Mill, JOHN STUART, the eldest son of James Mill, was born in London on 20th May 1806. He was educated by his father, by whom he was subjected from his earliest years to a careful and systematic training, which was to fit him to carry on the work and champion the opinions with which the elder Mill was identified. Almost from infancy his intellect was on the strain. He is said to have begun Greek at the age of three, and before he was fourteen he had read extensively in Greek, Latin, mathematics, and English, had begun logic and political economy, and already possessed the intellectual acquirements of a well-educated man. But he was secluded from companions of his own age. As he himself says, he 'never was a boy.' His nearest approach to recreation was the long walks—in reality peripatetic oral examinations—for which he was regularly taken by his father. In 1820 he went to France on a visit to the family of Sir S. Bentham (Jeremy Bentham's brother), and was thus removed for more than a year from his father's immediate influence. His studies were never intermitted. His residence in France not only gave him a keen interest in French politics and social conditions, but stimulated his botanical enthusiasm, and the love for scenery and travel, which became the chief relaxations of his arduous life. After his return home he worked at history and law, and read the English and French philosophers. His first published writings appeared in the Traveller newspaper in 1822. In the following year a career was secured for him by an appointment under his father at the India Office, from which he retired as head of his department in 1858, on the transfer of the Company's government to the crown. At the same time he declined a seat in the new India Council offered to him by Lord Derby. During the years 1823–26 he was a member of a small Utilitarian society which met for the purpose of discussion at Jeremy Bentham's house. The name 'Utilitarian' was suggested by an expression in one of Galt's novels, and seized upon by him 'with a boy's fondness for a name and a banner,' to describe himself and others of like opinions. In the Speculative Society, which was founded in 1825, and of which he remained a member till 1829, he met men of a greater variety of creeds, and formed an intimate friendship with Maurice and Sterling, Liberals of a different type from those he had met at his father's house, and influenced by Coleridge, not by Bentham.
Before he was twenty, Mill was recognised as the champion and future leader of what may be called the Utilitarian School in philosophy and politics, and had become the most frequent contributor to the newly-established organ of the party, the Westminster Review. But the 'mental crisis' through which he passed at this time (1826–27) led to a modification of his attitude. Bentham's Treatise on Legislation, which he had read four or five years before, formed the keystone of his previous position. It gave him 'a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy; in one among the best senses of the word, a religion; the inculcation and diffusion of which could be made the principal outward purpose of a life.' The crisis under which his enthusiasm for his old creed and opinions broke down was attributed by himself not merely to a dull state of nerves, but to the purely intellectual education which weakened his sympathies at the same time as it taught him to analyse and trace them to their origin. He ultimately emerged from the state of depression by discovering that feeling was not dead within him. The experiences of this period left, he tells us, two very marked effects on his opinions and character. In the first place, they led him to a new theory of life in relation to happiness. The conviction was forced upon him that happiness—although the test of all rules of conduct and the end of life—was only to be obtained by not making it the direct end, but by having one's mind fixed on some such ideal end as the improvement of mankind, or even some art or pursuit. His 'mental crisis' further led him to see the necessity for human well-being of the internal culture of the individual. He ceased to attach almost exclusive importance to the ordering of outward circumstances, and to the forced training of the human being for thought and action. And soon after this time he found in Wordsworth's poems 'the very culture of the feelings' he was in quest of.
The wider appreciation of speculation and literature brought about by this new attitude may be seen in his reviews of Tennyson's poems (1835), and of Carlyle's French Revolution (1837), as well as in his article on Coleridge (1840). His article on Bentham (1838) made clear the extent of his divergence from his inherited creed, and gave rise to the 'admiration mixed with fear' with which Grote and others of the school regarded him. In this article can be traced the lines along which, in his subsequent writings, he modified the traditional creed of Bentham and James Mill. Perhaps the reaction from Benthamism would have gone further had it not been for the friendship with Mrs John Taylor (whom he first met in 1830, and whom he married in 1851), which formed the romance of his life. It is indeed hardly possible to estimate her influence so highly as Mill did himself. All his leading opinions were formed before he made her acquaintance, and some of his most important works were completed without her assistance. But she did exert great influence on the expression of his views, and apparently had a steady effect on his philosophical position.
Mill never forsook, though he modified, the leading principles of the philosophy in which he was educated. He held that knowledge could be analysed into impressions of sense, and that the principle of association was the great constructive force which combined these sensations and their copies, or ideas, into systems of thought, modes of feeling, and habits of acting. His System of Logic (1843)—perhaps the most original and important of his works—traces, and gives a rationale of, the way in which the real, disjointedly given in sensation, is combined into scientific knowledge. Its treatment of the methods of inductive science—in which it owes much to Herschel, Whewell, and Comte—has become classical. His Examination of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy (1865), and edition of James Mill's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1869), contain a polemical defence and exposition of the association-psychology, notable for their clear recognition of the mental elements which that psychology assumes without explanation. His essay on Utilitarianism (1861) defends the greatest-happiness theory, but suggests modifications inconsistent with it (see ETHICS, p. 435 b.). He held that government was to be purified and made into a utilitarian instrument by means of representative institutions; but he had less confidence than Bentham and his father had in the effect of reason and argument upon men, disapproved of an equal suffrage, distrusted the ballot, and argued eloquently for individual liberty of thought and action against the tyranny of the majority (Considerations on Representative Government, 1861; Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform, 1859; On Liberty, 1859). His Principles of Political Economy (1848) is a systematic treatise, which does not depart in its main teaching from the theory laid down in abstract fashion by Ricardo; but it recognises more clearly the hypothetical character of this theory, and it discusses the social applications of economic doctrines. Mill was M.P. for Westminster from 1865 to 1868. In parliament he voted with the advanced Radical party; and his advocacy of women's suffrage in the debates on the Reform Bill of 1867 led to an active movement for placing the legal and political rights of women on an equality with those of men. Mill died at Avignon, 8th May 1873, and was buried in the cemetery there.
In addition to the works already mentioned, Mill was the author of Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy (1844), Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865), England and Ireland (1868), Subjection of Women (1869). After his death were published Autobiography (1873), and Three Essays on Religion (1874). His more important occasional writings are collected in four volumes of Dissertations and Discussions (1859-75). For his life and opinions, see biographies by A. Bain (1882) and W. L. Courtney (1889), and a study by C. M. Douglas (1895).