Abstract
Mill’s fullest account of the nature of the external world and of the relation to it of the knowing subject is to be found in the eleventh chapter of the Examination, ‘The Psychological Theory of the Belief in an External World.’ Mill was evidently very pleased with this chapter, and a few years after its first appearance he reprinted it unchanged as an appendix to his edition of his father’s Analysis. Bain, too, was impressed by Mill’s discussion, and wrote in reference to it, ‘I give him full credit for his uncompromising Idealism, and for his varied and forceful exposition of it’ (Bain (1882), p. 120). Some critics, however, were less flattering; James M’Cosh, for instance, scornfully classed Mill’s theory with the ‘wire–drawn attempts to fashion all our ideas out of one or two primitive sources by means of association,’ which were among the more baneful products of the tradition of Locke (M’Cosh, p. 21). But many of Mill’s readers from early days to the present have noted that it is actually far from easy to be sure just what view of the external world he intended to maintain, and, indeed, whether he really had a firm view at all. R.F. Anschutz has claimed that he was trying to be all things to all men, and to satisfy both the Berkeleian and the realist (Anschutz (1953, p. 178); Alan Ryan holds that he simply could not make up his mind whether he intended to deny the existence of the external world or not (Ryan (1974), p. 222).
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Chapter Eight
That Mill is engaged in two tasks in Chapter XI of the Examination has been noted by J.P. Day in his paper ‘Mill on Matter.’
The first three laws have been given in Mill’s own words, the fourth in a summary form. For variant statements of the first three see SL, p. 852, BP, p. 360. (The fourth law appears only in the Examination.)
Sir William Hamilton had held that we become aware of the existence of external objects by a species of intuition. Mill, with some justice, thought the reference to a faculty of intuition wholly obscurantist, and urged against it Hamilton’s own ‘Law of Parcimony’ that ‘Where there is a known cause adequate to account for a phaenomenon, there is no justification for ascribing it to an unknown one’ (EH, pp. 182–83). By a ‘known cause,’ Mill meant to refer to sensation and reflection on sensation, as described by the ‘Psychological Theory’ — which, for all the ambiguity and vagueness of its presentation, does manage to avoid postulating anything as mysterious as Hamiltonian intuition to account for our belief in an external world.
Malebranche, however, Mill noted, still believed in the existence of this superfluous wheel because he thought its existence asserted in scripture (EH, p. 204). (For a recurrence of the’ superfluous wheel’ metaphor, see Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, I. sect. 271). 5 Berkeley, as Pitcher has observed (Pitcher, ch. 10), himself held early in his career a view similar to this. But in the writings he prepared for publication he asserted that objects only exist when they are present as ideas in some mind (see, for instance, Berkeley, p. 158). This is a highly unsatisfactory view, not redeemed by Berkeley’s helping himself to the thesis that ideas no one else is thinking about continue to exist in the mind of God; for it is not plausible to hold that the idea of a tree now in God’s mind is numerically identical with the idea of a tree formerly present in mine, and God’s now having an idea of a tree qualitatively similar to an idea I formerly had does not serve to maintain my idea (and thus my tree) in existence.
Berkeley, as Pitcher has observed (Pitcher, ch. 10), himself held early in his career a view similar to this. But in the writings he prepared for publication he asserted that objects only exist when they are present as ideas in some mind (see, for instance, Berkeley, p. 158). This is highly unsatisfactory view, not redeemed by Berkeley’s helping himself to the thesis that ideas no one else is thinking about continue to exist in mind of God; for it is not plausible to hold that idea of a tree now in God’s mind is numerically identical with the idea of a tree formely present in mine, God’s now having an idea of a tree qualitatively similar to an idea I formely had does not serve to maintain my idea (and thus my tree) in existence.(
The critic was Francis O’Hanlon, who wrote a pamphlet entitled A Criticism of John Stuart Mill’s Pure Idealism, to which Mill replied in a note added to the third edition of the Examination (p. 203ff.).
This is a prospect which commentators have ignored. Typical of many in this connexion are H.H. Price and Alan Ryan. Price noted that Mill held that matter consists of sensations and possibilities of sensation, but immediately after referred to ‘this vast mass of actual and possible sense-data’ (a sense-datum presumably being for Price closer to a sensation than to a possibility of sensation) (Price (1926/27), p. 112). Ryan, after recording Mill’s definition of matter as a permanent possibility of sensation, proceeds to assert that ‘Mill’s identification of objects with possible sensations seems almost more shocking than their identification with actual ones’ (Ryan (1970), p. 97).
There appear to be no significant differences between Mill’s use of’ sensations’ and the modern phenomenalist’s talk of’ sense-data’; accordingly I shall here treat the two terms as equivalent in meaning.
For an objection in similar vein to ‘idealism,’ see Venn’s Empirical Logic, p. 16.
At least one commentator has become very confused over Mill’s talk of possibility. J.P. Day has written: ‘to say that there is a possibility of snow is simply to say in other words that snow exists potentially: it is not to say that a possibility, or anything whatever, exists actually’ (Day, p. 57). It is not clear what it means to say — still less,’ simply to say’ — that snow exists potentially. Yet Day’s difficulties indicate how great the need is to clarify the notion of possibilities of sensation before Mill’s theory can be properly assessed.
See Hartry Field, ‘Realism and Relativism,’ p. 559. Field’s target is actually a little more restricted than mine. He is reacting to Putnam’s suggestion that we cannot properly relate properties of phenomenal objects to the powers of individual noumenal objects, but are forced to say, more vaguely, that they are related to powers of the world. Field contends that ‘it makes no sense to say that something has a dispositional property without having a ground for the disposition,’ and that, whatever precisely Putnam meant by his claim, he should at least be ready to allow that dispositional properties to affect our senses are grounded in ‘lower-level’ properties, perhaps of a noumenal sort. Now Mill appears to rule out not just that there are such lower-level properties to be the grounds of powers to cause sensations, but also that there is anything having properties of either level — even anything referred to by such an unspecific phrase as Putnam’s ‘the world’.
To be remotely plausible, the theory must allow that objects, as causal powers to produce sensations, are able to operate on subjects at a distance. The physics of such interaction at a distance are obscure, but it is evident they could not involve any passage through space of numerically identical ‘objects’ such as photons. It would be reasonable to refuse to accept the theory until some explanation had been provided of the nature of the causal relationships between subjects and spatially removed objects, and also of how permanent possibilities interact with each other (as Mill claimed they do).
This view of time is similar to Berkeley’s that time is ‘nothing, abstracted from the succession of ideas in our minds’ (Berkeley, p. 162).
Thus Dummett oversimplifies the situation when he writes that idealism stands opposed to materialism (Dummett (1981), p. 504). The opposite of materialism is immaterialism, and immaterialism is not logically committed to denying the existence of objective space and time.
Some readers will have qualms about Mill’s interchangeable use of ‘mind,’’ self’ and ‘ego’. But it is questionable whether these words have acquired sufficiently sharp boundaries of employment for any very substantial objection to Mill’s practice to be pressed. His project is to enquire whether human mental life can be analysed without remainder in terms of bundles of mental states, or whether room has to be left too for some form of substratum or base to support or collect mental states, and to serve in addition as the principle of unity and distinction of human subjects. Once his intentions are grasped, it seems unnecessary and distracting to quibble about his usage of an inevitably imprecise terminology.
See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Bk. I. pt. iv. sect. 6. Hume voiced doubts about his theory in an appendix to the work. (For an interpretation of that appendix, and for further discussion of bundle theories of the mind, see my note ‘What Was Hume’s Worry About Personal Identity?’)
Mill may not have noticed that not all memories and expectations concern the self: not, for instance, a memory of the date of the Battle of Hastings, or an expectation that the Conservative Party will win the next election.
Alan Ryan has argued that Mill’s failure to clarify the nature of personal identity is a weakness’ at the heart of the metaphysics on which his system of ideas rests’ (Ryan (1970), p. xx). He justifies this by saying that for Mill, the identity of physical objects ‘is parasitic upon the mind of the percipient who, so to speak, builds his expectations into things’ (p. xvii), so that if Mill cannot explain personal identity, he cannot explain object identity either. This calls for two comments. First, Ryan’s criticism can apply at most to the idealist view that the principles of the unity of objects are psychological principles, such as the laws of association, operating within a single mind. While Mill occasionally took this line, he frequently maintained that objects are permanent possibilities of sensation of an objective kind within a common world, and with a nature independent of any mind. On this view, the unity of objects is the product of certain objective causal relations forming into groups possibilities of sensations of (primarily) resistance, extension and shape; and while minds can recognise the unity of objects, they do not construct it. But, secondly, Ryan’s objection really fails to have any force even against Mill’s idealist theory of objects. For what that theory actually requires is not that he should have explained personal identity, but merely that he should presuppose the persistence of selves to be a fact. Now Mill did indeed presuppose this, though he confessed himself ultimately unsure how to analyse the identity of the self. His failure to analyse personal identity does not entail that he failed to analyse the identity of objects, even if the identity of objects presupposes the existence of personal identity. Ryan appears to be confusing the situation here with one in which the first stage of a two-stage argument delivers as its conclusion a proposition which then becomes an essential premise of the second stage; clearly, if the first stage fails, the second will fail too, as it contains an unsupported premise. But Mill was not trying to prove the thesis of continuing self identity, but to analyse it; he followed the common belief of philosophers and laymen alike that it is true.
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© 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands
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Scarre, G. (1989). The World and Its Subject. In: Logic and Reality in the Philosophy of John Stuart Mill. Synthese Historical Library, vol 34. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2579-3_9
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