The rulers of Ming China would not have recognized the region known today as Southeast Asia. They considered the archipelago east of Brunei (modern Borneo) to be part of that area they termed the Eastern Oceans, while all other coastal states they considered part of the Western Oceans, which, for long periods in their nomenclature, also included countries bordering on the Indian Ocean. Those states which comprised what are now modern Burma, Laos, and northern Thailand, were grouped quite differendy from the other nations comprising the Eastern or Western Oceans.

The view of other nations held at the imperial capital at Nanking or Peking was always sinocentric. Foreign countries were considered to have no meaningful existence unless their rulers had a relationship with the emperor of China. Such factors as the country's distance from China's capital, whether the country shared a border with the empire or not, and whether the country was important to the empire's defense were also deemed significant. There were held to be technical differences between nations as well: countries which sent missions through Ch'üan-chou in Fukien were distinguished by the court from countries whose missions entered China through Canton in Kwangtung; and countries sending overland missions from beyond the provinces of Kwangsi and Yunnan were considered yet different again from the others. Certain general principles concerning the proper conduct of foreign relations that the Chinese court continually emphasized notwithstanding, what remained most important in determining Chinese foreign policy toward Southeast Asia were the political conditions prevailing at the particular time during the dynasty.

INTRODUCTION

Mill would have found it entirely appropriate that, in a collection on his philosophy, attention should be paid to his political writings and to their reception, which itself had a strong political dimension. Mill saw his political ideas as an integral part of his philosophy, and his philosophical battles as also political battles whose outcome had great practical importance. He stated this explicitly in his Autobiography in the survey of his aims in writing his principal philosophical books, A System of Logic and An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy. He thought it crucial to set out in the Logic the true philosophy, deriving all knowledge from experience, because it was “hardly possible to exaggerate” the practical mischiefs done in morals, politics, and religion by the false philosophy that “truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience”. The latter was “the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions” because it allowed “every inveterate belief and every intense feeling, of which the origin is not remembered... to dispense with the obligation of justifying itself by reason....” “There never was”, Mill concludes, “such an instrument devised for consecrating all deep seated prejudices.”

John Stuart Mill's views about arithmetic and geometry have probably attracted more ridicule and disdain than the positions of any other thinker in the history of the philosophy of mathematics. I believe that the unfavorable assessment of Mill is quite unwarranted, resting in part on misunderstandings of his position born of hasty misreading (sometimes, one suspects, of reading only the scornful remarks of his influential critics), in part on commitments to a view of philosophy quite different from that which moved Mill. In this chapter I shall try to set the record straight.

Because it is essential to any clear appreciation of Mill's ideas about mathematics to recognize the problems he attempted to address, we should begin by contrasting two large conceptions of philosophy in general and of the philosophy of mathematics in particular. One of these conceptions, which I shall call “transcendentalism”, believes that a central task of philosophy is to identify fundamental conditions on human thought, representation, or experience, and that this enterprise is to be carried out by special philosophical methods that yield knowledge quite independently of experience or of the deliverances of the natural sciences. Prime examples of transcendentalist philosophy can be found in Kant, in Frege, and, in recent philosophy, in the writings of Michael Dummett.

Mill's essay On Liberty had both the good and the ill fortune to become a “classic”on first publication. The immediate success of the book, dedicated as it was to preserving the memory of Harriet Taylor, could only gratify its author. Yet its friends and foes alike fell upon it with such enthusiasm that the essay itself has ever since been hard to see for the smoke of battle. That it is a liberal manifesto is clear beyond doubt; what the liberalism is that it defends and how it defends it remain matters of controversy. Given the lucidity of Mill's prose and the seeming simplicity and transparency of his arguments, this is astonishing; ought we not to know by now whether the essay's main target is the hold of Christianity on the Victorian mind or rather the hold of a monolithic public opinion of whatever kind; whether its intellectual basis lies in utility as Mill claimed or in a covert appeal to natural right; whether the ideal of individual moral and intellectual autonomy is supposed to animate everyone, or only an elite; and so indefinitely on?

INTRODUCTORY

Mill's theory of meaning is couched in the syntax of syllogism rather than that of modern, post-Fregean logic, whereas the advance of logic has been a pivotal element in the story of twentieth-century philosophy. But this should not blind us. A Millian semantics and epistemology of logic can be stated as well in a modern as in a syllogistic framework; in fact the modern framework allows it to be stated more perspicuously. Mill's doctrine of connotation and denotation and his thoroughgoing empiricism remain robust. And it was as a defender of empiricism in the epistemology of science - including logic and mathematics - rather than as a contributor to logic or science as such that he wrote.

The real criticism of Mill remains much the same as that made by his nineteenth-century critics. He does not reflect enough about the content of his empiricism and its overall coherence. The same criticism, it is true, can be made of many contemporary naturalists. We shall come back to it in section VI. But first the outlines of Mill's position must be set down and some influential misconceptions set aside.

Mill is an empiricist in that he holds that no informative assertion about the world is a priori. In the System of Logic he distinguishes between Verbal' and 'real' propositions, and between 'merely apparent' and 'real' inferences. The assertion of a purely verbal proposition conveys no information about the world, though it can convey information about the language in which the assertion itself is couched. Similarly, a merely apparent inference moves to no new assertion - its conclusion has been literally asserted in its premises.

Much has been written, admiring and dismissive, on Mill the preeminent champion of individuality. And appropriately so; On Liberty is likely to remain the most widely known of his social and political writings, one that seems never to lose its power to stimulate both thought and emotion. Analysis of Utilitarianism and his other writings on ethical questions properly centres on what he says about individual motivation and behaviour. And as one of the greatest of Classical economists, Mill was in the tradition whose analysis and values were based on the individual's selfinterest. This insistent concern for individuality should not, however, preclude attention to his portrayal and evaluation of humans as social animals.

It is significant - to touch only on the most contentious area, economics - that the full title of Mill's major treatise is Principles of Political Economy with some of their applications to social philosophy. And that after finishing his other great treatise, A System of Logic, he told Alexander Bain that his next project was a work on ethology (Bain 1901, 159; Bain 1882, 78-79), one that L. S. Feuer thought would have been a "masterpiece of sociology" (Feuer 1976, 87). What he had in mind was an analysis and exposition of "the science which corresponds to the art of education; in the widest sense of the term, including the formation of national or collective character as well as individual" (System of Logic, CW VIII:869). Though he never wrote this work, it is not fanciful to look for his views of civilization and culture in this context.

THE FALL AND RISE OF A REPUTATION! MILL AND MODERNISM

So Henry Sidgwick wrote after John Stuart Mill's death on 7 May 1873. Several days later he continued:

This indicates Mill's influence at its peak as well as presaging its decline. Four decades later, Balfour wrote that Mill's authority in the English Universities had been “comparable to that wielded... by Hegel in Germany and in the middle ages by Aristotle”, and Dicey noted that “John Mill was between 1860 and 1870 at the height of his power. His authority among the educated youth of England was greater than may appear credible to the present generation”. It was already becoming necessary to explain how influential Mill had been.

A GRAND PROJECT

John Stuart Mill undertook to rehabilitate the utilitarian radicalism of Bentham and his followers, “to show that there was a Radical philosophy, better and more complete than Bentham's, while recognizing and incorporating all of Bentham's which is permanently valuable”.To carry out his grand project, he studied the insights into will, imagination, and character offered by German Idealists (including Goethe, Kant, and Schiller) and their British disciples (notably Coleridge, Frederick Maurice, John Sterling, and Carlyle). He was also far more open than his utilitarian predecessors to egalitarian social Utopias of the sort proposed by French 'socialists' (including Saint-Simon, Fourier, Comte, and Louis Blanc). Moreover, at his death in 1873, he was lampooned as a 'feminine philosopher' for his insistence that justice demanded equal rights for women as well as men independently of race or colour. In his view, as they gained equality with men, women would tend to demand more prudent family practices (including birth control measures) than had hitherto been observed or could otherwise be expected under the prevailing system of male domination.

Such psychological insights and improved ideas of society, Mill believed, could somehow be integrated with the basic tenets of the Benthamite approach. Bentham, James Mill, and Ricardo, whatever their other differences, analyzed political and economic affairs by assuming that any agent is motivated by his own particular interests as he conceives them. In addition to universal education, therefore, they generally advocated social institutions (including majoritarian democracy and competitive capitalism) designed to give predominantly self-interested individuals adequate incentives to act so as to promote the general happiness (understood as the sum or perhaps average of the enlightened self-interests).

When John Stuart Mill married Harriet Taylor in 1851, he wrote out a formal protest against the laws that would govern their marriage. He objected to

This critique of the injustices of English marriage law formed the core of Mill's later work, The Subjection of Women. Although The Subjection of Women was enthusiastically welcomed and widely circulated among the small circles of women's rights advocates on both sides of the Atlantic in the latter nineteenth century, beyond these groups when the book was not ignored it was frequently ridiculed or excoriated by philosophers and politicians alike. James Fitzjames Stephen, one of the foremost jurists of the century, wrote that he disagreed with The Subjection of Women “from the first sentence to the last” (Stephen 1873/1967, 188).

When Mill was addressing a public meeting in his campaign to be elected as a member of Parliament, he was handed a placard with a quotation taken from one of his works that “the lower classes, though mostly habitual liars, are ashamed of lying”, and he was asked whether he had written those words. When he answered “I did”,the meeting, consisting largely of the working classes, applauded loudly. This incident epitomizes some of Mill's characteristic attitudes towards the working classes. He did not think much of their present intellectual and moral qualities. But he was prepared to speak frankly about them. His obvious pleasure at their favourable response to his openness confirmed his view that they had the capacity and willingness to improve themselves. He wanted to provide them with the opportunities for such improvement. He saw himself as their friend, or “a person whom they could trust” (CW I:274). But his idea of improvement was not to impose paternalistically his own conception of their interests on them, but instead to increase the scope for them to voice their interests, while at the same time subjecting them to various influences, including the influences, though not the direction, of abler persons, in order to advance their mental cultivation and thereby to broaden their interests. His hopes for their future well-being were tempered by his fears about letting them dominate social and political life in their present unenlightened state. So another part of his case for social and political reform focussed on finding a counterpoise to the prevailing views and on ensuring greater diversity. In the end, it was his overriding concern for the fate of individual freedom and development which guided all his social and political proposals.

THE ORIGINS OF MILL S PHENOMENALISM! BERKELEY, HAMILTON AND THE RELATIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE

“Matter, then, may be defined as the Permanent Possibility of Sensation”. With this famous phrase, Mill put phenomenalism firmly on the philosophical map. The origins of phenomenalism - the standpoint which regards sensations as the basic constituents of reality, and attempts to construct the external world from sensations and the possibilities of sensation - can be traced back to Berkeley. But the analysis of matter as the “permanent possibility of sensation” and the attempted application of that analysis to mind in the best-known chapters of Mill's Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy constitute the first developed presentation of the doctrine. After Mill, a commitment to phenomenalism became standard among scientific philosophers, until superseded by physicalism in the 1930s. Figures associated with the doctrine included Mach, Russell, Carnap, C. I. Lewis and A. J. Ayer, and with these it took an increasingly “linguistic” or “semantic” form.

In his Autobiography Mill declares himself to be “one of the very few examples, in this country, of one who has, not thrown off religious belief, but never had it” (CW I:45). Yet Mill could hardly avoid engaging with religion in pursuit of his main concerns. It is no surprise that he does so in setting out the utilitarian morality, in defending liberal principles in the face of restrictions on free speech and discussion, and in assessing the quality of current University education. But only in the posthumously published Three Essays on Religion (1874) was religion itself the focal point of his analysis. In these essays Mill attacks orthodox theology on both epistemological and moral grounds. He argues, however, that there is some evidence that the universe was created by an intelligent being and he takes seriously the possibility that something important might be missing from a life in which religion had no place.

MILL'S CLASSICAL INTERESTS

Mill began learning Greek at the age of three and Latin at eight. From about the age of twelve his Greek and Latin reading focussed on works “such as were worth studying, not for the language merely, but also for the thoughts”.He mentions especially Demosthenes, Tacitus, Juvenal, and Quintillian. His father laid special emphasis on Plato. Throughout his literary career, from his discussion of Sedgwick on education in Cambridge to his own rectorial address on education in St Andrews, Mill retained a keen interest in Classical studies and their place in education. Moreover, he took an active part in encouraging the study of Classical antiquity among readers who were beyond the years of formal education. In 1834-35 he published 'Notes on some of the More Popular Dialogues of Plato' - really an abbreviated translationcum- paraphrase. In 1840 he reviewed two publications on Plato. In 1846 and 1853 he reviewed two sections of the multi-volume history of Greece by his friend and (with some qualifications) ally, George Grote, and in 1866 and 1873 he reviewed Grote's works on Plato and Aristotle.

INTRODUCTION

Books III and IV of A System of Logic lie at the heart of Mill's empiricist enterprise, ambitiously aiming to provide “a reduction of the inductive process to strict rules and to a scientific test, such as the syllogism is for ratiocination” [Autobiography, CW I: 215-17). Mill's lengthy examinations 'Of Induction' and 'Of the Operations Subsidiary to Induction' constituted, in his own estimate, the principal part of his theory of logic, because - by the arguments of Book II - inductive inference was the only form of 'real' inference capable of leading us to genuinely new knowledge. Since deductive processes enable us to do no more than 'interpret' inductions, identifying the particular cases which fall under general propositions, it is induction alone “in which the investigation of nature essentially consists.” Consequently, “What Induction is ... and what conditions render it legitimate, cannot but be deemed the main question of the science of logic - the question which includes all others”(A System of Logic, CW VII:283).

INTRODUCTION

Mill's Utilitarianism was not written as a scholarly treatise but as a series of essays for a popular audience. It was first published in three instalments in Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and appeared in book form in 1863. Fraser's Magazine was a magazine with a general audience and the essay was written with this readership in view. Although many commentators have examined the arguments Mill puts forward in this work in isolation from his other writings, in fact it cannot be properly appreciated unless it is placed in the context of the larger body of his work. In particular, this work needs to be read against the background of his more scholarly writing in A System of Logic and in his editorial footnotes to James Mill's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind [Logic, CW VII and VIII; James Mill 1869).

John Stuart Mill is rightly considered to be a major figure in the history of utilitarianism,- his theory is a touchstone to which contemporary ethical theorists regularly return for insights. Yet at the same time, Mill's utilitarianism is boldly revisionist, breaking free of many of the constraints and confines of the narrower and simpler utilitarianism of his predecessors Jeremy Bentham and his father James Mill. Although John Stuart Mill was carefully educated and prepared by his father to be the transmitter and torch bearer of Benthamite utilitarianism, he instead radically transformed it.

John Stuart Mill held, with his father, James Mill, and with all utilitarians, that the end of morality and of practice in general is to maximize the general welfare of humankind. However, to achieve any end, including this ultimate end, requires a knowledge of the means to that end, a knowledge of causes and effects that may be used to realize the end. Practice can only be as solid as the theoretical knowledge of fact upon which it is based. But the younger Mill disagreed with his father and the older generation of utilitarians on the nature of that knowledge and on the methods to be used to justify claims to have acquired such knowledge. To be sure, both the older and the younger Mills must be counted within the empiricist camp, with regard to the nature of human knowledge.On this view, human knowledge begins and ends in sense experience, and knowledge of causes is, as Hume argued, knowledge of matter-of-fact regularities (cf. James Mill 1869, L350, 4O2ff).