Produced by Ed Brandon
ANALYSIS
OF THE PHENOMENA OF THE
HUMAN MIND
BY JAMES MILL
WITH NOTES ILLUSTRATIVE AND CRITICAL BY
ALEXANDER BAIN
ANDREW FINDLATER
AND
GEORGE GROTE
EDITED WITH ADDITIONAL NOTES BY
JOHN STUART MILL
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I.
SECOND EDITION
LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, READER, AND DYER.
1878
"In order to prepare the way for a just and comprehensive system of
Logic, a previous survey of our nature, considered as a great whole,
is an indispensable requisite."--_Philosophical Essays_ (_Prelim.
Dissert._) p. lxvii. _by Dugald Stewart, Esq._
"Would not Education be necessarily rendered more systematical and
enlightened, if the powers and faculties on which it operates were
more scientifically examined, and better understood?" _Ibid._ p.
xlviii.
[_Right of Translation reserved._]
PREFACE
TO
THE PRESENT EDITION.
IN the study of Nature, either mental or physical, the aim of the
scientific enquirer is to diminish as much as possible the catalogue
of ultimate truths. When, without doing violence to facts, he is
able to bring one phenomenon within the laws of another; when he can
shew that a fact or agency, which seemed to be original and
distinct, could have been produced by other known facts and
agencies, acting according to their own laws; the enquirer who has
arrived at this result, considers himself to have made an important
advance in the knowledge of nature, and to have brought science, in
that department, a step nearer to perfection. Other accessions to
science, however important practically, are, in a scientific point
of view, mere additions to the materials: this is something done
towards perfecting the structure itself.
The manner in which this scientific improvement takes place is by
the resolution of phenomena which {vi} are special and complex into
others more general and simple. Two cases of this sort may be
roughly distinguished, though the distinction between them will not
be found on accurate examination to be fundamental. In one case it
is the order of the phenomena that is analysed and simplified; in
the other it is the phenomena themselves. When the observed facts
relating to the weight of terrestrial objects, and those relating to
the motion of the heavenly bodies, were found to conform to one and
the same law, that of the gravitation of every particle of matter to
every other particle with a force varying as the inverse square of
the distance, this was an example of the first kind. The order of
the phenomena was resolved into a more general law. A great number
of the successions which take place in the material world were shewn
to be particular cases of a law of causation pervading all Nature.
The other class of investigations are those which deal, not with the
successions of phenomena, but with the complex phenomena themselves,
and disclose to us that the very fact which we are studying is made
up of simpler facts: as when the substance Water was found to be an
actual compound of two other bodies, hydrogen and oxygen; substances
very unlike itself, but both actually present in every one of its
particles. By processes like those employed in this case, all the
variety of substances which meet our senses and compose the planet
on which we live, have been shewn to be {vii} constituted by the
intimate union, in a certain number of fixed proportions, of some
two or more of sixty or seventy bodies, called Elements or Simple
Substances, by which is only meant that they have not hitherto been
found capable of further decomposition. This last process is known
by the name of chemical analysis: but the first mentioned, of which
the Newtonian generalization is the most perfect type, is no less
analytical. The difference is, that the one analyses substances into
simpler substances; the other, laws into simpler laws. The one is
partly a physical operation; the other is wholly intellectual.
Both these processes are as largely applicable, and as much
required, in the investigation of mental phenomena as of material.
And in the one case as in the other, the advance of scientific
knowledge may be measured by the progress made in resolving complex
facts into simpler ones.
The phenomena of the Mind include multitudes of facts, of an
extraordinary degree of complexity. By observing them one at a time
with sufficient care, it is possible in the mental, as it is in the
material world, to obtain empirical generalizations of limited
compass, but of great value for practice. When, however, we find it
possible to connect many of these detached generalizations together,
by discovering the more general laws of which they are cases, and to
the operation of which in some particular sets of {viii}
circumstances they are due, we gain not only a scientific, but a
practical advantage; for we then first learn how far we can rely on
the more limited generalizations; within what conditions their truth
is confined; by what changes of circumstances they would be defeated
or modified.
Not only is the order in which the more complex mental phenomena
follow or accompany one another, reducible, by an analysis similar
in kind to the Newtonian, to a comparatively small number of laws of
succession among simpler facts, connected as cause and effect; but
the phenomena themselves can mostly be shewn, by an analysis
resembling those of chemistry, to be made up of simpler phenomena.
"In the mind of man," says Dr. Thomas Brown, in one of his
Introductory Lectures, "all is in a state of constant and
ever-varying complexity, and a single sentiment may be the slow
result of innumerable feelings. There is not a single pleasure, or
pain, or thought, or emotion, that may not, by the influence of that
associating principle which is afterwards to come under our
consideration, be so connected with other pleasures, or pains, or
thoughts, or emotions, as to form with them, for ever after, an
union the most intimate. The complex, or seemingly complex,
phenomena of thought, which result from the constant operation of
this principle of the mind, it is the labour of the intellectual
inquirer to analyse, as {ix} it is the labour of the chemist to
reduce the compound bodies on which he operates, however close and
intimate their combination may be, to their constituent elements....
From the very instant of its first existence, the mind is constantly
exhibiting phenomena more and more complex: sensations, thoughts,
emotions, all mingling together, and almost every feeling modifying,
in some greater or less degree, the feelings that succeed it; and
as, in chemistry, it often happens that the qualities of the
separate ingredients of a compound body are not recognizable by us in
the apparently different qualities of the compound itself,--so in
this spontaneous chemistry of the mind, the compound sentiment that
results from the association of former feelings has, in many cases,
on first consideration, so little resemblance to these constituents
of it, as formerly existing in their elementary state, that it
requires the most attentive reflection to separate, and evolve
distinctly to others, the assemblages which even a few years may
have produced. It is, therefore, scarcely possible to advance even a
single step, in intellectual physics, without the necessity of
performing some sort of analysis, by which we reduce to simpler
elements some complex feeling that seems to us virtually to involve
them."
These explanations define and characterize the task which was
proposed to himself by the author of the {x} present treatise, and
which he concisely expressed by naming his work an Analysis of the
Phenomena of the Human Mind. It is an attempt to reach the simplest
elements which by their combination generate the manifold complexity
of our mental states, and to assign the laws of those elements, and
the elementary laws of their combination, from which laws, the
subordinate ones which govern the compound states are consequences
and corollaries.
The conception of the problem did not, of course, originate with the
author; he merely applied to mental science the idea of scientific
inquiry which had been matured by the successful pursuit, for many
generations, of the knowledge of external nature. Even in the
particular path by which he endeavoured to reach the end, he had
eminent precursors. The analytic study of the facts of the human
mind began with Aristotle; it was first carried to a considerable
height by Hobbes and Locke, who are the real founders of that view
of the Mind which regards the greater part of its intellectual
structure as having been built up by Experience. These three
philosophers have all left their names identified with the great
fundamental law of Association of Ideas; yet none of them saw far
enough to perceive that it is through this law that Experience
operates in moulding our thoughts and forming our thinking powers.
Dr. Hartley was the man of genius who first clearly {xi} discerned
that this is the key to the explanation of the more complex mental
phenomena, though he, too, was indebted for the original conjecture
to another wise forgotten thinker, Mr. Gay. Dr. Hartley's treatise
("Observations on Man") goes over the whole field of the mental
phenomena, both intellectual and emotional, and points out the way
in which, as he thinks, sensations, ideas of sensation, and
association, generate and account for the principal complications of
our mental nature. If this doctrine is destined to be accepted as,
in the main, the true theory of the Mind, to Hartley will always
belong the glory of having originated it. But his book made scarcely
any impression upon the thought of his age. He incumbered his theory
of Association with a premature hypothesis respecting the physical
mechanism of sensation and thought; and even had he not done so, his
mode of exposition was little calculated to make any converts but
such as were capable of working out the system for themselves from a
few hints. His book is made up of hints rather than of proofs. It is
like the production of a thinker who has carried his doctrines so
long in his mind without communicating them, that he has become
accustomed to leap over many of the intermediate links necessary for
enabling other persons to reach his conclusions, and who, when at
last he sits down to write, is unable to recover them. It was
another great disadvantage to Hartley's theory, that its {xii}
publication so nearly coincided with the commencement of the
reaction against the Experience psychology, provoked by the hardy
scepticism of Hume. From these various causes, though the philosophy
of Hartley never died out, having been kept alive by Priestley, the
elder Darwin, and their pupils, it was generally neglected, until at
length the author of the present work gave it an importance that it
can never again lose. One distinguished thinker, Dr. Thomas Brown,
regarded some of the mental phenomena from a point of view similar
to Hartley's, and all that he did for psychology was in this
direction; but he had read Hartley's work either very superficially,
or not at all: he seems to have derived nothing from it, and though
he made some successful analyses of mental phenomena by means of the
laws of association, he rejected, or ignored, the more searching
applications of those laws; resting content, when he arrived at the
more difficult problems, with mere verbal generalizations, such as
his futile explanations by what he termed "relative suggestion."
Brown's psychology was no outcome of Hartley's; it must be classed
as an original but feebler effort in a somewhat similar direction.
It is to the author of the present volumes that the honour belongs
of being the reviver and second founder of the Association
psychology. Great as is this merit, it was but one among many
services which he rendered to his generation and to mankind. When
{xiii} the literary and philosophical history of this century comes
to be written as it deserves to be, very few are the names figuring
in it to whom as high a place will be awarded as to James Mill. In
the vigour and penetration of his intellect he has had few superiors
in the history of thought: in the wide compass of the human
interests which he cared for and served, he was almost equally
remarkable: and the energy and determination of his character,
giving effect to as single-minded an ardour for the improvement of
mankind and of human life as I believe has ever existed, make his
life a memorable example. All his work as a thinker was devoted to
the service of mankind, either by the direct improvement of their
beliefs and sentiments, or by warring against the various influences
which he regarded as obstacles to their progress: and while he put
as much conscientious thought and labour into everything he did, as
if he had never done anything else, the subjects on which he wrote
took as wide a range as if he had written without any labour at all.
That the same man should have been the author of the History of
India and of the present treatise, is of itself sufficiently
significant. The former of those works, which by most men would have
been thought a sufficient achievement for a whole literary life, may
be said without exaggeration to have been the commencement of
rational thinking on the subject of India: and by that, and his
subsequent {xiv} labours as an administrator of Indian interests
under the East India Company, he effected a great amount of good,
and laid the foundation of much more, to the many millions of
Asiatics for whose bad or good government his country is
responsible. The same great work is full of far-reaching ideas on
the practical interests of the world; and while forming an important
chapter in the history and philosophy of civilization (a subject
which had not then been so scientifically studied as it has been
since) it is one of the most valuable contributions yet made even to
the English history of the period it embraces. If, in addition to
the History and to the present treatise, all the author's minor
writings were collected; the outline treatises on nearly all the
great branches of moral and political science which he drew up for
the Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica, and his countless
contributions to many periodical works; although advanced thinkers
have outgrown some of his opinions, and include, on many subjects,
in their speculations, a wider range of considerations than his,
every one would be astonished at the variety of his topics, and the
abundance of the knowledge he exhibited respecting them all. One of
his minor services was, that he was the first to put together in a
compact and systematic form, and in a manner, adapted to learners,
the principles of Political Economy as renovated by the genius of
Ricardo: whose great {xv} work, it may be mentioned by the way,
would probably never have seen the light, if his intimate and
attached friend Mr. Mill had not encouraged and urged him, first to
commit to paper his profound thoughts, and afterwards to send them
forth to the world. Many other cases might be mentioned in which Mr.
Mill's private and personal influence was a means of doing good,
hardly inferior to his public exertions. Though, like all who value
their time for higher purposes, he went little into what is called
society, he helped, encouraged, and not seldom prompted, many of the
men who were most useful in their generation: from his obscure
privacy he was during many years of his life the soul of what is now
called the advanced Liberal party; and such was the effect of his
conversation, and of the tone of his character, on those who were
within reach of its influence, that many, then young, who have since
made themselves honoured in the world by a valuable career, look
back to their intercourse with him as having had a considerable
share in deciding their course through life. The most distinguished
of them all, Mr. Grote, has put on record, in a recent publication,
his sense of these obligations, in terms equally honourable to both.
As a converser, Mr. Mill has had few equals; as an argumentative
converser, in modern tunes probably none. All his mental resources
seemed to be at his command at any moment, and were then freely
{xvi} employed in removing difficulties which in his writings for
the public he often did not think it worth while to notice. To a
logical acumen which has always been acknowledged, he united a clear
appreciation of the practical side of things, for which he did not
always receive credit from those who had no personal knowledge of
him, but which made a deep impression on those who were acquainted
with the official correspondence of the East India Company conducted
by him. The moral qualities which shone in his conversation were, if
possible, more valuable to those who had the privilege of sharing
it, than even the intellectual. They were precisely such as young
men of cultivated intellect, with good aspirations but a character
not yet thoroughly formed, are likely to derive most benefit from. A
deeply rooted trust in the general progress of the human race,
joined with a good sense which made him never build unreasonable or
exaggerated hopes on any one event or contingency; an habitual
estimate of men according to their real worth as sources of good to
their fellow-creatures, and an unaffected contempt for the
weaknesses or temptations that divert them from that object, making
those with whom he conversed feel how painful it would be to them to
be counted by him among such backsliders; a sustained earnestness,
in which neither vanity nor personal ambition had any part, and
which spread from him by a sympathetic contagion to those {xvii} who
had sufficient moral preparation to value and seek the opportunity;
this was the mixture of qualities which made his conversation almost
unrivalled in its salutary moral effect. He has been accused of
asperity, and there was asperity in some few of his writings; but no
party spirit, personal rivalry, or wounded _amour-propre_ ever
stirred it up. Even when he had received direct personal offence, he
was the most placable of men. The bitterest and ablest attack ever
publicly made on him was that which was the immediate cause of the
introduction of Mr. Macaulay into public life. He felt it keenly at
the time, but with a quite impersonal feeling, as he would have felt
any thing that he thought unjustly said against any opinion or cause
which was dear to him; and within a very few years afterwards he was
on terms of personal friendship with its author, as Lord Macaulay
himself, in a very creditable passage of the preface to his
collected Essays, has, in feeling terms, commemorated.
At an early period of Mr. Mill's philosophical life, Hartley's work
had taken a strong hold of his mind; and in the maturity of his
powers he formed and executed the purpose of following up Hartley's
leading thought, and completing what that thinker had begun. The
result was the present work, which is not only an immense advance on
Hartley's in the qualities which facilitate the access of recondite
{xviii} thoughts to minds to which they are new, but attains an
elevation far beyond Hartley's in the thoughts themselves. Compared
with it, Hartley's is little more than a sketch, though an eminently
suggestive one: often rather showing where to seek for the
explanation of the more complex mental phenomena, than actually
explaining them. The present treatise makes clear, much that Hartley
left obscure: it possesses the great secret for clearness, though a
secret commonly neglected--it bestows an extra amount of explanation
and exemplification on the most elementary parts. It analyses many
important mental phenomena which Hartley passed over, and analyses
more completely and satisfactorily most of those of which he
commenced the analysis. In particular, the author was the first who
fully understood and expounded (though the germs of this as of all
the rest of the theory are in Hartley) the remarkable case of
Inseparable Association: and inasmuch as many of the more difficult
analyses of the mental phenomena can only be performed by the aid of
that doctrine, much had been left for him to analyse.
I am far from thinking that the more recondite specimens of analysis
in this work are always successful, or that the author has not left
something to be corrected as well as much to be completed by his
successors. The completion has been especially the work of two
distinguished thinkers in the present {xix} generation, Professor
Bain and Mr. Herbert Spencer; in the writings of both of whom, the
Association Psychology has reached a still higher development. The
former of these has favoured me with his invaluable collaboration in
annotating the present work. In the annotations it has been our
object not only to illustrate and enforce, but to criticise, where
criticism seemed called for. What there is in the work that seems to
need correction, arises chiefly from two causes. First, the
imperfection of physiological science at the time at which it was
written, and the much greater knowledge since acquired of the
functions of our nervous organism and their relations with the
mental operations. Secondly, an opening was made for some mistakes,
and occasional insufficiency of analysis, by a mental quality which
the author exhibits not unfrequently in his speculations, though as
a practical thinker both on public and on private matters it was
quite otherwise; a certain impatience of detail. The bent of his
mind was towards that, in which also his greatest strength lay; in
seizing the larger features of a subject--the commanding laws which
govern and connect many phenomena. Having reached these, he
sometimes gives himself up to the current of thoughts which those
comprehensive laws suggest, not stopping to guard himself carefully
in the minutiæ of their application, nor devoting much of his
thoughts to anticipating all the objections that {xx} could be made,
though the necessity of replying to some of them might have led him
to detect imperfections in his analyses. From this cause (as it
appears to me), he has occasionally gone further in the pursuit of
simplification, and in the reduction of the more recondite mental
phenomena to the more elementary, than I am able to follow him; and
has left some of his opinions open to objections, which he has not
afforded the means of answering. When this appeared to Mr. Bain or
myself to be the case, we have made such attempts as we were able to
place the matter in a clearer light; and one or other, or both, have
supplied what our own investigations or those of others have
provided, towards correcting any shortcomings in the theory.
Mr. Findlater, of Edinburgh, Editor of Chambers' Cyclopædia, has
kindly communicated, from the rich stores of his philological
knowledge, the corrections required by the somewhat obsolete
philology which the author had borrowed from Horne Tooke. For the
rectification of an erroneous statement respecting the relation of
the Aristotelian doctrine of General Ideas to the Platonic, and for
some other contributions in which historical is combined with
philosophical interest, I am indebted to the illustrious historian
of Greece and of the Greek philosophy. Mr. Grote's, Mr. Bain's and
Mr. Findlater's notes are distinguished by their initials; my own,
as those of the Editor. {xxi}
The question presented itself, whether the annotations would be most
useful, collected at the end of the work, or appended to the
chapters or passages to which they more particularly relate. Either
plan has its recommendations, but those of the course which I have
adopted seemed to me on the whole to preponderate. The reader can,
if he thinks fit, (and, if he is a real student, I venture to
recommend that he should do so) combine the advantages of both
modes, by giving a first careful reading to the book itself, or at
all events to every successive chapter of the book, without paying
any attention to the annotations. No other mode of proceeding will
give perfectly fair play to the author, whose thoughts will in this
manner have as full an opportunity of impressing themselves on the
mind, without having their consecutiveness broken in upon by any
other person's thoughts, as they would have had if simply
republished without comment. When the student has done all he can
with the author's own exposition--has possessed himself of the
ideas, and felt, perhaps, some of the difficulties, he will be in a
better position for profiting by any aid that the notes may afford,
and will be in less danger of accepting, without due examination,
the opinion of the last comer as the best.
CONTENTS
OF
THE FIRST VOLUME.
* * * * *
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER I.
Sensation 2
SECTION 1. Smell 7
2. Hearing 16
3. Sight 21
4. Taste 25
5. Touch 28
6. Sensations of Disorganization, or of the Approach to
Disorganization, in any part of the Body 37
7. Muscular Sensations, or those Feelings which
accompany the Action of the Muscles 40
8. Sensations in the Alimentary Canal 45
CHAPTER II.
Ideas 51
CHAPTER III.
The Association of Ideas 70
CHAPTER IV.
Naming 127
SECTION 1. Nouns Substantive 134
2. Nouns Adjective 144
3. Verbs 151
4. Predication 159
{xxiv}
SECTION 5. Pronouns 194
6. Adverbs 199
7. Prepositions 201
8. Conjunctions 212
CHAPTER V.
Consciousness 223