MILL, JAMES (1773-1836), historian and philosopher, was born on April 6, 1773, at Northwater Bridge, in the parish of Logie-Pert, Forfarshire, the son of James Mill, a shoemaker. His mother, Isabel Fenton, of a good family which had suffered from connection with the Stuart rising of 1745, sent him first to the parish school and to the Montrose academy, and then to the university of Edinburgh, where he distinguished himself as a Greek scholar. In October 1798 he was licensed as a preacher, but occupied himself with occasional teaching and with historical and philosophical studies. In 1802 he went to London in company with Sir John Stuart, then M.P. for Kincardineshire, and devoted himself to journalism. In 1804 he wrote a pamphlet on the corn trade, arguing against a bounty on the exportation of grain. After his marriage (1805) with Harriet Burrow, he took a house in Pentonville, where his eldest son, John Stuart Mill (q.v.), was born in 1806. About the end of this year he began his History of India, which he took 12 years to complete, instead of three or four, as he had expected.
In 1808 he became acquainted with Jeremy Bentham, and was for many years his chief companion and ally. He adopted Bentham's principles in their entirety, and did more to propagate them and to oppose the beginnings of Romanticism than anyone else. He was a regular contributor (1806-18) to the Anti Jacobin Review, the British Review, the Electric Review, and the Edinburgh Review (1808-13). In i8ii he co-operated with Wil liam Allen (177o-1843), quaker and chemist, in a periodical called the Philanthropist. He contributed largely to every number—his principal topics being Education, Freedom of the Press, and Prison Discipline (under which he expounded Bentham's "Panop ticon"). He took part in the discussions which led to the founda tion of London university in 1825. In 1814 he wrote various articles, containing an exposition of utilitarianism, for the supple ment to the fifth edition of the Encyclopcedia Britannica.
In 1818 the History of India was published, and, in spite of the fact that it contained drastic criticisms of British rule in India, Mill was appointed an official in the India House. He gradually rose till he was appointed, in 1830, head of the office. His Ele ments of Political Economy appeared in 1821 (3rd and revised ed. 1826).
From 1824 to 1826 Mill contributed to the Westminster Review, started as the organ of his party, articles attacking the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews and ecclesiastical establishments. In 1829 appeared the Analysis of the Human Mind. From 1831 to 1833 Mill was largely occupied, as the spokesman of the court of direc tors, in the defence of the East India Company, during the contro versy attending the renewal of its charter. His last published book was the Fragment on Mackintosh (1835). He died June 23, 1836.
Mill's greatest literary monument is the History of India. The materials for the history of the conquest of India were put into shape for the first time ; political theory was brought to bear on the delineation of the Hindu civilization, and the conduct of the actors in the successive stages of the conquest and administration of India was subjected to a severe criticism. The work itself, and
the 4uthor's official connection with India for the last 17 years of his life, effected a complete change in the whole system of govern ing that country.
Mill played a great part in English politics, and was, more than any other man, the founder of what was called "philosophic radicalism." His writings on government and his personal influence among the Liberal politicians of his time determined the change of view from the French Revolution theories of the rights of man and the absolute equality of men to the claiming of securities for good government through a wide extension of the franchise. Under this banner it was that the Reform Bill was fought and won. His Elements of Political Economy, which was intended only as a textbook of the subject, shows all the author's precision and lucidity. Its interest is mainly historical, as an accurate summary of the views of the philosophic radicals, based mainly on Ricardo. Mill maintained : (I) that the chief problem of practical reformers is to limit the increase of population, on the assumption that capital does not naturally increase at the same rate as population (ii. § 2, art. 3) ; (2) that the value of a thing depends entirely on the quantity of labour put into it; and (3) that what is now known as the "unearned increment" of land is a proper object for taxation. The clear enunciation of the second of these proposi tions is important in view of the emphasis laid on it by Marx and his followers and the deductions they made from it.
In his Analysis of the Mind Mill developed the psychological side of the Benthamite philosophy. It was a more systematic attempt than that already made by Hartley to explain all mental phenomena by the association of ideas. "Not only does he explain all phenomena of consciousness as having arisen through associa tion, but he also—in a somewhat artificial fashion—reduces all associations to the association of such ideas as have frequently occurred together (which has since been called association by contiguity). . . . As Bentham had attempted to base the whole of ethics on the single principle that pleasure is preferable to pain, so James Mill attempts to construct the whole of psychology on the single principle that that which has been once experienced can be recalled when experiences which occurred with it, either in space or time, are repeated" (Hoffding, Hist. of Mod. Phil. ii. 371). The implication of the Benthamite doctrine as inter preted by Mill, which took too little account of all emotions save one, and of the unconscious and involuntary elements in life, was fiercely fought by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.