Albert D. Pionke
The University of Alabama
The comprehensive index to the 33-volume Collected Works of John Stuart Mill records three references to eighteenth-century Scottish jurist and Enlightenment intellectual Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696-1782). The first appears in one of seventeen-year-old Mill’s very first publications, a letter to the editor of the Morning Chronicle entitled “Judicial Oaths” printed on 25 July 1823. A slight elaboration on an earlier letter, “Free Discussion”—the second with that title—from 8 February 1823, “Judicial Oaths” discounts the promissory value of oath-taking when dissociated from public opinion. Echoing Jeremy Bentham’s 1813 tract, “Swear not at all,” Mill cites the proverbial falseness of customs oaths as an example of what he means and mines Home’s Sketches of the History of Man (1774) for the specific example of specious swearing about the provenance of imported wine.[1] Ten years later, in an October 1833 review essay, “Blakely’s History of Moral Science,” for the Monthly Repository, Mill enumerates the authors mentioned in “what professes to be a summary” by Blakely of their opinions “concerning the first principle of ethics” (CW X.21); Lord Kames is one of thirty writers named in the list. Finally, after not quite another decade had passed, Mill, in a letter to Auguste Comte dated 28 January 1843, explains that the “true scientific spirit” is very rare in Britain, “except maybe among the Scottish,” whose education is more French than English, a fact which explains the “eminent merit of Scottish thinkers since Kames and Ferguson up to my father who died in 1836, [and who] was the last survivor of this great school” (CW XIII.566).[2] To this reference the editors of the Collected Works helpfully attach a note identifying Homes as the author of Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (1751), which is not, however, cited or even alluded to in the letter.
Only three references over thirty years, with only one specific enough to require a page citation, and that one appearing in a reiteration of a reiteration of a pamphlet by somebody else, might suggest that Mill was not particularly familiar with or invested in Home’s writings, whether proto-sociological or ethico-religious. Moreover, neither of the works cited by the editors of Mill’s Collected Works—Sketches of the History of Man and Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion—occupies a spot in that portion of Mill’s personal library conserved as the John Stuart Mill Collection at Somerville College. Which is not to say that Home was absent from Mill’s home at Blackheath. In fact, among the more or less contemporary works of English literature, criticism, botany, and other miscellaneous subjects stored just to the west of the Mill Collection’s sole, south-facing window is a 1774 edition of
Home’s Elements of Criticism (1762).[3] Published in over forty editions through the mid-nineteenth century, Elements was widely used as a college textbook on rhetoric and criticism, and may have been first encountered by Mill in 1817-1819, during that period of his childhood education that began with compiling synoptic tables of Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Organon and progressed through Quintilian, various treatises on scholastic logic, and Thomas Hobbes’s “Computatio sive logica” (1668).[4]
When he did read Elements of Criticism, Mill was engaged enough to add 61 distinct marginalia to its pages. These include 33 verbal annotations and 28 nonverbal marks distributed unevenly between his edition’s two volumes: 55 of these instances, including 31 annotations, appear in volume one; leaving only six, including two annotations, in volume two.[5] To put this number and frequency of annotation in context, Mill inscribed only 11 annotations and 25 marks in the second volume of his friend, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835-40), which he was reading in 1840 in order to review it for the Edinburgh Review. Both the overall number and the preponderance of annotations in Home’s Elements of Criticism, then, indicates an unusual and unusually verbal intensity of marginal reaction.
The overall tenor of Mill’s response to Home’s account of criticism is highly critical. At best, only three of the annotations might be described as neutral or slightly positive. On p. 19, Mill has paraphrased Home’s account of ideas that “arise in the mind without any perceived connection; as for example, after a profound sleep” as “excited by a sensation.” Later, on p. 83, in the outer margin next to a passage describing the “instinctive” and therefore “rash and ungovernable” passion that impels one “suddenly to return a blow,” Mill has written “a very strong association.” Similarly approbational, on the back flyleaf, Mill has summarized the contents of pp. 60 and 121 without editorializing:
60. Love, admiration & the other feelings with which we are affected by sentient beings are compounded of a mere pleasant emotion (like that toward an inanimate but agreeable object), and a desire to reward or benefit, the being in question.
121 Why obstacles of the gratification of desire increase the desire – because a constant endeavour to remove an obstacle preserves the object of the passion ever in view.
This last annotation appears intended to serve as an aid to memory and an index to content perhaps worth revisiting. Its somewhat more legible hand suggests that it was likely added after Mill’s initial reading had been completed and therefore represents an extra effort prompted by what Mill judged to be superior reasoning.
Although both intent and provenance are more difficult to determine with nonverbal marks, one might also interpret at least some of the 14 curly brackets, 8 standard scores, and 5 standard underlines found throughout Elements as at least neutral acknowledgements of content worth noting. That found on p. 19, where “excited by a sensation” appears alongside a curly bracket, seems clearly associated with Mill’s marginal annotation, and the same apparent linkage between nonverbal and verbal forms of marginalia is also present on fifteen additional pages (pp. 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 32, 36, 38, 46, 50, 51, 76, and 178) of volume one.
The annotations on these later pages, some of them quite long, are generally not complimentary. Two of these pages, 22 and 25, feature pairs of verbal annotations, the first a bracketed lower-case “a” next to a passage that is then annotated at length in the bottom margin; the bottom marginal annotation is in both cases prefaced with the same bracketed lower-case “a.”[6] On the former, a curly bracket highlights Home’s observation “That a great or comprehensive memory is seldom connected with a good judgment,” and is paired with an “(a)” in the inner margin that connects to a long rebuttal at the bottom of the page:
(a) A superficial remark arising from an unphilosophical mode of observation. A man is generally said to have a great memory because he can remember words, or trivial occurrences. A man of good judgement cannot remember these because his attention is never fixed upon them but as signs of something more important. But his memory may contain as many things.
The pejoratives “superficial” and “unphilosophical” compound “non sequitur,” which begins this page’s other, outer marginal annotation, together indicating Mill’s already strong, negative response to Home’s collective assertions about memory, wit, and judgment in this, only his first chapter.
Three pages later, and still in chapter one, Mill uses a similar annotation technique to answer Home’s riverine metaphor for the mind’s way of linking parts to a whole and the pleasure that comes from achieving an “orderly arrangement” of “unequal objects.” Inscribing another “(a)” in the margin, Mill writes at the bottom of the page, “(a) the whole is generally more important to us than the parts which are seldom interesting except as conducing to the production of the whole. The principal is always, qua principal, more important to us than the accessories.” Home has, in other words, missed the point about orderly arrangements and cognitive pleasure, just as, slightly higher on the same page, he has failed to realize that the mind’s river of thought flows the way it does “because the eye does,” i.e., because our method of perception affects our process of cognition.[7] Mill’s other marginal comment on this page—“a vague and unsatisfactory generalization,” written in response to an independent clause about “the great influence of order upon the mind of man,” which is set off with a handwritten curly bracket—captures his collective response to all three passages, and might well summarize his response to Elements of Criticism as a whole.
Chapter one ends with a blanket denial by Mill of Home’s implicitly theological premise, that there must be an “original propensity” over and above that uniting our “perceptions into one connected chain,” and thereby producing a unity to our actions. To this Mill has responded, “no. It is our own habits of reflection which alone prevent our ideas from succeeding one another in the mere casual order in which we happened to experience the sensations” (32). In other words, there is no need for a priori assumptions once the overdetermining effects of human habits, instilled by education and reinforced by subsequent practice, are taken into account.
Chapter two contains one annotation that suggests that at least some of Mill’s marginalia in Elements must have been added in 1826 or later, three years after Mill’s reference to Home’s Sketches of the History of Man in “Judicial Oaths.” On p. 45 in the bottom margin, Mill has inscribed the following skeptical response to Home’s attempt to account for actions “not governed by reason” by attributing them to the force of “instinct”: “The distinction between instinct & will, or, as Cousin expresses it, between the spontaneous and the voluntary activity, may be useful as a classification for ordinary purposes but a closer analysis would remove it.” The reference here is to French philosopher and educational administrator Victor Cousin, whose Fragments philosophiques appeared in its first edition in 1826. There is, unfortunately, no work by Cousin in Somerville’s John Stuart Mill Collection within which to check for corresponding marginalia.
The remainder of Mill’s annotations express more or less degrees of reservation about Home’s assertions. Thus, the attempt to establish a “principle of benevolence” as a self-actuating “motive to action” prompts Mill to demur, “This dilemma is grounded in a confusion of ideas” (50). Later, Home’s effort to explain why “a man’s affection to his parents is less vigorous than to his children” is highlighted by a curly bracket tied to Mill’s judgment, “a singularly shallow explanation” (76). And, to cite one final example, a much later passage that seeks to explain the relationship between music and emotion, “A found in a low key, brings down the mind” is scored and dismissed as “a mere pun” (178).
During that period of his career associated with his epistolary relationship with Comte, Mill returned to many of the topics raised by Home in Elements of Criticism, writing about the links between perception, memory, and cognition at length in his System of Logic (1843). This same work also contains a small number of largely favorable reference to Victor Cousin.[8] Hence, even if Elements itself did not merit a reference, Mill’s earlier response to Home’s account of criticism helped to sharpen his thinking about matters that became central to Mill’s first, career-making book. In other words, just because they were marginal does not mean that Mill’s verbal and nonverbal inscriptions were peripheral to his own river of thought.
Works Cited
The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Ed. John Robson, et. al. 33 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963-1991.
[1] “In Scotland, a country where the religious spirit certainly is not deficient, a law once existed, which imposed higher duties upon French than upon Spanish wine. The inconveniences of this law were soon felt; public opinion ceased to enforce its observation, and we are told by Lord Kaimes [sic] that it was constantly evaded by all who were interested in doing so, through the simple expedient of swearing the French wine to be Spanish” (CW XXII.32).
[2] Translation mine.
[3] Somerville’s John Stuart Mill Collection also includes an 1807 edition of Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Honourable Henry Home of Kames with over 40 examples of marginalia, almost all nonverbal and therefore impossible to attribute with certainty to John Stuart Mill.
[4] Home’s Elements of Criticism is not, however, mentioned specifically in the Autobiography. See Mill, CW I.15-21, 563-58.
[5] The annotations in volume two are generally much harder to read and so in the interests of clarity, as well as in response to Mill’s own apparent preferences, I shall concentrate my remarks on the marginalia found in volume one.
[6] Similar bracketed lower-case “a”s appear elsewhere in Mill’s library, including in Barthold Georg Niebuhr’s Römische Geschichte, wherein p. 23 of volume one features a similar pairing of a, in this case interlinear, “(a)” with a bottom marginal annotation.
[7] This brief annotation on p. 25 picks up on the sense of Mill’s much longer comment on the same subject, i.e. the ways in which perception and/or intention affect cognition, from p. 23: “i.e. the ideas follow each other either in the order in which the sensations were received or in the order in which new habits of meditation have formerly arranged the ideas themselves. This last may be called the order of nature because we of course have in our reflections, made our thoughts succeed one another according to some law; and this law, or principle of arrangement, was grounded upon that part of the nature of the things themselves which either is most striking in itself, or was most nearly connected with the purpose we then have in view.”
[8] Cousin enjoys a much fuller presence in the index to Mill’s Collected Works than does Home, with references to Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie (1827) appearing in Mill’s System of Logic (1846; CW VII and VIII), Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865; CW IX), and review essay “Bain’s Psychology” (1859; CW XI.339-74), which also nods approvingly at Cousin’s earlier Fragments. Cousin’s work as an educational reformer, especially once translated into English by Sarah Austin, also features in Mill’s more occasional reviewing in the 1830s, including essays in the Monthly Repository (CW XXI.61-74) and The Examiner (CW XXIII.727-32).