour of a medicine where the tastes of the several ingredients cannot be distinguished. Such an apparently simple idea as that of gold is in reality a very complex idea, — one which the ideas (themselves not simple in every case), of hardness, colour, extension, weight, have by frequent union coalesced to form. The complexity of such abstract ideas as those of Humanity, Poetry, or Civilization, is more obvious. • This law may be regarded as a case of the law of the generation of synchronous ideas by similarly synchronous sensations. Hartley draws attention to this, and, in his semi-mathematical language, puts the generalization thus: — A+B+C+D (sensations) often occurring together [or — though this does not seem so certain — A equally often occurring with B, C, or D alone, or with, pairs of B + C, B + D, C-f-D alone] generate the synchronous simple ideas a + b + c + d, and these synchronous simple ideas, by their repeated 42 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL union, coalesce into a cluster or complex idea, abed. He regards the merging of the ideas of the letters of the alphabet into the ideas of syllables, and the ideas of syllables into the ideas of words, — in fact the whole process of learning a language, — as a conspicuous instance of this law ; and says that, similarly, the most abstract ideas are capable, with per- severance, of being analyzed into such simple ideas as are but copies or images of sensations ; since, as simple ideas run into complex ones, so complex run into decomplex ideas; but the complex ideas which go to compose a decomplex idea adhere together less closely than the simple ideas which go to form a complex idea, just as letters adhere together more closely to form a syllable by association than syllables do to form a word, and these latter again than words to form a sentence. It is to be noticed that when a complex idea is made up of several simple ideas, one of which is a visible idea, the visible idea, being the most glariug, so to speak, will generally serve as a symbol to suggest and connect the rest, just as the first letter of a word, or the first word of a sentence, will often call up the entire word or the entire sentence. In connexion with this part of the theory, Mill just mentions the principle (which will occupy our attention hereafter) of indissoluble association. Two or more simple ideas maybe so constantly and invariably conjoined that they form what may, from one point of view, be called a complex idea, with- out a special name, the parts of which, though specially named, it is impossible to disconnect, — such pairs of simple ideas, for instance, as colour and extension, solidity and figure, two straight lines and unterminated space. The sensations of colour and figure are so firmly associated with the sensations from which we infer distance, solidity, &c, that we even imagine that we see distance and solidity, though in fact we see only the former, and the rest is inference of a somewhat COMPLEX IDEAS. 43 complicated character. We here have an instance of a sen- sation and an idea being so closely and repeatedly united that they merge into a whole which appears to be a simple sensation. Just as simple ideas thus associated cannot be disjoined, so neither of them can be conjoined by any effort of mind with the opposite of the other. Here we have the law of the in- conceivability of the opposite, about which Mr. Herbert Spencer's views have of late given rise to so much contro- versy. Mill further remarks that another instance of the law now under consideration is the case (already mentioned) of ante- cedent sensations or ideas leading up so rapidly to a train of more interesting consequent ideas, that a complex idea results in which, the supervening ideas form the dominant element, and the antecedent sensations or ideas are almost entirely lost. The main principles of association, as enounced by Mill, are compared by him to those which Hume put forward. The two theories, though expressed differently and worked out from a somewhat different starting-point, are found to be in substance much the same. Hume considers the elementary principles, according to which cur ideas are associated, to be Contiguity in Time and in Place, Causation, and Resemblance. Causation, however, even according to Hume himself, and certainly according to Mill, is only a particular case of Con- tiguity in Time; and Contrast, which Hume mentions as another possible principle, he himself admits to be derivative, as being a compound case of Resemblance and Causation. James Mill, indeed, thinks this analysis unsatisfactory, and prefers to call Contrast either a case of Resemblance (as when a dwarf suggests a giant, the two resembling one another in the fact of both departing from a common standard), or a 44 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. combined case of Vividness and Frequency, as when the sensation or idea of pain suggests the idea of relief from pain, or of pleasure, because the sensation of pain has often been followed by the sensation accompanying relief from pain, and also, whenever it has been so followed, the associative link has generally been of a vivid and forcible character. There remains then Contiguity in Place and in Time, together with Resemblance. The two former correspond to Mill's syn- chronous and successive orders; and we have seen that the simultaneity or sequence of our ideas depends on the simul- taneity or sequence of our sensations. As to Resemblance, Mill, in a somewhat hasty generalization, infers that it is merely a case of the law of Frequency, because when we perceive an object by our senses we generally perceive other objects of the same class together with it. This is a very crude and unphilosophical explanation. We perceive, together with any given object, quite as many objects of different classes, at any given moment, as objects of the class to which it belongs, and, therefore, might be expected to have formed quite enough counter-associations to dispel the association which is alleged to be created in this manner. Reduced then to their simplest terms, Mill's primary laws of Association come to this. I. Whenever a strong association is formed between two or more sensations, the recurrence of any one of these sensations, or of the idea of any one of these sensations, will suggest the ideas of the remaining sensations either simultaneously or successively, according as the sensa- tions, of which the suggesting sensation was one, were con- nected together in a synchronous or successive order. II. The strength of the association is caused by either (1) the frequency of the association, or (2) the vividness of the sensations asso- ciated, or one of them, or (3) a combination of both. III. After simple ideas have occurred together a great many times MILL'S PRIMA RY LA WS OF A SSOCIA TION. 45 simultaneously, or even successively, in an order corresponding to that of the associated sensations, they are apt to coalese into a single complex idea, which, from the close adherence and interfusion of the parts composing 1 it, will appear to be a simple indecomposable idea ; and when the association has been con- stant and invariable, those parts or elements will in fact, as well as appearance, be inseparable by any effort of imagination. IV. Complex ideas thus formed may, by a similar process, merge into decomplex ideas ; and in this way are formed the most abstract ideas which the human mind can frame. Thus, having, with Hartley's guidance, determined the constitution and construction of the materials of thought, viz. Sensations, Simple Ideas, Complex Ideas, and Trains of Ideas, Mill has paved the way for the consideration of the principal operations of the human mind in making use of these mate- rials. And first he examines the process by which (through the formation of links of association between ideas and sensible symbols) thought is communicated from mind to mind. This subject demands a chapter to itself. 46 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. CHAPTER III. THE COMMUNICATION OF IDEAS — LANGUAGE — NAMING. Hartley attaches considerable importance to the process of associating- impressions, made by written words and uttered sounds on the senses of sight and hearing" respectively, with the corresponding ideas ; and James Mill (always more pre- cise and methodical than his predecessor) gives the theory of Naming a definite and a considerable place in his system. In all the more intricate and complicated states of human con- sciousness, to which, after the explanation of the simple and familiar states, we are now about to proceed, " something- of the process of Naming is involved/' This artifice, therefore, craves immediate attention. In order to communicate the trains of our thoughts to others, as well as to record for our benefit and use our own past trains in the order in which the ideas composing- them actually occurred, it was found absolutely necessary to employ sensible signs or marks. Mind cannot work upon mind directly. One person can only devise aud use visible or audible signs, which shall impress themselves on the senses of another person, and, by means of predetermined associations, call up in his mind ideas in a certain order, and at the same time signify to him that those ideas are passing, or did at some previous time pass, in his (the first person's) mind. Nor can we at will recall any set of ideas we please, still less in the order in which on some past occasion they occurred to us. If VISIBLE AND A UDIBLE MARKS OF IDEA S. 47 we wish to recall an idea, that idea must be present to our minds in the very act of willing to recall it ; and, of course, we cannot will to will to recall an idea. We have no power over the occasions of our ideas. But by our power over the occasions of our sensations, that is, natural objects, we can devise such an order of them as must necessarily, at any time we wish, raise up a corresponding 1 order of sensible impres- sions. By making-, therefore, certain sensible impressions stand for certain ideas, we can ensure the possibility of raising up in our minds at any future time both the connexion and the order of the ideas which have formed part of any of our past trains of thought. For the first of the above-mentioned purposes of language, namely, the immediate communication of sensations or ideas to others, audible signs (owing to their rapidity and variety, and the flexibility of the human voice) are preferable to visible signs, or the language of action and pantomime, which savage tribes use to a considerable extent, and which, of course, is useless in the dark. For the latter purpose, the permanent recording of thought, the converse is the case : visible marks are preferable to audible, durable signs to evanescent. Man- kind first of all invented, by way of visible marks, picture- writing or hieroglyphics, the association here being a direct one between a portrait-representation and the sensible object, the idea of which is intended to be presented to the mind. Gradually the hieroglyphics became less directly pictorial, and more technical ; and began to depend more on the various combinations of certain fixed types or picture-symbols, than on the successive imitations in each case of separate sensible objects ; till, finally, men arrived at a new method of pre- determining the associations requisite for the recording of thought, that, namely, whereby different arrangements of a few letters (which stand for certain simple sounds or motions 4 S HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. of the vocal organs preparatory to the emission of sound), are associated with the various audible sounds which constitute the evanescent signs by which ideas and their order are com- municated to others. Thus the permanent signs have fixed laws of association with the audible, and the audible again with the ideas which they are intended to convey. The former, therefore, are secondary marks of the ideas, the latter are immediate and primary. It was of the greatest importance, to man, in the first instance, to acquire the means of communicating to others the sensations affecting him, in order to secure the co-operation and assistance of his fellow-men in coping with the forces of nature. He, therefore, first devised audible signs of these sensations, such as hot, cold, black, white, pain, pleasure, sweet, bitter, &c. It next became advisable, if only for purposes of economy, instead of repeating on each occasion the marks of the various separate sensations simultaneously affecting him in the perception of a sensible object, to invent sounds which should symbolize the entire cluster of sensations. Hence the names of External Objects, (the sun, the sky, &c.,) or Clusters of Sen- sations, or, in the language of later philosophy, " permanent possibilities " of clusters of sensations. Of these clusters some included a greater, some a less, number of sensations. Men advanced, no doubt, gradually from the latter to the former. It was then further found necessary to make these marks of sensations on the one hand, and of clusters of sensations on the other, stand for classes of sensations, and classes of clusters of sensations. Mill puts this again on the ground of economy, though, as we shall see, this was not the only motive which prompted the invention of class-names. In the next place, marks for Ideas were required. Ideas, as we have seen, are either Simple or Complex. And, for purposes of Naming, the Complex Ideas are further divisible MARKS OF COMPLEX IDEAS. 49 into those as to which the mind has not exerted itself to form the combination, but the cluster of ideas has been copied directly from a cluster of sensations found ready made, so to speak, in the natural world ; such ideas, that is, as those of external objects, rose, house, river, &c. ; and, secondly, those ideas in respect of which the mind has exercised its active powers in putting together arbitrarily various copies of sen- sations, and has itself constructed the idea of a cluster of sensations, which cluster does not answer to any object in fact existing in the order of physical phenomena ; such ideas, for instance, as centaur, mermaid, sea of glass, snark, &c, or again language, piety, nation, &c. The former of these may be called Sensible Complex Ideas, or copies of clusters of sen- sations, the latter Mental Complex Ideas (answering to Locke's Mixed Modes), or clusters of copies of sensations. The names of the Mental Complex Ideas as well as those of Simple Ideas and those of Sensible Complex Ideas stand for classes, as well as individuals, in order to be as ex- tensively applicable as possible, and to economize the use of marks. But in the two latter cases, the name (according to Mill, though this seems decidedly doubtful) stands both for the sensation, and the idea of the sensation, for the cluster of sensations, and the idea of the cluster of sensa- tions; whereas, in the case of Mental Complex Ideas, the name of course only stands for the idea, since there is in the order of nature no cluster of sensations, corresponding to the idea. However, in escaping one sort of ambiguity (whether real or not), we are met by another; for, since the idea of the cluster is formed arbitrarily, each man frames his own idea of the cluster, and therefore cannot be sure when using the name corresponding to it that he is communicating to another the idea which he himself possesses, since there is no actual cluster of sensations experienced, or capable of being experienced, to 50 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. which reference may be made as a standard. One man's idea 01 religion or of patriotism is not another man's idea. Half the debates and controversies, political, religious, and philo- sophical, which have occupied the attention of the world, divided a house against itself, distracted humanity, and often culminated in bloodshed and war, have arisen in large measure from the impossibility of one man conveying to another by means of names the exact complex idea in possession of his own mind. As soon as a name had been invented to stand for all the individuals of a class, it was found that, in the desire for economy, the name had been made to express too much. Men wished to distinguish between varieties of a class, and to signify sub-classes by signs. For this purpose adjectives were invented. This device, besides sufficiently effecting the ends of economy, had this further advantage, that cross-divisions were rendered possible, as well as (with the assistance of the copula) predication, which is a distinct means, or rather symbolizes a distinct means, of adding to the sum of our knowledge. (This latter feature in the use of adjectives Mill does not seem to properly appreciate.) Were names always to be invented for the smaller parcels into which the main genera are broken up, a language would become too copious for serviceable use ; the appending of adjectives, however, to the names of the classes, when occasion demands, serves the same purpose, while the adjective is available for breaking up, not one class only, but several, into appropriate sub-classes. If substantives, consecpaently, are marks, adjectives are marks upon marks, as Mill says. Verbs are similar marks upon marks, and are essentially adjectives, but " receive a particular form, in order to render them at the same time subservient to other purposes." Mill's analysis of the moods and tenses of verbs corresponds with his analysis of the nature and use of CLASS NAMES. 51 adjectives, and exhibits the same incompleteness. He con- ceives the verb to be merely a name qualifying' its subject, carving- a sub-class out of the class represented by the name of that subject, and stating that the particular phenomenon adverted to belongs to that sub-class. He ignores the fact that a proposition with a verb in it does more than merely name ; it involves a predication or affirmation, and is designed to convey information from one person to another as to the occurrence or order of sequence of certain sensations in the mind of the person communicating the information, dependent upon the occurrence or order of sequence of certain natural phenomena. If I inform another that the sun rose at 5 a.m. yesterday, I do not merely carve out of the class of rising suns a sub-class of suns rising at 5 a.m., and name yesterday's sun as belonging to that sub-class. I convey to him infor- mation as to the sequence of my sensations in a particular order and manner. And, similarly, if I say that the rose which I saw yesterday was a yellow one. To subdivide great classes into smaller ones, and save labour and multiplication of names, is not, as Mill seems to think, the sole or most important object either of verb-framing or adjective-framing; nor are verbs merely adjectives so fashioned as to imply " a threefold distinction of agents, with a twofold distinction of their number, a threefold distinction of the manner of the action, and a threefold distinction of its time." Besides the device of special marks to call attention to some one prominent sensation in the midst of a cluster or bundle of sensations, or to denote that a particular sensation or sequence of sensations was experienced along with the cluster of all those sensations usually comprised in its appropriate class- name — the provinces of adjectives and ordinary verbs respec- tively — a symbol has been invented by means of which, when coupled with a name denoting a sensation, or a cluster of e 2 52 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. sensations, we signify the fact that the sensation, or cluster of sensations so denoted, was at some past time in fact experienced by some sentient being- — or is now being so experienced, or might then have been, or may now, or at any future time, be experienced by any sentient being bringing himself within the range of possibility of being affected by them. This is the verb denoting Existence, the Verb Sub- stantive as it is called. When we say that a thing exists, or is, we mean that we may have sensations from it. This mark is, therefore, the most comprehensive and generical of all the secondary marks that have been invented. But there is an unfortunate peculiarity attending the named signifying Existence in most languages, namely, that this same verb is also used for the copula in pi*edication. Predi- cation, according to Mill, serves two purposes ; first, to mark the order of the ideas in a train of thought which we wish to communicate or record — (it will readily be seen that this account is insufficient ; we wish the order to be believed in as having corresponded to fact) ; — secondly, to signify that a certain name (the predicate) is the mark of the same idea of which another name (the subject) is also the mark — (here too, the essential element of information as to matter of fact is omitted). A name merely brings an idea of a sensation, or of a cluster of sensations, before the mind ; a predication denotes an order of sensations and ideas, and, supplementing Mill, we may say, that it conveys information and contains an assertion ; it represents, in J. S. Mill's words, " some co- existence, or succession of phenomena experienced, or sup- posed capable of being experienced." [Anal. vol. i. p. 162. Editor's note.] Now, whenever we predicate, we employ the word, "is;" and we predicate quite as often of sensations merely supposed, for the moment, capable of being expe- rienced, as of sensations actually experienced, or believed THE FALLACY OF THE COPULA. 53 capable of being- experienced. Yet, in the former case, where the subject of the predication does not, in fact, exist, nor ever has existed, the copula " is," from its association in other connexions with the idea of existence, induces the habit of belief in the existence, in rerum natura, of what is in fact, a nonentity. In this way endless confusion of thought has arisen. James Mill points this out very elaborately, and was, indeed, the first to do so in any detail. Still further evi- dences have, since his day, been forthcoming from the Posi- tivists and others, to show the monstrous hypotheses, theories, and even systems, of philosophy for which this terrible little word is responsible. The Fallacy of the Copula was at the bottom of most of the false views of the ancient Greek, espe- cially the Platonic, philosophy. It has induced the personi- fication, even the deification of essences, qualities, attributes, &c. It has been the great king-maker of the metaphysical world : and from it alone such conceptions as Time, Space, Chance, Fate, Nature, hold their ontological dominion. Mill's further remarks on predication by means of Genus, Species, Differentia, Proprium, Accidens, contain nothing new or remarkable. His account, however, of the different kinds of trains of thought, which are represented by predi- cation, deserves notice. In communicating* or recording we have occasion to mark either (1) the order of sensations expe- rienced by us at any time, or (2) the order of ideas in a train of thought which has passed through our minds. In the former case the order which we desire to communicate or record, may either be the order of succession in time, or of position in space. In the latter, the ideas, the sequence of which we wish to represent by predication, are generally related to one another, either as cause and effect, or in the way of resemblance, or lastly as included under the same name. When a man forbears to strike a match near a barrel of gun- 5 4 HA RT LEY AND J A 31 ES MILL . powder, Mill says that the train of ideas urging 1 forbearance is merely a sequence, or rather a set of sequences, of ideas : — "I strike the match on a box" — "the stroke produces a spark " — " the spark ignites the gunpowder " — " the ignition of the gunpowder causes an explosion." This set of sequences is all that is involved, according to Mill, in the predication, " This gunpowder will explode if I strike the match against the box." The analysis is here obviously, almost grotesquely, deficient, from the omission once more of the element of conviction. All the above ideas might successively pass through the mind without giving rise to the belief which would warrant a predication of the kind pointed out. \_Anal. i. 187. J. S. Mill's note.] Predication of Resemblance is in the same way regarded as merely naming, and nothing else. And just as propositions or predications are nothing but naming, so also is the syllogism by which a third propo- sition is elicited from two of such predications as premises. All idea of there being an inferential process, or of fresh information being conveyed in syllogizing, is abandoned. The successive predications: "every tree is a vegetable" — "every oak is a tree" — "therefore, every oak is a vege- table," are, according to Mill, naming, and nothing but naming, throughout. The same criticism which applies to his account of predication will, of course, apply to his account of syllogism, on which we may have something further to say hereafter, and also to his corresponding view of arithmetical and geometrical propositions, as being merely verbal. When (according to Mill), we any that 7 + 5 = 12, or that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, we merely call 7+5, and the three angles of a triangle respectively, by other names, the marking power of which is more precise and well known to us than that of the names which we first assign to them. NAMES OF NAMES. 55 There is one other kind of predication to be noticed, namely, that in which the subject is a name, and the predicate the name of a name, — predications, for example, which contain descriptions or definitions of terms, such as " argument," " metaphor/' " oration," &c. It is somewhat curious that, having- specially called attention to this class of predications, Mill failed to see that it is only to this class, as distinct from the others, that his theory of Predication as a mere naming operation is applicable. In such cases as these, and in such only, we really do not mark any sequence of sensations or ideas as having been actually experienced, or even as having been the possible object of experience : we here import no element of belief into the predication, and we do, in fact, what Mill wrongly says that we do in all predications, — " signify that a certain name is the mark of an idea of which another name is also the mark." Mill's further remarks on the other grammatical forms of language, such as Adverbs, &c, have no very necessary rela- tion to his general system, besides being based on the obso- lete, though ingenious speculations, of Home Tooke, as con- tained in his Diversions of Purley. We pass on therefore to Hartley's account of the connexion between words or names and ideas. Hartley does not treat the various classes of words after James Mill's fashion, or show how names are first given to sensations, then to clusters of sensations, then generalized into class-names, out of which sub-classes are carved by means of adjectives and verbs : he proceeds on a rather different tack, and prefers, in accordance with the more physical bent of his studies and observations, to give a sort of natural history of the process by which in the growing mind ideas are gradually associated with words, and thought wedded to language. For, as he says, words and phrases must excite ideas in us by 56 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. association, and can excite them in no other way. Words may (physically) be considered from four points of view. They may be treated as impressions made upon the ear; or as the actions of the organs of speech ; or, again, as impressions made upon the eye by written characters ; or, lastly, as the actions of the hand in writing. And the above is the chronological order of the different ways in which children gradually become conversant with their use. The first of these relations in which words necessarily stand to the mind of a child, affords him some rough notion of their bare mean- ing, sufficient for the common purposes of life : the second makes the knowledge so acquired handy and serviceable : the third enlarges it, and renders it copious by association with other words in the way of definition, and description : the last renders the mind " careful in distinguishing, quick in recollecting, and faithful in retaining, the new signi- fications of words" acquired by reading. Thus Hartley's very true account of the distinctive advantages of the methods by which a child learns a language, Hearing, Speaking, Reading, and Writing, corresponds exactly (as regards the last three of these) to Bacon's maxim : " Speaking maketh a ready man : reading maketh a full man : writing maketh an exact man." When a child's attention is directed to a particular object, (say, his nurse) the name of that object will be pronounced to him. This will occur frequently, till a bond of association is formed between the sensation of hearing the sound of the name and the sensation of seeing the face and form of the nurse ; and the child will then, whenever he hears the nurse's name pronounced (supposing him, that is, to have acquired sufficient voluntary power over his motions) turn his head in that direction ; and thus the process of association of the name with the visible idea of the nurse will rapidly be accom- GROWTH OF LANGUAGE IN CHILDREN. 57 plished. Later still, the converse process will take place, and the sensation of seeiug the nurse will excite the audible idea of the sound of the name. He will next notice that the name of the nurse will still be repeated in her presence by those around her, notwithstanding change of dress and other acci- dental adjuncts, and that the name of fire, &c, will be pro- nounced notwithstanding that the cluster of sensations of heat, light, &c, may be accompanied on the different occasions of its being named, by different sensations impressed by adjacent objects. He will thus learn to distinguish between the strong associations of the names of nurse and fire with the con- stitutive elements of these objects respectively, and the less strong counter-associations of these names with the variable surroundings of the objects. In this he will be unconsciously performing the process (to which we shall come presently) of Abstraction. He will be creating, or rather re-cognizing for himself, one of those class-names of which Mill gives such a different account. The next stage in his mental progress will be that of associating abstract names, such as whiteness, with the ideas of the attributes common to several white objects, while by means of adjectives he will learn to make cross-divisions of clusters of sensations. He will, at the same time, be forming complex ideas out of simple by the process already mentioned : his idea of the nurse will comprise not only the simple visible idea of her face and form, but also the simple audible idea of the sound of her voice, and the simple idea of the taste of her milk, &c. The use and meaning of particles will be learnt mainly from their association with other names 4o which meanings have already been attached, they being, like the x, y, z of algebra, " determinable and decipherable, one may say, only by means of the known words with which they are joined" [Hartley, vol. i. p. 274]. The attempts made by the child himself to express his own wants, then reading, and 5 — would, if this were the case, be tantamount to lf avafivrjais." What, then, must be added to ideas and their association in trains to make passive imagination equivalent to passive memory, and active or deliberative imagination equivalent to active memory or re- 3 Professor Max Miiller notices an ingenious attempt (by Don Sinibaklo de Mas in his Ideographic) to create direct associations between ideas and pictorial or visible emblems, by constructing a language consisting of 2C00 figures, framed on the pattern of musical notes, and capable of innumer- able variations in meaning, corresponding to those effected by the parts of speech, according to the position of the head of the note {Science of Language, vol. ii. p. 48). This would have commended itself to Hartley. Mr. Slmte (in his Discourse on Truth) is, however, afraid that, even as it is, men are more and more losing their power of associating ideas with audible emblems, and tend more and more to assimilate visible signs in preference to them. The whole subject of the differences between the pictorial or local, and the successive or eventual memory, is gone into by Mr. Francis Galton, "Mental Imagery," in Forin, Rev., September, 1880, and Mind, July, 1880. 88 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. collection ? The answer is : The element of recognition. " Suppose that my present state of consciousness is the idea of putting- my finger in the flame of the candle. I recognize the act as a former act; and this recognition is followed by another, namely, that of the pain which I felt immediately after. This part of my constitution, which is of so much importance to me, I find it useful to name. And the name I give to it is Memory." [Analysis, vol. i. pp. 319,320]. But this recognition is a somewhat complex process. What are its elements ? Can it be reduced to a case of Associa- tion? We may remember either sensations or ideas formerly ex- perienced by us. In remembering a sensation — say, the having seen an object at some past date — the following conditions are implied : first, a visible idea of the object; secondly, the idea of my having seen it. 4 And the former irresistibly calls up the latter idea, and in this we have (so far) merely another case of inseparable association. But into what elements is the idea of my having seen an object resolvable ? First of all, we may break it up into : (1) the idea of my present (the remembering) self; (2) the idea of my past, the then sentient, and now remembered, self. These two ideas are connected at the moment of memory. How? By running over the intermediate states of con- sciousness, and (by means of a rapid process already referred to) uniting the two terms and the intervening links into one very complex idea. And this, again, is association. The remembrance of ideas admits of an exactly similar 4 To these J. S. Mill would add — the belief (independent of the evidence of others) of my having seen the ohject. And in this he would he clearly right ; but James Mill thinks that there is nothing elementary or unana- lyzable in Belief itself, which he regards as in every case reducible to Association of ideas in the last resort, as will be seen in the sequel. REMEMBRANCE OF PAST IDEAS. 89 explanation. I remember, for example, my idea of Charles I/s execution. In doing so, I have, — (1) The ideas of the various acts and objects related and described in the account of the execution ; and (2) [Inseparably associated with the above], the idea of my having had those ideas. And (2) again includes, — (a) The idea of my present self remembering : 1 United by asso- (b) The idea of my past self conceiving : Uiation into one (c) The idea of the intervening states of consciousness: J complex idea. To put the matter comprehensively (so as to include the remembrance both of past sensations and of past ideas), the necessary elements in the memory of our past experiences, of whatever kind, would seem to be as follows : — ' i. The idea of my past self sentient or conceiving = /-The idea (of a past sensation : or, pas ea (of a past sensa (of a past idea. The idea of the Self. ii. The idea of my present self as remembering = rThe idea of the Self The idea of [Remembering =] Asso- ciating, iii. The intervening trains of ideas, the calling up of which depends upon Association. So that the memory of past experiences has now been resolved to Ideas (one of which must always be the Idea of the Self), and Association. Nothing, therefore, now needs eluci- dation, in connexion with memory, except this constant factor, the Idea of Personal Identity, after analyzing* which we may 90 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. (since there can be no Memory without involving- it in some way) examine the idea of Time. Neither of the two important metaphysical problems of modern times connected with the investigation of the concep- tions, ideas, or forms (as they are variously called) of the Ego and of Time, attracted the attention of Hartley; con- sequently we must be taken as here presenting" the views of James Mill alone. Personal Identity, or the Identity of the Ego, must be ex- plained on the same grounds and by the same method as the Identity of other human beings, and this again on the same grounds as the Identity of other animal existences ; and the Identity of animal existences in general can be explained in no other way than the Identity of inanimate objects. [Anal. vol. ii. pp. 164 — 170.] It is necessary, then, to satisfy our- selves as to the essence of Identity, generically considered, before we can show the nature of that particular species of it called Personal Identity. Now when I say, that the object which I now see is the same which I saw ten years before, or that the words which I now read were written by a certain author 2000 years ago, or that the object which was seen 2000 years ago by one man was the same which was seen 1000 years ago by another, — Belief is involved, and nothing else. The first example pre- sents one case of Belief, the secoud another, and the third another ; but all alike are Belief. The reader will be some- what surprised to find here what looks very like the inter- pretation of a thing by itself. One of the kinds of Belief, namely, Memory, is alleged to involve, among other elements, the Idea of Personal Identity ; and this idea, as being merely a case of Identity in general, is then found to be a case of Belief. The definition in a circle is rendered still more con- spicuous when we find that, of the three instances of Identity BELIEF IN IDENTITY. 91 given above, Mill would call the first an instance of that specific kind of Belief which is called Memory [the other two being- cases of Belief in Evidence or Testimony, or of Belief in the Uniformity of Nature, or of a combination of both] . And as to Identity in general, Mill's own statement is : — " As we have already shown wherein Belief, in all its cases, consists''' [it must be remembered that the chapter on Identity was written after all the cases of Belief had been examined — an arrangement from which we have seen reason to depart] " we have implicitly afforded the explanation of Identity " [Anal. vol. ii. p. 165] : — while, in the chapter on Memory, he says, " It is in this process that Memory consists No obscurity rests on any part of this process, except the idea of self, which is reserved for future analysis All this will be more evident when what is included in the notion of Personal Identity is included.''' [Anal. vol. i. p. 360.] Belief and Identity cannot, on Mill's own showing, be both capable of analysis. Either Belief must involve the idea of Personal Identity as an ultimate and irreducible element, or this latter must similarly imply Belief. In the face of the contradiction in terms patent in Mill's own language, we will not attempt to guess which element he really thought the unanalyzable one. 5 Let us examine, however, his reduction of Personal Identity to a case of Identity in general. We have already seen what is implied when we say that the inanimate external object which we now perceive, is the 5 J. S. Mill, in his notes to the Analysis, evidently considers that the idea of the Self involves Memory, while Memory involves Belief, and that this Belief is the ultimate element. Judging from the frequency with which he insists on this view, by way of correction on numerous other occasions where James Mill leaves out of account this ultimate factor in a variety of mental processes, we may, perhaps, conclude that it was Personal Identity which the latter, if pressed, would have admitted to be irreducible. 92 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. same object as that which we have previously perceived. But what do I mean when I say that some object having growth and life is the same now, when present to my senses, as it was when I perceived it at some former date ? Whether that object be a vegetable, an animal of the lower orders, or a human being other than myself, I mean the same thing : I express my belief that there is a certain series (known by experience) of antecedents and consecpaents, which is called the life of that object; that this series is capable of being marked off and distinguished from all other similar series ; and that my present perception is the last link in that par- ticular series, and no other. In all these cases the Belief involved is one thing, and the essential thing : the evidence for that Belief is another thing, and may be of various kinds. The belief in the identity of another human being is often evidenced by observation, that is, sensation and memory of sensation; or, in other words, it is often evidenced by itself; but more often it rests on evidence and testimony of another kind as well. Now, when I use the word " same" in connexion with my own life, do I imply anything beyond this belief? Nothing whatever. The Belief is the same, and the evidence is the same. So far as my memory extends, my belief in my own identity rests on consciousness and memory, that is (as before), it rests on itself; it is its own evidence. When I get beyond reach of my memory, then my belief in my own identity is supported by exactly the same kinds of external testimony as my belief in the identity of any other person, as to whom observation has not been possible. We have said that, within the range of memory, the evidence for my own identity is Consciousness and Memory, the evidence for the identity of other men is Observation and Memory. In the latter case we have the memory of past observed facts, in the other we have the memory of past PERSONAL IDENTITY. 93 states of consciousness, added, in each case, to a present sensation. But observation itself is nothing but a state of consciousness. Therefore the memory of a series of states of consciousness, coupled with an existing- state, is the evidence in both cases. But the states of consciousness remembered in the two cases, though they are equally evidence, become evidence in different ways. And here we come upon a real distinction between the intellectual phenomena of the two processes. In the one case, we remember past states of consciousness in ourselves as pointing to the contemporaneous or prior exis- tence of states of consciousness in others, or as marks of those states in accordance with the laws of association which decree that certain signs, to wit, impressions of certain sensations in us, shall call up in our minds the ideas of certain sensations of others signified by them : whereas, in the other case, we remember states of consciousness in our- selves for their own sakes, and not as pointing to anything else. To use the language of the law-courts, our own states of consciousness are equally the evidence in either operation ; but in the former they are secondary evidence, in the latter they are primary. In the former, they are imperfect means of inferring the continuity and separate existence of a series of states of consciousness, constituting the thread of life of the person (other than the Ego), in whose identity we assert our belief: in the latter, they are, in fact, themselves the thread of life of the person (the Ego) in whose identity we believe. The difference then between Belief in the Identity of others, and Belief in Personal Identity, is not in the evi- dentiary materials, but in the manner in which these materials evidence the existences or events to which credence is given. In the idea of Time, which falls to be considered in connexion with Memory, Mill sees none of the mystery 94 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. which, according' to him, other philosophers have found in it. Its supposed necessity he regards as merely another result of inseparable and irresistible association, since the idea of succession, or of the relation of antecedent and con- sequent, is inseparably associated with the idea of every object. Any theory of Time, as one of the forms imposed by the mind on the matter furnished by sensation, he would, consequently, reject; though he agrees with Kant so far as to deny with him that Time is an inherent property or attribute of objects. Time is nothing but the abstract name of all successive order, just as Space is of all simul- taneous order, [Anal. vol. ii. p. 132], and it is formed no otherwise than as other abstract names are formed. With the idea of every present event we associate the idea of an antecedent, with this latter idea the idea of an antecedent to that, and so on f ad infinitum/ The idea of the present event, coupled with the ideas of the antecedents so associated with it, make up our idea of the Past, which therefore implies infinite concrete past successions of objects ; it notes, that is, in Mill's phraseology, or primarily marks, successions ; it connotes, or secondarily marks, objects. Omit the connota- tion, as must be done to form any abstract name, and we get the successions, without the objects, — or Time Past in the abstract. In the above process put consequent for antecedent, and by similar steps we arrive at Time Future in the abstract. Next, regard all real or possible events (or objects, in Mill's language), whether past, present, or future, as successive, lump them together, and we obtain the idea of concrete Time in general ; that is, the successions with the objects. Take away the objects, and we have left the successions without the objects, or the idea of abstract Time in general. Thus Time is an abstract name, the corresponding- concrete to which is ultimately built upon nn indissoluble association, which forces TIME IN RELA TION TO MEMOR Y. 95 us, in contemplating- any event, to go beyond it and look on both sides of it. Whether the above process would not rather give us the abstract idea of Successiveness, and not that of Time at all, we will not here stop to inquire. The connexion of Time with Memory in Mill's system will be best seen in his own words [Anal. vol. ii. p. 120] ; — " Pastness is included under the term Memory. . . . Memory is a connotative term ; what it notes is. the antecedence and consequence of the several parts of that which forms the chain of remembrance ; what it connotes are the feelings them- selves, the objects remembered. When what it connotes is left out, and what it notes is retained, we have the idea which is expressed by Pastness/' Mill would presumably consider an analogous connexion to exist between Anticipation and Futureness. But Anticipation (as we shall see presently) rests on Belief in the Uniformity of Nature, and this again on Association, and the association is based on felt and re- membered cases of succession. There is nothing, therefore, as we are expressly told, in Time distinct from Memory and Sensations. Hartley differs with Mill, and agrees with Reid and most other philosophers, in considering Memory to be a faculty, and not an idea framed in a particular way. It is " that faculty by which traces of sensations and ideas recur, or are recalled, in the same order and proportion, accurately or nearly, as they were once presented." [06s. on Man, vol. i. p. 374]. After this somewhat loose and unsatisfactory definition, Hartley gives us some desultory remarks, prin- cipally of a pathological character, on the relation between the state of the faculty of memory and the state of the brain ; in the course of which he takes occasion to notice that such a connexion would tend to support the vibration theory, since vibrations in the medullary substance of the brain may be 96 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. presumed to be affected by such causes as disease, concussions, liquors, poison, &c. Hartley appears to hold with Mill, that the exercise of Memory depends almost entirely upon Association ; but he does not enter into any examination of the idea of the Self in connexion with this part of his theory. He answers the in- evitable query as to the nature of the difference (on this hypothesis) between Memory and Imagination in much the same way as his successor. " Let it now be asked/' he says [vol. i. p. 377], "in what the recollections of a past fact, consisting of an hundred clusters " [complex ideas] " differs from the transit of the same one hundred clusters over the fancy, in the way of a reverie ? I answer, partly in the vividness of the clusters, partly and principally in the readiness and strength of the associations, by which they are cemented together." The notions of Personal Identity, Belief, Time, as incidental to Memory, are here ignored; whereas Mill would say that, in every such process as is above described, the idea of the Self, then sentient, and now re- membering, would be irresistibly called into being. Hartley supports his contention, by instancing the remarkable fact, — which Mill also notices, but explains more completely and philosophically, — of a man, by frequent repetition, coming at last to believe a fictitious story told by him to be true. This phenomenon, says Hartley, is attributable to the "magnify- ing " of the ideas and the associations by the narrator. Mill on the other hand, in accordance with his more careful ex- position of the idea of the Self as one of the constituents of Memory, asserts the operation to be due to the loss of one association, and its replacement by another. The narrator used to associate the ideas of the events imagined by him with the idea of himself as imagining or inventing them : this association becomes weaker and weaker, till it finally HARTLEY ON MEM OR Y. 97 expires altogether, and a new association, namely that between the ideas of these events and the idea of himself as ex- periencing them, takes its place. It must be admitted, how- ever, that the cause of this latter association supplanting' the former, would appear, from Mill's account, to be something- very like Hartley's " magnifying " the one, and ceasing to pay attention to the other. Hartley also refers sagaciously to the case of a man in doubt as to whether his trains of ideas are recollections or reveries. But this phenomenon too might be accounted for more satisfactorily on Mill's, than on Hartley's, hypothesis. The latter is of opinion that such a doubt, (when the ideas are in fact those of remembered events), represents a diminution of the associations between these ideas, and (when the ideas are in fact merely imagined) an increase of the same : but Mill would maintain that such a state of mind would in the two cases respectively indicate either a diminution or an increase of the association between the ideas of the events and the idea of the Self as percipient of them. In madness and in dreams, to both of which Hartley is particularly fond of referring, the vividness mentioned is often magnified to an extent which causes the mental picture or image of an action or object to appear the recollection, in some cases, and, in others, the present sensible experience, of it. Mill \_Anal. vol. i. p. 321] explains such phenomena in delirium, madness, or dreams to be the result of a mistake of present ideas for present or past sensations, just as in the above-mentioned case of repeated fiction past ideas are mistaken for past sen- sations. Hartley's account of the attempt to recollect a thing (ui'(ifiin]ai, fhen, thirdly and necessarily, the 1 ii4 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. idea of sensation A called up by sensation B, through asso- ciation in a certain manner: last comes Naming. When three sensations A, B, C, follow one another in succession, the process is (1) sensation A, (2) sensation B, (3) idea of sen- sation A called up by sensation B, (4) sensation C, (5) idea of sensation B called up by sensation C, (G) idea of sensation A called up by idea of sensation B. Bub here the idea of sen- sation A is not called up immediately by the sensation C. Consequently the sensation A is not recognized as antecedent to the sensation C. So we arrive at the following proposition [Anal. vol. ii. p. 21] : " when two sensations in a train are such that, if one exists, it has the idea of the other along with it, hy its immediate exciting power, and not through any inter- mediate idea, the sensation, the idea of which is thus excited, is called the antecedent, the sensation which thus excites that idea is called the consequent." Next as to the relations of complex ideas ; and first as to Sensible Complex ideas, or the ideas of external objects. What is implied in naming these in pairs ? The modes in which we so name them are divided by Mill into four classes, according as we regard the members of such pairs, (1) as havings an order in space, or (£) as having an order in time, (3) as agreeing or disagreeing in quantity, (4) as agreeing or disagreeing* in quality. Now just as by dropping the con- notations of the related pairs of simple sensations and ideas, we have arrived at the abstract relations Similarity, and Ante- cedence and Consequence, so by first finding the concrete re- lated pairs proper to the above four classes, and then dropping the connotations, we shall arrive at the abstract relatives, [Forms or Categories they would be called in other systems], Position [and Extension], Causality, Quantity, and Quality. With regard to Mental Complex Ideas, we may name con- crete pairs of relatives and correlates, according as we regard SIMILARITY. 115 the members of such pairs (1) as consisting of the same or different simple ideas (2) as standing- to one another in the relation of antecedent and consequent. Taking the three classes, therefore, of sensations and ideas above enumerated, and the Relative Terms proper to them, it will be found that we have to show how the followino- Abstract Relations are established, — Similarity (on which we have already said something), Causality, Extension [Position], Quantity, Quality [Homogeneity]. We propose to give Mill's account of these in the above order : with Quantity we may conveniently investigate his theory of Numbers, and Equality ; while in considering Extension and Position we may also consider his conception of Space as a privative term (in contradistinction to Time, which most philosophers rank with it as analogous), as well as his views on the subject of Motion. Afterwards we may point out in their proper place some observations of Hartley on Similarity and Causality, together with their respective cognate ideas, Analogy and Induction. The process involved in calling two sensations like one another has been explained. Now the abstract term Simi- larity or Likeness must, like any other abstract term, note a quality, and connote the objects possessing that quality. It is easy to see what is connoted by the abstract term in this case : it is the two sensations, or the two series of sensations, 2 compared. What is noted is that inseparable, though not indistinguishable, part of the entire process, which consists in comparing the two as like or unlike. Leave out the con- noted part of the process, and retain the notative, and we get Similarity. 2 Because the series " red, red," can be distinguished from the series " red, green," as much as the single sensation "red" from the single sensation " green," and in exactly the same way. I 2 1 1 6 HA R TLB Y A ND J A MES MILL. Next, as to Causality. Here too we must first discover the nature of the concrete related pairs, before we can determine that of the abstract relation. Now it is a cardinal tenet of Mill's system that, in his own words, "all our sensations are derived from objects And, reciprocally, all our knowledge of objects is the sensations themselves Therefore a knowledge of the successive order of objects is a knowledge of the successive order of our sensations.'"' [Anal. vol. ii. p. 37]. But it has already been shown that having two sensations or ideas successively is the same thing as knowing them to be successive; or rather the latter is an inseparable and inextricable element in the whole series of sensations or ideas contemplated as successive. This ele- ment, which, though never isolated in fact, can be isolated in thought, is that which is noted by the related pair, Ante- cedent - Consequent : the rest of the process, that is, the having the two sensations or ideas, (so far as the having them can be distinguished from the recognition of their successive- ness), together with the ideas or sensations themselves, is what is connoted. Drop the connotation, and we have Suc- cessiveness, or Priority and Posteriority (when taken together) . It is to be observed that Priority or Posteriority alone will not suffice, because either has a special connotation of its own, — it connotes the other,— just as a concrete object called prior connotes an object posterior, and vice versa. In the case of single-worded, as opposed to double-worded pairs of related terms, the compound names (such as Likeness-Like- ness, Equality-Equality, Friendship-Friendship) would also strictly be required in order to express the corresponding abstract relations, and it is only because their use would involve a tiresome reduplication that they are dispensed with, and the single name used instead. When we pair together two successive sensations or ideas, CAUSALITY. 117 and contemplate the former as immediately, as well as con- stantly, preceding" the latter, we use the related terms Cause- Effect, and not merely Antecedent-Consequent. In express- ing- the latter relation, we often find it convenient to miss or slur over the intervening links, when they are not (as often happens) unknown; but in determining" a causal relation, we seek to find the immediate antecedent, and seek so pertina- ciously that (according* to Mill) we often insist on inserting between the real Cause and the real Effect an imaginary Cause of our own devising, such as Power, &c, in the vain endeavour to bring ourselves, so to speak, nearer to both the one and the other of the two extremities of the chain of succession. As instances of Antecedent and Consequent, Mill very curiously classes such pairs of related ideas as Doctor-Patient, Father-Son, &c, any of which, when taken together, he con- tends, makes up a complex idea consisting of a long chain of ideas of which Doctor or Father, &c, is the " terminus, a quo," and Patient or Son, &c, the " terminus ad quern." Two brothers, or Brother-Brother, mark a still more complex idea, being- equivalent to a train of ideas taken twice over, the prior extremity the Father being the same in the two cases, the latter extremity different. There are a large variety of paired names, which represent more or less long trains of ideas between, and including, the two extremities noted by them. In the relation First-Last, the extremities are as far as pos- sible distant from one another: in Father-Son, Owner-Pro- perty, Guardian-Ward, &c, they are still very distant : in Prior-Posterior, they may be any distance from one another. But the peculiarity of Cause-Effect is that the extremi- ties are in juxtaposition. The chain therefore consists of the extremities only, and there is either no link between them, or, if so, its existence is unknown. This pair there- n8 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. fore of concrete interrelated terms notes immediate (and constant) juxtaposition in the way of succession, of two sen- sations or ideas, or of a sensation and idea ; and it connotes those sensations or ideas which are contemplated as thus immediately (and constantly) successive. Leave out the connotation, and we get that which is represented by the abstract relative compound term, Causingness (or Causa- tiveness)-Causedness, or the corresponding single name, Causality or Causation. As we apply the terms Antecedent-Consequent, Cause- Effect to those ideas of clusters of sensations called external objects ; so also do we apply them to those clusters of ideas in the formation of which the mind takes a more active share : " thus we say that Evidence is the cause of Belief, or Vil- lainy of Indignation." [Anal. vol. ii. 67]. Thoughts, as well as things, may be regarded as standing to one another in an order of succession, or in a causal relation. For in any train of ideas — and, in Mill's opinion, there cannot be more than one train present at the same time to the same individual — thoughts succeed one another ; — each thought is therefore, at all events, the proximate antecedent to the rest. But can we say that it is also the constant antecedent — for constant as well as proximate antecedence is necessary to causation — in face of the fact that different minds have different series of ideas, notwithstanding that the starting-point may be the same ? We can, answers Mill, for this reason. Our trains of feelings do not consist only of ideas, but of sensations also ; and those sensations are impressed by surrounding objects and contemporary events, the number and different orders and relations of which are infinite, and independent of our volition in the great majority of cases. This will be sufficient to account for the variety of trains starting from the same idea in different minds. The degree of force possessed by the POSITION AND EXTENSION. 119 initial idea in suggesting its particular successor may still, for all we know, be constant ; but it so happens that the results are various, because other factors and influences unite with that idea to moderate its operation. Of these factors James Mill has mentioned sensations alone, but he might just as well have added ideas, since, as J. S. Mill points out, the mind is never completely occupied by a single idea ; and also the constitution, formed habits, and temporary state of the mind to which the series is present. But these qualifications, though they would have left intact the statement that one antecedent idea, if unmodified by other circumstances, must inevitably produce the same consequent idea in every mind — would have very much weakened, indeed utterly destroyed, the value of the proposition for purposes of psychological analysis. It is all very well to tell a marksman . that, if no other laws were to act in company with the First Law of Motion, his arrow would inevitably hit the bull's-eye. The proposition is true, but trivial. So here. Thus much, then, on the causal relation between successive thoughts. The relation called Position, and the cognate rela- tion of Extension, next demand attention. As before, the related concrete terms must be determined before the relation. Examples of such related terms are naturally among the most familiar to us of any — High-Low, Right-Left, North- South, Behind- Before, &c. These cannot be defined except in terms involving the thing to be defined. But that which cannot be defined so as to avoid a circle may, notwith standing, often be conveniently described in other ways, for the purpose of bringing its meaning home to us with clear- ness. The Synchronous differs from the Successive Order, — Space from Time, — in one very important respect. The latter is always, as it were, in one direction ; and when a series of sue- 120 HARTLEY AND J A MES MIL L . cessive events is represented figuratively in terms of space, no other symbol can be used but that of a line : whereas objects in synchronous order can stand to one another in several other relations than that of Lineness or Linth. 3 But as being" in a line with one another is the simplest of all spatial rela- tions between objects, let us examine what this is a little more closely. If we take a single particle of matter as centre, and attach to it another particle, we get the most elementary case of synchronous order. Add to these successive particles along the direction of the same radius, and we still have the same relation between the various component particles of the line thus formed, which will be of greater or less length, according to the number of the particles. Now the name of this supposed physical line notes, according to Mill, the par- ticles of which it is composed, and connotes the direction. On taking away the connotation, we get the abstract relation, for which some such name as Lineness is required. If we then attach to the imaginary central particle other particles not only along the direction of one radius, but along those of every possible radius, an analogous account may be given of the abstract relations of Figure and Bulk. The Position of any given particle will be its order in relation to the central and every other particle in the mass. It remains to inquire, what are the sensations which give the cognition of sj^nchronous order. They are, according to Mill, tactual and muscular. And in the very complex idea of 3 These are the terms that Mill coins, to avoid, as he says, the ambi- guity of the double use of the word Liue, first to represent a concrete and physical, secondly, an abstract or mathematical line. It is obvious that he is here confusing two very different things, — an abstraction and an ideal, the former representing a quality of which concrete objects of a class are all more or less in possession, the latter a limit to which they more or less nearly approach. This confusion vitiates Mill's whole theory of spatial relations. SPACE. 121 muscular resistance is included at least tins much : — the will to move the muscles, the exertion of that will, and certain sensations in those muscles, in virtue of which we call an object hard or soft, resisting- or non-resisting-. These, then, are the sensations capable of being- derived by a sentient being from any particle of matter. Now let us take our central particle again, and the radius of which that particle forms one extremity ; and let us suppose a person endowed only with tactual and muscular sensibility (in order to exclude foreign and non-essential conditions) to be brought in contact with the aggregate of particles composing the line in ques- tion. Then such a person, just as he would have two different states of feeling- according- as the finger touching the line was still or in motion, or according- as the motion of his finger was slow or swift, so would he have two different states of feeling-, according as the finger moved along the whole line or only along half of it. And thus it is that " after certain repetitions of particular tactual sensations, and particular muscular sensations, received in a certain order, I give to the combined ideas of them this name Line. But when I have got my idea of a line, I have also got my idea of extension. For what is extension, but lines in every direction ? " [Anal. vol. ii. p. 34]. The explanation of Plane Surface is analogous. It is to be remembered that we never perceive objects except in space, that is, except in the synchronous order. Position therefore becomes so inseparably associated with the idea of any object, that belief in the necessity of the relation of space has thereby, and thereby only, according to Mill, been engendered. It will be convenient now to examine the supposed necessity, and generally the nature of that which we call space. Space is held by Mill to be not an abstract relative, but an abstract privative term. By "privative" terms Mill really 122 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. means negative: (the term "privative" being properly limited to indicate the absence of some element or quality usually present in an object and necessary to its completeness as such object) ; and in the ensuing exposition, to avoid misunder- standing, we shall use the term " negative. " In the idea of an object, (such as Light, Sound, Know- ledge) is included the idea of its existence, or the belief that a sentient organism existing at such and such a time and place would have certain sensations or ideas. In using the corre- sponding negative terms (Darkness, Silence, Ignorance) we couple with the idea of the object the idea that such an organism would not have those sensations or ideas at any time or place, or at all events at the time and place to which we refer the term. Now the latter idea, — its association with the former being, so to speak, strained and violent, — is forced into a prominence which overshadows it ; whereas, in making use of the corresponding positive terms, we find that the idea of the object so completely absorbs the accompanying idea of its existence, that we should never, except on careful analysis, notice that the former idea co-exists with the latter at all. The comparatively small number of negative terms in a language is accounted for, in the same way as the com- parative paucity of relative terms, by reference to the princi- ples of convenience which led men to name only what was most important to name, — (though some languages, the ancient Greek for instance, are richer in negative terms than others). From the above distinction between Presence-affirming and Absence-affirming Names, Mill devises a simple explanation of those bugbears of the ancient, to whom we may add some modern, philosophers, Being, Nothing, &c. From the notion that a name must represent some positive existence, " to fX7]8ev " and the like, have often been elevated to the rank of Substances and Entities of much mysterious importance. It SPACE. 123 is true that even Nothing- must name something ; but what it names is the idea of Everything — all possible objects — coupled with the idea of their non-existence. 4 On these principles Mill proceeds to expound the somewhat more complex negative idea of Emptiness, which is the idea of Fulness together with the idea of its absence. But the idea of the absence of Fulness Mill shows, by a curious process of reasoning, to be equivalent to the abstract name corresponding to "solid extended body " or "bulk." For the ideas of linear, superficial, and solid extension are in each case the ideas of linear, superficial, and solid surfaces or bodies, with their con- notation (which in each case is Resistance) dropped. But in the last case of " bulk " or i( solid extended body,' - ' we obtain a strange result; — we seem, in dropping the connotation of the idea Resistance, to drop everything that constitutes the idea. This, however, is not so : we have remaining the place for Bulk, namely Position, or Space with a limitation. If we drop the connotation of infinitely extended solid bodies, we get the abstract term Infinite Space. It will be seen from the above account that, in defining such notions as Nothing, Space, &c, Mill seems to hesitate whether he shall call them abstract names derived from concretes in the ordinary way, or negative ideas, equivalent to the ideas of the corresponding positive terms coupled with the idea of their absence. It cannot clearly be gathered from his expo- sition, whether he regards Space as the abstract term corre- sponding to all concrete extended objects, or, like Emptiness, * J. S. Mill here points out the insufficiency of this explanation, ni d says (what is unquestionably true) that negative terms do signify some- thing positive : they signify a state of consciousness : Silence, for example, a state of consciousnes, when there is no sound affecting the organs of hearing, and Nothing a state of consciousness when we are not affected by sensations from any object. 124 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. to be the negative of au idea of infinitely extended bulk. To have said, with J. S. Mill, that it is the ideal negative of an ideal positive would have been the simpler and truer way out of the difficulty : but he was precluded from taking' this course by his peculiar and rather confused views on the subject of abstract terms. Mill concludes his observations on Space by a neat summary of the various indissoluble associations which combine to en- gender and form our ideas of that abstraction. " First of all with the idea of every object, the idea of position or place is indissolubly united. Secondly, with the idea of position or place, the idea of extension is indissolubly united. Thirdly, with the idea of extension the idea of infinity is indissolubly united. 5 Fourthly, by the unfortunate ambiguity of the Copula " [see above, ch. iii.] " the idea of existence is indisso- lubly united with Space, as with other abstract terms." And all these elements, the ideas of Position, Extension, Infinity, and Existence, " forced into combination, by irresistible association, constitute the idea o£ Space." [Anal. vol. ii. pp. 114, 115]. Intimately connected with Space is Motion. It is also, as appears on analysis, closely related to Time. It is the abstract name corresponding to the concrete " moving body," the idea of the body being dropped, and the idea of that which con- stitutes it a moving body being retained. Now the idea of a moving body comprises the following ideas (1) the idea of a line, whether straight or otherwise ; since every moving body 6 In this way: we can never think of a finite line, surface, &C, without thinking of something heyond it, just as we can never think of an event without the idea of its antecedent or consequent heing hrought up, or of a numher without thinking of one more heyond it. Infinity is, therefore, that state of consciousness in which the idea of something heyond is asso- ciated with the idea of any given finite line, surface, or hulk, &c. MO TION— TIME. 1 2 5 must move in a line of some sort, — (2) the idea of a body, — (.") the idea of position (or extension in every direction, which talcen abstractly, is Space), since the particles composing- the line have each of them position, — and (4), since the body must move successively from one position in the line to another, the idea of Succession, which in the abstract, coupled with the idea of infinity, is Time. Now how do we acquire our knowledge of moving bodies ? Not by the sense of sight, any more than we see figure or distance : that we imagine sight to be the source of our per- ception of moving bodies is due, as in the other cases, solely to association. We in fact derive the idea of moving bodies from the same kinds of sensation as those from which we derive our idea of extended objects, that is, from tactual and muscular sensations. If we touch a (physical) line at any one point we experience the sensations in virtue of which we call it tangible. If we move our finger along the line we have the sensations (tactual and muscular) and the ideas — (for in all cases of succession, the ideas of past sensations must co-exist with or rather follow immediately upon present sensations) — in virtue of which we call it extended. But these are the very sensations and ideas in virtue of which we call our finger a moving body. So that according as we regard the object or the finger principally, we have the idea Object Extended, or the idea Finger Moving. Drop the connotation, and the result is the abstract name Extension, on the one hand, and the abstract name Motion on the other, [that is the four elements mentioned above, excluding* the second]. The term Quantity is, like the others, an abstract relative term. The concrete related terms corresponding to it are As- Great, So-Great, Quantus, Tantus. These are equivalent to Equal-Equal. Then what use have the former terms? If they had no use, says Mill, somewhat gloomily, it would not 120 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL, be surprising-, " considering by whom languages have been made/' But in the present case there is a use. In the pair of related terms Equal-Equal, either may be taken as the standard of the other. But of the other pair, Quantus must always stand for the measure of Tantus. Quantitas then, if it had kept its original meaning, would (dropping the conno- tation of Quantus, which has reference to some specific body taken as a standard) involve the idea of some amount of body being taken as the standard of some other body ; and it would thus connote Tantitas, just as Priority connotes Posteriority. But the idea so implied has been dropped, and there has been substituted for it the idea of some amount of body being taken as the standard of all other bodies ; or rather, not even this has been permanently substituted, but Quantity has at length become an absolute, instead of a relative, abstract term ; and is used to represent any portion of extension, weight, number, heat, or anything, in fact, which can be measured by a part of itself. What do we mean when we use the terms More-Less, Longer-Shorter, &c. ? Such names may be applied to a variety of things, the simplest of which to take, for purposes of ex- planation, is Extension. Tactual and muscular sensations give lis the line. We have certain sensations of this kind in ex- tending the arm a certain distance, and certain other sensations of this kind in extending it further. To have these different sensations in succession is to recognize their difference. Having recognized the difference, we find it important to name it. The pair of sensations are accordingly named in relation to one another Shorter-Longer. So of superficies, and bulk. When we apply the terms Part- Whole to objects, the idea of division is involved. The term Division when applied to a physical line comprises the ideas of the feelings of contraction of the muscles, and resistance after the contraction (the act of Q U AN TIT V— NUMBER. 1 27 dividing'), the idea of the sight of the line before division (the antecedent of the act), and the idea of the sight of the line after division (the consequent of the act) . It is found con- venient to assign a pair of related terms to the antecedent and consequent above indicated ; the former we call the whole line, the latter the part of it. Whole and Part, of course, connote each other. Taken together they make a complex idea in- volving the three stages or elements of the above process. The same remarks hold good [mutatis mutandis) in the cases of Surface and Bulk. The division, of course, need not be physical in all cases : it may be imagined. Similar reasoning applies also to Weight, Heat, &c. ' ' More heavy, " Less heavy," are names given to objects from which we have derived separate and successive sensations differing from one another by the more or less muscular resistance, in a particular direction, which they involve. " More or less muscular resistance " must, it would thus appear, be accepted as ultimate and unanalyzable. Whether any very important object is gained by stating the expression " more or less heavy" in other terms — for that is what the alleged anal}'sis comes to — may very well be doubted. It is true, as J. S. Mill says, that this, like all other relations of quantity, exists only as it is felt, — and to this extent James Mill's descrip- tion, rather than explanation, is important — but it must be understood that differences of quantity are really irreducible, however much we may choose to translate them into different language. Mill's conception of Numbers proceeds faithfully upon the foregoing lines. He does not regard them as the names of objects, but as expressing and naming a process, — the process of addition, of putting one object to another. "One" is merely the name of this operation once performed ; " two," of the operation once more performed ; " three," of the operation 128 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. once more performed, and so on. Mill seems to have been quite unconscious that, in this account, he was interpreting the thing- by itself. It may be, however, that he meant the above as a description, not as an analysis. But, if so, he ought to have recognized, more emphatically than he has, the ulti- mate character of numbers ; and not have left his statement, that there is nothing mysterious about numbers, open to the construction — " there is nothing unanalyzable about num- bers." Of course, in one sense, there is nothing mysterious about them, any more than there is about Time, Space, an Idea, or a Sensation ; that is, we all know when we experience a sensation, or have an idea, and what is the difference between walking one mile and ten, and what is the distinction between missing a train and catching it. But in the only other sense which the word "mysterious" can bear in this connexion, namely, that of ultimateness, Numbers — judging from the fact that Mill himself is driven to define them in a circle — are "mysterious/' Numbers (Two, Three, Four, &c.) connote, says Mill, the objects to which these numerals are applied. When we drop the connotation we get the corresponding abstract names ; but, unfortunately, there is only one name for both the con- cretes and the abstracts. When we say, " two roses and three roses are five roses/' we use the concrete names ; when we say, "two and three are five," we drop the connotation, and retain only the idea of the process ; and it would be more correct to say, " twoness and threeness are fiveness." It will strike the reader that in this, as in other instances, Mill has formed a wrong conception of abstract names. Numerals are always concrete names. The ordinal numbers (First, Second, Third, &c.) note a certain position, (if the objects, one of which is described in relation to the others, are in synchronous order), a certain QUALITY.- 129 link (if they are in the successive order) : they connote the ob- ject which has the position, or forms the link. The abstract term is derived in the ordinary way from the concrete. Quality is the last metaphysical category, or (to keep to Mill's own phraseology) abstract relative term, which has to be discussed. Qualities of objects are the names of the sensations which we derive from them — (the name "quality" notes this much) — and also of the unknown causes of these sensations — (and this is the connotation). We know about objects only the sensations, the effects, but we suppose a cause to produce these effects, owing" to what some would call a mental instinct, others a " category," or law of thought, others, the actual independent existence of the Cause, but what Mill would ascribe to the working of association, and association only. There are, it is to be observed, two kinds of qualities, strictly speaking : there is that kind, in virtue of which we say that an object has a certain colour, form, consistency, &c. — the " sensible" quality : and there is also that kind, in respect of which we are not properly said to derive our sensa- tions from the objects themselves, which possess them, but from certain powers or properties in the objects. Thus, when we say that aqua regia dissolves gold, or has a gold-dissolving quality, the aqua regia is not itself the immediate antecedent of my sensation, but is one remove from it. The order is : Antecedent, aqua regia ; Consequent, gold dissolved by aqua regia; Second Consequent, myself perceiving the gold so dissolved. But, in the other sense of the word " quality," the object is not distinct from its qualities : beyond the qualities, it is nothing. Qualities, in this latter sense, are, as we have seen, the sensations which we derive from the objects, together with the association of their ideas with the idea of something as the K 1 10 HA RTLEY A ND J A MES MIL L . cause. This something turns out, on analysis, to be nothing but sensations regarded as antecedent to those experienced by us at any moment from an object. When I am affected by any object, say, through the sense of smell, I associate with the idea of such sensation the ideas of the sensations of colour, figure, size, weight, position, &c, which I imagine myself capable of deriving from the object, and presuppose their indissoluble union. And this is all that really takes place in the mind, according to Mill, during a supposed reference of sensations to an unknown cause, or to the object as their cause, however much we may be led by the perma- nent illusions of association to fancy otherwise* When we affirm that one object is Talis-Qualis another — ■ of like nature with another — we mean that we derive from the two objects like sensations, — whether of one kind only (that is, in respect of one quality), or of several (that is, in respect of several qualities) , or of all those kinds which we are capable of deriving from the objects compared (that is, entirely, or in respect of all the qualities which constitute the object, excepting only the relation of dimension). 6 And what having like sensations is, has already been shown. Talis-Qualis, then, are names applied to objects in respect of every kind of sensation derivable from them, except that of dimension. And they differ from Like-Like in the one peculiarity, in which Tantus-Quantus differ from Equal- Equal, — that is, the objects denoted by Qualis and Quantus are always taken as standards, whereas in the case of the other two pairs either member is the measure of the other. The abstract name Quality is formed in exactly the same way as the abstract name Quantity. Qualitas, moreover, (like Quant itas, and all relative, as distinguished from 6 For which a special pair of related terms, viz., Tantus, Quantus, has •been invented. QUALITY. 131 ordinary, abstract terms) did originally connote something-, namely Talitas, its abstract correlate : but from its having been from the beginning employed to express first one feature in an object which required to be specially marked, and then another, the term acquired in its rapid locomotion a migra- tory tendency, so to speak, which eventually enabled it to slip the bonds imposed by its original connexion with its correlate, and it thus became " the generical name. of every- thing in objects, for which a separate notation is required." [Anal. vol. ii. p. 60.] Mental, as well as sensible, complex ideas can, when put together in pairs, be contrasted as same or different, like or unlike, &c. We call them by these names, when the members of any such pair are composed of like or unlike simple ideas. 7 And what it is to call two simple ideas like or unlike, has been seen already. We may even style one complex idea greater than another, as when we say that the delicacy of Portia is greater than that of Antigone, or the statesmanship of Julius Caesar than that of Charlemagne. We make such quantitative compari- sons on analogous grounds to those, on which we call three yards greater than two. Just as in using the latter expres- sion, we mean that one yard would have to be put to two, in 1 Or because there would have to be added to, or subtracted from, the idea of one member of the pair, some generically different idea or ideas, in order to make it like the other of the two complex ideas compared: e.g. to the idea of a horse has to be added the idea of wings in order to con-" stitute that of a Pegasus : from the idea of a man has to be subtracted the idea of an eye, and other ideas substituted, in order to frame the idea of a Cyclops : from the idea of Firmness the idea of sound judgment bus to be subtracted, in order to establish the idea of Obstinacy. It is for this reason only that we call the sensible complex ideas Horse, Mail, and the mental complex idea, Firmness, different from the mental complex ideas, Pegasus, Cyclops, Obstinacy, respectively. K 2 132 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. order to produce in us the same muscular and tactual sensa- tions which we experience in moving our finger along a physical line of three yards in length : so, in the former mode of speech, we mean that further ideas of states- manlike qualities would require to be added to, or asso- ciated with, those suggested by the name of Charlemagne, in order to realize or come up to the combination of qualities, which we connect with the idea of the character of Julius Caesar. Hartley does not formally discuss Qualities, and the cognate relative terms so elaborately handled by his successor. His incidental remarks, indeed, on this head show him to have been (as far as he went) substantially at one with Mill. His analysis, however, was not very penetrating or detailed. The general conception of Quality was common to the two philo- sophers, though Hartley puts his case in a somewhat different form from that of Mill. He lays down that the explanation of the assent to the proposition, " Gold is soluble in aqua regia," is that the idea of gold has come to suggest the idea of solution in aqua regia, and vice versa. (Observ. on Man, vol. i. p.' 329). This is tantamount to saying, with Mill, that the name "solubility in aqua regia" notes the specific quality, and connotes the other properties of gold, from which we derive sensations, regarded as the antecedent or cause of that specific quality. Hartley, however, makes no distinction between such propositions as the above, and such as " milk is white," &c, which Mill carefully marks off from one another; and therefore presumably would not discrimi- nate between the kind of quality called whiteness in milk, and the kind of quality, or power, called gold-dissolving in aqua regia, or solubility by aqua regia in gold. In connexion with the subject of Quality, we ought not to omit to mention Hartley's observations on a relation which INDUCTION—ANALOG Y— HYPOTHESIS. 1 33 is intimately bound up with that of Similarity in Qualities, namely Analogy. Hartley uses the term Induction as equivalent to a higher type of analogical reasoning. When we see a piece of coal before us, and observe that the sensations in us (and, there- fore, qualities in the object) of Form, Colour, Consistency, &c, are mostly similar to those derived from, or noticeable in, other pieces of coal, we immediately infer that, if fire be applied to it, it will burn and be reduced to ashes. Such an inference is grounded on what Hartley calls " the highest probability, which may be termed induction, in the strict sense of the word." But when the qualities, in respect of which the similarity between the objects is observed, are com- paratively few, we call the process analogy and not induction. In science Analogy can only be admitted provisionally, and where induction is impossible. " Coincidence in mathematical matters, and induction in others, wherever they can be had, must be sought for as the only certain tests of truth " [vol. i. p. 343]. Hartley's view of analogical inference as that mode of reasoning, whereby we argue that, where A has one or more of its properties or qualities similar to one or more of the properties or qualities of B, therefore A will resemble B in some or all of their remaining qualities, coincides very nearly with J. S. Mill's account of one of his modes of the argument from analogy. On Hypothesis (which does not come within Mill's scheme, and would probably have been relegated by him to the " Book of Logic," which he mentions in the last page of his "Analysis," as distinct from analytical psychology), Hartley, who in this, as in so many other matters, follows Newton, makes a number of sound observations. He notices its different kinds ; the provisional hypothesis, awaiting tests and " experiments crucis," before its validity can be established, and the hypo- 134 HARTLEY A ND J A MES MILL . thesis sanctioned by analogies, but not yet elevated to the rank of an ascertained law : he distinguishes also between that form of hypothesis, in which the supposed cause is a real one, or is known to operate in the natural world, while its causal connexion with the phenomenon to be explained is assumed, and that other form, wherein the effect is known, and the law governing- it, but the cause (e.g. an impon- derable a?ther in astronomy) is assumed, though not met with among physical phenomena. In connexion with this branch of his subject he shrewdly remarks — (what has since been observed by Faraday, and other scientific men most compe- tent to judge from their own experience) — the dangerous fascination of a hypothesis which has once been allowed to dwell in the mind, and explains it on principles of association. " The ideas, words, and reasonings belonging to the favourite hypothesis by recurring and being much agitated in the brain, heat it, unite with each other, and so coalesce in the same manner, as genuine truths do from induction and analogy" [vol. i. p. 3-16]. Tn this statement is wrapped up a warning especially useful in these days of hypothesis run mad. On much the same principle Mill, as we shall see below, explains the operation of the Will, and of a desired End in connexion therewith, as giving rise to action. In Hartley's interesting, but somewhat ill-arranged " farrago libelli/' we are constantly coming across matters and hints which take us by surprise. Here, for instance, at the end of the section on " Propositions and the Nature of Assent," we somewhat unexpectedly meet with a topic, which has had an important place in the systems of various philosophers from Plato to Mr. Herbert Spencer and Comte, namely, the Classi- fication of the Sciences. Hartley's division is rudimentary, of course, but not withoiit interest, as reflecting his general views. He distributes knowledge in general into seven leading branches. The first of these is significant as an illus- HARTLEY ON THE SCIENCES. 135 tration of the belief, common to him with Mill, in the import- ance of names. Under Philology, or the knowledge of words and their significations, he places together, oddly enough, Grammar, Criticism, Rhetoric, and Poetry. In ancient treatises on Poetry (as in Aristotle's Eoetica), there is cer- tainly a good deal of grammatical disquisition; but we should scarcely have expected from Hartley an arrangement so un- scientific, as to include in one class of science both Grammar and Poetry. The second branch is Mathematics or the doc- trine of Quantity; the third Logic, which he defines, quite in the Baconian manner, as the art of using words as symbols, ("as counters, not as coin," Hobbes would say), for the purpose of discovery in all departments of knowledge. Logic presupposes the two foregoing classes to some extent. The fourth branch is Natural History, which he terms, as Bacon again termed it, " regular and well-digested accounts of the phenomena of the natural world." Civil History is the next, (in which are comprised histories proper of every kind), followed by Natural Philosophy, which depends upon the application of Mathematics and Logic to Civil and Natural History, with a view to the determination of the laws on which the external and physical world is governed, and thereby the acquisition of Foreknowledge and Power, or the means of predicting and producing phenomena. The seventh and last sphere of know- ledge is Divine Philosophy, or Religion, which treats of, amongst other things, the Summum Bonum, the highest end of life, and, as such, includes Ethics and Politics, and even (Hartley appears to hint) may, through the conception of Pinal Cause, be applied with advantage even to the analysis and interpretation of natural phenomena. The insertion of this last branch of science serves to show us how widely diffe- rent Hartley's standpoint was from that of Mill, in relation to ethical, political, and generally to practical speculations. 1 36 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL CHAPTER VII. THE "ACTIVE POWERS " OF THE HUMAN MIND. We now come to an entirely new section of the Association Theory, that, namely wherein are discussed our sensations and ideas, not merely as existing 1 in our minds, but in their effect upon action. We have done with the intellectual faculties and phenomena, and now come to the moral energies or active phenomena, of human nature. 1 And in the Association system of philosophy, as in all others, we shall see that the practical doctrines follow closely the lines of the theoretical. Sensations may he either pleasurable, painful, or indifferent. They are known to be such only as they are felt : they are distinguished from one another in the feeling" them, and by no other process. We do not, however, attach so much im- portance to our ideas of the pleasurable and painful sensations as we do to the causes of them, because, as Mill says, the sensations, so to speak, " provide for themselves," whereas it is of the greatest interest to us to discover their causes or constant antecedents in order that we may learn how to pro- duce or remove them, according as the sensations consequent upon them are pleasurable or painful. Moreover, the conse- 1 " Active phenomena of Thought " is a very loose expression : but it is obvious what Mill means by it. Instead of intellectual and active phe- nomena, Hobbes expressed the distinction by the terms, Cognitive and Motive Powers. DESIRE AND A VERSION. 137 quent sensations are not nearly so numerous or various as their actual and possible antecedents. These considerations are sufficient to account for the absorbing' attention paid by us to the antecedents of sensations, whether proximate or remote, and for the fact of the association between the sensa- tions and the causes throwing- the interest so heavily on to the side of the latter, as even to lessen or completely obliterate the interest originally attached exclusively to the former, — a phenomenon instanced by the familiar case of the miser. Ideas of pleasurable or of painful sensations are, like the sensations themselves, known only by being experienced. They are respective^ identical with those states to which we give the names of Desire and Aversion. To have the idea of a pleasurable sensation is, according to Mill, one and the same thing as to have a desire for it : to have the idea of a painful sensation one and the same thing as to have an aversion to it. But these two expressions are also, by an ambiguity of lan- guage, applied to our ideas of the causes of the sensations, as well as those of the sensations themselves. We are said to have a desire for water, when in reality, the object is indiffe- rent except in producing relief from thirst, the pleasure of which relief is what we in fact desire. From the fact that the names which, in strictness, belong only to the ideas of the sensations are (through association) transferred to the ideas of their antecedent, Hartley explains the derivative character of all intellectual pleasures and pains, which, in his scheme, are those of ambition, self-interest, sympathy, theopathy, and the moral sense. The " originals" which we really or pri- marily desire are sensible pleasures, but out of our secon- dary interest in the associated causes of these pleasures, are gradually generated independent desires for the "intellectual" pleasures. \Observ. on Man, vol. i. pp. 416, 417.] The idea, then, of a pleasurable or painful- sensation is the 138 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. same thing" as the desire for, or aversion to it, together with a eonnotative reference to the absence of the sensation, the idea of which is in our minds. The absence may be either because the sensation is past, or because it is to come, — generally the latter; Desire and Aversion however are the only terms in use to express both the one and the other of these two possible cases. It follows that the number of our desires and aversions is equal to the number of our pleasurable and painful sensations. When a pleasurable or painful sensation is contemplated as future, but not as certainly about to be experienced, the state of consciousness with which it is regarded is called Hope or Fear. When such sensations are contemplated as certainly about to be felt, the states of consciousness, with which they are respectively regarded, may be described (though unsatis- factorily) by the terms Joy and Sorrow. When such sensa- tions are contemplated as past, the attitude of the mind is almost neutral. But besides the sensations, the causes of those sensations, may be regarded either as past or future. If as past, the idea or thought of them, unlike that of the sensa- tions in an analogous case, is called Antipathy or (less con- veniently) Hatred, in the case of past causes of painful, and Sympathy or Love (both most inexact terms) in the case of past causes of pleasurable, sensations. If as future and cer- tain, the state of consciousness is termed Hatred, Horror, or Aversion in the one case, and Joy in the other : if as future and uncertain, the state of consciousness is called Dread in the one case, and Hope in the other. The reason of our regard- ing with such interest the past causes of past sensations, while we look back with comparatively tranquil feelings on the past sensations themselves, is to be found partly in those associations to which allusion has already been made, but principally in that particular form of it, whereby the thought CAUSES OF PLEASURE AND PAIN. 139 of a past antecedent and consequent is no sooner raised in us, than the mind becomes, so to speak, possessed with the idea of the relation of antecedent and consequent in its generic character, and divested of any limitation as to time, and so passes naturally, and even irresistibly, to the idea of future antecedents and consequents. Then from the idea of a future antecedent of a painful sensation, it arrives finally at the idea of a future painful sensation : " and thus the feeling- partakes of the nature of the anticipation of a future painful sensation." [Anal., vol. ii. p. 202]. The cause of a past pleasurable sen- sation is, it is to be observed, not so attractive an object of contemplation and reminiscence, as the cause of a past painful sensation is a revolting and disagreeable one ; and that because the sensation itself in the former case is not so pungent as in the latter. But of course the cause of the extinction of a past pain is often a subject of the most livgly and absorbing in- terest. Just as the causes of pleasures and pains are more inte- resting, for the reasons already given, than the pleasures and pains themselves ; so the remote causes of them are often more interesting than the proximate, — both for the same rea- sons, and owing to this further fact, that the more remote causes, such as Money, necessarily carry with them a larger number of associated ideas of pleasures and pains ; since they are associated primarily with all the proximate causes of them (Money, for instance, with Food, Health, Comfort, Power, Art, &c), and through each of these mediately with several sets and combinations of sensations. After these preliminary remarks, Mill discusses the different causes of our own plea- sures and pains in separate classes. Wealth, Power, and Dignity have this feature in common, that they all advance our happiness as instruments in securing for us the good offices of our fellow-men, and hardly at all in any other way. 1 40 HARTLEY A ND J A MES MILL. In the achievement of these results, Wealth operates mainly through the opportunities which it affords of rewarding 1 others ; Power (according- to Mill) through the opportunities which it affords of inflicting evils and imposing burdens on others ; while Dignity expresses " all that in and about a man which is calculated to procure him the services of others, without the immediate application of reward or of fear/ 5 together with (though in a less marked degree) a disposition to make a good use of Wealth and Power (which is Virtue) , and Know- ledge and Wisdom, which enable him to direct the disposition into proper channels. All the three conditions above enume- rated procure for their possessor respect and admiration even beyond the sphere of their operation, or of the possibility of their operation. This noticeable fact — which other schools of philosophy would explain on other grounds, and instance as justifying a deduction of the phenomena in question from anti-selfish principles —Mill, of course, regards as only another example and effect of association. We associate the idea of the power of doing good and harm enjoyed by other persons, with the idea of pleasurable and painful sensations inflicted in the exercise of that power; and with this latter idea is asso- ciated the thought of such sensations inflicted on ourselves : and; though this association may be only momentary, yet even a momentary association — one no sooner formed than for- gotten — may be such as to give "its whole character to a phenomenon of the human mind •" since, according to the theory which Mill emphatically endorses and repeats in this connexion, there can be no idea present to the mind without at least a momentary belief in its existence. The opposites of the above causes of pleasures, namely, Poverty, Weakness, and Contemptibility, admit of the same analysis. The Affections, or the feelings, with which we regard the WEAL TH—PO WER— DIGNITY. 1 4 1 above causes of pleasures and pains, whether as past or as future — unfortunately we have no names to distinguish affec- tions according as they refer to the one or the other — are named Love of Wealth, Power, Dignity, and Hatred of Poverty, Weakness, Contemptibility. It is only in this roundabout manner that we can express them. When the element of comparison enters into our state of consciousness while contemplating the above causes of pleasures and pains (that is, when we compare the degree in which they are enjoyed or endured by ourselves with the extent to which they are enjoyed or endured by others), the affections called Pride, where the comparison is favourable to ourselves, and Humility, where it is unfavourable, are engendered. This is where the reference is primarily to such causes as possessed by ourselves — when the Self is the standard of comparison : when another individual is the standard by which we measure our- selves, the respective affections are those of Contempt and Admiration. On the pleasures and pains connected with the sentiments of Power, Dignity, &c, Hartley has something to say, though, as usual, of a descriptive, rather than a deeply analytical, character. He does not formulate distinctions so nicely, or dissect with so keen a scalpel, as the later philosopher. But, under the head of the Pains and Pleasures of Ambition, he makes some penetrating observations covering much the same ground as Mill's treatment of Wealth, Power, and Dignity. Of these pleasures and pains of ambition he recognizes several varieties, according as they are referred to, and connected with, External Advantages or Disadvantages, Bodily Per- fections and Imperfections, Intellectual Qualities (accomplish- ments or defects), or Moral Qualities (virtue and vice). Under the first of these he includes riches, titles, &c, and their opposites, most of which Mill would consider as inci- 1 42 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. dental to Wealth and Dignity ; under the second, Beauty, Health, and Strength, which Mill would probably refer to Power and Dignity. The last two classes speak for them- selves; and without the one to supply the right means, and the other the right end, Mill (as we have seen) would hardly admit that Dignity conld properly be said to exist. In common with Mill, Hartley is of opinion that, in seeking the good offices and opinions of others, the primary object in the first instance is the acquisition of the pleasures, and avoid- ance of the pains, likely to result to us from their attitude towards us ; 2 but that, by association, we accustom ourselves to seek those good offices and opinions independently of im- mediate results, and even when results of any kind are almost or entirely beyond the range of probability or even possibility. He takes account, accordingly, of the fact that counter-asso- ciations may ecpially well be generated, whereby poverty, instead of riches, low instead of high birth, may be identified in thought with the pleasures and aims of ambition (as, for instance, in the history of monastic orders) ; and notes that the common element in all the pleasures of ambition, of what- ever kind, is the prominence in their constitution of the " videri/' as compared with the " esse," and the greater richness of the former in the interesting associations and ideas which it is able to bring before the mind. \_Observ. on Man, vol. i. p. 446, sqq.] It is to be thought, not to be, rich, of high birth, strong, beautiful, intellectual, virtuous, &c, that men rise so early, and so late take rest — in so far at least as they are actuated by ambition, which is all that we are at present considering. To be thought intellectual is considered desirable by most -' "All the things," he writes [vol. i.' p. 455], " in which men pride themselves, and for which the}- desire to be taken notice of by others, are cither means of happiness, or have some near relation to it.'' HARTLEY ON AMBITION. 143 men, chiefly (says Hartley) owing- to the association in their minds of the eagerly pronounced opinions of learned men in their boohs to that effect, apart from a consideration of the more obvious and external advantages accruing" from such a reputation. Hartley seems to insinuate that the world is in a gigantic conspiracy to suppress and degrade the dullard ; and that, in discussing the comparative merits of ignorance and learning, the controversy has always been entirely on one side. While Learning has always a series of recorded opinions with which to support its case, and so a link of association in its favour is formed — a link which becomes stronger every day from repetition — the dullard, on the other hand, " ex vi termini " cannot write books himself, or plead his own cause. Many a learned man could write a " Ship of Fools" but no dunce can write an " 'Encomium Morice." The scholar does it for him occasionally, but, unfortunately, only in such a way as to show that his real object is to attack other learned men, and not at all to elevate the fool. In his serio-comical way — we often cannot be quite sure whether he is amusing himself or in earnest — Hartley alludes, in this connexion, to " the high-strained encomiums, applauses, and flatteries, paid to parts and learning, and the outrageous contempt and ridicule thrown upon folly and ignorance, in all the discourses and writings of men of genius and learning " [perhaps Hartley had been reading the Dunciad of his friend Pope] ; " these persons being extremely partial to their own excellences, and carrying the world with them by the force of their parts and eloquence" [vol. i. p. 449]. In considering those kinds of the pleasures and pains of ambition which relate to the repu- tation of virtue or vice, it is to be noticed that Hartley, like most of his successors in the Associationist School, universally adopts the Sensational or Selfish theory of morals, that is to say, the theory which derives in the last resort the love of i 4 | HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. virtue and repugnance to vice from the desire of the real and supposed pleasures associated with the idea of the practice of the one, and the aversion to the real and supposed pains associated with the idea of the practice of the other. He maintains the reward-and-punishment doctrine of ethical action. Thus it is the " many advantages resulting from the reputation of being benevolent," which causes most people to desire that reputation : and the honour in which the virtue of Benevolence, as contrasted with that in which Piety, for instance, is held, is explained on egoistic and utilitarian prin- ciples combined (since it does not very clearly appear whether the advantages spoken of are advantages to the individual agent, or to others). Military glory he deduces from a more exclusively utilitarian starting-point, coupled of course, with association. Humility he divides into negative and positive, the former being " the not thinking better, or more highly, of ourselves than we ought," and the latter " a deep sense of our own misery and imperfections of all kinds " [vol. i. p. 455], and here sagaciously observes that men are often impelled by the grossest motives of vanity and ambition to seek the re- putation of that which contradicts it, namely, humility. 3 In this he finds an instance of the tendency of vice to destroy itself. Not only are the prospects of praise or blame incentives to or deterrents from a particular course of action or a particular habit, but (as is acutely remarked by Hartley) it is considered praiseworthy to be influenced by praise and blame, and cen- surable to be unsusceptible to those influences. And thus " praise and shame have a strong reflected influence upon 3 One is reminded of the story of Diogenes theatrically stamping on Plato's rich carpets, with the words, " thus do I trample on the pride of Plato ; " to which Plato retorted, " with yet greater pride yourself, Diogenes." HARTLE Y ON SELF-INTERES T. 145 themselves/' and " praise begets the love of praise, and shame increases the fear of shame." The latter part, however, of this proposition may be considered doubtful. Tt is rather to be gathered from experience, and would certainly be supposed a priori, that it ought to stand as the converse to the other part, and that a succession of ignominies heaped upon a man produces as shameless a callosity and indifference as a succession of encomiums and rewards fosters, if it does not engender, a refined and delicate sense of honour. Self-Interest Hartley divides (not very philosophically) into three kinds, Gross, Refined, and Rational. The exposition of Gross Self-interest covers the same ground as those observa- tions of Mill on the Love of Wealth, on which we have already commented. It is defined as " the cool pursuit of the means whereby the pleasures of sensation, imagination, and ambition, are to be obtained, and their pains avoided," and he refers to the love of money as a crucial and interesting example, both of the pursuit of Gross Self-Interest, and of the general prin- ciples of association. In this latter reference, his language is almost identical with that of both the Mills, the younger of whom relies largely on the phenomena of avarice to support bis utilitarian theory. There can be no original desire for money in itself. But from being regarded as the measure, standard, and exponent of a large variety of the pleasures of common life, it comes, by association, to signify, and stand for, " the thing itself, the sum total of all that is desirable in life." And so completely and rapidly is this mental process accomplished, that even a child will prefer a piece of money, as the symbol of a choice of pleasures deferred, to the imme- diate fruition of any specific pleasure. Wealth, Power, and Dignity, are only mediately the causes of our pleasures and pains — through the intervention, that is, of the actions and attitude towards us of our fellow-men. Having: L i 4 6 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL examined Hie ultimate causes, Mill proceeds to treat of the (relatively to them) proximate causes, of our pleasures and pains — in a word, our Fellow-men. And with this view, he discusses successively Friendship, Kindness, Love of Family, of Party, of Country, of Mankind, according- to the extent of 1 he various circles and sections of humanity whose actions may be supposed to affect our happiness. These sentiments are expounded on principles, with which the reader by this time will be sufficiently familiar ; and we need not stop to examine his account in detail. Suffice it to say that in each case, according- to Mill, the ideas of services rendered and to be rendered, benefits derived and to be derived, pleasures enjoyed and to be enjoyed, are associated, directly or circuitously, con- sciously or unconsciously, but always strongly, with the ideas of the individuals or portions of mankind who are the objects of the sentiments in question. And the sentiments are the outcome of, and depend for their force and durability, upon that association. One or two views, however, colouring all the different parts of Mill's exposition of our Fellow-men regarded as the causes of our pleasures and pains, should be noticed. To begin with, Mill has a somewhat peculiar notion as to the manner in which a person prompted to do a kind action regards a fellow-creature in pain, or in which a Father or Husband regards his Son or Wife, as the cause of his own pain or pleasure. His theory is that we cannot see a man in pain, without associating with the idea of his pain the idea of ourselves as suffering it ; that, this latter idea being painful to us, we hasten to remove it by removing the man's sufferings; and that it is thus only that he can be said to be the cause of our pain, or we to be prompted to do a kind action. This, however, can hardly be said to answer to the experience of most men ; and J. S. Mill, in cor- recting- the error (which, however, he is inclined to regard as THE S YMPA THE TIC A FFECTIOA 'S. 1 47 lying 1 rather in expression than in meaning-), carefully points out that there is probably no conscious association of the kind described, but that the idea of another person in pain is to most people hi itself a painful idea. Benevolent and com- passionate impulses may be in the last resort reducible to such an association ; but this is a different thing from saying that it is actually experienced on each occasion of performing- kind actions. "An association does not necessarily act in all cases, because it exists in all cases " \_Anal. vol. i. p. 2 IS. Editor's note] . The Parental and Marital Affections are very minutely analyzed : and it is shown how, apart from the parental and sexual instincts involved in them, association contributes a large share to their formation and development, as appears in the case of a man rearing- orphan children, and in similar instances, where such instincts cannot exist. In connexion with the discussion of these affections, some shrewd observations are to be found : as, for instance, that a . man is prone to love the person on whom he has frequently conferred benefits — (which is the converse of Aristotle's obser- vation that there is something- in human nature which impels a man to hate one from whom he has received frequent and great benefits, and to whom he is under lasting obligations) ; — also the remark that one among other strong incentives to a mother to love her child is the recollection of the pains and hopes and fears connected with parturition, (which again corresponds to another quaint Aristotelian dictum to the effect that maternal affection, like the artistic pride of the poet and sculptor in his own works, is a case of the law, according- to which that is most loved, which has been produced with the greatest pain and anxiety). In the case; of the Family Affections, as in that of the Love of Wealth, and the Desire for Posthumous Fame (noticed later in the Analysis), which 148 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. seem to be the most typical illustrations, Mill draws attention to the tendency of association to render the means more acceptable than the end, and the disposition, by exercising 1 which wc achieve pleasures, more desirable than those pleasures themselves. The associations connected with the ideas of Party, Country, or Mankind in general are merely enlargements of those con- nected with the ideas of Family, Friends, persons in distress, &c. Any one of the various affections dependent upon these associations may of course militate against one or more of the others. To subordinate them to one another properly, giving each its just weight and proportion of influence, is to order life well. A man may " give up to party what is meant" for country, and to country " what is meant for mankind," — or conversely he may give up to mankind what is meant for country, party, friends, family, or those whose calls on his assistance are the most immediate and urgent ; and (like the elder Mirabeau) call himself the Friend of Man, in order to dispense with being the friend of wife and family : in such cases, life is ordered badly. Class-feeling, Esprit de Corps, Party- Spirit, Codes of Honour, "honour among thieves," &c, all these are so many recognitions of our dependence upon some circle of our fellow-men, some portion of humanity, wider than the limits of the domestic hearth, not only for our pleasures and comfort, but for social, that is human, existence itself. It is only when not corrected by the higher and broader associations that the Spirit of Caste, devotion to Church or Order, becomes reprehensible and, in extreme cases, even wicked and hateful. We have seen that Hartley divides Pleasures and Pains into — apart from those of Imagination, which will be treated separately in a later chapter — those of Sensation, Ambition, Self-Interest, Sympathy, Theopathy, and the Moral Sense. HARTLEY ON SYMPATHY. 149 This is not a very philosophical division : for, on examination, the pleasures of Self-Interest seem to be not properly in- cluded in the list, but rather to stand outside it, because they are nothing" more or less than (to use Hartley's own words) the pleasures " generated by attention to and frequent reflec- tion upon, the things which promise us" the pleasures of Sensation, Imagination, Ambition (in which cases the Self- interest is gross), Sympathy, Theopathy, and the Moral Sense (in which cases the Self-interest is refined). In fact they are only the pleasures of the other six classes with a special reference to the Self. The motive would thus appear to constitute the distinction. In the one case the pleasures are contemplated merely as attendant and consequent, as a matter of fact, upon certain sensations and acts ; in the other, as con- sciously pursued by the agent, in the doing of certain acts, or the putting one's self in the way of receiving certain sensations. So that we may pass over Hartley's Refined Self-Interest for the present, 4 and proceed to his account of the Pleasures and Pains of Sympathy, which covers the same ground as Mill's theory of our Fellow-creatures regarded as the causes of our pleasures and pains. Hartley distributes the sympathetic affections into (1) those by which we rejoice at the happiness of others, (2) those by which we grieve for their misery, (3) those by which we rejoice at their misery, (4) those by which we grieve for their happiness. It is a somewhat over-subtle refinement which separates the first of these classes from the second, and the third from the fourth. Two classes are quite sufficient. 4 Rational Self-interest (as distinct from Gross and Refined) appears to be tantamount to the judicious ordering of life as a whole, as contrasted with the acquisition of particular pleasures, — the pursuit of happiness instead of momentary gratifications of sense, — eudseinonism as opposed to hedonism. 150 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. Sociality, Benevolence, Generosity, Gratitude (of which "a lively sense of favours to come" is recognized as one con- stituent element, though not the absolute equivalent, as in the proverb), Compassion, and Mercy are treated under the former of these two heads much in the same way, though not so minutely or accurately, as they are analyzed by Mill. The ibrce of association in producing " pure disinterested benevo- lence" (a slightly contradictory expression in the mouth of an Associationist) is insisted on by him, as by the later philosopher. 5 In his remarks on Compassion and Mercy, Hartley speaks of the sight of another's pain directly exciting- disagreeable sensations in the percipient, which act on his nervous system, 6 giving rise to "painful internal feelings," and calling up, immediately or by association, unpleasant ideas. He nowhere resorts to the needless and artificial desire of inferring an association between the idea of the pain of another, and the idea of the self as suffering that pain, which is Mill's explanation of the phenomena; and, to this extent, he is the more satisfactory of the two. Mercy, he observes, is a higher quality than Compassion, because it has to over- come a repugnance founded on retributive justice or a legiti- mate vindictiveness. In the second of the two classes (amalgamated as above) are comprised Moroseness, Auger, Revenge, Jealousy, Cruelty, Malice, Emulation, and Envy. Into the ideas productive of these tempers of mind, those (already considered) attendant upon the Love of Power and Dignity and Wealth largely enter. The idea of another's happiness or power, when com- bined with accjuiescence in it, constitutes (in relation to our- 6 It is a recognition of this process which induces even Epicurus to say of his ideal wise man, that " he will sometimes die for his friend." 6 " Persons whose nerves are easily irritable .... are, in general, more disposed to compassion than others." [Observ. on Man, vol. i. p. 475.] HARTLE Y ON S YAIPA TH V. 151 selves) the affection of Humility, and (in relation to the other person, as we have seen) Respect and Admiration. But, when not so combined, and when the Love of Power and of Dignity is strongly developed, Envy and Jealousy are the Affections which result. It is this Love of Power, and the ideas asso- ciated with it, which often lead us (involuntarily, and against our better natures) to feel that degree of complacency in con- templating the fortunes of our friends, which the proverbial moralizers tell us that even the best of men are apt to feel at times. Having discussed these varieties of the sympathetic temper, and the share which association has in producing them, j Hartley first notices the different materials on which sucli tempers may be exercised ; and in his arrangement he is at one with Mill. His analysis of the marital and parental affections [vol. i. pp. 483 — 485] is followed closely, almost word for word, by Mill, as also his account of Friendship, Devotion to Country, Mankind, &c. Nothing need be added here to what has already been said. We have now considered (1) the proximate causes of our pleasures and pains, namely sensations (2) the remote causes, namely (a) Wealth, Power, and Dignity, (b) the dispositions of our Fellow- Creatures, to which Mill here adds, (c) the acts, as distinguished from the dispositions, of our Fellow- creatures.' It remains now to examine in order these several causes (whether proximate or remote), considered as conse- quents of our oioii acts, in connexion with which the corre- sponding Motives will come under consideration. ' Tbe remaining class of Remote Causes, namely " the objects called Sublime and Beautiful and their Contraries," we reserve for separate con- sideration in the chapter devoted to tbe aesthetic, as distinguished from the intellectual and ethical, sides of the association theory represented by Hartley and James Mill. 152 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. Mill defines Motive in the following' terms : " when the idea of a pleasure is associated with an action of our own as its cause ; that is, contemplated as the consequent of a certain action of ours, and incapable of otherwise existing, a peculiar state of mind is generated, which, as it is a tendency to action, is properly denominated Motive/'' [Anal. vol. ii. p. 258.] More strictly, the association above mentioned as leading to action is the association of the idea of an action of our own as cause, with the idea of a cause of our pleasure (whether proximate or remote) as effect; while, as has been already shown, the mere contemplation of the cause of our pleasure or pain, whether past or future, when regarded as independent of our own actions, is called Affection. A readi- ness to obey the Motive — a facility of being acted upon by it — is the corresponding Disposition. A motive must necessarily produce action, where there are no counteracting 1 motives ; and, in all cases, must tend to pro- duce action, even when eventually overcome by other moral forces. Every pleasure being" desirable, for otherwise it would not be a pleasure, the idea of any pleasure associated with the idea of action on our part producing it, must necessarily lead to that action, and so possess motivity, (though the term Motive is often loosely and incorrectly used to denominate the pleasure, without the accompanying idea of our own agency). The comparative strength of different motives in the case of any one individual depends upon the comparative strength of the associations, engendered by habit and education, (Aristotle's e#o? and SiSa^i}), between different pleasures and different actions or courses of action. The right thing to learn is how to make the abstractedly desirable equivalent to the actually desired, how to make the values and the associa- tions correspond. In this part of his exposition, Mill carefully points out the AFFECTION—MOTIVE— DISPOSITION. 1 5 3 distinction between the Motives, the Affections, and the Dis- positions in each of the classes of causes of pleasures already mentioned, notwithstanding the almost invariable identity of name to denote all three states of mind, or at least two of them, the Motive and the Disposition, — an identity extremely embarrassing- in any attempt at analysis. The following tables will show the Motives, &c, in each of the four classes alluded to, and exhibit the results of Mill's careful analysis: — I. Sensations, the pboxihate causes of ode Pleasuees and Pains. Affection = Motive. Disposition. Object. r a. Love of Eating (Gluttony when in excess). J /3. Love of Sex (Lust, when in excess). J y. Love of Drinking (Drunkenness when in v. excess). The same names. Palate. Sex. Drink. 1 It will be noticed that in the above class the Affection is the Motive in fact as well as in name, because our own acts are here the direct antecedents of our pleasures (regarding the pleasurable sensations as equivalent to the pleasures, as, following general usage, we may do), and not (except for purposes of strict analysis) the causes of the causes of our pleasures. A generic name for all the cases of excess above noted is Sensuality, which, like the names of its various species, stands both for Disposition, Motive, and Affection. Each of the senses, of course, has its separate motive, but only the above have names in common use. Temperance and Intemperance are names of Dispositions only, and have 154 //: IRTLEY AND J A MES MIL L . reference to Pleasures and Pains generally. The former Mill defines as " an equal facility of associating with any act both its pleasures and its pains/ [Anal. vol. ii. p. 26:2] . In the case of the latter Disposition, the pleasurable associations overbalance the painful. We now come to the remote causes of our pleasures and pains, and first as to — II. Wealth, Poweb, and Dignity. Affection. Motive. Disposition. Object. Ui. Love of Wealth — Wealth. Avarice, Rapacity, (when in excess). /3. Love of Power < (Ambition). The same names. The same names. Power. y. Love of Dignity. S. Pride, [e. Humility (Envy). Emulation. Envy. C Emulation. \ Ambition. Envy. Dignity. All the above as compared with the Wealth, &c. of others, to our own advantage, or to our own disadvantage. The last two of the above affections (with their corre- sponding motives and dispositions) require some explanation. When we contemplate our own wealth, power, and dignity as small, and slightly productive of pleasure, in comparison with those of other men, the Affection is Humility; when we con- template them as large, the Affection is Pride. But when we associate the idea of an increase to our wealth, &c, as com- pared with those of others, with an act of our own as causing that increase, the Motive is Emulation ; when we associate CL A SSIFICA TION OF MO TI VES, ETC. 155 the idea of our own poverty, &c., as compared with the riches &c., of others, with the idea of some act of our own detracting* from the superior influence of others, the Motive is Envy. III. The States oe Attitudes towabds us of oue Fellow-men, AND ALTEBATIONS IN THOSE STATES OE ATTITUDES. Affection. Motive. Disposition. Object. a. Friendship. Friends. /3. Kindness (or Compas- sion when the im- mediate object is No class. removal of pain). The The y- ( Love of Family. \ Parental Affection. same same > Family. 5. Patriotism. Country. 6. f Esprit de Corps. J Love of one's Order, | Church, &c, V. Party-spirit. names. names. Class. c Love of Mankind. Mankind. Here too the distinction between the Affections, Motives, and Dispositions is manifest, though the names are again, unfortunately, the same. In speaking' of the last of the above motives, Love of Mankind, Mill takes occasion to observe that large conceptions, such as those of Country, Mankind, and the like, not being- directly objects of sense, can only be brought home to men's minds through the medium of General Terms. For this purpose, as " an aid to the senses, " in Baconian language, Philosophical Education is necessary. k6 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. IV. The Acts (as distinguished fbom the States) both of our- selves, AND OF OUE FeLLOW-CEEATUEES, WHICH CAUSE US PLEASUEE oe pain. Object. Affection. Motive. Disposition. a. Acts primarily useful to the agent, secondarily to others : — 1 C(a) when the acts are f Courage. \ Prudence. J our own, j (b) when the acts are C those of others. Moral Approbation. /3. Acts primarily useful to The others, secondarily to the agent: — same f (a) when the acts are ("Justice. \ Beneficence. J our own, names. j (b) when the acts are V, those of others. Moral Approbation. y. Acts comprehending all the above : — 1 ( (a) when the acts are Virtue. J our own, j (b) when the acts are Moral Appro- Love of V. those of others. bation, Moral Approbation, Sense, Moral &c. Intention, Moral Fa- culty, Sense of Right and "Wrong, &c. The fourth and last table demands a somewhat detailed explanation. It is to be noticed in the first place that Mill, conformably to his ethical theory as developed in the Frag- ment on Mackintosh and Miscellaneous Essays, holds the generic element in the four cardinal virtues to be the conferring- of benefits on men, whether ourselves or our fellow-creatures, primarily on ourselves in the case of Fortitude and Prudence, PRUDENCE AND COURAGE. 157 primarily on others in the case of Justice and Beneficence. But — and here he seems to be following" Gay very closely — since Prudent and Courageous acts best enable us to perform acts of Justice and Benevolence to others, and since, further, our own acts of Justice and Benevolence best dispose others to perform similar acts towards ourselves, it follows that each of these two main classes of acts, the primarily self-regarding, and the primarily altruistic, may be said to have a double aspect. And not only this, — but there is another difference to be observed, according as the acts which cause us pleasure or pain are our own, or those of other men. First let us consider the case where the acts in question are our own. We associate with an}'- of our own acts of Prudence and Courage, as its immediate consequence, some advantage to ourselves, either Pleasure, that is, or the cause of Pleasure : and, moreover, we associate with the ideas of our own acts of Justice and Beneficence the ideas of the pleasurable feelings of a fellow-creature (ideas which are pleasurable in them- selves), and also the ideas of the benefits which we secondarily derive from our fellow- creatures by the performance of such acts, (the ideas, that is, of causes of pleasure to ourselves). Now to contemplate a Pleasure, together with its cause (how- ever remote), is to have a complex idea, which, after repetition, ceases to be an indifferent, and becomes a pleasurable, idea, that is, an Affection. And to contemplate, in addition, an act of ours as causing that cause, is to have the corresponding Motive. But in this case there is no act of ours to be associated as cause of that cause, because our own act is the cause. Therefore, in this case as in that Class (I), the Motive is the Affection, and the Affection is the Motive. The Disposition in this, as in all instances, is the ready capability, induced by habitual exercise and education (the e'&?]s uKovaai yj/eKados evdovai] (ppevi. Soj)h. Fr. THE SUBLIME IN NATURE. 195 equally suggest the ideas of dissatisfaction at our own con- dition as contrasted with their tranquillity and perfection. Mill even more emphatically than Hartley, says that the sensations which we immediately derive from Colours, Forms, and Sounds are in themselves absolutely indifferent, and only become interesting by association with ideas. In the case of Colours, for instance, the associations are either those which arise from the interesting nature of objects or phenomena per- manently coloured in certain ways, such as Day, Night, &c, or those which arise from some supposed analogy between certain colours and certain dispositions of mind, or lastly^ those which arise from accidental connexions, whether national or individual, e.g. the connexion of the colour of purple with ideas of dignity and majesty, or the connexion of black in some countries, of white in others (as China), with funerals and mourning. The Association in every case, and the Association alone, is the cause of the Beauty [Mill, ii. 244]. 2 Underived beauty of colours is denied. No new colour introduced by fashion is (says Alison, as quoted by Mill) pleasing at first. This proposition, we think, most persons will dispute with J. S. Mill (ii. 247 n.). And still more will they dispute the statement that there are no direct physical sensations of plea- sure to be derived from music at any rate, if not from the sounds of animals. Granting that the scream of the eagle or the roar of the lion is only interesting as suggestive of the ideas of lonely majesty and independence, who can ascribe the pleasure derived from a sonata of Beethoven to its association with pleasurableideas, once connected with similar sounds emitted by animals or inanimate objects in nature ? Similarly, it may very well be doubted whether there is not an original pleasure in the contemplation of beautiful Forms; and whether Alison's and Mill's derivation of the emotions with which we regard grace- : Cp. ii. 250. n 9 196 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. ful curves from the fact that, since most of our bodily motious are in curves, and most soft surfaces are round, therefore curves are suggestive of ease and comfort, and Hartley's explanation of the delight taken in beautiful architectural proportions as depending upon their association with the ideas of utility and adaptation to ends, are at all adequate. Mill as we have said, does not treat distinctively of the pleasures derived from works of art, hut that he would treat these on the same principles as those on which he bases the pleasures already noticed, is evi- dent from his somewhat astounding statement [ii. 251] that the train of ideas associated with the form of the Venus de Medicis, and this alone, induces us to call it beautiful and justifies us in so calling it. Hartley's exposition of the feelings consequent upon the contemplation of works of art consists mainly in a reference (1) to the associated ideas of fitness and utility (as in architectural and mechanical works), (2) to the pleasurable ideas, which are derived from the detection of a successful imitation, in Painting, for instance, and Poetry [Observ. on Man, vol. i. pp. 427, 431]. In the case of Music, however, Hartley allows that certain concords excite an ori- ginal, and not a derived, pleasure : but that original pleasure is enormously enhanced by those derived from the associations of certain sounds with the ideas of " amorous pleasures, public rejoicings, riches, high rank " — we may imagine the feelings of a musician on reading this — or with " battles, sorrows, death, and religious contemplation." In reference to this latter set of associated ideas, as in the attempted analysis of the Sublime in nature, there is a failure to explain satisfac- torily the great crux of the Associationists' theory of aesthetic emotion, namely, how it is that we experience a pleasure in the teeth of our pain or sadness. A cognate question would be raised by the consideration of the feelings attendant on tragic representations, where the paradox, that our pleasure HARTLEY ON ART. 197 consists in our pain, is still more apparent : but Hartley omits the Drama from his theory altogether. Discords, he says, are necessary and proper in music to prevent us being" cloyed with the delights of " concords of sweet sounds," just as, for pur- poses of contrast, a certain degree of obscurity may be both justifiable and delightful in poetry. We need not notice further the views of Hartley on these subjects, as they are not of much real value, and are only of interest as one of the earliest attempts to explain sesthetic emotion on strictly asso- ciationist principles : though ingenious, they are strained in the extreme, in order to bring every phenomenon under his favourite law, as, for example, where he speaks of the pleasure arising from pictures being derived from, amongst other things, "ambition, fashion, the extravagant prices of the works of certain masters, from associations of the villas and cabinets of the noble, the rich, and the curious, &c.," — a statement which, we imagine, would not find more favour with the painter, than would the passage quoted above with the musician. i 9 where L, F, and W re- present the three above sentiments respectively. Language, he often says, is merely a less perfect algebra, and perhaps this is why he flies to algebra so often where language fails him. The wealth of his illustrative matter is very great. Allusions to Newton, whose JPriwcipia first set him on to the Vibration Theory, and introductions of physical theories and analogies are numerous. He never forgets that he is a phy- sician, nor allows his readers to forget it. He culls several examples from the field of medicine, — comparing, for instance, a complex idea irresoluble into the separate elements of which HIS DISCURSIVENESS. 217 it is composed to Venice treacle [vol. i. p. 322], while the phenomena of disease and morbid affections are carefully con- sidered by him in relation to his philosophical principles, whenever an opportunity offers, and he devotes a special section [vol. i. pp. 390 — 403] to the imperfections of reason resulting from derangements or decline of bodily powers, such as madness, idiocy, dotage, drunkenness, delirium. To the phenomena of sleep and dreaming, and also to the condition of the deaf and dumb, he pays great attention [vol. i. p. 287] ; and in the practical part of his work devotes some pages to an elaboration of the rules of good disetetics [ii. 218 — 228]. His medical instincts similarly led him to couple muscular motion with sensation and ideation, and to give an account of association which should embrace each branch of its triple influence on the three main elements of human nature. Nothing is too apparently small to escape his attention. " De minimis curat philosophia " is his motto : and he is quite guiltless of that misconception of the function of philosophy which the late Mr. Bagehot imputed to most of its professors, preventing them from condescending to small things, or seeing that speculation should, like some Nasmyth's hammer, be able to put the head on to a pin as easily as beat out a ton of weight. He devotes a special section to the intellectual faculties of brutes [i. 404 — 415, cp. ii. 226 sqq.]. By his observations of the reciprocal influence of language and thought upon one another, he is (as we have already seen) led to suggest hints for the construction of a philosophical language for all nations, founded on combinations of a certain number of primitive words, carefully selected with a view to their facility of calling up the appropriate ideas [i. 315 — 318], — a scheme which was first worked out in some kind of outline by one George Dal- garno (1627 — 1687) in his Ars Signorum, — Vulgo Character Universalis et Lingua Philosophica, and elaborated by Bishop 2 1 8 HARTLEY AND J A MES MILL . Wilkins, 3 with his six genera and 3000 radicals, on a principle noticed with much approval by Professor Max Miiller. Such a philosophical language, says Hartley, " would as much exceed any of the present languages as a paradisiacal state does the mixture of happiness and misery which has been our portion ever since the fall." In connexion with this part of his subject, he speaks with approval of Byrom's system of shorthand, then first coming into use, as being a method of marking ideas by the most practicable, economical, and at the same time philoso- phical symbols as yet discovered. In another part of his work, his busy brain is occupied with the idea of a philosophical dictionary, which should be, as he says, " a real as well as a nominal one/' that is, should combine the merits of an ency- clopaedia and a lexicon [vol. i. p. 285]. From music Hartley derives several of his illustrations and analogies [i. 289, 321, &c] ; and for Pope and some other of the English poets of a practical and moralizing turn (as was stated in his Life) he had a sincere admiration : but, some- what to our surprise, we find his attitude towards the imagina- tive arts in their moral and educational aspects to have been decidedly hostile. The poets in general he rarely speaks of in his philosophical writings except as " lewd," and unfit to be taught to, or read by, the young. In his classification of the sciences, he contemptuously relegates poetry, together with Grammar and the cognate sciences, to the sphere of Philology, and he agrees (to the best of our recollection) with Mill in not having a single quotation from any poet in his philosophical " magnum opus." But of all his pursuits theological seem to have been the favourite ; such questions as the possible 3 In his Essay towards a Real Character and Philosophical Lan- guage (1668). The second part of the work was strictly philosophical, the remaining three were on the artificial language proposed. Leibnitz speculated in the same direction. THE VARIETY OF HIS TASTES. 219 restitution of the Jews to Palestine he discussed with the greatest avidity ; and did not shrink from such unortho- dox conclusions on the* expectations of man as that all indi- viduals will ultimately enjoy the same degree of happiness in the future state [i. 486 — 192, and vol. ii. passim], and the like expressions of what Mr. Leslie Stephen 4 calls his "optimism run mad," which remind us of similar speculations on the part of Abraham Tucker. From the above instances the varied nature of Hartley's in- vestigations will be apparent. His personal character and posi- tion shine through his writings. In them we see the patient physician professionally accustomed to " read each wound and weakness clear, And say, c thou ailest here and here/ " but having leisure for other studies in his moments of repose, and willingly seeking relief therein ; — a man of enthusiasm, but of a measured enthusiasm; — loving to speculate on the un- known future, but sober and restrained in his speculations, which generally rested on some solid basis of fact ; — not eager to publish his ideas when red-hot, but preferring to accumulate, to wait, to prove and improve. His position as oscillating between two poles, 5 — between the firm ground of earth and Ariosto's moon-region of abortive fancies, — between the career of the theologian for which he was destined in the first instance and the career of the experimental physician to which he even- tually devoted himself, — is curiously reflected in the form of the first sketch of his system, the Latin treatise above referred to in the Life, which commences modestly in the character of an appendix to a medical tract de Jjithontriptioo, or on reme- dies and solvents for the disease of the stone, and ends with a 4 Hist of Eng. Thought, Sfc, vol. ii. pp. Go, GG, 120. 5 The curious contrasts in Hartley's work are pointed out by Mr. Leslie Stephen {English Thought, Sfc. ii. 61) with his accustomed clearness and vivacity. 22o HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. rhapsodical eulogium of the Christian religion, 6 reminding us strongly of Bishop Berkeley's Slris, which, as Coleridge tells us/ was " announced as an Essay on Tar-water, and began with Tar and ended with the Trinity, the c omne scibile ' form- ing the interspace." In the closing sentences of this little pamphlet he augurs well for logical, ethical, and religious studies from the combined efforts of medicine and philosophy, based on physical science ["sociata opera Medicorum et Philo- sophorum, Lockii et Newtoni vestigiis insistentium "] : while, in his preface to theO&servations, he speaks of the double interest attaching to Association, — first that of tracing it to its physical cause, next that of following out its consequences in morality or religion. He apologizes too for the " many disquisitions foreign to the doctrine of association, which intermixed them- selves " in the course of his work ; disclaims the office of a system-maker ; and says that he did not look for facts to suit his system, but adapted his system to suit the new facts which were every day unfolding themselves to his view, as his labours proceeded. In consequence of this, he fears that the book may seem sketchy and incoherent, some of his doctrines (that of necessity or mental mechanism, in particular) having forced themselves upon him in the course of his undertaking in spite of vehement opposition on the part of his own inclinations and prejudices, and having been dragged, so to speak, with violence into the main body and drift of the treatise. The fact that the different parts of the work were written at different times, and at different stages of his intellectual growth may, he hopes, help to account for redundancies and repetitions, and other blemishes of manner. In upholding the uses of his system he fi Cp. p. 1 with p. 42 of the tractate " De Sensu, Motu, et Idearum Generatione " (in Dr. Parr's Metaphysical Tracts of the Eighteenth Century). 7 Biogr. Lit. p. 143. MILL'S SEVERITY OE STYLE. 221 presents a two-faced aspect ; on the one hand urging its value in medicine, especially pathology and therapeutics, on the other hand showing how it leads to a true conception of logic and mental science, how it destroys logomachies, interprets ethical phenomena successfully, and through them leads the inquirer to religious investigations and truths [De Sensit, &c, pp. 38—40]. Hartley's suggestiveness, combined with thorough intellec- tual candour, (even though that candour induces him occasion- ally to lay bare to his readers sinuous processes of reasoning, and intricate methods of arriving at results, which it would have been better to have concealed), has gained him ten disciples, where James Mill's superior philosophy, encumbered as it is by an ungainly style, has attracted one ; and has even charmed philosophers the most opposed to him in the current and tendency of their beliefs. 8 Mill's manner of philosophizing was very different. His severe simplicity and contempt for philosophical gossip and flowers of rhetoric was one of the distinguishing marks of his school, and as such will be noticed presently. He would turn neither to the right hand nor to the left out of the high road leading direct to the object in view. His own account 9 of the salient features in a coherent, as opposed to a rambling, discourse seems in its most literal sense to have been always present to him. His personal character and intellectual habits were firmer and more earnest — but, it must be added, narrower — than those of Hartley. The differences in point of matter between the two philo- sophers were not great. Such as they were, they arose partly from the peculiarities of the men, partly from the characteristics 8 Such as Coleridge, who called his eldest sun after the name of the philosopher, as a mark of the interest and admiration with which he \v;is then studying him. See Siogr. Lit. p. 86. 9 See Mill's chapter o'i the Will (end of vol. ii. 0? Analysis). 222 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. of the times in which they severally lived. Mill was more bent on the practical application of his views than Hartley, and wrote more with the fervour of a man who expected his creeds to be turned into deeds, and who attached an educational or social value to every opinion which he expressed. Mill com- posed with the rigour and simplicity of a schoolmaster of the world ; Hartley with the ingenuous babbling of a pupil of the world. Consequently the former at once discarded vibrations; for, provided that people can be brought to perceive the uses of association in education, it does not matter what physical theory is put behind it as the cause of the cause. Nor on the other hand will he follow his theory out into the nebulous region of theopathy and theology ; for if men can be induced to con- struct a morality on better associations, they will not be long in constructing a better religion. Like Hartley, Mill deplores the degenerate state of existing methods and principles, and, like him, groans at the "Jarring and inexplicable frame Of this wrong world :" but whereas Hartley contents himself with merely prophesy- ing a " culbute generale " of most of the nations of Christen- dom, Mill sets to work vehemently at schemes of reformation in law, politics, and education. Hartley's literary atmosphere was science and divinity, Mill's was the " philosophical radi- calism " of the Benthamite reformers. If to the former, as Professor Clifford said, must be given the credit of having first seriously handled the problem of the chemistry of the human mind, to the latter must be accorded that of having first thoroughly examined its mechanical forces and the possi- bility of utilizing them for social and educational purposes. But there are few specific theories broached by Hartley which Mill has very much improved, though he has put several of HIS SIMPLICITY OF METHOD. 223 his predecessor's tenets into a more philosophical shape, besides adding some fresh elements of his own to the general system. His chief merit — as J. S. Mill observes [Preface to the Analysis, pp. xvii, xviii] — was a vigorous exercise of the qualities (somewhat lacking in Hartley) " which facilitate the access of recondite thoughts to minds to which they are new:" when, however, the critic goes on to say that the Analysis " attains an elevation far beyond Hartley's " [work] " in the thoughts themselves/' as well as in their arrangement and elucidation, we are disposed to think the praise excessive. The doctrine of Inseparable Association was certainly elabo- rated by Mill, but the principle had been clearly enunciated by Hartley, and both the principle and the name were men- tioned, though not illustrated in any very great detail, by Gay, or whoever may have been the author of the Enquiry info the Origin of the Human Appetites and Affections, 1 notably in these words : " By association I mean that power or faculty by which the first appearance of two or more ideas frequently in the mind, is for the most part changed into a lasting, and sometimes into an inseparable union.'" Mill's analysis of the active or ethical phenomena of the mind was more explicit and accurate than Hartley's; but, on the other hand, he did not apply the doctrine of association to muscular motion with the same success as Hartley, nor did he improve on the latter's law of the three stages in the development of motive power, — automatic, voluntary, and secondarily auto- matic. His analysis, howeve r, of the Will was c ertainly more full and satisfactory than H artl ey's; indeed Har tley had no s pecific treatment of Volition as such, though h ehad a long disc ussion on Necessity or Mechanism (as he preferred to call it) and Freewill, — a subject omitted somewhat unacc ountably 1 In the MetajyJi. Tracts above referred to, p. 68. Cp. Mill's Analysis, vol. i. p. 91. 224 HARTLEY AND JA MES MIL L . by James __Mill — wherein lie carefully distinguished between the " philosophical " doctrine of Freewill which asserts that a man can will two different thing's when all the previous and contemporary circumstances, internal and external*, are the same, — a doctrine transparently false, — and the " practical " or popular doctrine of Freewill, which asserts that a man has control over his own actions, and can exercise choice between two different courses open to him, — a doctrine transparently true. This latter important distinction (not noticed by Mill) has no doubt helped to put moderns on the right track, and to show how meaning-less is the controversy between so-called Libertarians and Necessitarians. 2 Mill's examination of Belief is much more profound and elaborate than that of his prede- cessor, but unfortunately is also less correct, because it bases Belief on the mere juxtaposition of two ideas in the mind, without postulating that irreducible element of conviction which Hartley saw was essential to this process, as distinguished from mere Imagination. Professor Bain it will be seen goes back to Hartley on this point, and dpes not follow Mill : he also (with Hartley) attaches great importance to action as the best, if not the only, evidence of Belief. In his system of Classification, too, Mill, so far as he ignores what have been since called " Natural Kinds/' and regards the process as resulting from nothing beyond a desire for economy in naming, distinctly retrogrades from Hartley. On the other hand, he makes advances on his forerunner's system, in his minute analyses of some of the abstract relative terms. But the 2 It is beginning to be generally understood now tbat Liberty and Necessity are two disparate conceptions, and that to compare one with the other is like comparing an inch with a minute. The proper antithesis to Liberty (in the sense in which it is used by Libertarians in the contro- versy) is Bondage, not Necessity ; to Necessity (in the sense in which it is used by Necessitarians) Chance, not Liberty. HARTLEY'S PREDECESSORS. 225 differences iu the matter of the two philosophers are also partly to be explained from the history of the Association Theory. II. We have alrgady noticed [Part II. ch. i.] the forerunners of Hartley , namely, Ar istot le, H obbes, Loc ke^Gay. and his contemporaries Ab raham Tucker and C o ndillac . Coleridge indeed \_Biogr. Lit,, ch. v.] proposes to add several names to these. He denies the claim of Hobbes's " diseursus mentalis " to be an original solution of the difficulty : and says that these philosophers had been anticipated by Descartes in his treatise Be Methodo, which appeared a year before the Human Nature. Descartes constructed on association principles a theory of human language and naming", much as Mill did after him. But, like Hartley, he resorted to a physical hypothesis to explain the intellectual operation, and for that purpose brought in " nervous fluids " and material configurations of the brain, instead of, like Aristotle and Mill, resting content with the latter as ultimate and irreducible. In his physical doctrines he headed the class of " humoral pathologists" (as Coleridge calls them), as opposed to the other physicists headed by Hartley, who resorted to vibrations and an oscillating cether, 3 or to the more modern sect who appeal to " chemical composition by electric affinity." Nor is it certain (according to Coleridge) that there was much originality in Hume's Essay on Association, the idea of which treatise he is suspected of having borrowed from St. Thomas Aquinas's Commentary on the Parva Naturalia of Aristotle. 4 ;i These two rival theories are clearly described by Gay in the "Enquiry above mentioned [p. 60]. The nerves in the former case are regarded says Gay, as bundles of threads or fibres, along which a tremor passes during sensation ; in the latter case, they are considered as tubular, and filled with a subtle fluid, or animal spirits. On Vibrations, see further Kibot \_Contemp. Engl. Psych., Etig. Transl.~\ p. 282, sqq. 4 A copy of this work, once in Hume's possession, was found to have Q 226 HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. Moreover, the functions of Association had been set out long before even- Hobbes by the non-scholastic Aristotelians Me- lanchthon, Ammerbach, and Ludovicus Vives. The upshot of Coleridge's account of these pre-Hartleian gropings is that they were all based on the teaching of the " gran maestro di coloro che sanno : " and that, moreover, Aristotle was often nearer to the truth than those of his successors who sought to improve upon him, in that, while clearly setting down in the Be Animd five distinct principles of association,* he yet guarded himself against going beyond what the facts warranted, and sternly rejected physical hypotheses. Such then was the intellectual ancestry of Hartley. Be- tween the commencement of Hartley's and the close of James Mill's life, we find in iha_sanie way of thinking Priestley and the elder Darwin, and other disciples of Hartley, and, in France, Condillac. From the last-named, however, Mill (accord- ing to his son) did not derive nearly so much aid as from Hartley^ compared with whose painstaking suggestons Con- dillac's generalizations seemed barren and void. [J. S. Mill's Aid oh. p. 68]. Tucker wit h his " transl ation," and Brown with his hints as to "relative suggestion," which were their res pe ctive names for association, (though the latter seems to have rather struck out a line of his own to some degree), were the next to follow. Belsham developed the moral side of Hartley's theory, and Alison [On Taste) the aesthetic. Helvetius, Rousseau, Cabanis, Darwin, and Bentham in their different ways paid attention to the educational aspect of Associationism ; Bentham and been read and carefully annotated by bim, wben subsequently lent to a friend by Sir James Mackintosh, into whose hands it eventually came. fi Namely (1) connexion in time, whether simultaneous or successive, (2) vicinity in space, (3) necessary connexion, such as that of cause and effect, (4) similarity, (5) contrast. MILL AND THE BENTHAMITES. 227 Austin to the legal. The improvements in science which took place in the interval which separated the two men are also very remarkable, as well as the influence of Bentham and his fol- lowers in other and more practical directions, some account of which, as having- largely helped to determine the line adopted by James Mill in philosophy as contrasted with that of Hartley, would seem to be necessary here. James Mill expresses himself, in the Fragment on Mack- intosh, very indignant at the supposition of there being in existence any Benthamite school at that time. Still there is no doubt, — indeed, it has been recorded by J. S. Mill in the AatoUographj, — that there existed a body of men distinguished by certain common characteristics, aiming at certain common objects, and united together by a bond of strong moral and intellectual sympathy: the most prominent names among them being those of Bentham and James Mill. These common characteristics were a deep-rooted love of clearness and simpli- city in writing and conversation, a tendency to mathematical precision, an utter contempt for sentiment in ethics, and for the graces of style and art in composition, an ardour and even bitterness in controversy, an abhorrence of everything which seemed like mystery, or presumed to defy the analytical processes in which they manifested such an unbounded belief. The common objects resulted from the common creed. Believing that men were formed by circumstances, these phi- losophers attached the highest value to education and legislation. Believing that the greatest good of the greatest number was the proper end of action and thought, they were always busy propagandists of their tenets. Believing that theory was all- powerful, that no hard and fast line could be drawn between the theoretically sound and the practically feasible, and that every simple and intelligible system only required energy and determination to convert it at once into a body of maxims Q % 228 HA R TLE Y AND 7 A MES MILL. and motives, they set to work in all directions with undaunted applications of their brand-new doctrines to the crude material of fact. And it is in these applications that Assoeiationism and Utilitarianism have achieved their highest triumphs. It is difficult to overrate the importance of the effects which the former doctrine has had in the region of education (however incomplete an explanation we may deem it of the entire opera- tions of the mind), or of the latter in legislation (under Bentham's and Austin's auspices), however unsatisfactory an account we may think this again of duty and the entire moral life in all its relations. Though we may believe that the mind is something far too subtle in its workings to be explained on the iEolian harp principle as the sport of circumstance, and the conscience not simple enough to be accounted for on the hypothesis of metaphorical pulleys and weights and levers ; 3 r et these chemical and mechanical laws (true in themselves, and only false when offered as interpreting more than they can) are of the utmost use in the practical fields to which they have been applied, since for these purposes it does no harm, and produces no error in our calculations, to regard men as building their habits of thought solely on association, or as led to act solely by a consideration of their own interests. In Legislation and in Education, as in Political Economy (as has been before noticed), we are at liberty to isolate special characteristics and tendencies of human nature from those ordinarily acting in conjunction, and intertwined, with them. But the result of this isolation, when put forward as a full and complete theo- retical justification of morality, is not allowable ; and this is the mistake which the school of Bentham and James Mill, as also some of their successors, though to a far less degree, have made. The theories in question are it is true palpable and plausible to ordinary intellects : most theories containing one principle are. " Here is something we can understand, couched in MILL AND THE BENTHAMITES. 229 plain language/' is the Philistine's encomium : but though plain language deserves all praise where it is possible, the plainness and popularity of the doctrines conveyed, when we consider the complexity of the phenomena analyzed, make rather against than for their truth. 6 The simplicity affected by their professors is of itself calculated to excite suspicion in the minds of the reflective. Is everything, one asks, really so simple as this ? Are we to believe that we can only move people to act rightly from motives of self-interest (however refined that self-interest may be) ? Is it true that one man or body of men in the possession of political power will constantly endeavour to rob all the other citizens for their own advantage, unless restrained by checks and police ? Do we account for the mazes of a creative imagination, when we have talked of trains and sequences of ideas, and dispelled (to our own satis- faction) all " mystery " on the subject ? This tendency to simplification, and devotion to theory, characteristic of the Bentham school was shared in ample measure by James Mill. J. S. Mill [Preface to the Analysis, pp. xix, xx,] notices this feature, accompanied "with a certain impatience of detail" in his father's philosophizing. The latter was so anxious to seize upon some commanding and comprehensive law under which all the phenomena might be subsumed, — to attain some " specular mount " from which a flood of light might be thrown on the widest possible extent of material, — that minutiae escaped him. Correction and modification were not his strong points. He longed to jump at once to the "Summa Axiom ata," without either verifying them afterwards by a reference to intermediate laws, or previously passing through the intermediate laws to them. He takes a simple and obvious principle, Association. (1 As Malebranche says [Z>e Inquircndd Yeritate, lib. iii. p. 194] : " the assent and approbation of tbo vulgar on a difficult subject is a sure argument of the falsity of the opinion to which the assent is given." 2 3 o HARTLEY AND JAMES MILL. and fits it off-hand to every imaginable case. He will re- cognize no conception, no faculty, as ultimate. All must be reduced to this principle. Hartley indeed was not quite so exacting in his assertion of the authority of this law ; but then his idol was an idol of the theatre, as well as of the tribe, in the shape of the all-sufficient vibrations. We find, conse- quently, that the efforts of Mill's successors in the way of improving the general theory were directed almost entirely to rigidly limiting its extensive application both by its founder and its " second founder/' and to the recognition of more and more ultimate faculties and metaphysical conceptions. In this way Profes sor Bain has re cog nized an unanalyz able element in B elief and in Mus c ular Re sistance [A nal, ii. 3 1 ], and simila rly J . S. M ill holds Memory a nd Expectation to i nvolve T^lipf, and Belie f to be u l timate, as also _T_sea his-work onJE[ami]ton] the co nception of the Self . All these James Mill considers to be cases of Association ; and, by his extreme anxiety to maintain this view, he is sometimes driven into curious straits, as, for instance, where he is forced to explain Belief by the Self (or Personal Identity), and the Self by Belief. Resemblance, Difference (as a case of Resemblance) Quality, Causality, which JamesMill equally holds to be instances of Asso- ciation, J. S. Mill re gards a s either jjl ementary , o r at all events involving somethiiig beyond_Association : and to thlTultimate elements_of Resemblance and Contrast, Professor Bain add_s_Conti guity [Anal, ii. 120]. Indeed the latest professors of the doctrine agree as to the unanalyzable nature of nearly all the leading metaphysical conceptions and distinctions, which James Mill believed quite capable of analysis, excepting only the distinction between Sensa- tions and Ideas, which even he was compelled to postulate as ultimate. We may notice a few more instances of the manner in which DEFECTS OF MILES THEORIES. 231 James Mill's successors split up supposed identities, and modified the application of that Law of Parcimony — ("causes and existences are not to be multiplied more than is neces- sary") — to which he gave such undiscriminating- allegiance. Nothin g is more characteri stic nf .Tn.mog iyn^'« philn g "phy than the denial of the di stinction bet ween hav ing a feeling _ _a o an d atten din g to or he in