Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

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Frederick Rosen

as code for James Mill, whose work on psychological association (James

Mill 1829) was used to distinguish Bentham from James Mill, particularly in

pointing out defects in Bentham as a moral philosopher. Unlike Bentham,

Hartley (and presumably Mill’s father) recognised the importance of feelings

of ‘moral sense’, whereas Bentham, while considering sympathy, omitted

feelings of duty, conscience, and generally right and wrong as independent

motives for happiness (Mill 1969, CWM, x,p.13).

On the whole Mill was most critical of Bentham as a moral philosopher,

and, by implication, as a philosopher of mind. Bentham was criticised for

ignoring character in his ethics, particularly in the chapters on motives

and dispositions in IPML (Mill 1969, CWM, x,pp.8–9; Bentham 1996,

pp. 96–142). Bentham and his followers, he contended, emphasised the

consequences of actions alone and ‘rejected all contemplation of the action

in its general bearings upon the entire moral being of the agent’ (Mill 1969,

CWM, x,p.8). Furthermore, Mill wrote:

As an analyst of human nature (the faculty in which above all it is necessar y that an

ethical philosopher should excel) I cannot rank Mr. Bentham very high. He has done

little in this department, beyond introducing what appears to me a very deceptive

phraseology, and furnishing a catalogue of the ‘springs of action’, from which some of

the most important are left out. (Mill 1969, CWM, x,p.12)

Mill went on to criticise Bentham’s conception of motives and interests in

relation to virtue in the sense that a person ‘recoils from the very thought

of committing an act; the idea of placing himself in such a situation is

so painful, that he cannot dwell upon it long enough t o have even the

physical power of perpetrating the crime’ (Mill 1969, CWM, x,p.12).

Mill should have known that Bentham’s idea of disposition (based on habit)

could and did accommodate the concept of virtue, and while Mill was not

able to read a decent version of Deontology (even Bowring’s highly defective

edition was not published until 1834; see Bentham 1834), he might have

seen how the idea of virtue could easily ﬁt into Bentham’s system as a

combination and completion of the work of Hume. But Mill at this point

sought a more earnest and uplifting morality than he would ﬁnd in either

Hume or Bentham (see Rosen 2003,pp.29–57). He criticised Bentham

for using the language of interests, when such a language tended to be

understood as purely self-regarding interest (see Mill 1969, CWM, x,p.14).

Bentham’s philosophy provided no moral message and uplifting theme. Mill

wrote:

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Upon those who need to be strengthened and upheld by a really inspired moralist – such

a moralist as Socrates, or Plato, or (speaking humanly and not theologically) as Christ;

the effect of such writings as Mr. Bentham’s...must either be hopeless despondency

and gloom, or a reckless giving themselves up to a life of that miserable self-seeking,

which they are there taught to regard as inherent in their original and unalterable nature.

(Mill 1969, CWM, x,p.16)

As if such a sin of omission, the failure to provide an uplifting moral doc-

trine, was not bad enough, Mill also asserted that ‘by the promulgation of

such views of human nature, and by a general tone of thought and expres-

sion perfectly in harmony with them, I conceive Mr. Bentham’s writings

to have done and to be doing very serious evil’ (Mill 1969, CWM, x,

p. 15).

In his theory of government Mill not only ignored Constitutional Code

(Bentham 1983b[1830]), other writings on government (e.g. AFragment

on Government (Bentham 1988c[1776]) and those on parliamentary reform,

but he also criticised him for failing to go beyond a theory of legislation to

develop a ‘theory of organic institutions’. Such a theory would include ‘the

great instruments of forming the national character; of carrying forward the

members of the community towards perfection or preserving them from

degeneracy’ (Mill 1969, CWM, x,p.9; see also Varouxakis 1998, 2002a).

He also criticised Bentham for not giving due weight to what he called ‘the

historical recollections of a people’ in so far as these ‘recollections’ formed

the basis of political institutions (Mill 1969, CWM, x,p.17).

These criticisms on their own do not seem adequate. Mill ignored Ben-

tham’s emphasis on the continuity of traditional institutions in grounding

government on a ‘habit’ of obedience within the people (Bentham 1988c

[1776], p. 40). Furthermore, Bentham regarded his Constitutional Code (Ben-

tham 1983b[1830]) as setting out the institutions that could lead to per-

fection and preserve the populace from degeneracy. In addition, Bentham

might well have argued that the object of moral and political philosophy was

not to provide moral uplift, but to seek the truth through the analysis of the

language and concepts employed in argument, and an assessment of their

contribution to human happiness. He meant his philosophy to be a criti-

cal doctrine, seeking truth by ﬁrst exposing error and then by developing

alternative arrangements.

Mill, however, set these concerns aside, as he wanted to conclude not

that Bentham had a reply to these criticisms, but that Bentham was correct

as far as he went. His philosophy was ‘one of the faces of the truth, and

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a highly important one’. More speciﬁcally, Bentham’s doctrines concerned

with government and morality ‘are still highly instructive and valuable to

any one who is capable of supplying the remainder of the truth; they are

calculated to mislead only by the pretension which they invariably set up

of being the whole truth’ (Mill 1969, CWM, x,p.18). It is clear from

the discussion thus far that he regarded the remainder of the truth as best

supplied by his father’s philosophy and his own attempt to build on that

philosophy.

7 ‘Bentham’ and ‘Coleridge’

Many of the themes ﬁrst stated in the ‘Remarks on Bentham’s Philoso-

phy’ were developed further in the two substantial essays, ‘Bentham’ and

‘Coleridge’ (Mill 1969, CWM, x,pp.77–115, 119–63), published in the

London and Westminster Review in 1838 and 1840. The essay on Bentham

was ostensibly a review of the early volumes of the new edition of Ben-

tham’s Works, but from the outset the two essays were conceived as being

related to each other (Mill 1969, CWM, x,pp.76, 77). Rather than provid-

ing a full account of these important texts (see, for example, August 1975,

pp. 74ff.; Robson 1968;Ryan1975,pp.53–8), my object here will be to

explore them mainly in terms of the issues already raised in the present

essay. One issue is concerned with how Mill saw the intellectual legacy he

inherited from Bentham and his father. The second is Mill’s conception of

philosophic radicalism and how it differed from Bentham’s own philosoph-

ically inspired radicalism.

Although James Mill had died in 1836, just after the publication of

the ‘Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy’ and prior to the publication of

‘Bentham’ two years later, J. S. Mill did not use this occasion to provide

as critical an assessment of his father’s thought as he did of Bentham’s.

Indeed, in ‘Bentham’, though understated in some respects, the younger

Mill seemed to inﬂate his father’s role in completing the ‘metaphysical’

side of Bentham’s philosophy. In linking the ‘negative’ philosophy of the

eighteenth century with the work of David Hume, and assessing Bentham’s

role as a follower of Hume, he wrote: ‘If Bentham had merely continued

the work of Hume, he would scarcely have been heard of in philosophy; for

he was far inferior to Hume in Hume’s qualities, and was in no respect ﬁtted

to excel as a metaphysician.’ Mill then continued by turning to his father

‘who united the great qualities of the metaphysicians of the eighteenth

century, with others of a different complexion, admirably qualifying him to

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complete and correct their work’ (Mill 1969, CWM, x,p.80). In contrast,

Mill insisted that Bentham’s mind was ‘essentially practical’ and that it was

roused to speculation and hence ‘to carry the warfare against absurdity’

by the abuses he saw in practical arrangements, and mainly in the law

(Mill 1969, CWM, x,p.81). Although Mill appreciated the signiﬁcance of

Bentham’s achievement, as one of the two seminal minds of his generation,

his comments about his father gave the impression that Bentham’s legacy was

seriously deﬁcient. However, Mill emphasised in ‘Bentham’ that Bentham’s

method was original and philosophically important:

It is the introduction into the philosophy of human conduct, of this method of detail –

of this practice of never reasoning about wholes until they have been resolved into

their parts, nor about abstractions until they have been translated into realities – that

constitutes the originality of Bentham in philosophy, and makes him the great reformer

of the moral and political branch of it. (Mill 1969, CWM, x,p.86)

Mill insisted on the genuine originality of Bentham’s method by arguing that

it was not part of the utilitarian tradition rooted in ancient Epicureanism:

The application of a real inductive philosophy to the problems of ethics, is as unknown

to the Epicurean moralists as to any of the other schools; they never take a question to

pieces, and join issue on a deﬁnite point. Bentham certainly did not learn his sifting

and anatomizing method from them. (Mill 1969, CWM, x,p.87)

Mill was not entirely fair to the Epicurean tradition, as he seemed to refer

mainly to the discussions in Cicero’s de Finibus, and not to the more ‘scien-

tiﬁc’ modern version associated with Gassendi and linked to Hobbes, Locke,

Hume, Smith, Helv

etius and Bentham (see Rosen 2003,pp.15–28). With-

out denying its originality, one could more easily see Bentham’s method

emerging from this more modern tradition. Furthermore, the darker truths

of man’s inhumanity to man, as part of the whole Epicurean tradition from

Lucretius onwards, motivated Bentham to use his method to protect indi-

viduals against such evil by attacking abuses of power and showing how one

might reduce suffering in society. His method, then, was closely linked to

his Epicurean conception of utility. Nevertheless, in making this contention

regarding Bentham’s method, Mill enabled James Mill’s ‘metaphysics’ to ﬁll

an ‘empty’ space in modern thought.

In ‘Coleridge’, when Mill came to the point where he had to

choose between the eighteenth-century philosophy of Bentham and the

nineteenth-century ‘Germano-Coleridgean’ philosophy that opposed it,

he clearly and emphatically came down on the side of Bentham:

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It [Mill’s opinion] is, that the truth, on this much-debated question, lies with the school

of Locke and of Bentham. The nature and laws of Things in themselves, or of the

hidden causes of the phenomena which are the objects of experience, appear to us

radically inaccessible to the human faculties. (Mill 1969, CWM, x,p.128)

If Mill rejected the doctrine of transcendental truth in Coleridge and others

in the ‘German’ school, he nonetheless found it very valuable on another

level. The development of Locke’s theory in the eighteenth century had

been uneven with most attention given to the theory of knowledge rather

than to his psychology. The system of Condillac, Mill believed, was inad-

equate, even useless. Har tley’s highly original and important work had

been ignored. However, the attack by Reid and members of the ‘German’

school on Locke’s psychology forced those who were followers of Locke to

reconsider the work of Hartley who might otherwise have been forgotten

and whose associationism solved numerous problems in Locke’s psychology

(Mill 1969, CWM, x, 129–30). In a footnote to the original 1840 edition

Mill added a reference to James Mill’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human

Mind as ‘the greatest accession to abstract psychology since Hartley’ (Mill

1969, CWM, x,p.130n). Hence, thanks to Coleridge and the ‘German’

school whose doctrine forced those in the Lockean school in a sense to

keep truth alive and repair its deﬁciencies, James Mill came into his legacy

as the ‘metaphysician’ that completed the doctrine of Bentham. If Ben-

tham’s longevity prevented Mill from becoming his master’s successor, the

son has nonetheless enabled him to realise his inheritance not only as a

leader of the philosophic radicals but also as a leading metaphysician in his

own right.

One might wonder why Mill did not contrast James Mill and Coleridge

rather than Bentham and Coleridge. But the two essays on Bentham and

Coleridge have few philosophical objectives and are written from within

the perspective of radicalism. This thesis requires some explanation, as by

this time Mill seemed to have abandoned the project of intellectually leading

a party of radicals. Although the two essays were published in the London

and Westminster Review, the phrases ‘philosophic radical’ and ‘philosophic

radicalism’ did not appear in them. Nevertheless, Mill’s agenda remained the

same. He sought to point out the weaknesses and limitations of Benthamism

as a foundation for radical political reform, and indicate how these failings

might be remedied through the study of Coleridge.

As Robson has remarked, ‘the roots of Mill’s comparison of Bentham and

Coleridge in the opening pages of the essay on the latter, probably go back

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to arguments with Coleridgeans in the London Debating Society’ (Mill

1969, CWM, x, p. cxxi). It is also fair to say that the comparison between

the two thinkers was not restricted to the level of philosophical ideas,

even though Mill began with an image of two closet-philosophers secluded

‘by circumstances and character, from the business and intercourse of the

world . . . ’ and regarded ‘by those who took the lead in opinion (when they

happened to hear of them) with feelings akin to contempt’. But Mill’s initial

point of contrast between the two was as ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’

thinkers. These appellations were more political than philosophical, though

Mill did not hesitate to refer to Bentham as ‘a Progressive philosopher’ and

Coleridge as ‘a Conservative one’ (Mill 1969, CWM, x,pp.77–8).

But were Bentham and Coleridge ‘the two seminal minds of England in

their age’ (see Bain 1882b, p. 56; cf. Colmer 1976, p. lxiii)? Note that despite

the emphasis on the ‘German’ school of philosophy, Mill conﬁned his atten-

tions to England. Even Scotland, whose eighteenth-century philosophers,

like Hume and Smith, were the greatest of the age, and which also con-

tained important representatives of the so-called ‘German’ school, such as

Reid, seemed to be excluded. When one recalls the attack on Bentham as

a thinker in the earlier ‘Remarks’, and the fact that Coleridge was known

more as a literary man than as a philosopher (cf. Morrow 1990,p.164;

Snyder 1929), the choice of Bentham and Coleridge as the two seminal

minds seems even more problematic (cf. Mill 1980,pp.9ff.). Indeed, the

whole enterprise of comparing these two thinkers does not make much

sense unless it is seen as an attempt to deﬁne a new political radicalism,

based on a combination of Bentham and Coleridge, which is designed to

replace the synthesis between philosophy and politics achieved by Bentham

and his followers.

When Mill discussed these essays in the later Autobiography, he maintained

that his criticisms of Bentham were ‘perfectly just’. Nevertheless, he added

the following comment:

but I have sometimes doubted whether it was right to publish it at that time. I have

often felt that Bentham’s philosophy, as an instrument of progress, has been to some

extent discredited before it had done its work, and that to lend a hand towards lowering

its reputation was doing more harm than service to improvement.

Mill continued by conceding that in the essay on Coleridge:

I might be thought to have erred by giving undue prominence to the favourable side, as

I had done in the case of Bentham to the unfavourable. In both cases, the impetus with

which I had detached myself from what was untenable in the doctrines of Bentham and

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of the eighteenth century, may have carried me, though in appearance rather than in

reality, too far on the contrary side. But as far as relates to the article on Coleridge, my

defence is, that I was writing for Radicals and Liberals, and it was my business to dwell

most on that in writers of a different school, from the knowledge of which they might

derive most improvement. (Mill 1981, CWM, i,pp.225–7)

What is striking about these remarks is that they are set forth in the context

of creating a new political radicalism, one detached from Benthamism, but

also one addressed to those who, as radicals, might never have hitherto

thought of studying Coleridge’s moral and political writings. Mill might

have argued simply that radicalism needed to add some of the insights of

Coleridge to those of Bentham, for example to be less opposed to the

Church by considering the role of a clerisy, or to see in Coleridge a liberal

and progressive force not opposed to improvement, rather than simply a

conservative (see Edwards 1995). To argue in this manner would allow Mill

to remain in the Benthamite camp and to ‘improve’ that position by adding

some of the doctrines of Coleridge.

For example, if Bentham did not appear to provide answers to questions

regarding government such as ‘to what authority is it for the good of the

people that they should be subject?’ or ‘how are they to be induced to obey

that authority?’, but only to questions concerning the abuse of power and

authority, one might simply add this material to Bentham’s doctrine (Mill

1969, CWM, x,p.106). This would be one way of improving Bentham. If

Bentham failed to give due weight to ‘national character’, it would appear

to be a fairly simple matter to add considerations of national character to

Bentham’s own conceptions of the public interest and public opinion (see

Rosen 1983,pp.19–40).

Mill, however, did not take this route. In the essays on Bentham and

Coleridge he sought to establish a new perspective from which to create a

new approach to the two thinkers, which would probably not appeal to any

follower of Bentham (see Wallas 1951 [1898], p. 91) and possibly not to most

followers of Coleridge. If in the London Debating Society, Benthamites and

Coleridgeans were bringing out the negative and positive aspects of both

thinkers, it was only Mill, as far as one can determine, who decided that

future improvement required a new understanding and combination of the

two. He did so, not for the sake of philosophy (for his position was settled

there), but for the sake of the future of a radicalism that was philosophically

inspired not only to replace that of Bentham but also to carry forward

Bentham’s perspective of a radicalism not based on envy or opportunism

but on analysis and a programme for improvement (cf. Pringle-Pattison

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1907,pp.31–2). The perspective was thus philosophical in a limited sense,

though the substance, political.

Mill began to develop this per spective by taking an independent posi-

tion and regarding the two thinkers as fundamentally incomplete, but when

brought into proximity, they provided a new perspective. Both were ques-

tioners of established arrangements. If Bentham asked ‘is it true?’, Coleridge

asked ‘what is the meaning of it?’ Bentham stood outside as a stranger, while

Coleridge looked at issues from within (Mill 1969, CWM, x,p.119). If

Bentham tended to discard an idea he found not to be true, for Coleridge,

the fact that the idea had been believed for generations was ‘part of the

problem to be solved, was one of the phenomena to be accounted for’. As

Mill put it in a bold assertion:

From this difference in the points of view of the two philosophers, and from the

too rigid adherence of each of his own, it was to be expected that Bentham should

continually miss the truth which is in the traditional opinions, and Coleridge that which

is out of them, and at variance with them. But it was also likely that each would ﬁnd or

show the way to ﬁnding, much of what the other missed. (Mill 1969, CWM, x,p.120)

Just how ‘each would ﬁnd or show the way to ﬁnding much of what the

other missed’ is not entirely clear, but for Mill it depended on their being

exact contraries of each other. Logicians would say that they ‘are the farthest

from one another in the same kind’ (Mill 1969, CWM, x,p.120). But what

did Mill mean by such remarks and, particularly, by ‘the same kind’? For

Mill, there must be important points of agreement between them. He set

these out in several propositions. First, they were the two men of their age

who most agreed on the importance and necessity of philosophy. Second,

both proceeded by linking opinions to ﬁrst principles and examining the

grounds and evidence for such opinions. Third, they both took the view

that sound theory was a necessary basis for sound practice. Fourth, they both

believed that the foundations of all philosophy had to be in philosophy of

mind. Finally, although they used ‘different materials’ these materials were

based on observation and experience. Thus, the two could supplement

each other, because, for Mill, they were of ‘the same kind’, but, even more,

they were each other’s ‘completing counterpart’: ‘the strong points of each

correspond to the weak points of the other. Whoever could master the

premises and combine the methods of both, would possess the entire English

philosophy of their age.’ If Coleridge in his Ta b l e Ta l k could divide people,

‘by birth’, into Platonists or Aristotelians, so Mill could assert that ‘every

Englishman of thepresent dayis...eitheraBenthamite oraColeridgian’

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(Mill 1969, CWM, x,p.121). In Mill’s hands, however, the two might

be combined but not to achieve a new ‘truth’ in philosophy of mind, for

Mill remained on the side of Locke, Bentham, Hartley and James Mill. Mill

seems more concerned with English national character, which, in his hands,

would not reﬂect Bentham or Coleridge, but the two together with each

providing what the other ignored.

One might be excused for still wondering what Mill was attempting to

achieve. Mill clearly did not choose one side over another (cf. Semmel

1998,p.50). Nor did he provide ‘a vivid portrait of the liberal, or free and

complete, mind’ (Berkowitz 1998,p.24). Bain saw in it ‘a noble experiment’

in combining opposites and maintaining ‘a perpetual attitude of sympathy

with hostile opinions’. But in the end, he saw in Mill’s essays no lasting

beneﬁt: ‘The watch-word in those days of the Review, was – Sympathise in

order to learn. That doctrine, preached by Goethe and echoed by Carlyle,

was in everybody’s mouth, and had its ﬂing’ (Bain 1882b, pp. 57–8). The

philosophical origin of this enterprise, if there was one, might be in the

early Socratic dialogues of Plato, where, despite aporeia, what was achieved

was the recognition that one only possessed an opinion of the truth, not the

whole of it and possibly not the truth at all. Similarly, Mill could write that

‘the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of

mistaking part of the truth for the whole’. Mill continued by asserting:

It might be plausibly maintained that in almost every one of the leading controversies,

past or present, in social philosophy, both sides were in the right in what they afﬁrmed,

though wrong in what they denied; and that if either could have been made to take

the other’s views in addition to its own, little more would have been needed to make

its doctrine correct. (Mill 1969, CWM, x,pp.122–3)

Mill’s doctr ine looks more to tolerance than to Socratic ignorance. Nev-

ertheless, one might say that Mill placed a social and political version of

the Socratic dialectic at the heart of his new conception of philosophic

radicalism (see Rosen 2003,pp.201–2). He did not expect and did not

present a ﬁnal fusion of Bentham and Coleridge to provide a new doctrine

to replace Benthamism (see O’Rourke 2001,pp.51ff.). The dialectical pro-

cess was ongoing and, in his later striking arguments in On Liberty as well

as in ‘Coleridge’, Mill used the example of Rousseau’s thought which set

an imposing challenge to those who championed the virtues of civilisation

by extolling the virtues of independence (Mill 1969, CWM, x,p.123).

Both had merit in their positive doctrines, but their weakness rested with

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mistaking part for the whole and failing to see either the negative side of

their own doctrines or to appreciate the positive side of the other’s doctrine.

Mill then suggested that with regard to partial truths, there were always two

conﬂicting modes of thought, one that tended to give the truth too large

and the other, too small a place in public debate. ‘[A]nd the history of opin-

ion is generally an oscillation between these extremes’ (Mill 1969, CWM,

x,p.124).

The ‘Germano-Coleridgean’ doctrine represented a severe reaction

against the philosophy of the Enlightenment. It was ontological, where

the latter was experimental, conservative as opposed to innovative, reli-

gious as opposed to inﬁdel, concrete and historical as opposed to abstract

and metaphysical, and poetical rather than matter-of-fact. But Mill then

claimed that this reaction was not as severe as those which preceded it,

particularly not as severe as that triumph that brought the philosophy of

the eighteenth century to prominence and ‘so memorably abused its vic-

tory, over that which preceded it’. Mill was even willing to propose a

general proposition regarding human progress calling it ‘the general law of

improvement’:

Thus every excess in either direction determines a corresponding reaction; improvement

consisting only in this, that the oscillation, each time, departs rather less widely from

the centre, and an ever increasing tendency is manifested to settle ﬁnally in it. (Mill

1969, CWM, x,p.125)

The full nature of the improvement and the location of truth in this oscil-

lation that may eventually end, but still requires free expression, open

debate and the continued challenge of arguments simply to keep truth

alive, cannot be explored further within the scope of this essay. Neverthe-

less, Mill had clearly found in Coleridge’s thought (see O’Rourke, 2001,

pp. 42ff.), together with an adoption of a Socratic method (see Demetriou

1999,p.243) that allowed him to combine the thought of Bentham and

Coleridge as ‘completing counterparts’, a radicalism that he thought he

could use to remedy the deﬁciencies of Benthamism. For the most part

Mill’s radicalism remained one of ideas. It was philosophic radicalism but,

paradoxically, it would not provide any leadership to the radicals whom a

few years earlier Mill sought to lead (see Stephen 1900, iii,p.38), and,

additionally, it represented no lasting contribution to philosophy. But it is

also fair to conclude that his search for another way of doing philosophical

ethics and politics continued in his subsequent writings from the Logic to

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