"In 1828 he was promoted to be assistant examiner, and in 18.56 he succeeded to the post of chief examiner, after which his duty consisted rather in supervising what his assistants had written than in writing himself; but for the tliiee-and-twciity years preceding he had had im- mediate cliarge of tlie political department, and had writ- ten almost every 'iMilitiral' (lcs])at(h of any importance tliat conveyed the iii>u unions of the merchant princes ofLeadenlmll Street to tlicii- pro-ron^als in Asia. Of the quality ofthe-e documents it is suirnient to say that they were John Mill's; but in res|)eet 1(j llicir (|naulily, it iiiav be worth mentioning that a descii])i ive caialoLriie oi'ihiin completely Alls a small quarto volume of liei \\ ecu ::(iii and 400 pages, in their author's handwi iiin^, whiili now lies before me; also that the share of the Court of Directors in the correspondence between themselves and tlie Indian government used to averat'e annually about ten huge velliim-bouud volumes, foolscap size, and live or six inches thick, and that of these volumes, two a year, for nioie than twenty years running, were exclusively of ISIill's composition : this, too, at times when he was en- gaired upon such voluntary work in addition as his Logic and Political Economy" {Memorial, p. 31).'
Mill remained with the East India Company until its extinction in 1858. In 1865 he was elected to Parliament, and acted with the advanced liberals, but lost his seat in 18(38. In 1867 he was chosen rec- tor of St. Andrew's University, Edinburgh. In 1869 his wife, whom he adored, died, and in order to be ever near her grave he removed to Avignon, France, and there spent the remainder of his life. He died May 9, 1873.
While yet a youth we have seen Mill a writer of va- rious essays. They were of such a bold and thoughtful character as to secure him even then a prominent place in the Edinburgh and Westminster Revie%cs, and from 1834 to 1840 he was editor in chief of the latter. In 1827 he was intrusted with the editorship of Bentham's Rationale of Judicial Evidence. But his great produc- tion he brought out when he was thirty-eight years old, and at once secured by the System of Logic, Ratio- cinatire ami Inductive (Lond. 1843, 2 vols. 8vo ; repub- lished, N. Y., Harpers, 1864, from the 8th ed.), a world- wide reputation. It is a perfect exhibit of his philosophy, notwithstanding his claim that he seeks simply to dis- cover and expound the proper method of investigating truth, without pledging himself to any system of specu- lative philosophy. " There are so many points of a spec- ulative nature touched upon, all in the spirit of the Analysis, that he must necessarily be regarded as a partisan of the modern Lockian school of metaphysics" (Morell, p. 252). Mill has developed in his Logic the deductive principle and its application to logic as a sci-
ence, and thus has lent special value to his work. The last hundred pages are taken np with what the author calls " the logic of the moral sciences." Here, as he tells us, he makes "an attempt to contribute towards the solution of a question which the decay of old opin- ions, and the agitation which disturbs European society . to its inmost depths, render as important in the present day to the practical interests of human life as it must at all times be to the completeness of our speculative knowledge, viz. wdiether moral and social phenomena are really exceptions to the general certainty and uni- formity of the course of nature, and how far the meth- ods by which so many of the laws of the physical world have been numbered among truths irrevocably acquired and universally assented to can be made instrumental to the formation of a similar body of received doctrine in moral and political science." The Logic, together with an Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865), and his editorial corrections and comments on his father's -1 nalysis of the Human Mind, constitute John Stuart Jlill's philosophical works. From these it is apparent that, as Dr. Porter says (in Ueberweg's Hist. ofPhilos. ii, 427-429),
"The physiological fouudation on which he builds is the system of James Mill, moditied by that of Dr. Thomas Brown. He carefully insists, however, that he neither accepts nor inculcates any system of metaphysics. But the system of metaphysics which he usually applies is substantially that of Hobbes, Hume, and Comte. He does not rigidly adhere, however, either to the psychology or to the philosophy which characterizes or controls his con- clusions. He differs from his father in holding the act of belief to be something more than an inseparable as- sociation of one object with another (compare James Mill's Analysis, 2d edition, chap, xi, note); that causa- tion is a terra which it is indispensable we should use in our analysis of the conceptions of matter and mind; and that certain axioms are the necessary foundations of mathematical and physical sciences, but are themselves tlie prodnrts of indurtiou (comi). Logic, passim). After a loiri .-ind 1,-iliorions an.ily^is, he reaches the conclusion th:ii ni:iii''i- iini^t l)i' ilrtined as ' a permaueut possibility of si'iis iiion,' and thai ' niiud is resolved into a series of feelill,L■■^•, wiih a baekgidiuid of possibilities of feeling.' He concedes that in adhering to this deflnitiou 'we are re- duced to the alternatixe of believing that the mind, or ego, is soniethiuir diflerent from any series of feelings or pos- sibilities of them, or else of accepting the paradox that something which, ex hypothesi, is but a series of feelings can be aware of itself as a scries.' In respect to the beliefi in the real existence of the external world, he concedes that it cannot be proved philosophically, and can only be justified by the consideration that 'the world of possible sensations, succeeding one another according to laws, is as much in other beings as it is in me ; it has therefore an existence outside me; it is an external world' (comp. Exam, of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosoiihy, ch. xi, xii, xiii)."