Contrastación de hipótesis

In the 1830s, Mill was interested in history from two different points of view: one

explained its meaning, and shewed the fallacy of the vulgar form of speech which I had used: leaving me fully persuaded that in being unable to give a correct definition of Theory, and in speaking of it as something which might be at variance with practice, I had shewn unparalleled ignorance.’

18 JSM, Autobiography, CW, i, 169.

19 Ibid., 171.

20 JSM, ‘The Spirit of the Age [3]’ (6 February 1831), CW, xxii, 252.

21 Ibid., 238.

was ‘scientific’; the other, ‘moral or biographic’.²² As a scientific inquiry, to Mill’s mind, history ‘exhibits the general laws of the moral universe acting in circumstances of complexity, and enables us to trace the connexion between great effects and their

causes’. As a moral or biographic inquiry, ‘it represents to us the characters and lives of human beings, and calls on us, according to their deservings or to their fortunes, for our sympathy, our admiration, or our censure’.²³ Mill now referred favourably to the moral function of history, which he had at one time dismissed.²⁴

In order to combine scientific and moral interests, or, to use his terminology, ‘logic’

and ‘poetry’, Mill emphasized in particular the role of imagination. While he had once thought that scientific accuracy was by no means compatible with poetic imagination, he now came to think that these could be made compatible within the study of history.

As far as his attitude towards history at this period is concerned, an important article is

‘Carlyle’s French Revolution’, published in the London and Westminster Review of July 1837, in which Mill praised the poetical aspect of Carlyle’s work, even though he criticized Carlyle for undervaluing ‘general principles’.²⁵ Mill stated that, thanks to his imagination, Carlyle’s epic poetical narrative of history dealt successfully with

historical figures as ‘real beings, who once were alive, beings of his own flesh and blood, not mere shadows and dim abstractions’, though it tended to ‘set too low a value on what constitutions and forms of government can do’.²⁶

In 1836 Mill stated that history was ‘the record of all the great things which have been achieved by mankind’. Students could learn from history as such ‘a certain largeness of conception’; ‘the great principles by which the progress of man and the condition of society are governed’; and ‘the infinite varieties of human-nature’. In addition, it could correct ‘anything cramped or one-sided in his own standard of it [i.e.

human nature]’ by showing ‘the astonishing pliability of our nature’.²⁷

22 JSM, ‘Alison’s History of the French Revolution [1]’ (July 1833), CW, xx, 117-8.

23 Ibid., 118.

24 E.g. JSM, ‘Modern French Historical Works’, (July 1826), ibid., 15-52; JSM, ‘Scott’s Life of Napoleon’ (April 1828), ibid., 53-110.

25 JSM, ‘Carlyle’s French Revolution’ (July 1837), ibid., 162.

26 Ibid., 134, 162.

27 JSM, ‘Civilization’, CW, xviii, 145.

At this period, Mill had attained a relativist perspective on politics, a perspective that, in his own terms, recognized that ‘all questions of political restitutions are relative, not absolute, and that different stages of human progress not only will have, but ought to have different institutions’.²⁸ There were two kinds of empirical knowledge to which Mill attached a high value in order to redeem a lack of imagination, an ability which was crucial for relativism. These were history and travel, or, in his own words,

‘Intelligent investigation into past ages, and intelligent study of foreign countries’. He explained how these could be useful in the study of politics:

We would not exaggerate the value of either of these sources of knowledge. They are useful in aid of a more searching and accurate experience, not in lieu of it. No one learns any thing very valuable either from history or from travelling, who does not come prepared with much that history and travelling can never teach. … Even to the philosopher, the value both of history and of travelling is not so much positive as negative; they teach little, but they are a protection against much error.²⁹

In Mill’s view, due to a lack of imagination, man was generally apt to regard his own experience as universal, even when it might be confined to his own society. In order not to commit such a mistake, Mill placed emphasis on empirical knowledge. According to Mill, ‘The correction of narrowness is the main benefit derived from the study of various ages and nations: of narrowness, not only in our conceptions of what is, but in our standard of what ought to be.’³⁰ Such an attitude towards empirical knowledge apparently reflected the discontent that Mill held towards Benthamite politics, for Mill thought that it failed to take the actual diversity of man and society into consideration, due to an undue reliance on the universality of the laws of human nature.³¹

28 JSM, Autobiography, CW, i, 171.

29 JSM, ‘America’, CW, xviii, 93.

30 Ibid.

31 In ‘Bentham’ in 1838, Mill criticized Bentham for lacking imagination: ‘the faculty by which one mind understands a mind different from itself, and throws itself into the feelings of that other mind, was denied him by his deficiency of Imagination. … The Imagination which he had not, was that to which the name is generally appropriated by the best writers of the present day; that which enables us, by a voluntary effort, to conceive the absent as if it were present, the imaginary as if it were real, and to clothe it in the feelings which, if it were indeed real, it would bring along with it. This is the power by which one human being enters into the mind and circumstances of another.’ (JSM, ‘Bentham’, CW, x, 91-2.) Interestingly,

It was in ‘Definition of Political Economy’, published in 1836, that Mill raised and attempted to resolve the methodological question of how to make better use of empirical knowledge in politics. He gave empirical knowledge a crucial role, especially in

verifying the conclusions of deductive reasoning from the laws of human nature. His view of history in this essay was similar to that expressed in ‘State of Society in America’; he claimed that history was not completely reliable at all the stages of reasoning. According to Mill:

Knowledge of what is called history, so commonly regarded as the sole fountain of political experience, is useful only in the third degree. History, by itself, if we knew it ten times better than we do, could, for the reasons already given, prove little or nothing: but the study of it is a corrective to the narrow and exclusive views which are apt to be engendered by observation on a more limited scale. Those who never look backwards, seldom look far forwards: their notions of human affairs, and of human nature itself, are circumscribed within the conditions of their own country and their own times. But the uses of history, and the spirit in which it ought to be studied, are subjects which have never yet had justice done them, and which involve considerations more multifarious than can be pertinently introduced in this place.³² A further investigation into proper scientific method in the late 1830s and early 1840s brought about a vital change in his views on historical knowledge, which were reflected in the historical argument contained within the Logic. Crucially, the passage quoted above, together with some other passages regarding history, was deleted when the essay was republished as part of Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy in 1844. As J. H. Burns points out, this modification reflected a change in Mill’s attitude towards history, which was a consequence of his deepened understanding of Comte’s position.³³ Comte’s impact on Mill can be seen in the Logic, where Mill identified the laws of the development of society with the subject-matter of his projected science of society. Among the methods of the study of social phenomena

Mill later ascribed British misrule in India to ‘the inability of ordinary minds to imagine a state of social relations fundamentally different from those with which they are practically familiar’. (JSM, PPE, CW, ii, 320.)

32 JSM, ‘Definition’, CW, iv, 333.

33 Burns (1976) 7.

formulated in the Logic, it was in the inverse deductive method, which was also

suggestively termed the ‘Historical Method’, that historical knowledge was expected to play an important role. The first logical stage of the inverse deductive method was to establish a link between the higher and the lower empirical laws by showing that the lower could be derived from the higher. In this process, historical knowledge was of vital importance.

4. J. S. Mill and Historical Knowledge (iii) the 1840s