The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Introduction
• Textual Introduction
• Prefaces
• Introduction
• Book I: Of Names and Propositions
• Chapter I: Of the Necessity of Commencing With an Analysis of Language
• Chapter II: Of Names
• Chapter III: Of the Things Denoted By Names
• Chapter IV: Of Propositions
• Chapter V: Of the Import of Propositions
• Chapter VI: Of Propositions Merely Verbal
• Chapter VII: Of the Nature of Classification, and the Five Predicables
• Chapter VIII: Of Definition
• Book II: Of Reasoning
• Chapter I: Of Inference, Or Reasoning, In General
• Chapter II: Of Ratiocination, Or Syllogism
• Chapter III: Of the Functions and Logical Value of the Syllogism
• Chapter IV: Of Trains of Reasoning, and Deductive Sciences
• Chapter V: Of Demonstration, and Necessary Truths
• Chapter VI: The Same Subject Continued
• Chapter VII: Examination of Some Opinions Opposed to the Preceding Doctrines
• Book III: Of Induction
• Chapter I: Preliminary Observations On Induction In General
• Chapter II: Of Inductions Improperly So Called
• Chapter III: Of the Ground of Induction
• Chapter IV: Of Laws of Nature
• Chapter V: Of the Law of Universal Causation
• Chapter VI: Of the Composition of Causes
• Chapter VII: Of Observation and Experiment
• Chapter VIII: Of the Four Methods of Experimental Inquiry
• Chapter IX: Miscellaneous Examples of the Four Methods
• Chapter X: Of Plurality of Causes; and of the Intermixture of Effects
• Chapter XI: Of the Deductive Method
• Chapter XII: Of the Explanation of Laws of Nature
• Chapter XIII: Miscellaneous Examples of the Explanation of Laws of Nature
• Chapter XIV:: Of the Limits to the Explanation of Laws of Nature; and of Hypotheses
• Chapter XV: Of Progressive Effects; and of the Continued Action of Causes
• Chapter XVI: Of Empirical Laws
• Chapter XVII: Of Chance and Its Elimination
• Chapter XVIII: Of the Calculation of Chances
• Chapter XIX: Of the Extension of Derivative Laws to Adjacent Cases
• Chapter XX: Of Analogy
• Chapter XXI: Of the Evidence of the Law of Universal Causation
• Chapter XXII: Of Uniformities of Coexistence Not Dependent On Causation
• Chapter XXIII: Of Approximate Generalizations, and Probable Evidence
• Chapter XXIV: Of the Remaining Laws of Nature
• Chapter XXV: Of the Grounds of Disbelief

Textual Introduction

JOHN M. ROBSON

I.

THE WRITING OF THE LOGIC

in 1831, when he was twenty-five years old, John Stuart Mill made a significant analysis of his intellectual and active powers in a letter to his friend John Sterling:

Though the “cycle of reformation & antagonism” has not yet come to a close, the key of history is ours; the treatise did see the light, as A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, in 1843, not quite twelve years after this letter.

As the obituaries of Mill demonstrate, his contemporaries judged the Logic to be his most important work. The significance he himself attached to it may be inferred from the lengthy discussions of its composition and content in his Autobiography. In particular, one may note his linking it with his best-loved work: “The ‘Liberty’ is likely to survive longer than anything else that I have written (with the possible exception of the ‘Logic’). . . .”² As Professor McRae, also citing this passage, suggests in his Introduction above, the formal discipline of logic has altered vastly since Mill’s day, and so, although the Logic had a very long life as a textbook, it now is seen not as definitive, but as an important document in the history of logical speculation. It remains, moreover, central to an understanding of Mill’s thought, for the approaches and doctrines contained in it throw light on almost every aspect of his writings. Furthermore, as his first published book, it played a major role in determining the course of his career, for its wide reception gave him prominence and confidence. There is more than technical interest, then, in tracing the course of his logical studies, and the history of the composition of the Logic.³

MILL’S EARLY STUDIES OF LOGIC, 1818-30

Mill was first introduced to logic in 1818, when he was twelve, and of all his precocities, it was here, as Bain says, that he was “most markedly in advance of his years.”⁴ His own account deserves quotation:

He goes on to mention the practice this gave him in dissecting arguments, and to outline his reading of the classical rhetoricians and Plato, which reinforced the practice.

At the same time he became interested in experimental science, the foundation of the inductive portion of his Logic. “I never remember being so wrapt up in any book,” he says, “as I was in Joyce’s Scientific Dialogues; and I was rather recalcitrant to my father’s criticisms of the bad reasoning respecting the first principles of physics which abounds in the early part of that work” (ibid., 12). He also “devoured” chemical treatises, especially Thomson’s System of Chemistry, which he first read in 1816, and again in 1818,⁵ and which provided an important clue in his later speculations. During the same visit to Sandhurst in which the utility of syllogistic logic was brought home to him, he attended chemistry lectures given to the cadets by Phillips, and won fame by his notes and general performance.⁶

The most important element in Mill’s logical training in these years was, of course, his father’s constant supervision of his studies. Though James Mill never wrote a treatise on logic, the analysis of meaning and the dissection of arguments were his great polemical instruments. Bain, who had a high opinion of his logical powers, notes, “a considerable portion” of his Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind “should have gone to make up a treatise on Logic.”⁷ His direct influence on his son’s studies did not stop when, in 1819, James Mill began his career in the East India Company, nor even when in the following year, aged fourteen, John Mill went to France to live with the family of Sir Samuel Bentham, Jeremy’s younger brother.

In response to a letter from his father concerning the study of Political Economy and Logic, Mill wrote from France (11 July, 1820): “The best exercise in both these branches of knowledge would perhaps be to write treatises on particular subjects appertaining to both. This I have not yet commenced doing, but I shall certainly do so.”⁸ In the next few days, he worked on classification tables for insects and chemicals, and began a “Treatise on Value” (in French), and a “treatise on the definition of political economy” (the latter at Lady Bentham’s suggestion). Having already been at work on Sanderson’s Logic, he notes on 24 August, “Je commençai à me faire des tables Logiques,” and on 24 October began his “court Traité de Logique.” In November he began to attend courses of lectures in the Faculty of Sciences of the Academy of Montpellier in Chemistry, Zoology, and Logic, the last offered by Joseph-Diez Gorgonne, Dean of the Faculty, “comme servant d’introduction à la Philosophie des Sciences.”⁹ His grasp of the material, as well as his diligence, is revealed in two extant documents, one containing Mill’s notes of the eighteenth through thirty-second of Gorgonne’s lectures, and the other the “Traité de Logique” started before the lectures began, but clearly incorporating material from them.¹⁰

On his return to England in the summer of 1821, Mill began his intensive reading of Bentham in Dumont’s French version. The most important result of this reading, as he indicates in an oft-cited passage in the Autobiography (42), was his adoption of utilitarianism as “in one among the best senses of the word, a religion,” but one should also note his delight in Bentham’s method of classification, which appealed to him not only because of his previous intellectual training, but also because of his new interest in botany, his life-long avocation.¹¹

The next few years saw his first articles in newspapers and in the newly founded Westminster Review. His imitation of his father’s and Bentham’s methods may be seen in these published writings, and in his speeches in the London Debating Society; his continued interest in logic may be inferred from what little is known of his continuing education, which included John Austin’s tutoring and lectures in law. (He also began his professional career in these years, entering the East India Company as a clerk in the Examiner’s Office the day after his seventeenth birthday, on 23 May 1823.)¹²

In 1825 Mill joined several other young men in a “Society of Students of Mental Philosophy” that met in George Grote’s house in Threadneedle Street.¹³ Their discussions, which led to the writing of Mill’s first complete book, Essays on Some Unsettled Questions in Political Economy (written 1830-31, published 1844), and also to the Logic, were a very effective educational instrument, as Mill indicates in his Autobiography (72-3):

Having begun with political economy, they turned to scholastic logic in 1827.

Mill “always dated” his “own real inauguration as an original and independent thinker” from these meetings, which bore their first fruits in his review of Whately’s Logic, one of their texts. This important article, which includes discussion of the utility of logic, the analysis of arguments, the Predicables, the relation of Induction and Syllogism, and the problem of assenting to general propositions without knowing all that they contain, concludes with Mill’s assessment of what important tasks remained for Whately and other logicians in 1828:

The next important step in Mill’s logical speculations resulted from the attacks in 1829 by Macaulay on James Mill’s essay On Government and on utilitarianism in general.¹⁶ These shook his faith in his father’s methodology in political philosophy, without converting him to Macaulay’s position, which he thought shallow. The source of James Mill’s and Macaulay’s errors “flashed” upon him “in the course of other [i.e., logical] studies” (Autobiography, 95). James Mill had appropriately chosen a deductive method in politics, but had wrongly used a geometrical model, while Macaulay had mistakenly advocated an experimental method, that of chemistry (ibid., 96).

FIRST VERSIONS OF THE Logic, 1830-40

The result of all these activities was the first step towards the composition of the Logic, as described by Mill in the Autobiography (95-7):

One cannot give an exact date to the speculations here described, but they evidently preceded by some months at least the letter to Sterling of 20-22 October, 1831. In the portion of that letter already quoted, Mill says he has put down upon paper a great many of his ideas on logic; these would seem to include not the speculations on method mentioned in the section of the Autobiography just quoted, which he says laid a “foundation” in his “thoughts” for what became Book VI of the Logic, but rather his “ideas . . . on the distinctions among Terms, and the import of Propositions,” which he dates in the early part of 1830. In any event, the letter to Sterling provides an instructive guide to his work in the following years, for it continues, after an account of his having finished his part of the work on political economy in which Graham was intending to collaborate,¹⁷ with the following sentence: “The next thing I shall do will be to complete my speculations on Logic: very likely I shall not get to the end of the subject yet, viewed as I understand it; but I shall at least gather in another harvest of ideas, & then let the ground lie fallow a while longer.”¹⁸

Once again the Autobiography provides a full and interesting account. In 1830 and 1831, he says, he resumed¹⁹ his logical inquiries, puzzling himself “with the great paradox of the discovery of new truths by general reasoning.” He continues:

What Mill began to put on paper at this time led to the manuscript henceforth referred to as the “Early Draft,” which is here printed for the first time in Appendix A. In the headnote to that Appendix, the manuscript is described, and the evidence about its dating is given. In reconstructing the process of composition, the following are the most significant facts: the manuscript is a scribal copy, in three different hands, with corrections, additions, and some footnotes in Mill’s hand. The paper is of various makes, and three different dates, 1833, 1834, and 1836. Mill collected his folios into “gatherings,” rough equivalents of printed signatures, normally of 20ff., which he lettered alphabetically, in the top right corner, A through P, with a second N for the final gathering. The most important external evidence is in a series of letters from Mill to John Pringle Nichol in 1834. In the first of these (17 January), he mentions that he would like to have Nichol’s comments not only on articles, but also on “a much more elaborate work on Logic” which he has “made some progress in.” On 14 October he asks whether he may send Nichol “as much as is written of my book on Logic; if book it can be called, which is but the raw material out of which I shall some time or other make a book.” And finally, on 26 November, he says: “I will send the Logic very soon. I anticipate the greatest help in it, both from your general powers of thought and from your peculiar acquaintance with the philosophy of algebra, in which I am myself far from profound, but yet have found the little I do know to be of the utmost possible use.”²¹ As a note by Nichol’s son in the Early Draft indicates, the manuscript was sent to Nichol, though we know not when.

This evidence does not permit an exact reconstruction of the process of composition, but the general pattern may be set out as follows. The manuscript reveals three stages of composition: the first consists of Gatherings A-F and K-M (K-M having been relettered over the original G-I), and contains the equivalent of what became, in the published version of 1843, the Introduction, Book I, Chapters i-vi, and Book II, Chapters i-iii. This material would appear to have been copied by a scribe in 1834 from the draft Mill wrote after his re-reading of Stewart (perhaps as early as the autumn of 1831).

The next stage consists of Gatherings G-J and the second Gathering N, and contains an expanded re-writing of the conclusion of Gathering F equivalent to the end of the final Book I, Chapter vi, plus material equivalent to the final Book I, Chapters vii and viii, and (in the second Gathering N) Mill’s first attempt to deal with Induction, in three chapters containing material that contributed to Chapters ii and iii of Book III. The second scribe, in copying this material, presumably not long after the first scribe had finished copying the material of the first stage (i.e., in 1834), relettered the original Gatherings G-I (the material of Book II, Chapters i-iii) as K-M, to follow on the new conclusion of Book I, and then a third scribe continued with N (i.e., what finally was the second Gathering N).²²

Stage three consists of Gatherings N-P, and contains material equivalent to what became Book II, Chapters iv-vi of the published version. The third scribe, who also copied this material, did not reletter the old Gathering N, which should have become Q to accommodate the added material. Scribe C made his copy sometime after the beginning of 1836, as the watermarks establish, and undoubtedly before Mill began, in 1837, the version of the Logic that appears in the Press-copy Manuscript.²³

In view of the rewritings that occurred from 1837 to 1843, it is surprising to see how closely the Early Draft corresponds to the Introduction²⁴ and Books I and II in the Press-copy Manuscript, and even to the subsequent editions through Mill’s lifetime. Table 1, which includes the tentative chapter headings of the Early Draft, gives the equivalents,²⁵ and summarizes the three-stage composition.

As a guide to Mill’s rewriting between 1837 and 1843, when the Logic was published, the major differences between the Early Draft and the Press-copy Manuscript may be described as follows:

The most noticeable difference is the absence in the Early Draft of Books IV, V, and VI, and the embryonic form of Book III. As finally published, the Introduction and Books I and II follow quite closely the organization of the equivalent material in the Early Draft. In comparing the versions one finds the following:

The “Introductory Matter” is closest in wording to the final version, and has relatively few gaps when compared with the Press-copy Manuscript.

Book I is somewhat closer in bulk than Book II to the final version, but varies more, especially in two important places, in wording and organization. These two places, equivalent to parts of the final Book I, Chapters iii and vi, are significant for a study of the composition of the Logic, and also for its doctrine. The first of these reflects Mill’s problems in laying out the chapter on the Classification of Things. As indicated in the notes to the text of the Early Draft, §§1-2, and much of 6-10 are generally covered in the Early Draft, with the other sections being either absent, or so different in organization as to prevent direct collation. Mill’s dissatisfaction with the account may be inferred from his insertion, at the end of this chapter in the Early Draft, of the “Linea Prædicamentalis” (see 1004 below), which does not, as might appear, summarize the preceding account, but seems to indicate his second thoughts on the proper ordering of the argument. This chapter continued to give Mill trouble, for, as will be shown later, Alexander Bain found it difficult, and so Mill made changes in the final stages of revision of the Press-copy Manuscript to clarify the argument.

The second place in Book I where there is a major departure from the final version reflects, in part, Mill’s recasting of Chapter iii, and in part his development, after the Early Draft was completed, of the theory of Natural Kinds, which led to extensive changes in the conclusion of Chapter vi and in Chapter vii, as well as minor changes elsewhere.

The sections of the Early Draft that correspond to Book II are, as mentioned above, generally closer in wording and order to the final version than those corresponding to Book I. The equivalents of Chapters iv, v, and vi were in fact, as the preceding table indicates, the last part of the Early Draft to be composed. (Book II, Chapter vii, it should be noted, first appeared only in the 4th edition, 1856.) The most extensive rewriting between the Early Draft and the Press-copy Manuscript occurred in the discussion of the syllogism (the end of Chapter ii, and throughout Chapter iii), and in those parts of Chapters iv and v affected by Mill’s fuller development of the theory of induction after 1837.

Given all these differences, the Early Draft and the Press-copy Manuscript provide a striking exemplification of Mill’s comment in the Autobiography (132-3) on his methods of composition. His books, he says,

This admirable method, it may be noted, while more coherently followed by Mill than by Bentham, from whom he may have borrowed it, still makes for great editorial problems in dating as well as in text.

His inability to resolve the difficulties in inductive theory, Mill says in the Autobiography (109), brought him to a halt, which lasted until 1837. “I had come to the end of my tether; I could make nothing satisfactory of Induction, at this time. I continued to read any book which seemed to promise light on the subject, and appropriated, as well as I could, the results; but for a long time I found nothing which seemed to open to me any very important vein of meditation.” Early in 1837, having become convinced that a “comprehensive and . . . accurate view of the whole circle of physical science,” which it would take him long to acquire, was necessary before he could continue with Induction, he read Whewell’s recently published History of the Inductive Sciences. Stimulated by this reading, he returned to Herschel’s Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, which he had reviewed favourably in 1831 on its first appearance.²⁶ Setting “vigorously to work out the subject” of Induction, he wrote, during two months of the summer of 1837, what he later estimated at about one-third, “the most difficult third,” of the whole work (what he had written earlier, i.e., the major part of the Early Draft, comprised another third).²⁷ “What I wrote at this time,” he says in the Autobiography (125), “consisted of the remainder of the doctrine of Reasoning (the theory of Trains of Reasoning, and Demonstrative Science), and the greater part of the Book on Induction.”²⁸ If his memory is accurate, the third stage of the composition of the Early Draft (Gatherings N, O, and P) occurred in the summer of 1837 and, following one (though the less likely) hypothesis suggested above (see n23), he may have sent the Early Draft to Nichol at that time, keeping before him a holograph to which he then added “the greater part” of Book III.²⁹

Noting that Mill considered the time necessary for this writing as having been “stolen from occupations more urgent” (Autobiography, 125), one is reminded that his major avocation during these years was the editing of the London and Westminster Review, and that he had become the head of the family after his father’s death in mid-1836. His role as teacher included initiating his youngest brother, Henry, into the mysteries of logic; he undoubtedly profitted himself from this instruction, for during 1837, when engaged in the writing just described, he “carried [Henry] through the Aristotelian logic,” and started him on Hobbes.³⁰

Mill interrupted his work on logic to compose two articles for the London and Westminster,³¹ and then, after reading for the first time Volumes I and II of Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive,³² he wrote three more chapters of Book III in the autumn, and “did not return to the subject until the middle of the next year: the review engrossing all the time [he] could devote to authorship, or to thinking with authorship in view.”³³

In July and August of 1838 he completed the first draft of Book III and, as a result, was led to “recognize Kinds as realities in nature,” and so to “modify and enlarge several chapters” of Book I (i.e., v and vi, and, in part, iii).³⁴ On 2 October, while on holiday, he wrote to John Robertson that he had planned “the concluding portion” since leaving London (in the middle of September), had written a “large piece” of it, and hoped to do more before returning to London. During this holiday he read the third volume of Comte’s Cours.³⁵ In the Autobiography (132) he identifies the work done that autumn as the “Book on Language and Classification [Book IV], and the chapter on the Classification of Fallacies [Book V, Chap. ii].” With so much done, he then hoped to finish, except for rewriting, during the winter of 1838-39.³⁶ But a severe illness interrupted his plans, and he went to Italy on a six-month leave, returning to London in the early summer. Resuming work on the Logic on his return, he told Sterling that he could hardly fail to finish during the next year,³⁷ and, after a month in Falmouth during which his brother Henry died, he completed the draft of the whole work during the summer and autumn of 1840.³⁸

It seems safe to assume that what Mill had written up to this time was gathered in a holograph manuscript not now extant (except for a few folios that appear in the Press-copy Manuscript), consisting of the Early Draft, rewritten in parts, and its continuation through the rest of Book III, Books IV and V, and probably Book VI. He therefore felt himself near the end of his task, and so, though he had to rewrite the work completely, and Sterling had advised him to read the German logicians,³⁹ he was looking forward to publication in 1841.

FINAL MANUSCRIPT VERSION, 1841-43

The rewriting of the Logic beginning in 1841 produced the Press-copy Manuscript and, finally, the 1st edition, published in March, 1843. The main pattern of composition in these years may be traced, before the details are discussed.

In April, 1841, Mill began the final draft, and worked steadily on the revision until the end of January, 1842,⁴⁰ having finished Book I by 6 May, and “about half of it, & the most difficult half” towards the end of September.⁴¹ During the rewriting he read Whewell’s Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences,⁴² and introduced many references to the work. His intention was to finish the Logic in time for publication in April, 1842,⁴³ and to that end submitted it (not complete) to John Murray on 20 December, 1841, sending what he thought was the final revision of the last three Books at the beginning of February, 1842. In early March, Murray, who had been ill in the interval, turned down the manuscript for reasons, now unknown, that in Mill’s opinion could have been given much sooner.⁴⁴ Annoyed at what he thought an unreasonable delay⁴⁵ (it will hardly seem so to modern authors), Mill sent the manuscript to John Parker—or rather, sent such portions as Parker’s reader (William Cooke Taylor) wished to see, saying that he had to include “some other chapters or portions of chapters which from the manner in which the papers are stitched together [i.e., in Gatherings], cannot conveniently be separated from them.” He continues: “I fear some parts are by no means so legible as I could wish, owing to the number of interlineations & erasures. The portions moreover of the Third Book, will scarcely perhaps be intelligible without the chapters which are intended to precede them.”⁴⁶

Parker accepted the manuscript early in April, suggesting an edition of 750 copies at his own risk, and half-profit; Mill was delighted:

By this time it was too late to think of spring publication, and Parker suggested the end of the year, with printing to begin in July. But the rewriting was far from completed, even at this late stage, and though Mill was somewhat annoyed that printing did not begin until September, and had reached only Vol. I, p. 160 by 19 December,⁴⁸ this delay enabled him to make significant revisions in the manuscript before the proof stage. (And, as will be shown, there were many changes in the proofs as well.) A major insight into these late revisions is given by comparing the final Table of Contents with the Table of Contents Mill enclosed in a letter to John Austin on 7 July, 1842, the implications of which will be dealt with in the detailed discussion below.⁴⁹

Two events were largely responsible for these late revisions. The first was Mill’s meeting Alexander Bain, with whom he had previously corresponded, in London in April, 1842. Impressed by Bain’s abilities, and in particular by his scientific knowledge, Mill asked him in the middle of July “to revise the MS. of his Logic, now nearly ready for the press.”⁵⁰ Bain immediately set to work, especially looking for inductive examples. He remained in London for the purpose until 10 September (just at the time printing was beginning), and continued his work in Aberdeen, with the assistance of John Shier, the assistant to Thomas Clark, Professor of Natural History at Aberdeen. He finished what he could do in November; however, as he had contracted to write a review of the Logic for the Westminster Review, he immediately began to receive proof sheets as they were worked off,⁵¹ and there can be little doubt that some of the proof changes also resulted from his comments. Mill’s due appreciation is seen in the Autobiography (147n):

The second event was the publication in 1842 of the sixth and final volume of Comte’s Cours, Le Complément de la philosophie sociale, et les conclusions générales. Mill, having in the interval read Comte’s fourth and fifth volumes, was immensely impressed by the sixth, which led him, in January, 1843, into a “remaniement complet” of the concluding chapters of Book VI.⁵²

At last, however, though he was ill in the autumn of 1842 and again in December, and although he was greatly troubled by the American repudiations of that year, Mill managed to get the work through the press in about five months,⁵³ and sent off a large number of complimentary copies on its publication in March, 1843.⁵⁴

With the major pattern in mind, one may turn to important particular revisions in the period 1841-43, relying for the most part on internal evidence in the Press-copy Manuscript.⁵⁵ In doing so, it should be remembered that the first full draft (that completed in 1840) is not now extant, except for a few intercalated folios in the Press-copy Manuscript, and so cannot be used for comparison.⁵⁶ The account is based on the divisions into Books, rather than on the exact times of various revisions, which cannot be determined.

Book I. As mentioned above, Bain felt, on first reading the manuscript, that the chapter on “Things denoted by Names” (I, iii) was not fully intelligible; he also had doubts about its place in the total scheme, though he did not press this objection. “The result was that [Mill] revised the chapter, and introduced the subordinate headings, which very much lightened the burden of its natural abstruseness.”⁵⁷ The manuscript evidence confirms this account. The grossest evidence is that while Mill’s normal “gatherings” (except for those concluding the Books) contain twenty folios, Gatherings D and E, which include all but the first two folios of Chap. iii, contain, respectively, 24 and 25 folios, and indications of revision are seen where both would have ended had they contained 20 folios: e.g., f.77, which would be the first folio of the original Gathering E, is a relatively clean copy, as is f.81, on which the final Gathering E begins; also, f.101 is headed “(Supplement to E)”, and ff.99-105 are clean copies. (Less obviously, the paper’s colour changes slightly between ff.80 and 81, and between ff.82 and 83, and f.82, like f.81, is a clean copy.) The insertion of the “subordinate headings” is also plainly indicated, as at f.62v, where, along with the concluding sentence of §2, the title, “I. Feelings, or States of Consciousness,” is added. Throughout the chapter there are cancellations, interlineations, and additions on the versos, all relevant to the changes prompted by Bain’s criticism.⁵⁸

All the paper in Book I is watermarked 1839, and so, since Bain met Mill only in April 1842, it may be assumed that Mill was using 1839 paper as late as the autumn of 1842; this assumption leads to the conclusion that the latest paper in the manuscript, that of 1841, was used solely for very late revisions (all in Book VI).

Only one other slight change need be mentioned here, as again helping to date the revisions. In his letter to Austin of 7 July, 1842, Mill gives the title of Chapter vii as “Of the five Predicables, & the nature of Classification”; the final title reversed the elements, reading, “Of the Nature of Classification, & the Five Predicables.” This change, in conjunction with others cited below, enables one to date portions of the manuscript as pre-July, 1842, and many changes involving cancellations and interlineations as post-July, 1842. In other words, Mill, after rewriting the whole of the manuscript by February, 1842, went through it again, making not only the major changes prompted by Bain’s advice and his rereading of Comte, but also altering and tidying up throughout.

In addition, one may mention (treating the “Introduction” as similar to Book I in history) the unquestionably late addition of the reference to Mill’s review of Bailey on Berkeley’s theory of vision, which appeared in the Westminster for October 1842 (see 8 below).

Book II. There is comparatively little evidence of manuscript revision of Book II. Three gatherings, M, O, and P, are of anomalous length, O having an extra folio because Mill’s diagram on f.283 was cut out and pasted on a separate sheet. The other two anomalies are more interesting. Bain remarks, in his John Stuart Mill (67): “I was so much struck with the view of Induction that regarded it as reasoning from particulars to particulars, that I suggested a farther exemplification of it in detail, and [Mill] inserted two pages of instances that I gave him.” These “pages” were added to Gathering M, which grew to 24 folios by the addition of ff.251-4, comprising paragraphs 7-9 of Chapter iii, §3, and including, among other examples, the anecdote about Lord Mansfield (190 below).

Gathering P has an extra folio because the long note that concludes Chapter v was added, running from f.320v to the bottom of f.321r (on which the text ends), and onto an extra part folio (f.322r, unnumbered by Mill). This note deals with Herschel’s review of Whewell in the Quarterly Review for June, 1841; in the note Mill says: “the whole of the present chapter was written before I had seen the article (the greater part indeed before it was published) . . .” (cf. 248 below). Since Bain refers to letters to and from Mill late in 1841, in which mention is made of Whewell and Herschel,⁵⁹ one may reasonably assume that this note (plus another in Chapter vi, §2, later deleted)⁶⁰ was added in the autumn of 1841.

One other addition merits mention, that of the reference to the Dutens edition of Leibniz, in Chapter v, §6. (The reference to Leibniz’s Oeuvres, 1842 ed., in Book V, Chapter iii, §3, is also added, apparently at the same time.)

Book III. Here the importance of Bain’s contributions is most clearly apparent.⁶¹ Being familiar with “the Experimental Physics, Chemistry and Physiology of that day,”⁶² he saw, on first reading Mill’s manuscript, that the main defect was in the experimental examples, which were “too few and not unfrequently incorrect.” Therefore, with the help of Shier, who “went carefully over all the chemical examples with [Bain], and struck out various erroneous statements,” he gave Mill “a large stock of examples to choose from, as he revised the Third Book for press.”⁶³

This aid is most markedly seen in the addition of Chapters ix and xiii after the letter to Austin of 7 July, 1842, in which these chapters are not mentioned. Both chapters contain inductive examples: Chapter ix is entitled “Miscellaneous Examples of the Four Methods,” and Chapter xiii, “Miscellaneous Examples of the Explanation of Laws of Nature.” The first folio of each of these chapters has a note in Mill’s hand, requesting duplicate proofs of the chapter; these were undoubtedly for Bain, who, though he was receiving proofs of the whole work for his review, probably marked up these duplicate sheets and returned them to Mill. As the variants in the text below show, there were important changes in the proof stage, probably resulting from Bain’s further reflection on these matters; he comments that he spent some time from November, 1842, to April, 1843, on “the final contribution of scientific examples to Mill. . . .”⁶⁴

Chapters ix and xiii were evidently both added at the same time, as the numbers of the chapters from Chapter x on are altered by current cancellations

The opening folio of Book III, Chapter ix, of the Press-copy Manuscript British Museum

and additions, so that x-xiii are altered from ix-xii, and xiv-xxv from xii-xxiii.⁶⁵ The other internal evidence confirms these conclusions.⁶⁶

One interesting change in title occurred before the letter to Austin: in the MS, Chapter xvii was originally entitled “Of the Evidence of Empirical Laws”; this was changed (when it was still Chapter xv, i.e., before ix and xiii were added) to the final “Of Chance and its Elimination.”⁶⁷

There are a few other noteworthy additions in Book III at this stage. The reference to Carpenter’s Physiology was almost certainly added to Chapter vi, §2: Mill’s notice of the 2nd edition appeared in the Westminster Review, XXXVII (Jan., 1842), 254. Bain, who met Carpenter in the summer of 1842, mentions that George Bentham Mill, John’s second youngest brother, was living at this time in Carpenter’s house as a pupil, and comments that John Mill was “very much impressed from the outset by [Carpenter’s] writings on Physiology.”⁶⁸ A reference (deleted in a later edition) to Vol. VI of Comte’s Cours was added to Chapter xxiv, §6 (see 615^g-g below), and the latter part of the note to Chapter xviii, §5 (543n below), concerning a quotation from Laplace, was also evidently added.

A light on the types of examples used by Mill in Book III is thrown by the text of Mill’s letter to Austin, where, evidently encouraging Austin to review the Logic for the Edinburgh, Mill admits that “the part relating to Induction is not ‘more occupied with the mental & social than with the mathematical & physical sciences’ because it was more convenient to illustrate inductive methods from those subjects on which the conclusions elicited by them are undisputed.”⁶⁹ Bain’s comment may be compared: “For the Deductive Method, and the allied subjects of Explanation and Empirical and Derivative Laws, the examples that we found were abundant. When, however, I suggested his adopting some from Psychology, he steadily, and I believe wisely, resisted; and, if he took any of these it was in the Deductive department.”⁷⁰

Book IV. This Book was little revised in 1841-43, as the regularity of the gatherings shows.⁷¹ There were two minor changes in chapter titles, one before the letter to Austin (the title of Chapter vii, “Of Classification, as subsidiary to Induction,” replaces the cancelled “Of the Principles of Classification”), and the other before and perhaps again after that letter (in the letter the title of Chapter v, “On the Natural History of the Variations in the Meaning of Terms,” is given without the first two words; originally in the MS the title was “On the Natural History of the Variations in Language”).

There are some brief additions, mainly on the versos, such as the reference to Chalmers (of whom Bain had a high opinion), coupled with a reference to electrical terminology (see 703^f), and the quotations from Paris’s Pharmacologia (see 692^k and 693-4); the first section of Chapter iii was also added. These additions, like similar ones in Book V, may reflect the desire of Parker’s reader for more examples (see lxvii above).⁷²

Book V. One gathering, Ww, is anomalous in length, having 24 folios, but the internal evidence of revision is inconclusive, and there are no significant changes in chapter titles.⁷³ The most interesting additions are the references to Malebranche and to Coleridge’s borrowing from Spinoza (770-1), to Paris’s Pharmacologia (750, 766, 778-80, 783^e, 793n, the last with some additional text), and the probable addition of §6 to Chapter v.

Book VI. The final Book of the Logic was the last and most heavily revised in this period. Bain says:

The internal evidence strongly establishes the outlines of the extensive late revision. None of the gatherings has 20ff.; in revision Mill adapted the gatherings to the lengths of the chapters, so that each gathering contains all of at least one chapter (Yy contains i and ii; Zz, iii and iv; 3A, v; 3B, vi, vii, and viii; 3C, ix; 3D, x; and 3E, xi). The major revisions are revealed by differences between the chapters as indicated in the letter to Austin and as they finally appear in the MS.

In the letter, the final Chapters ii and iii are listed in reverse order, with the final ii being entitled “Digression concerning Liberty & Necessity,” rather than “Of Liberty and Necessity” (the change is revealed, through cancellation and interlineation, in the MS). Chapter iv, “Of the Laws of Mind,” does not appear in the letter to Austin; consequently, all the subsequent equivalent chapters have altered numbers.⁷⁵ Chapter ix, “Of the Physical, or Concrete Deductive Method,” appears in the letter as Chapter viii, “Of the Mathematico-Physical, or Analytic Method.” The letter has as Chapter ix “Of the Verification of the Social Science,” and as Chapter x “Of the Progressiveness of Human Nature in connexion with the Social Science; & of the new Historical Method founded thereupon”; in place of these the MS has only Chapter x, “Of the Inverse Deductive, or Historical Method.”

The evidence suggests the following line of argument. Unhappy about the placing of the chapter on Liberty and Necessity (as “Digression” indicates), Mill retitled and renumbered it, and then divided the original Chapter ii into Chapters iii and iv, adding material to both.⁷⁶ The numbers of the succeeding chapters were then changed, so that Chapters v-ix became vi-x. Such evidence as cancellations at the bottom of folios that are not continued on the following folios, short folios, and paper dates (alternation between 1839 and 1841 papers begins with MS Vol. IV, f.218), indicates revisions and additions in Chapters v-x, evidently resulting in the main from Mill’s reading of Vol. VI of Comte’s Cours. The changes are most evident in Chapters ix and x where, as noted above, the titles in the letter to Austin are not matched in the MS. Apparently Mill first added Chapter x (“Of the Inverse Deductive, or Historical Method”), retaining both the original Chapter ix (“Of the Verification of the Social Science”) and Chapter x (“Of the Progressiveness of Human Nature in connexion with the Social Science; & of the modern Historical Method founded thereupon”), renumbering x and xi as xii and xiii (iv also having been added).⁷⁷ He then amalgamated four chapters (ix-xii) into two, deleting the titles of ix and xi, and rewrote to produce the final MS form.⁷⁸

The extent of the rewriting obscures some of the details, because the discarded sheets are not found in the MS. One may mention, however, that Chapter i, which was not completely rewritten, shows extensive revision, and an added reference to Vol. VI of Comte’s Cours shows in §6 of the final chapter (see 948^i-i), which also was not completely rewritten in January, 1843.

REVISIONS, PROOF TO 8TH EDITION, 1843-72

As will by now be amply evident, the Logic was the most carefully composed and revised of all Mill’s works. Comparison of the variants with those in his other major systematic work, the Principles of Political Economy, demonstrates, of course, the dependence of revisions on the subject matter. That is, Mill’s economic treatise, while containing a great deal of analysis, also involves much description and some normative comment, and so was more open to alterations of attitudes (towards socialism and labour, for example) than was his logical treatise. The passage of time (nearly thirty years between the final manuscript and the 8th edition of the Logic) did not introduce any new logical “facts,” and the major changes in logical analysis that have almost totally altered logic in the twentieth century were only beginning to be introduced towards the end of Mill’s life, and did not influence his thought in any marked degree. In the Logic, therefore, the most extensive changes reflecting the passage of time do not, as they often do in the Principles, reveal a shift in attitudes; rather, they typically consist of answers to opponents, or new illustrations of methods.

This is not to suggest that the Logic of 1872 is not different in important ways from the Press-copy Manuscript. Most obviously, the work increased in length. The number of pages of text (1st ed., 1204; 2nd ed., 1210; 3rd ed., 1029; 4th ed., 1059; 5th ed., 1086; 6th ed., 1096; 7th ed., 1096; 8th ed., 1120) is misleading, because the number of words per page was significantly increased in the 3rd edition, so that, taking the amount of material in the 1st edition as 1.00, the other editions contain approximately the following amounts: 2nd edition, 1.005; 3rd edition, 1.04; 4th edition, 1.07; 5th edition, 1.10; 6th edition, 1.11; 7th edition, 1.11; 8th edition, 1.13. This comparison partly indicates the extent of the revisions, although it disguises substitutions and deletions. In fact, there were over 4800 substantive alterations in the text,⁷⁹ and many of these, singly or in groups, cast new light on various aspects of Mill’s thought and life, and on attitudes to logic and science in the nineteenth century. Because the Logic, unlike the Principles, is not complemented over a long period by many other of Mill’s writings (the Hamilton is of course important), his revisions have a special significance for an understanding of his speculative development.

The variants have until now received no critical attention beyond allusions to isolated changes, there being wide awareness only that complimentary references to Comte were excised at some point.⁸⁰ Mill’s Prefaces have perhaps contributed to this neglect because, though they call attention to the fact of revision, and indicate many of the major changes, they do not indicate the scope and nature of the rewriting. The first seven paragraphs of the Preface to the 1st edition remained, with minor alterations, in all editions; the Preface to the 3rd edition, again with minor alterations, was retained, under a separate heading, in all subsequent editions; and in each edition a concluding paragraph or paragraphs (deleted or substantially altered in the next subsequent edition) described the current edition. (The exact changes are shown in the text below.)

Just how carefully Mill revised and reconsidered, and just how seriously he took the duties of an author to his public, are demonstrated clearly by a full collation, which yields the results seen in Table 2.

What immediately strikes the eye is the large number of changes—almost 40 per cent of the total—made in the 3rd edition. Almost equally striking to the twentieth-century author is the very considerable number of proof changes. While nineteenth-century authors had considerably more leeway than our contemporaries in running up printing costs, it should be remembered that Mill, while not unknown, was not an established author, this being his first published book. It will also be noted that, compared to the other editions, the final three, like the final two of Mill’s Principles, were lightly rewritten. But even in these editions his careful revision is evident: the pattern of changes in the various portions of the Logic is surprisingly similar in all editions, with the minor variants sufficiently outnumbering the major ones to give this consistency. The table shows that Book III was the most heavily revised (as will be demonstrated, it also contains many of the

major variants); it should be remembered, however, that it is much the longest Book, and when the number of variants per page is calculated, the order of frequency of changes is seen to be: Introduction, Book V, Book VI, Book IV, Book I, Book III, Book II.⁸²

Such calculations are of course less meaningful than a study of individual variants in context, not here practicable. Only as prolegomena to more detailed study, therefore, the following comments are offered, beginning with a discussion of the longer variants,⁸³ and those of special interest, edition by edition, and then moving to an outline of the shorter variants of diverse kinds. As there are no long variants between the Press-copy Manuscript and the 1st edition, one may begin with the 2nd edition.

2nd Edition, 1846. In the Preface to the 2nd edition Mill says that the text has been “carefully revised, and all errors corrected which have been either discovered by the author himself, or pointed out by others.” He also calls attention to the “materially changed” chapter on the Calculation of Chances (III, xviii), and the revision of the latter part of that on the Grounds of Disbelief (III, xxv).⁸⁴ The changes in these chapters are, indeed, the most significant in the edition. As Mill indicates in the Preface, his revised opinion was largely the result of Sir John Herschel’s objections in correspondence.⁸⁵ On 10 July, 1845, replying to Mill’s thanks for the complimentary remarks he had made in his Presidential Address to the British Association, Herschel mentioned some problems in the treatment of physical science and mathematics in the Logic, and said he would, on request, specify particular passages that needed correction. In December, when he was beginning to prepare the 2nd edition, Mill wrote asking for specific objections, which Herschel supplied on 22 December, discussing at some length the treatment of Laplace in the chapters on probability. Other criticisms, Mill replied, had already convinced him that Laplace was not so wrong as he had accused him of being in Book III, Chapter xviii, and he would rectify the matter (see Appendix F); he was not yet convinced that Herschel’s comments on the treatment of probability in Book III, Chapter xxv, were justified. As the revision progressed, Mill wrote on 2 February, 1846, asking whether Herschel had found anything objectionable in the 1st volume. As a result of Herschel’s reply, Mill made further changes in Book III (see 456^p-p, 469^o-o, 469^d-d, 501n). And finally, after a further exchange concerning Book III, Chapter xxv, Mill said, in April, 1846, that he was convinced that Herschel was right, and so had written a new conclusion to the chapter (see Appendix G).⁸⁶

The changes in Book III, Chapters xviii and xxv led to a bibliographic rarity. Not foreseeing how much revision lay in the years ahead, Mill had the two chapters offprinted from the 2nd edition, probably with a view to sending copies to those who had received complimentary sets of the 1st edition.⁸⁷

Although, in Bain’s word’s, the Logic was “about the best attacked book of the time,”⁸⁸ it was not extensively reviewed on its first appearance. This fact is worthy of notice here because so many of the major revisions introduced in later editions contain Mill’s responses to his critics. Mill was understandably disappointed that prospective reviews in the Edinburgh Review by Austin and in the Quarterly Review by Herschel never materialized,⁸⁹ and that Whewell did not reply at this time. He may have been later consoled by the comment of R. H. Hutton in the Prospective Review in 1850: “The prolonged silence with which his book has been received by English critics seems to imply a surrender without terms; and in fact the qualities of Mr. Mill’s mind are eminently calculated to impress and frighten our countrymen into silence, even when unconvinced.”⁹⁰

The “prolonged silence” was not in fact total; two important reviews appeared, that of Bain in the Westminster Review,⁹¹ and that of W. G. Ward in the British Critic.⁹²

Two other sets of changes that, though most of the individual variants are brief, are of cumulative significance, began in the 2nd edition. These are alterations in passages referring to Whewell and Comte. Even though Whewell’s first reply to Mill did not appear until 1849 in his On Induction, Mill removed twenty-eight references to him in the 2nd edition, three in the 3rd, and three more in the 5th.⁹³

The alterations reflecting Mill’s revised view of Comte are even more extensive, and demonstrate, more than those concerning Whewell, extralogical considerations. Mill had an extensive correspondence with Comte from 1842, when he was engaged in the final revisions of the manuscript of the Logic, and the final volumes of Comte’s Cours were appearing, until 1845, when his reservations about Comte’s social and political views (and financial affairs) resulted in a complete break. While a large number of quotations from and references to Comte remain in all editions, Mill’s disillusionment is adequately demonstrated in his revision or deletion in the 2nd edition, just after their correspondence ended, of nearly fifty generally laudatory references. In the 3rd edition of 1851, probably at the urging of Harriet Taylor, who took profound exception to Comte’s attitude to women, and who married Mill in that year, some ten similar changes were made, including the deletion of an epigraph to Book VI that had survived the cutting away of 1846. A few changes also appear in the 4th edition (1856), but one of these involves the deletion of a new criticism introduced in 1851. In the 5th edition (1862), presumably as a result of time’s balancing power and Comte’s death (though it should be noted that Harriet also had died in the interval), a few complimentary changes were made, and finally, in the 8th edition (1872), two of the deletions of 1846 were reinstated.⁹⁴

3rd Edition, 1851. The 3rd edition of the Logic, like the 3rd edition of the Principles, which appeared in the next year, is the most heavily revised of all, introducing, as already mentioned, nearly 40 per cent of the total number of variants. In the Preface, noting the necessity of replying to criticisms, especially those of Whewell, Mill says he has “carefully reconsidered” all points on which he had been assailed, and “in general silently” corrected such “minor oversights” as were detected by himself and his critics, adding, “it is not to be inferred that I agree with the objections which have been made to a passage, in every instance in which I have altered or cancelled it.” This generalized statement covers nearly 1900 variants, including twenty-one long ones. Five of these are of considerable importance: four in Book III involve the addition of a whole section (ii, §5; v, §11; ix, §6 [in 51, 56, this appeared as a footnote]; and xviii, §4); the fifth, in the final chapter of Book VI, involved the significant rewriting and expansion of §§5-6 into §§5-7.

In addition to Whewell’s strictures (see, e.g., 287n, 300n), Mill replied to those of Francis Bowen in his Lowell Lectures, on the Application of Metaphysics and Ethical Science to the Evidences of Religion (see 354, 356n),⁹⁵ and of R.H. Hutton in his “Mill and Whewell on the Logic of Induction” (see, e.g., 331n). He also incorporated references to De Morgan’s work on logic (see 170n),⁹⁶ and received from Bain some suggestions for “alterations and additional examples,” of which Bain says in 1882, “I scarcely remember what they were.”⁹⁷

4th Edition, 1856. The sale of the Logic remaining steady, probably because of its use in “colleges & other places of education,”⁹⁸ Mill was again called on for revisions, resulting, as he says in the Preface to the 4th edition, in “a considerable number of additions,” the “most important” relating to the “doctrine of Causation” (see, e.g., 340^k-k, 363^a-a) and to his controversy with Spencer (II, vii being added). This disagreement between two generally allied philosophers was sparked by criticisms of the Logic in Spencer’s “Universal Postulate” (first published 1853), and was continued through various works and editions by both.⁹⁹

In addition to these long variants mentioned in the Preface, there are six others in the 4th edition, one of them being the deletion of a passage added in the 3rd edition (see 950^c), and another the addition of a passage subsequently rewritten and then deleted in the 8th edition (see Appendix D).

5th Edition, 1862. In 1861, concurrently with his revision of the Principles for its 5th edition, Mill again went through the Logic, finishing early in 1862.¹⁰⁰ Though this edition (like its companion edition of the Principles) is the most heavily revised after the 3rd, there are only six long variants,¹⁰¹ one being the addition of a section (II, iii, §8), and another the addition of a whole chapter (VI, xi); the latter, referred to in the Preface (along with “many minor improvements”) shows the influence on Mill of Buckle’s History of Civilization in England.¹⁰² Another interesting addition is the reference to Darwin (498n-499n), foreshadowed in his letter to Bain of 11 April, 1860.¹⁰³

6th Edition, 1865. Mill’s candidacy for Westminster in 1865 led to his “cheap volumes,” the People’s Editions, going off “like wildfire, while there was an increased demand for the Logic.”¹⁰⁴ So again Mill was faced with “an unusual amount of revision,”¹⁰⁵ once more for both the Logic and the Principles, which also went into a sixth edition in 1865.

Four long variants were introduced into the Logic, three of them involving at least a full section (II, iii, §9; III, ix, §4; and III, xiii, §§1-3). The final two of these are covered by the Preface’s reference to “new and apt examples of inductive and deductive investigation,” for which Mill was again indebted to Bain, who comments: “I referred him to Brown Séquard’s interesting research on Cadaveric Rigidity, and induced him to read the same author’s volume of Researches on the Nervous System. I also obtained from Thomas Graham a complete set of his researches on Gases and Liquids; pointing his attention to what I thought most available.”¹⁰⁶

Mill also mentions in the extensive Preface his introduction of material previously excluded, indicating that he supports the “experiential” epistemology in its battle with the “à priori or intuitional” school. This comment points to the first of the long variants mentioned above, and also to many other changes, none of them reaching a page in length, but all contributing to a different tone (certainly not a different opinion) concerning the relation between logic and epistemology. In fact the difference in tone would be more marked if Mill had not silently introduced similar qualifications and explanations into the 3rd and 4th editions.¹⁰⁷ Perhaps the most noticeable changes in the 6th edition are found in the footnoted references, eleven in total, to the matter of Mill’s Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, which was first published in 1865 after some years of preparatory study of Hamilton and his allies.¹⁰⁸

Another interesting change (further altered in the 8th edition) resulted from criticisms of the argument in Book III, Chapter xxiii, §6 by De Morgan and his son (599ⁿ).¹⁰⁹

7th Edition, 1868. Mill’s parliamentary prominence, and the increasing use of the Logic as a textbook, quickly exhausted the 6th edition, and late in 1867 Longmans reported the need for a new edition.¹¹⁰ The wide sales of the People’s Editions of his other works suggested that the Logic should appear in a cheaper format, but Mill was by this time fully aware that the People’s Editions were cutting into the sales of the Library Editions (the Principles did not go into a seventh edition until 1871), and so refused the suggestion, as he did again in 1870, and the People’s Edition of the Logic (still very much in use in reprints) appeared only posthumously in 1884, with Helen Taylor’s agreement.¹¹¹

Comparatively lightly revised, perhaps because of Mill’s very busy schedule at this time, the 7th edition was quickly prepared.¹¹² The Preface refers unspecifically to “a few further corrections . . . , but no material additions,” and there is only one long variant, in Book I, Chapter vi, §2. This correction of the interpretation of Porphyry’s Isagoge has special interest as arising from a criticism by George Grote, Mill’s lifelong friend, who had a very high opinion of the Logic.¹¹³ Grote wrote to Mill on 12 January, 1867 concerning this passage, enclosing a memorandum giving the authorities, and commenting that “So excellent a book ought to be cleared even from small reproaches of incurie.”¹¹⁴

De Morgan also contributed a correction, in this case not a mathematical but a literary one. In a letter of 3 September, 1868, referring to Book V, Chapter vii, §2 (822 below), he comments: “you say that a pedantic physician in Molière accounts for the fact that ‘l’opium endormit’ by the maxim ‘parcequ’il a une vertu soporifique.’ From whom do you get your quotation marks? Not from Molière.” And he goes on to quote the passage correctly. Mill replied, on 13 September, “I had marked the humourous doggrel from Molière to be quoted correctly, instead of incorrectly, as I had done on the authority of Whewell. The words I used in p. 71 [66 in this edition] were probably also quoted at secondhand from some writer who retained the pith of the satire without remembering its words.”¹¹⁵

John Venn, another important figure in the history of logic, also influenced the 7th edition, through his Logic of Chance (1866), a copy of which he sent to Mill. Though not accepting all Venn’s views, Mill made some alterations, and acknowledged his indebtedness in the concluding footnote to Book III, Chapter xviii.¹¹⁶

One other variant, the introduction of Bishop Butler’s name into the discussion of miracles in Book III, Chapter xxv, §4, though very slight, may be cited as an example of private criticism leading to reconsideration over time, for the question was raised in a letter from Joseph Napier of 22 December, 1861, though the variant was not introduced until the 7th edition.¹¹⁷ It is also interesting because the passage as a whole relates to similar discussions in one of Mill’s earliest publications, his edition of Bentham’s Rationale of Judicial Evidence (1827), and in one of his latest writings, “Theism” (written 1868-70, published posthumously, 1874).¹¹⁸

8th Edition, 1872. The final edition of the Logic in Mill’s lifetime included several important revisions.¹¹⁹ There are nine long variants, the most significant being the addition of two sections (5 and 10) to Book III, Chapter v, “Of the Law of Universal Causation,” the deletion of part of Book III, Chapter x, §4, and the addition of §4 to Book II. Chapter vii in further response to Spencer.

It is fitting that Bain, the most important contemporary influence on Mill’s Logic, should be noticed in the Preface, although once again the extent of the revisions is disguised by the wording: “The additions and corrections in the present (eighth) edition, which are not very considerable, are chiefly such as have been suggested by Professor Bain’s Logic, a book of great merit and value.” Most of the direct debts are indicated not in the text, but in footnotes, twenty-eight of those added in this edition referring to Bain’s book.¹²⁰ Furthermore, two of the long variants mentioned above, the deletion of part of Book III, Chapter x, §4, and (in effect) its replacement by Book III, Chapter v, §10, as is only hinted in the Preface, also show the importance of Bain’s views. These sections, dealing with the Conservation of Force, reveal more than almost any other parts of the Logic the growth of physical knowledge in the middle of the nineteenth century, and Mill’s hesitation about speculation in areas beyond his special competence. The complexities of the matter justify its separate treatment in Appendix D below, where, along with the excised passage and its variants, the relevant exchanges between Bain and Mill are printed.

Other Variants, 1843-72. After this outline of the long variants, all of which merit more detailed examination, one may return to a general description of the different types of substantive variants. Choosing Book IV as most typical,¹²¹ and categorizing the variants as (1) alterations in opinion or fact, including major amplifications and corrections of information; (2) alterations resulting from the time between writings, including changes in statement of fact resulting from the passage of time and new publications; (3) alterations which qualify, emphasize, or give technical clarity; and (4) alterations which are verbal, give semantic clarity, or result from changes in usage, one obtains the following results:

Table 3 shows again that the more significant alterations (those in the first two categories) are most frequent in the 3rd, 5th, and 8th editions; it also demonstrates that the numerous proof alterations for the 1st edition were of a minor kind, and that minor changes play a comparatively small role in the 8th edition. (It can be argued, of course, that the relative infrequency of minor changes in the last three editions indicates not that Mill was less concerned with the revision but that he was more satisfied with the general texture of the work; this argument would support the contention that the revision for the 8th edition was especially important to Mill, for the number of long changes increased over those of the two previous editions.)

Of the first type of variant, that reflecting an alteration in opinion or fact, the longest in Book IV is that at 659^b-b, where five paragraphs on classification were added in 1862 to Chapter ii, §6, and a long concluding sentence referring to Whewell was deleted at the same time (662ⁱ), with a consequent change in section title (659^a-a). An interesting deletion is found at 695^o, where two long paragraphs deal with the tendency, “which grows as civilization advances,” to speak “of disagreeable things with the least possible suggestion of their disagreeable details, and of agreeable things with as little obtrusion as possible of the mere mechanism of their production. . . .” The passage contains an anecdote that may, in 1851, when it was deleted, have seemed to Mill to suggest too much for Victorian civilized taste. Indeed, it probably was the one referred to in Ward’s review of 1843, where, alluding to Mill’s “miserable moral and religious deficiencies” in the Logic, he says: “We cannot however conclude our notice of these [deficiencies], without severely condemning his utterly gratuitous introduction of a most objectionable anecdote. We trust he will be advised to omit it, should his work reach another edition.”¹²²

One other passage (690-1) may be mentioned as involving a series of connected changes concerning examples of misapplication of terms through generalization; one of the changes (691n), an addition in the 4th edition, relates to a letter Mill wrote to the Times, printed on 7 April, 1847, on the spelling of “sanitary.”

The changes resulting from Mill’s altered attitude to Comte, mentioned above in connection with the 2nd edition, may be illustrated from Book IV.¹²³ The deletions made in the 2nd edition are often of the sort found at 730^e-e and ^h-h where Comte’s judgments are retained without his name, in a rather unfair manner. In the first of these, the reading in the manuscript and 1st edition is: “M. Comte, for example, blames Cuvier for having formed his natural groups with an undue degree of reference to the mode of alimentation . . .”; in the 2nd edition the sentence is altered to begin: “Cuvier, for example, has been justly criticised for having . . . .” An instance of a deletion for the 3rd edition may be seen at 713^h, which involves also the deletion of a reference to Whewell. The reintroduction, in 1862, of deletions made in 1846 is instanced in one of the epigraphs to Book IV (640^b-b). And, finally, an alteration of 1846, further changed in 1872, is seen at 715^i-i, where the earlier reading, “as M. Comte justly remarks”, was altered in 1846 to read, “as has been justly remarked”, and in 1872 to “as M. Comte remarks”. Here credit for the comment is finally restored, but without the laudatory adverb; a glance at other variants involving Comte shows that they often turn either on a deleted complimentary phrase if the reference is retained, or on a deleted reference if the complimentary phrase is retained. (The same observation is only slightly less applicable to the variants, mentioned above, involving Whewell.)

The second type of variant, that reflecting the passage of time, is seen most obviously in such footnotes as those at 649n, 650n, 676n, and 726n, where publications by Bailey, Mill himself (the Hamilton), Bain, and Whewell are cited. The first of these, added in 1862, also involved a change in the text, with Bailey’s authority being substituted for Dugald Stewart’s. In the same sentence another change of this type, found in several places in the Logic, was introduced in 1868, when Mill altered “Mr. Mill” to “Mr. James Mill” to make what was by then a necessary distinction between his father and himself. A minor example of Mill’s awareness of the growth of scientific knowledge is signalled at 673^b-b, where until the final edition he had said that questions concerning definitions of Specific Heat, Latent Heat, Chemical Combination, and Solution, “are still open”; in 1872 the passage was altered (Bain’s influence may be assumed) to read, “were long open and are not yet completely closed”. (Cf. 716^m-m, where the reference to “the secondary” and “tertiary” geological periods was altered to “the palæozoic, mesozoic, and tertiary” in 1872; and 721^s-s, where the “azote” of earlier editions became “nitrogen” in 1862.) Changes directly revealing the passage of time between editions, more necessary and frequent in the Principles than here, but made vaguely and erratically in both, are illustrated at 679^a-a, where “a few thinkers of the present generation” was altered in 1868 to “a few thinkers of the present century”.

Of the third type of variants, those that qualify, emphasize, or give technical clarity, one of the most interesting is indicated at 686^b-b and ^d, where in the first case “necessarily” was changed to “certainly”, and in the second “necessarily” was deleted, both changes being made in 1868. In his Principles of Psychology (1st ed., 1855), Spencer had criticized Mill’s use of the term “necessity,” and in a note added to the Logic in 1856 (267n), Mill, without conceding his ground, says that he has “corrected the expressions” which led Spencer to misapprehend his meaning. The point is further discussed in a letter to W. G. Ward of 28 November, 1859. The kind of change referred to in the note of 1856 will be seen at 252^c-c and ^d-d, 257^t-t, 260^a, and 261^e, in the fourth of which Mill deleted, from the title of Book II, Chapter vi, §5, the words “and of logical necessity”; but Mill continued, as the cited variants in Book IV indicate, to make related changes in later editions.¹²⁴

The most common variants of this third type involve qualification, as Mill typically tries to be as precise as his information and experience, and the vagaries of language, allow. See, for example, 722^a-a, where “possibly” replaced “probably” in 1868, and in the next sentence (722^b) where the manuscript reading “perhaps” was deleted in proof. Other examples are the change from “utterly lost” to “in danger of being totally lost” in 1851 (682^o-o), and the deletion of “so far as I am aware” in 1856 (707^h) and of “(what appears to be the truest opinion)” in 1872 (650^f). Attempts to give philosophical clarity to phrases may be seen in the change in 1865 (within a passage added in 1862) of “predicated” to “affirmed” (660^d-d), and, in a passage relating to perception, the change in 1851 from “seem to see” to “see what seems” (642^d-d; cf. 642^e-e). A change of a similar sort, perhaps reflecting a friend’s criticism, is seen at 688^c-c, where the term “villain or villein” is applied to those subject to “the less onerous forms of feudal bondage”; until 1846 this read “the least onerous form of feudal bondage, those serfs who were adscripti glebæ”. And one further variant may be cited, to illustrate the difficulty of precisely accounting for some of these changes: in illustrating the folly of ignoring habitual associations when applying terms, Mill cites (671^b-b) the imaginary case of calling “the higher classes in Europe savages”; until 1872 “France or England” appeared in the place of “Europe”.¹²⁵

The fourth type of variant, that which is verbal, or gives semantic clarity, or reflects changing word usage, is the most common, and is not without importance, especially in cumulative effect. A few, of varying kinds, may be cited in illustration. A frequent change (see, e.g., 670^l-l) is of “men” to “people” or “mankind” (and “a man” or “he” to “a person”) in 1851, a change also found in the 3rd edition of the Principles in the next year.¹²⁶ A hint that the term “philosopher” was being more strictly applied by Mill, and perhaps generally, at mid-century, is seen in the frequent substitution of another term: in 1851 at 657^e-e “philosophers” became “inquirers”, at 664^a-a “thinkers”, at 709^s-s “writers”, at 680^d-d “metaphysicians”, and at 428^f-f “astronomers”. There are many similar changes (not all in the 3rd edition): for example, at 666^a-a “metaphysicians” became “thinkers” in 1868. The meaning of “scientific” is also involved, as “philosophic” became “scientific” inquirers, writers, or thinkers, in various places at various times.

Mill’s desire for semantic clarity, simply illustrated at 644^k-k (the introduction of “that” in 1862), often, though not so often as in the Principles, led him into double and triple revision: on 655^p-p, where the final reading is “This is the tentative process which Dr. Whewell speaks of; and which has not unnaturally suggested the theory . . .”, the manuscript reading of the second clause is “and this it is which suggests the theory . . .”; in the 1st edition it reads “and this it is which suggested the theory”; and in the 2nd edition the final version is introduced. Mill’s sharing of the common infirmities of mankind may be seen in his frequent uncertainty over verbal forms and agreement with collective nouns; see, e.g., 644^i-i, where he cancelled the “s” on “remains” in the manuscript, and returned to the singular form in 1865; and 647^d-d, where “corresponds” became “correspond” in 1846. Sometimes this verbal hesitation also led to multiple changes, as at 697^q-q and ^r-r, where the manuscript reading of the passage is “mankind now see the meaning which before they only felt, and will . . .”; in the 1st and 2nd editions the reading is “mankind shall see the meaning which before they only felt, and shall . . .”; in the 3rd edition the first “shall” became “can”, but in the 4th “shall” was restored.¹²⁷

As Table 3 shows, most of the changes between the manuscript and the 1st edition are of a minor kind. Two special types may be mentioned, as indicating the printers’ difficulty in reading Mill’s hand, and Mill’s return in later editions to a manuscript reading, sometimes to a cancelled reading. Both are seen at 646^e-e, where the manuscript’s “those” was printed as “these” in 1843 and 1846, with “those” appearing again in 1851. (Cf. 670^m-m.) The second type is seen at 664^b-b, where in the manuscript “the sole” replaced the cancelled “the” which was, however, restored for the 1st edition, and at 689^g-g, where in the manuscript Mill wrote “the two” and then cancelled “two”, “the” appearing in all editions until 1862, when it was replaced by “two”.

When one turns from the substantive variants to the accidentals, exceedingly complex problems emerge, without dominant patterns to guide interpretation or editorial practice.¹²⁸ There are a bewildering number of changes in punctuation, the great majority being between the manuscript and the 1st edition. Again taking Book IV as typical, one finds some 940 changes, over 700 of them between the manuscript and the 1st edition. Most of these (696 overall; 528 in the 1st edition) involve the addition or deletion of a comma (or two enclosing commas), with the additions outnumbering the deletions about five to three. The most frequent changes apart from comma addition and deletion are the replacement of a comma with a semi-colon and the reverse, and a colon with a semi-colon and the reverse, in those orders. With the exception of the 1st edition, the frequency of punctuation changes approximates that of the substantive changes, with more occurring in the heavily revised 3rd edition, though there are, compared with substantive variants, relatively more in the 6th edition and relatively fewer in the 4th.¹²⁹

The largest number of changes in initial capitalization also was made in the proof revisions for the 1st edition, which is far less heavily capitalized than the manuscript, seventy-three single or linked words having their initial letters reduced in the Preface and Introduction alone. In subsequent editions there was a slight tendency to reduce capitals, most marked in the 3rd edition, where twenty-seven capitals are reduced, and ten introduced. No consistent practice is discernible, however, and in some cases (especially A/a, K/k, M/m)¹³⁰ difficulty in reading Mill’s hand is probably responsible for some changes and some inconsistencies.

Similarly, a comparison of the manuscript with the 1st edition reveals the largest number of changes in word division and hyphenation, in the work as a whole 148 hyphens being added (of just over 200 added in all editions) and nine (of fifty-four) being removed. Nearly one-third of the total additions occur after the prefixes “co”, “pre”, and “re”; “to-day” and “to-morrow” become the standard forms in the 1st edition; and hyphens are introduced into numbers such as “ninety-nine” and fractions such as “one-half.” Here too, though printing-house practice was undoubtedly responsible for many, if not most, of the changes (in the 1st edition especially), there are many inconsistencies, and again Mill’s intentions in the manuscript are not always clear.

Like comments are appropriate on the spelling changes, which also are most frequent between the manuscript and the 1st edition. Some of these, however, are made with such regularity that they seem to reflect house practice: in 1843, changes from “enquire” to “inquire”, “shew” to “show”, “chuse” to “choose”; in 1856, “premiss” to “premise”.¹³¹ The most common (though not always consistent) alterations that suggest house practice are from “z” to “s” and the reverse (usually in participles): “analyse” becomes “analyze” in 1843, and “analyse” again in 1851; the manuscript “characterize” is spelled with an “s” in 1843, and returns to “z” in 1851; and “recognize” normally becomes “recognise” in 1843 and remains in that form. These of course reflect, as do most of the other changes, uncertainties and alterations in common nineteenth-century spelling, and the later and earlier forms of all these words appear in other Mill holographs.

Other less frequent and less consistent changes (with late forms sometimes appearing as early as the manuscript, and early forms persisting in late editions) include “develope” to “develop”, “decypher” to “decipher”, “favor” and “honor” to “favour” and “honour” (all these usually made in 1843; the last example shows a tendency to consistency, for the usual manuscript form is “our”). While “mixt”, “dropt”, and “stopt” all took “ed” forms in 1843, “learnt” was not altered in 1843, though it was in five cases in later editions, but both “learnt” and “learned” are found in the manuscript and in all editions.¹³² A few changes have minor separate interest: “Houyhnhms” (which also appears in the Early Draft) was corrected to “Houyhnhnms” in 1851 and 1856; “Spinosa” altered to “Spinoza” in 1862 and 1868; “Majendie” to “Magendie” in 1865; and “schirrus” to “scirrhus” (both, surprisingly, acceptable) in 1862.

As a final comment on the accidentals, one may note the tendency to reduce italicization: there are over two hundred cases where roman replaced italic, as against a handful of reverse cases. Here the reduction is most marked in the 5th and 6th editions.

SUMMARY OF THE COMPOSITION OF THE LOGIC

This lengthy treatment of the details, great and small, of the history of Mill’s Logic has perhaps obscured the main pattern. Table 4, which isolates the most salient points in that history, is an attempt to re-establish the broader perspective. As the account above indicates, the dates for the manuscripts are not certain, though the termini ad quos are generally reliable, and two manuscript versions are not now extant (Mill’s holograph of the Early Draft and the complete draft preceding the Press-copy Manuscript).

MILL’S SOURCES

One matter not covered in Table 4 is the debt Mill owed to others. Kubitz, in his Development of John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic, gives an instructive, if somewhat outdated, account up to 1843, and the text of the Logic itself gives important evidence, which can here only be summarized. In his Preface, Mill characteristically remarks that the Logic is “an attempt not to supersede, but to embody and systematize, the best ideas . . . promulgated on its subject by speculative thinkers, or conformed to by accurate thinkers in their scientific inquiries.” Somewhat more strongly, he goes on to say that the subject has never yet been “treated as a whole,” and his originality lies only in trying to “cement” and “harmonize.”

Whatever one’s view of the justice of these remarks, they point to the use Mill makes of other thinkers. As Appendix K, the Bibliographic Appendix, shows, this use was extensive: some 250 individuals and 200 works being referred to, and 125 quoted from. Most frequently cited are Whewell (nine works referred to, and six quoted from, often at length), Comte, Bain, Spencer and Whately.¹³³ The British empiricists are often mentioned (Hume is slighted) but seldom quoted (except Bain); similarly with the Scottish Common-Sense school. There are quite a few references to, and a few quotations from, the Continental Rationalists, but the Idealists (five mentions of Kant, and three of Hegel) are really not used to any extent. Aristotle and (vaguely) the “scholastic logicians” or “Aristotelians” are quite widely cited, and (in Book III) a variety of scientific monographs is quoted or summarized. Mill refers to ten of his own writings, and quotes, at considerable length, from six of them.

Mill’s notes to his sources are typical of nineteenth-century practice, often too slight for immediate and precise identification; his quotations are fairly accurate (more so, on the whole, than in the Principles), but there is considerable departure from his originals in accidentals, and there are some errors in transcription.

Some of the points brought out by a study of Mill’s sources (which Appendix K is intended to facilitate) may be mentioned here. Evidence of the help given by Mill’s friends is seen, for example, in Grote’s marginal markings in his copies of Brandis’s Handbuch and Preller and Ritter’s Historia, of passages cited by Mill. Variant readings sometimes establish which form of a particular source Mill was using (see, for example, the entries under Whewell and Herschel).

Hints towards the interpretation of other of Mill’s writings may be drawn from some of the references: for example, his treatment of James Martineau’s “On the Life, Character, and Works of Dr. Priestley” points to the influence of that essay on Mill’s theory of poetry.¹³⁴ The variants in his

quotations from his “Coleridge” and Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy are useful in dating composition and revision, and a comparison of his quotation from his “On Miss Martineau’s Summary of Political Economy” with the original gives variant readings for that essay.

The revision of an example (that of the sentinel off his post, 331n-332n) is explained when one sees the full passage from Hutton’s “Mill and Whewell on the Logic of Induction,” from which Mill quotes only a part. Somewhat more complicated is the case of Mill’s citations from Prout’s Chemistry, Meteorology, and the Function of Digestion (identified by Mill simply as a “Bridgewater Treatise”): he twice quotes from it in exemplifying fallacies; Prout, in his 3rd edition (1845, after the publication of the Logic) rewrote the first passage (having already altered it in the 2nd edition before Mill’s work appeared), and deleted the second (also rewritten in the 2nd edition); in 1846, perhaps having looked at Prout’s 3rd edition, Mill deleted the second quotation.

Finally, a few examples of departures from the source readings may be mentioned: the printers’ difficulty in reading Mill’s hand is probably shown at 885^b-b, where “whenever” appears rather than “wherever”; this may also be the case at 101.n10 where “concrete form” rather than “correcter form” appears. Some of these are treated below as typographical errors, when the sense requires the change, as in the last example, or when there is supporting evidence, as at 640.11 and 12, where “que ceux” rather than “que de ceux” appears in the final two editions, with the correct form earlier; and at 357.28, where the omission of closing quotation marks in the 5th and subsequent editions cloaks the omission of a paragraph from Reid’s Essay on the Active Powers of Man. And at 577.24, in a passage added in 1872, where Mill cites Bain as saying that induction involves a “leap in the dark,” Bain says “leap to the future” and “the leap, the hazard of Induction”: was Mill recalling Lord Derby’s famous reference to the Reform Bill of 1867?

II.

THE PRESENT TEXT

the narrative and analytical complexities, and the bias inherent in any selective treatment of Mill’s revisions make apparent the value of a text giving full variant readings. In the text below, therefore, the 8th edition, the last in Mill’s lifetime,¹³⁵ is printed with the substantive textual changes found in a complete collation of the eight editions and the Press-copy Manuscript. “Substantive” here means all changes in text except spelling, capitalization, word division, punctuation, italicization, demonstrable typographical errors, alterations in footnote references and style, such printing-house concerns as type size and orthographic changes between the manuscript and the printed text (such as “&” for “and” and superscripts in abbreviations).¹³⁶

A glance at any of the heavily revised pages in this edition will reveal the difficulties in providing variant readings without making the text difficult to follow. Mill’s own recognition of the desirability and the difficulty of recording variants is seen in a letter to De Morgan, where he says: “I have sometimes thought I ought to have some mark for alterations and additions. But one could scarcely give distinctive marks to all the successive strata of new matter, and a mere note of distinction from the edition immediately previous would not answer the [purposes of] those readers who only possess a still earlier one.”¹³⁷ No one has yet done anything for the unfortunate owners of “still earlier” editions (though they may of course own valuable first editions and so be comforted), but our hope is that the method here adopted will meet the needs of all other readers. It is intended to provide a text as little interrupted by editorial apparatus as possible, variant readings that allow reconstruction of the earlier texts without separate instructions for each variant, and the minimum number of levels of text on each page consistent with accuracy and the above objectives. The method is harder to describe than to apply, as testing a few examples will indicate; one may well bear in mind, however, the note found in some construction kits: if all else fails, follow the instructions.

On a typical page, there will be three levels of text: the text of the 8th edition; in slightly smaller type, Mill’s own footnotes; in smaller type again, footnotes containing the variant readings. In the text itself, the usual indicators (*, †, etc.) call attention to Mill’s footnotes; where editorial notes of reference are added, they (and the indicators) appear in square brackets; small italic superscript letters, in alphabetical sequence (beginning anew in each section) call attention to variant readings. These variants are of three kinds: addition of a word or words, substitution of a word or words, deletion of a word or words. Illustrative examples will be drawn mainly from the early pages of the text.

Addition of a word or words: see 11^b-b. In the text, the words “consciously or unconsciously” appear as “^bconsciously or unconsciously^b”; the variant note reads “^b-b+51, 56, 62, 65, 68, 72”. Here the plus sign indicates that the words “consciously or unconsciously” were added; the following numbers (51, 56, 62, 65, 68, 72) indicate the editions in which they appear. The editions are always indicated by the last two numbers of the year of publication, as follows: 43 = 1843 (1st edition) 46 = 1846 (2nd edition), 51 = 1851 (3rd edition), 56 = 1856 (4th edition). 62 = 1862 (5th edition), 65 = 1865 (6th edition), 68 = 1868 (7th edition), 72 = 1872 (8th edition). The Press-copy Manuscript is indicated by MS. If the variant occurs within a quotation, and the earlier version (i.e., that in the variant note) is the reading of the source from which Mill is quoting, the word “Source” precedes the manuscript and edition indicators in the variant note (see, e.g., 885^b-b). (If the reading in the text, as opposed to that in the variant note, were the same as that of the source, “Source” would not appear.) If the text varies from the source, but not among editions, there is no variant note (the variant reading is given, however, in the Bibliographic Appendix; see, e.g., the entry for 250.19 under Herschel’s “Whewell on the Inductive Sciences”).

Placing the example (11^b-b) in context, then, the interpretation is that from the manuscript through the 2nd edition, the reading is “every mind conforms”; in the 3rd edition (51) this was altered to “every mind consciously or unconsciously conforms”, and the reading of the 3rd edition was retained (as is clear in the text) in all subsequent editions through the 8th.

It should be noted that when the variant is a long one, the second enclosing superscript may appear on the next page, or even several pages after the first; when necessary, to make reference easier, the superscript notation in the footnote (which appears on the same page as the first superscript) will give the page number on which the variant passage concludes (see, e.g., 147^w-w148).

Substitution of a word or words: see 12^b-b. In the text the word “advancing” appears as “^badvancing^b”; the variant note reads “^b-bMS, 43, 46, 51, 56 proceeding”. Here the word following the edition indicators is that for which “advancing” was substituted; again applying the rules and putting the variant in context, the interpretation is that from the manuscript through the 4th edition (56) the reading is “of proceeding from known truths”; in the 5th edition this was altered to “of advancing from known truths”, and the reading of the 5th edition was retained (as is clear in the text) through the 8th edition.

In a few places, to reduce the number of superscripts and to indicate linked changes, the procedure exemplified at 145^l-l is followed. Here the passage in the text begins “^lto which” and concludes “appeals^l”; the note reads “^l-lMS which . . . appeals to”. The interpretation is that in 1843 Mill moved “to” from the end of the sentence to before “which” without altering the rest of the passage, the unrecorded words being indicated in the note by the marks of ellipsis.

Deletion of a word or words: see 11^e. In the text, a single superscript ^e appears centred between “often” and “correctly”; the variant note reads “^eMS, 43, 46 very”. Here the word following the edition indicators is that deleted; applying the rules and putting the variant in context, the interpretation is that the reading through the 2nd edition (46) was “often very correctly”; the word “very” was deleted in the 3rd edition and the reading of the 3rd edition was retained (as is clear in the text) through the 8th.

Variants within variants. As mentioned above, Mill often altered a passage more than once. Such rewritings require different treatments. In most cases, the procedure exemplified at 28^a-a is followed. Here the text reads “^aGeorge, Mary^a”, and the variant note reads “^a-aMS, 43, 46 Peter, George] 51 Peter, George, Mary”. The different readings are given in chronological order, separated by a square bracket; the interpretation is that in the manuscript and 1st and 2nd editions the reading was “truly affirmed of John, Peter, George, and other persons”; in the 3rd edition this was altered to “truly affirmed of John, Peter, George, Mary, and other persons”; and the final reading, “truly affirmed of John, George, and Mary”, first appeared in the 4th edition.¹³⁸

In longer variants of this sort, it seems unnecessary to repeat the whole passage, and so such variant notes as that at 25^c-c appear, where the note reads “^c-cMS but that the physical object, the sun himself, is the cause from which the outward phenomenon, day, follows as an effect] 43, 46 as MS . . . the sun itself . . . as MS”; the interpretation is that the 1st and 2nd editions have the same reading as the manuscript, except for the word “itself” which is substituted for “himself”, and that the final reading was reached in the 3rd edition.

A similar procedure is adopted for some contiguous variants, to reduce the number of superscripts. At 3^c-c, for example, the note reads “^c-cMS, 43, 46 There cannot be agreement about the definition of a thing] 51, 56 as 72 . . . of a thing”; this procedure avoids the placing of another pair of superscripts around the word “anything” in the text, “a thing” (the only retention in 51, 56 from the earlier reading) being the only departure in 51, 56 from the 72 text. In other words, the interpretation is that the final reading appeared in the 3rd and 4th editions, except for the final two words (“a thing”) in which they agree with the MS and 1st and 2nd editions; “anything” replaced “a thing” in the 5th edition and was retained through the 8th. (Cf. 5^e-e for similar treatment of a slightly different kind of variant.)

In other places, for the reader’s convenience, especially where a substitution or deletion appears in the middle of an earlier and lengthy substitution, the variants within variants are indicated in the text by superscripts placed within other superscripts: see, e.g., 14^n-n and ^o-o. Here the passage indicated by ^n-n was given its final form in the 3rd edition, except for the words indicated by ^o-o, which appeared only in the 7th and 8th editions.

In all cases, variants within variants conclude as indicated. For example, at 614^g-g616 there is no footnote in 46, 51, 56, 62; and at 625^q-q626 the version in 46 ends “Disbelief.”

Variants in Mill’s footnotes. These are treated in the same manner as other variants, the alphabetical superscripts (and consequently the placing of the variant notes at the foot of the page) following the order dictated by a reading of Mill’s footnotes where they appear in the text. Again for convenience exceptional treatment is accorded footnotes added subsequent to the manuscript and retained throughout (sometimes with altered wording): here, in the footnote after the indicator, a square-bracketed edition indicator shows when the footnote first appeared. At 6n, for example, the note begins: “*[62] I use . . . ”, indicating that it was added in the 5th edition, and was retained in the 6th, 7th, and 8th. If no such indicator appears, the note is in the manuscript as well as all subsequent editions (see, e.g., 8n).

The same practice is used for the epigraphs to the several Books; see, e.g., 18.

Accidental variants. For reasons given earlier, these are not normally indicated in this edition. If, however, they occur within a variant, the earlier form is given (e.g., “&” appears in readings that occur only in manuscript), and the superscripts are placed exactly with reference to punctuation. Changes within variants, however, like changes in non-variant passages, are not indicated, so that if a reference is, say, to “MS, 43, 46”, the accidentals derive from the 2nd edition, the last cited.

Prefaces. To indicate clearly the special matters to which Mill wished to call attention in the successive editions, the additional prefatory matter in each edition is given in chronological order; variant notes indicate in the usual way changes in the material that appeared in all editions.

Other textual liberties. Typographical errors in the 8th edition have been silently corrected; a full list is given in Appendix I. (Where the authority for alternate readings is inconclusive, the final reading is retained, and the variant note concludes with “[printer’s error?]”.) Mill’s section titles in the Table of Contents have been introduced, in square brackets and italics, after each section number, so that the argumentative transitions can be followed without constant reference to the Table of Contents. (The wording of these titles has been slightly altered in a few cases to suit the different provenance.) Long quotations have been set in smaller type; this restyling leads to apparent anomalies between the variant notes and the text where, as at 761^e, quotation marks appear in the variant, while restyling has removed them from the text. When necessary, Mill’s references to sources have been amplified and corrected,¹³⁹ with all added information being placed in square brackets; internal references to the Logic have been altered to apply to the present edition. References to sources not identified by Mill have been added, with both indicators and footnotes in square brackets. Indications of ellipsis in quotations have been standardized to three dots plus, when required, terminal punctuation. A few trivial alterations in printing style have been made, such as the removal of periods after section titles and of dashes when combined with other punctuation as introducing quotations and references, and the restyling of chapter titles. The running heads have been modified to suit this edition’s format. Finally, in a few places where Mill removed italics from words used as examples, the italics have been returned for clarity.

III.

APPENDICES

Appendix A consists of the Early Draft of the Logic, with a headnote describing the manuscript, and setting out the editorial apparatus. The Early Draft has been printed in full, rather than in variant notes, because, though it closely parallels in many places the Press-copy Manuscript, there are more, and more complicated, variants than can intelligibly be accommodated in our method.

Appendices B-H contain variant passages of the Logic so lengthy or so heavily revised that they too require special treatment. Appendix B consists of the Supplementary Note to Book II, Chapter iii, in the 3rd and 4th editions, with the text taken from the 4th edition and variant notes giving the readings of the 3rd edition and those of later editions that incorporated parts of the Note. Appendix C consists of Book III, Chapter v, §9, in the MS, 1st and 2nd editions, with the text taken from the 2nd edition, and variant notes giving the readings of the MS and 1st edition. Appendix D consists of the complicated variant in Book III, Chapter x, §4 (at the end of the penultimate paragraph) in the 56, 62, 65, 68 versions, with the text taken from the 7th edition, and variant notes giving the readings of the 4th, 5th, and 6th; to this are added the papers written by Mill and Bain on the Conservation of Force, and supporting correspondence between them. Appendix E consists of Book III, Chapter xiii, §§1-3 in the MS, 43, 46, 51, 56, 62 versions, with the text taken from the 5th edition, and variant notes giving the readings of the MS, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th editions. Appendix F consists of Book III, Chapter xviii in the MS and 43 versions, with the text taken from the 1st edition, and variant notes giving the manuscript readings. Appendix G consists of Book III, Chapter xxv, §6, in the MS and 43 versions, with the text taken from the 1st edition, and variant notes giving the readings of the manuscript. Appendix H consists of Book VI, Chapter xii, §6, in the MS, 43, 46 versions, with the text taken from the 2nd edition, and variant notes giving the readings of the manuscript and 1st edition.

Appendix I lists the typographical errors in the 8th edition that are silently corrected in the text, and the manuscript slips of the pen that are not recorded in variant notes.

Appendix J gives an account of the Press-copy Manuscript, with examples of cancelled readings.

Appendix K, the Bibliographic Appendix, which lists all the persons and works quoted or referred to in the Logic, is designed to give a guide to logical writings and references in the nineteenth century, and also to Mill’s reading and to influences on him. Substantive variants between Mill’s quotations and his sources are given, both to correct misquotations and to provide contexts for partial quotations. Because this appendix includes all references to persons and books, it is in effect also an index of names and titles, which are therefore omitted from the Index proper.

The Index, a most essential doorway into a work so long and complicated as the Logic, has been prepared by R. F. McRae.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For permission to publish manuscript material, we are greatly indebted to the National Provincial Bank (literary executors and residual legatees of Mary Taylor, Mill’s step-grand-daughter), to the Pierpont Morgan Library (the Early Draft), the British Museum (the Press-copy Manuscript), and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University (the Bain-Mill material in Appendix D). I should like to express my deep gratitude to the staffs of the British Museum Reading Room and Manuscript Room, the University of London Library, the British Library of Political and Economic Science, the Somerville College Library, and the University of Toronto Library. To Professors McRae and Priestley, and the other members of the Editorial Committee of the Collected Works, to the copy-editor of the Logic, Rosemary Shipton, and the editorial and printing staff of the University of Toronto Press, my warm gratitude for long-suffering and guidance. My debts to others, incurred over the long years while this edition was in preparation, are numerous and varied; omissions from the following list should be attributed not to ingratitude but to failing memory or embarrassment: Francis E. Mineka (first and affectionately foremost), Pauline Adams, Peter and Caroline Allen, J. H. Burns, Kathleen Coburn, Daniel de Montmollin, Walter Houghton, J. R. de J. Jackson, Patricia Kennedy, Elizabeth Korotash, Dennis Lee, Judith Le Goff, John McClelland, Anne McWhir, Penelope Nettlefold, Gordon N. Ray, Francis Sparshott, the late Adelaide Weinberg, Ian Willison, and Elizabeth Zymans. And to my wife, the only one who can understand why it took me as long to edit this work as it took Mill to write it, my loving thanks for material aid and shared experience.

[1 ]Earlier Letters, ed. Francis E. Mineka, Collected Works, XII (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), 78-9 (20-22/10/31). Hereafter cited as EL, CW, with volume and page numbers.

[2 ]Autobiography, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 150. Hereafter references to this edition (which supersedes the Columbia edition of 1924) are usually given in parentheses in the text.

[3 ]There has been only one serious study of the composition of the Logic, Oskar A. Kubitz’s Development of John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic, Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences, XVIII, No. 1 (Urbana, March, 1932), 1-310. Though much evidence was not then available, this is a very useful examination of “the gradual metamorphosis” of Mill’s ideas on methodology from 1825 to 1843 (beyond which Kubitz does not go), with illuminating comments on influences.

[4 ]Alexander Bain, John Stuart Mill (London: Longmans, 1882), 26. Apart from Mill himself, Bain, his closest and most important disciple, is the best source for information about the Logic, and so is frequently cited below.

[5 ]Bain, James Mill (London: Longmans, 1882), 157, 168, quoting letters from James Mill to Thomson. In the latter (22/2/18) James Mill says: “John has fastened with great greediness upon your book, and gives me an account of the new knowledge he gets out of it. He would have a great passion for the science, if he had the opportunity of seeing a course of experiments.”

[6 ]BM Add. MSS 35153, f.50; Works of David Ricardo, ed. P. Sraffa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), VII, 313-14, 324n.

[7 ]Bain, James Mill, 413; cf. ibid., 209, where, before saying much the same, he quotes from a letter of James Mill to Macvey Napier (11/9/23): “As to Logic, we must talk of that another time: but you must not expect the book too soon: though my expositions are pretty well down upon paper.”

[8 ]Anna J. Mill, John Mill’s Boyhood Visit to France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1960), 43.

[9 ]Ibid., 44-84, passim, esp. 45 (13/7/20), 53 (23/7/20), 64 (24/8/20), 80 (24/10/20), and 84 (16/11/20).

[10 ]These manuscripts, which are respectively in the London School of Economics and the Pierpont Morgan Library, will be found in Vol. XX of the Collected Works.

[11 ]Autobiography, 41-2. Henry Trimen, in discussing Mill’s botanical studies, says: “It may be safely stated, that the chapters on classification in the ‘Logic’ would not have taken the form they have, had not the writer been a naturalist as well as a logician” (H. R. Fox Bourne, et al. John Stuart Mill: His Life and Works [New York: Holt, 1873], 47). It is interesting to note that Mill’s first instructor in botany, who was also responsible for correcting the French in his “Traité,” was George Bentham (Sir Samuel’s son). George Bentham published An Outline of a New System of Logic in 1827, a work highly critical or Whately; Mill was quite severe about Bentham’s book (EL, CW, XII, 23 [10/3/28]), just after his own appreciative review of Whately and the beginning of the discussions of logic in Threadneedle Street. Curiously, Mill, like the few others who read Bentham’s Outline (only about sixty copies were sold before the publisher went bankrupt), paid no attention to Bentham’s treatment of what was later called the “Quantification of the Predicate,” which both Augustus De Morgan and Sir William Hamilton claimed to have first developed; Hamilton’s claim led to a considerable controversy, involving (as well as De Morgan), Spencer, Baines, and Jevons, during which Bentham’s work was rediscovered. See B. Dayton Jackson, George Bentham (London: Dent. 1906), 57, 215-16, 227; and Later Letters, ed. Francis E. Mineka and Dwight Lindley, Collected Works, XVII (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 2004, for Mill’s reading of De Morgan’s claim as against Hamilton’s. (Later Letters hereafter cited as LL, CW, with volume and page numbers.) See also the text below, 170p.

[12 ]The choice of occupation, though of course not fortuitous, as Mill was joining his father, was in accord with the belief of both father and son that, in Bain’s words (John Stuart Mill, 147), “literature and philosophy should not be resorted to as a means of livelihood; that people should derive their subsistence from some of the common vocations, and work at the higher themes in leisure hours.” Bain comments: “[John] Mill himself was nominally engaged six hours a-day; but probably never gave more than the half of that time to his office routine. His two great works—the Logic and the Political Economy—were, I may say, written during his office hours”—and, one may add, undoubtedly on India Office stationery.

[13 ]The name of the group is given in Ethel E. Ellis, Memoir of William Ellis and an Account of his Conduct-Teaching (London: Longmans, Green, 1888); Mill never identifies it by name. The group, which met twice a week, from 8:30 to 10 a.m., before the members took up their “daily occupations,” consisted of “a dozen or more,” according to Mill, who mentions as members, in addition to himself, Grote (who joined for the discussions of logic), Prescott (Grote’s banking partner), Roebuck, Ellis, and Graham. H. R. Fox Bourne, in his sketch of Mill’s life (John Stuart Mill: His Life and Works, 12-13), quoting from Grote’s obituary in the Examiner, lists the same members (giving “Ellice” for “Ellis”), adding “two brothers Whitmore,” and comments: “The mentor of their studies was the elder Mr. Mill.” Henry Cole joined the group in 1827; he notes in his diary that the discussions had ended by 30 January, 1828, and were resumed late in 1829 for the discussion of James Mill’s Analysis, at which time Bulwer and Wilson also joined (Anna J. Mill, “Some Notes on Mill’s Early Friendship with Henry Cole,” Mill News Letter, IV [Spring, 1969], 2).

[14 ]Autobiography, 73-4. The words “by subscription” in square brackets derive from the Early Draft of the Autobiography, ed. Jack Stillinger (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 109. Henceforth referred to as Stillinger, to avoid confusion with the “Early Draft” of the Logic, discussed below.

[15 ]“Whately’s Elements of Logic,” Westminster Review, IX (Jan., 1828), 171-2; this article will be found in Vol. XI of the Collected Works. For the discussion, cf. Bain, John Stuart Mill, 36-7.

[16 ]T. B. Macaulay, “Mr. Mill’s Essay on Government,” “Bentham’s Defence of Mill,” and “Utilitarian Theory of Government, and the ‘Greatest Happiness Principle,’ ” Edinburgh Review, XLIX (1829), 159-89, 273-99, and L (1829), 99-125.

[17 ]Graham never did complete his part, and Mill eventually published his contributions as Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (see Collected Works, IV, 230).

[18 ]EL, CW, XII, 80.

[19 ]As has already been suggested, and will be mentioned again, Mill in the Autobiography is somewhat vague about dates. If he actually resumed his logical speculations in 1830, it would have been after only a few months; it is much more likely that he had started to think again on the subject just before he wrote to Sterling in late October, 1831, and the account in the next quotation from the Autobiography refers mainly to 1832.

[20 ]Autobiography, 108-9; the bracketed words appear in Stillinger, 150, as a cancelled reading. It is surely not fanciful to argue that, like the earlier strong recollection of the walk near Bagshot Heath, when his father explained the importance of syllogistic reasoning, this reference to a specific moment, at Mickleham, indicates the great importance that logical speculations had in Mill’s development. (James Mill rented a cottage at Mickleham from 1828 till 1835, the year before his death; the family stayed there six months of the year, with John Mill and his father coming down for their holidays—six weeks in James Mill’s case—and for weekends. There are two other excised references to Mickleham in Stillinger.)

In the Logic itself there are some exceptional passages that may be called personal. The most important of these is, of course, Book VI, Chap. ii, “Of Liberty and Necessity,” which, he says in the Autobiography (101-2), grew out of “later returns” of his dejection in the winter of 1826-27 (his famed “mental crisis”). Writing to James Martineau (21/5/41), when revising the Logic, he says: “I shall never forget the time when I was myself under that awful shadow [of Necessity] you speak of [in your “Introductory Lecture”], nor how I got from under it, but it is all written down in my book” (EL, CW, XIII, 476-7). Years later, in a cancelled draft passage in a letter to Florence Nightingale (10/9/60), Mill says: “It is very agreeable to me that you should have found my Logic of so much use to you, & particularly the chapter on Free Will & Necessity, to which I have always attached much value as being the writing down of a train of thought which had been very important to myself many years before, & even (if I may use the expression) critical in my own development” (LL, CW, XV, 706n).

For other personal references, see also below, 681 (which suggests parts of On Liberty), 839l, and (in the Early Draft), 1046.

[21 ]EL, CW, XII, 211-12, 235, 238. The reference to algebra is repeated in a later letter to Nichol of 21 December, 1837, that implies some now lost intermediate communication: “as to the ‘great subject’, I will read Peacock’s Algebra” (ibid., 363); he did, as references in the published version of the Logic (but not in the Early Draft) confirm.

[22 ]The intrusion of a third scribe at this point may suggest yet another stage, but the paper is the same as that in Gatherings H-J. Another anomaly is that the paper of Gathering G is different in make from that in H-J, and reappears mixed with 1836 paper in Gatherings O-P. See the headnote to Appendix A for a table giving paper makes and dates.

[23 ]The missing piece in the puzzle, which prevents full articulation, is the time of Nichol’s possession of the Early Draft. If Mill did not send the manuscript to Nichol until the third scribe had copied his portion, that is, until after the beginning of 1836, then one may assume that it never was returned to Mill; Nichol made his comments by letter (perhaps as late as the fall of 1837—see note 21 above), and retained the manuscript, which passed to his son. Mill then must have used a holograph version of the Early Draft for his rewriting of 1837, the parallels in wording and order being too great to assume that he began afresh.

If, on the other hand, as the letter of 26 November, 1834 would seem to indicate, he sent a version of the Early Draft to Nichol before the third scribe had copied his portion, Nichol must have returned the manuscript before the conclusion of Book II was written, and then at an indeterminable later date received it back, in its present form, and retained it. Again one may assume a Mill holograph, but in this case the assumption would be that the Early Draft itself, which contains corrections and additions in Mill’s hand, was used for the rewriting that began in 1837.

[24 ]The closeness of the Early Draft’s Introductory Matter to the final Introduction, especially since Mill had not formulated his theory of induction in the Early Draft, points to the problem of defining the purpose of the Logic. In the Introduction logic is seen as the science of proof or evidence, while the work as a whole is entitled A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation (the Early Draft has no title). Kubitz (Mill’s Logic, 22-3) argues, not in this context, that one of the most important influences on Mill’s early logical thought was his editing of Bentham’s Rationale, which explains his concentration on logic as the science of evidence. Bain (John Stuart Mill, 68), commenting on “the seeming incompatibility” between the definition in the Introduction and the subtitle, says: “But the title, although larger than the definition, is not larger than the work; he did discuss the methods of Investigation, as aids to Discovery, as well as means of Proof; only, he never explained the mutual bearings of the two. Any one that tries, will find this not an easy matter.”

One may also mention Caroline Fox’s note of Mill’s conversation (Memories ofOld Friends, 2nd ed., 2 vols. [London: Smith, Elder, 1882], I, 152; entry for 27/3/40): “John Mill considers it the duty of life to endeavour to reconcile the two, the active and the speculative; and from his own experience and observation the former gives vigour and system and effectiveness to the latter.” This gives added point to what many readers of the Logic have noted, as expressed in a letter from Mill to Pasquale Villari (LL, CW, XIV, 239-40; 22/8/54): “Vous avez vu, avec raison, dans ce sixième livre, le but principal de l’ouvrage tout entier, qui a été surtout destiné à répandre sur la méthode des sciences morales, les lumières qu’on peut trouver dans les procédés des sciences physiques. Je ne m’exagère pas la portée de ce que j’ai fait, ni même de ce qui peut se faire dans ce genre.”

See also the brief comments, lxxxv below, on the polemical nature of the Logic.

[25 ]The equivalence is, of course, of varying degrees of closeness; full collation is aided by the paragraph-by-paragraph comparison indicated in the text of Appendix A. There are no Book or Section divisions in the Early Draft. As will be noted, because the gatherings normally do not coincide with divisions in the text, there is overlap in the section divisions in the table.

[26 ]Examiner, 20 March, 1831, 179-80.

[27 ]Autobiography, 124-5; EL, CW, XII, 340-1, 345. In the former of these letters (30/6/37) Mill characteristically deprecates his work to Carlyle: “I am using this interval [of leisure, resulting from a lull in India House duties] to get on with my book—a book I have done little to since the review began, & which you will think very little worth doing—a treatise on Logic. I hope I do not overrate the value of anything I can do of that kind but it so happens that this, whatever be its value, is the only thing which I am sure I can do & do not believe can be so well done by anybody else whom I know of. In regard to all things which are not merely for the day, that seems to be the best rule for chusing one’s work.—Further, I do it in order to deliver myself of various things which I have in my head on the subject. As for its being read, it will be so by fewer people than even yours [The French Revolution], but it may be of use to some of those few.”

[28 ]Stillinger (162) reads “Deductive Science” where the final reading is “Demonstrative Science.”

[29 ]The great difficulty in reconciling Mill’s account with the other evidence is that he twice refers, in the Autobiography, to a five-year gap in his writing of the Logic, dating back from 1837 (he never clearly gives the earlier date). Excluding Gatherings N-P, the terminus ab quo of the copying of the Early Draft (admittedly not of its composition) is established as 1834 by the watermarks; the epistolary evidence would tend to support the argument that he was in fact, if perhaps sporadically, setting down his thoughts as late as 1834. (His quotation from his own review of Lewis’s Use and Abuse, which appeared in April, 1832, dates the composition of at least Gathering J as after that time; see 1050 below.) The gap would seem, then, to have been under three years, rather than about five.

[30 ]EL, CW, XII, 366 (21/12/37). Bain, mentioning that James Mill intended, before his death, to start Henry on logic at the age of fourteen, compares John’s beginning at twelve as evidence of his precocity (John Stuart Mill, 26n).

[31 ]“Parties and the Ministry,” and “Armand Carrel,” London and Westminster Review, 28 (Oct. 1837), 1-26, 66-111. In the years when he was most actively engaged on the Logic (1835-42), Mill’s contributions to newspapers and short pieces for other periodicals dropped in volume (the early 1830’s saw his greatest activity of this kind), only some forty appearing. His thirty-odd periodical articles in the period, however, are of great importance, including, among others, his reviews of Tennyson’s Poems and Carlyle’s French Revolution, his two articles on de Tocqueville, and his essays on Bentham and Coleridge.

[32 ]Autobiography, 125. The first two volumes of Comte’s Cours were Les Preliminaires généraux et la philosophie mathematique (1830) and La Philosophie astronomique et la philosophie de la physique (1835).

[33 ]Stillinger, 163 (this passage is not in the Autobiography).

[34 ]Autobiography, 132. The difficulties arose presumably in Book III, Chap. xxii; see also Book IV, Chaps. vii and viii.

[35 ]EL, CW, XIII, 388-9. The third volume of Comte’s Cours was La Philosophie chimique et la philosophie biologique (1838).

[36 ]EL, CW, XIII, 390.

[37 ]Ibid., 406.

[38 ]Autobiography, 132; EL, CW, XIII, 448 (to R. B. Fox, 25/11/40): “. . . I put the last hand to [the draft] a few weeks ago”; cf. ibid., 474. In a letter to Thornton cited by Bain (John Stuart Mill, 159; LL, CW, XV, 718), who dates it in 1860, Mill says that he finished the draft twenty years earlier, during a holiday in which he visited Oxford.

[39 ]EL, CW, XIII, 412, 450, 455. As always when Mill’s knowledge of German philosophy, or of the German language, is in question, there is conflicting evidence. His first acquaintance with Kantian thought evidently came in 1828-29, through Thomas Wirgman (see LL, CW, XVII, 1954-5, 1956), at the time when he was presumably learning German “on the Hamiltonian method” (Autobiography, 72). Michael St. J. Packe, in his Life of John Stuart Mill (London: Secker and Warburg, 1954, 271), says that Mill read the German logicians at Sterling’s suggestion for the Logic, but in a letter to Comte of 13 March, 1843 (EL, CW, XIII, 576), after the Logic was printed, Mill says: “Je ne suis pas peutêtre en droit de donner là-dessus [la philosophie allemande] une opinion très décidée, n’ayant moi-même lu ni Kant ni Hegel ni aucun autre des chefs de cette école, que je n’ai d’abord connue que par ses interprètes anglais et français” (presumably mainly Cousin’s). But later in his life he commented, after reading J. H. Stirling’s Secret of Hegel in 1867, that certain words, such as “reflexion, development, evolution, &c.,” gave him “a sort of sickening feeling” because they reminded him of his reading of Hegel; he had “found by actual experience of Hegel that conversancy with him tends to deprave one’s intellect” (LL, CW, XVI, 1324).

[40 ]Autobiography, 132, says, with reasonable accuracy, “the end of 1841,” but see EL, CW, XIII, 946-8. See also ibid., 474, 476-7, 478, 481, 485, 506.

[41 ]EL, CW, XIII, 474, 485, 485-6. In the last of these, to Sarah Austin (4/10/41) he says: “I find the rewriting harder work still than I had anticipated. I knew that the whole business of arranging it & of making it readable was yet to come, but the thoughts themselves I find were much more crude & imperfect than I fancied, & those only who have tried to write a systematic treatise on anything, know what the difficulty is of keeping the whole of a subject before one at once.”

[42 ]Autobiography, 133.

[43 ]Bain, John Stuart Mill, 65; EL, CW, XIII, 506.

[44 ]EL, CW, XIII, 493-4 (20/12/41), 497-8 (31/1/42), 500 (24/2/42), 506 (11/3/42). In returning the manuscript, Murray forgot to include the Preface and Table of Contents, and Mill had to write asking for them (LL, CW, XVII, 1996). John Sterling had written to Murray on 16 Dec., 1841, saying that Mill had finished, to encourage acceptance of the manuscript (EL, CW, XIII, 493n).

[45 ]Autobiography, 133; EL, CW, XIII, 513 (5/4/42).

[46 ]EL, CW, XIII, 505-6 (March, 1842).

[47 ]Ibid., 514. In later years Mill was less happy about this contract; see ibid., 723-4 (27/10/47), and Mill’s letter to Harriet (LL, CW, XIV, 17; cf ibid., 83-4), both referring to improvements in the contract for the Principles of Political Economy. Mill continued, however, to publish through Parker until Longmans took over the firm in 1863, and remained with Longmans thereafter.

[48 ]EL, CW, XIII, 505-6, 514, 527, 541, 547, 564. Vol. I, p. 160 of the 1st edition comes at the end of Signature L, in Book I, Chapter vii.

[49 ]One may mention here that the letter clears up one matter that has caused some discussion among commentators on Mill’s Experimental Methods. In the Logic, having said there are four methods, Mill goes on to treat five, and a question has arisen as to which of the five is included among the other four. The letter to Austin has a marginal note against the relevant chapter title (III, viii, “Of the Four Methods of Experimental Enquiry”), which reads: “1. Method of Agreement. 2. Method of Difference. 3. Method of Residues. 4. Method of Concomitant Variations” (BM Add. MSS 36878, ff.66v). The Joint Method of Agreement and Difference, as might be expected, is subsumed under the first two. Moreover, it is the Joint Method that is not included when Mill lists the four inductive methods in “Theism” (CW, X, 448).

The letter to Herschel (EL, CW, XIII, 583 [1/5/43]), cited by Professor McRae above, should also be recalled: “You will find that the most important chapter of the book, that on the four Experimental Methods, is little more than an expansion & a more scientific statement of what you had previously stated in the more popular manner suited to the purpose of your ‘Introduction’ [A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy].” Inter alia, Herschel had adduced Well’s researches on dew, used by Mill in Book III, Chap. ix.

[50 ]Bain, Autobiography (London: Longmans, Green, 1904), 137.

[51 ]Ibid., 141-2.

[52 ]EL, CW, XIII, 567 (28/1/43). See also ibid., 517, and Bain, John Stuart Mill, 68. The fourth and fifth volumes of Comte’s Cours were La Philosophie sociale et les conclusions générales: première partie (1839) and La partie historique de la philosophie sociale, en tout ce qui concerne l’état théologique et l’état métaphysique (1841).

Having mentioned these major influences, one may note that, although Mill met Harriet Taylor, his future wife, in 1830, just about the time he began to put his thoughts about logic on paper, there is, for once, little need to consider her part in one of his works. “The ‘System of Logic,’ ” Mill says in his Autobiography (147), “owed little to her except in the minuter matters of composition, in which respect my writings, both great and small, have largely benefited by her accurate and clear-sighted criticism.” In Stillinger (177), in a passage not found in the Autobiography as finally published, he explicitly rules out the Logic from among those works in which what “deserves remembrance” is owing mainly to her “intellect & character.” Se also Bain, John Stuart Mill, 172. For some comments on her part “in the minuter matters of composition” in the Logic, see John M. Robson, “ ‘Joint Authorship’ Again: The Evidence in the Third Edition of Mill’s Logic,” Mill News Letter, VI (Spring, 1971), 15-20.

[53 ]Bain, John Stuart Mill, 68, 77; EL, CW, XIII, 577.

[54 ]Complimentary copies were sent to, among others, R. B. Fox, Comte, George Bentham, Bulwer, Austin, Herschel, and de Tocqueville; see EL, CW, XIII, 569, 574, 577, 578, 579, 583, 612.

[55 ]For further details concerning the internal evidence, see Appendix J below, where the Press-copy Manuscript is described.

[56 ]For example, the changes in Book I resulting from Mill’s development of his doctrine of Natural Kinds in 1838 are not seen in the Press-copy Manuscript, which they antedate, but presumably were evident in the earlier manuscript.

[57 ]Bain, John Stuart Mill, 66. As the following account dwells on Bain’s objections, it should be noted that he was, in general, overwhelmingly impressed by Mill’s Logic.

[58 ]There is also, as mentioned below, evidence of such rewriting throughout the manuscript. As an example in Book I, one may cite the addition of the opening sentences of Chapter v, §5, to replace the cancelled bottom half of MS Vol. I, f.138 and the first sentence of f.139. This addition probably came at the time that the section indications were added (see Appendix J, 1164 below).

[59 ]Bain, John Stuart Mill, 67.

[60 ]See 257r below.

[61 ]Once again the absence of the first draft of the complete work makes the extent of an influence impossible to ascertain. Mill, admitting that he derived from Comte “many valuable thoughts, conspicuously in the chapter on Hypotheses [see III, xiv] and in the view taken of the logic of algebra [see II, vi, and III, xxiv],” adds that his main debt was in Book VI, and asserts that the “first volume, which contains all the fundamental doctrines of the book, was substantially complete before I had seen Comte’s treatise” (Autobiography, 147n). Bain twice refers to this question, once saying that “Mill got wind of the [first] two volumes [of Comte’s Cours] in the end of 1837, after he had completed the draft of his Book on Induction”; and later, with perhaps excusable enthusiasm in view of his own contribution, remarking, “To my mind, the best piece of work that [Mill] ever did, was the Third Book of the Logic—Induction. Now, he tells us how fortunate he was in having finished this Book before reading Comte.” (John Stuart Mill, 70, 146.) Bain had himself no knowledge of Comte’s writings during the time he was working on Mill’s manuscript, though he began to learn French in order to read the copy of Comte that Mill lent him in June, 1843, and he “steadily” talked about Comte to Mill during that summer (Bain, Autobiography, 145). Later in life, when the question of posthumous publication of the Mill-Comte correspondence first arose, Bain insisted that passages referring to him be deleted, evidently fearing damage to his reputation (see his unpublished correspondence with Helen Taylor in 1874 in the Mill-Taylor Collection). In any case, the Press-copy Manuscript shows no evidence of revisions of Book III because of Comte’s influence.

[62 ]Some evidence of this familiarity may be found in Bain’s Autobiography. For example, he made “a minute analysis” of Faraday’s collected papers on electricity in 1840, a portion of which he later shaped “into an example of Mill’s four methods” (92-3; see 410ff. below). He heard an abstract of Gregory’s lectures on the animal chemistry of Liebig in the winter of 1841-42; in October of 1842 Mill asked him, on Hickson’s behalf, to review Liebig’s two books. Bain did not write the review, but Mill, “seeing by [his] extracts the importance of the works,” read them and “was exceedingly struck with their bold originality” (115, 142; cf. John Stuart Mill, 66-7). Bain also met, in the summer of 1842, Thomas Graham, Faraday, and Carpenter. One anecdote, concerning the references to Liebig, is worth repetition from Bain: “. . . Liebig, in a reprint of his Animal Chemistry, handsomely repaid the notice taken of his researches in the Logic: saying of his amended views that ‘he feels that he can claim no other merit than that of having applied so [sic] some special cases, and carried out farther than had previously been done, those principles of research in natural science which have been laid down’ in Mill’s work. Mill exultingly remarked—‘The tree may be known by its fruits. Schelling and Hegel have done nothing of the kind.’ ” (John Stuart Mill, 88.)

[63 ]Bain, John Stuart Mill, 66-7. Mill acknowledged this help in a passage quoted above (lxviii) from the Autobiography. To list all the definite and possible additions made in the Press-copy Manuscript through Bain’s aid is here not practicable, but one may note the example cited in the previous note (III, ix, 2), that of the “electrical machine” (III, vii, 3), a corrected chemical example (III, vii, 4), and the heavily revised opening of III, viii. Also worth mentioning is Bain’s comment on one of his examples from Faraday: “. . . I extracted one generalization, somewhat modified by myself, and this Mill prized very highly; nevertheless, it was afterwards carped at by Whewell, as going beyond what Faraday would have allowed” (John Stuart Mill, 67).

[64 ]Bain, Autobiography, 145. Examples of proof revisions may be seen at 412i-i and k.

[65 ]Other evidence of these changes appears on MS Vol. II, f.29v, where there is a reference to “Infra, chap. 19”; the printed text refers, correctly, to Chapter xxi (see 311n below).

[66 ]The addition of Chapter ix shows in the number of folios in Gathering X. Chapter ix occupies 29 folios (124-52) of the total 33 folios, but the matter of ff.137-52 was originally part of Chapter viii. Mill evidently decided first simply to divide Chapter viii into two, writing the new heading on f.123v, and under it the first nine words of what became §4 of Chapter ix. He also cancelled the final words of f.123, “will be mostly extracted from Sir John”, substituting “accordingly, will form the subject of the succeeding Chapter.” At this time f.123 was followed directly by what became f.137, which begins, “Herschel’s Discourse. . . .” Then Mill cancelled f.123v, and began Chapter ix anew on f.124, adding §§1-3 (with examples from Liebig, Bain, and Faraday), and ending f.136 (a short folio) with “§4. Our third example shall be extracted from Sir John”, again matching the opening of f.137.

The 24 folios of Chapter xiii are included in the 38 folios of Gathering Aa, the last in MS Vol. II, and in Vol. I of the published work. There were more than 14 folios in the original form of Aa, however, for a cancelled “Bb” appears on MS Vol. III, f.56, indicating that ff.50-5 (the first 49 folios of MS Vol. III being misbound or nontextual) completed the original 20 folios. The final Gathering Bb, then, includes these extra 6 folios, plus one (MS Vol. III, f.62) clearly added in revision, in its 27 folios.

[67 ]On MS Vol. II, f.87, the opening folio of Chapter vii, the title, “Of Observation and Experiment,” is added to replace the cancelled title of what became Chapter viii, “Of the Four Methods of Experimental Inquiry.” Two slight differences in chapter titles between the MS and the letter to Austin are probably slips of the pen in the latter (“Grounds” in the title of Chapter iii is given as “Ground” in the letter; “of” appears in the title of Chapter xv in the MS, but not in the letter).

[68 ]Bain, Autobiography, 132-3.

[69 ]EL, CW, XIII, 527.

[70 ]Bain, John Stuart Mill, 67. See III, xiii, 6 below.

[71 ]Gathering P, which has 19 folios, would have the normal 20 if the folio between 338 and 339 (Mill’s f.93) were not missing from the MS.

[72 ]The catch-all quality of Book IV is mentioned by Bain in his John Stuart Mill (67): “I remember [Mill’s] saying at a later period [than 1842], that the Fourth Book (which I have always regarded as the crude materials of a Logic of Definition and Classification) was made up of a number of subjects that he did not know where to place.”

[73 ]The most likely explanation of the anomaly is that MS Vol. III, ff.108-11 are added, as there is a definite change of pen indicated; these include paragraphs 11-15 of Chapter vii, §1, with the illustrations drawn from Descartes, Coleridge, “the free-will controversy,” Whately, Plato, and Aristotle. But pen evidence is very weak, and the bottom of f.111 has four lines that, if the above inference is correct, must have been copied from another folio not now extant, so that one would still have to account for one folio. The section numbers in this chapter, it may be mentioned, were altered during revision; §1 contains what were originally eleven sections, and §2 (running into the next gathering) contains what were originally four sections.

Concerning the chapter titles, one may mention that a difference between the MS and the letter to Austin reflects Mill’s uncertainty in other works as well as in the Logic about the propriety of “Of” or “On”: in the MS Chapter i is “Of Fallacies . . . ,” and in the letter “On Fallacies. . . .” Also, the letter to Austin, like the MS, includes the word “Bad” in the titles of Chapters iv-vi; the word was cancelled in proof.

[74 ]Bain, Autobiography, 145-6.

[75 ]Interesting minor changes are seen in the title of Chapter v, finally entitled “Of Ethology, or the Science of the Formation of Character.” An earlier, cancelled MS reading is “Of Ethology, or the Philosophy of Character”; in the letter to Austin (which must predate the cancelled MS reading), the title is “Of Ethology; or the Philosophy of Human Character, considered as an Exact Science.”

Mill, it will be recalled, long “cherished” the subject of Ethology, intending to write a full work on it “as the foundation and cornerstone of Sociology” (Bain, John Stuart Mill, 78). Bain, who disapproved of Mill’s insistence (shared by his father) on environmental rather than hereditary differences, pursued his own line of thought on the question in his Study of Character (1860), though he does not assert any connection between his work and Mill’s abortive plans (Bain, Autobiography, 259).

[76 ]That the move preceded the division is indicated by a late revision of the last sentence in the final Chapter iii (MS Vol. IV, f.160), where “the succeeding chapter” is changed to “the two succeeding chapters”. An indication of the rewriting of Chapter iii is seen in the cancellation of the opening of §3 (f.156, with the cancellation not continued on f.157), and a new §2 beginning on f.157 (the original §2 not appearing in the MS).

[77 ]The number of Chapter xi in the MS shows evidence of having been changed from xi to xiii and then back to xi. Also the heading of the original Chapter x (the chapter that disappeared in the final rewriting) appears cancelled at the head of f.259, with x having evidently been altered to xii, and then back to x; its title shows, through cancellation and interlineation, a change from the title in the letter to Austin, “modern” being substituted for “New”.

It is in Chapter x, as Bain notes (John Stuart Mill, 72), that Mill adopted Comte’s law of “the Three Stages” as an essential methodological tool.

[78 ]Under the cancelled title on f.259 (see preceding note), “§3” has been added at the beginning of the first paragraph, indicating that that chapter as originally conceived was spliced onto the first three folios (ff.256-8) of the final Chapter x (f.258 is short).

[79 ]This count, like all subsequent ones, excludes typographical errors, changes between italic and roman type, variations in punctuation, spelling, capitalization, and word division, and alterations in footnote references. My figures are based on the form of the variants as recorded in this edition (including variants within variants) and should not be taken as numerically precise, because changes entailed by other changes are counted as one if they are sufficiently close together to be included in one variant note, but otherwise are counted separately. The intention is merely to suggest the scope of the changes, and their comparative frequency and distribution.

[80 ]The fullest listing of the changed references to Comte is in W. M. Simon, European Positivism in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1963), 275-9, where most of the differences between the 1st and 8th editions are identified, though not traced to the editions in which they first occurred; changes among editions, including reinstatement of views, are not indicated. For other comments on the references to Comte, see Bain, John Stuart Mill, 72, and Packe, 280. See also lxxxii-lxxxiii and xc-xci below.

Of the very few explicit references to other variants, one may cite those of Maurice Mandelbaum, who calls attention to the changes in §§5-7 of Book VI, Chapter xii, in his “Two Moot Issues in Mill’s Utilitarianism,” in J. B. Schneewind, ed., Mill: A Collection of Critical Essays (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968), 206-33. And in an essay reprinted in the same volume, Reginald Jackson refers (“Mill’s Treatment of Geometry—A Reply to Jevons,” 90n) to Jevons’ mention of an alteration of “false” to “not strictly true” (225d-d below), and describes (105n) the change from “makes” to “make” (234c-c below) as careless (the syntax is ambiguous).

[82 ]On the basis of the pagination of the 8th edition, the number of variants per page is: Introduction, 6.09; Book V, 4.79; Book VI, 4.75; Book IV, 4.66; Book I, 4.39; Book III, 4.31; Book II, 3.43. The overall average (excluding the Prefaces) is 4.37.

[83 ]I have arbitrarily selected as long variants those involving one page or more of the original text. Using this measure, there are about fifty passages qualifying as major: of these, over half appear in Book III, and over twenty percent in Book II, with four examples in each of Books I and VI, only two in Book IV, and none in Book V. Of the total number, seventeen involve the addition or rewriting of a full section or more (two of these being added chapters, and one an almost complete rewriting of a chapter); of the total, twelve are referred to in Mill’s Prefaces. Two of these latter do not involve the addition or rewriting of full sections or more, so there are seven places where the addition or rewriting of at least one full section is not signalled by Mill in his Prefaces.

[84 ]In a letter to John Austin of 22 April, 1848, thanking him for his approbation of the Logic, and sending him, at that late date, a copy of the offprint of Chapters xviii and xxv of Book III mentioned below, Mill says the offprint contains “the only alterations in opinion in the 2d edition of the Logic. Whatever other alterations were made, are little more than verbal.” (EL, CW, XIII, 730.)

[85 ]In this context he also thanks J. M. Macleod, whom he may have known through the East India Company. What Macleod’s contribution was is not now known.

[86 ]For Mill’s side of the correspondence, see EL, CW, XIII, 673, 676, 688-9, 694-5, 698-9, 700; Herschel’s drafts are in the Library of the Royal Society. (It may be noted that Mill’s great opponent, Whewell, praised Mill for the revised estimate of Laplace in his Of Induction [London: Parker, 1849], 85-6, reprinted in his Philosophy of Discovery [London: Parker, 1860], 290.) The timing of the revisions is indicated in these letters: having begun the process in December, 1845, Mill sent Vol. I to press about the end of February, 1846, and it was set by 30 March, at which time he began sending Vol. II.

[87 ]The offprint, a copy of which is in the library of Somerville College, Oxford, has, on its title page, “[Two chapters of “A System of Logic, Inductive and Ratiocinative, by JOHN STUART MILL,” as altered in the Second Edition.]” It is repaged, with added signatures, so that the two chapters are numbered seriatum, Al-C39. The last lines of four pages (2nd ed., II, 70, 71, 74, 75; offprint, 1, 2, 5, 6) are carried over to the next page in the offprint, but the line settings are not altered, and there are no variants in the text. Because Chapter xviii begins recto in the offprint instead of verso, as it does in the 2nd edition, the running titles of the chapter are reversed in the offprint.

For one recipient of the offprint, see note 84 above.

[88 ]John Stuart Mill, 67.

[89 ]See EL, CW, XIII, 527-8 (7/7/42), in which he expresses pleasure that Austin, rather than Hamilton or Brewster, is to do the Edinburgh review, and hopes that Herschel will do the Quarterly one; see also ibid., 683 (20/10/45), by which time he knew that neither the Edinburgh nor Quarterly would review the 1st edition. Herschel, in a letter of 10 July, 1845 (MS draft, Royal Society), which Mill must have received after he wrote to Austin on the 7th, says want of time prevented him from reviewing Mill’s book in the same spirit that he had Whewell’s.

[90 ]“Mill and Whewell on the Logic of Induction,” Prospective Review, VI (Feb., 1850), 110. Mill certainly would have green gratified had he seen a letter from James Stephen to MacVey Napier of 14 May, 1845 (BM Add. MSS 34625, ff.210-13), in which he tries to persuade Napier himself to review the Logic. Before mentioning certain “exceedingly debateable” tenets, such as those of “the last two or three chapters,” and Mill’s objectionable anti-religious views, Stephen says: “My more immediate object in writing is to remind you of John Mill’s Book of which I have been lately reading a considerable part, and I have done so with the conviction that it is one of the most remarkable productions of this 19th Century. . . . I . . . wish Mill to be treated respectfully and handsomely. I wish it the more because I have a great personal liking for him, and an high esteem for his knowledge and powers. A good stiff job in the thinking way would do you good also; and would animate your long vacation. Add to all this, that it is many a day since you have had any speculation on subjects of this kind in the E. R.”

[91 ]Westminster Review, XXXIX (1843), 412-56. This can hardly be considered a disinterested review: Mill read it in manuscript, recommended some cuts as too complimentary, and “gave the article the benefit of verbal revision, by which it was otherwise improved. After all, it was referred to by different critics as a eulogy rather than a review.” (Bain, Autobiography, 147-8.)

[92 ]“Mill’s Logic,” British Critic, XXXIV (Oct., 1843), 349-427. Ward returned again and again to the Logic in reviews, coupling the successive editions with other works by Mill (see the reprinted reviews in Vol. I of his Philosophy of Theism, 1884). He also corresponded with Mill on the subject, never quite, one judges, giving up hope of curing Mill’s “miserable moral and religious deficiencies” (see xc below).

[93 ]This count excludes simple changes such as those from “Mr. Whewell” to “he”. Some of the deletions (see, e.g., 798x-x), like some of those concerning Comte, could even leave Mill open to a charge of plagiarism.

For a full appreciation of the controversy with Whewell, the individual variants should be consulted in conjunction with the information in the Bibliographic Appendix under Whewell, where the complex publishing history of his works is outlined.

[94 ]Some of these variants are discussed below, xc-xci.

[95 ]See also Mill’s subsequent comment on Bowen’s rejoinder, in a letter to Harriet, LL, CW, XIV, 149 (4/2/54).

[96 ]See ibid., XVII, 2003-4 (10/5/47), 2005 (13/9/47), and XIV, 48 (21/7/50).

[97 ]John Stuart Mill, 92. Bain considered the overall revision for the 3rd edition the first important one, and thought that “no revision of anything like the same extent was undertaken till the eighth edition came out in 1872” (ibid.). Bain was, of course, impressed not by the total number of changes, but by their significance; the 8th edition, it may be mentioned, contains a large number of references to his own Logic, which was published in 1870.

[98 ]Mill to Harriet, 29/1/54, in LL, CW, XIV, 142. Its use as a text gradually grew, partly as a result of Bain’s Examinership in Logic at the University of London (1857 to the late 1860s) and his Professorship at Aberdeen (after 1860); see his Autobiography, 248, 271ff..

[99 ]See the Bibliographic Appendix, under Spencer. See also references in LL, CW, XV, 540, 648.

[100 ]LL, CW, XV, 738 (8/8/61) and 775 (29/1/62). In the latter, Mill’s worries about accuracy surface: “I hope the remaining sheets of the Logic and Political Economy will be looked through carefully. The reader who examines them is evidently a painstaking and careful man, but it nevertheless happens at times that one word is put instead of another with a very awkward effect.”

[101 ]Two of these (205n, 308n) are related to variants introduced in the 3rd edition.

[102 ]As no detailed study of the influence of Mill’s Logic on his contemporaries has been made, it is worth mentioning that Buckle’s heavily annotated copy of the 5th edition (in which he is first mentioned) is in the collection of Dr. Gordon N. Ray; also, Leslie Stephen’s copy of the 4th edition, probably used for Vol. III of his English Utilitarians, is in the British Museum.

[103 ]LL, CW, XV, 695.

[104 ]Bain, John Stuart Mill, 124. Inexpensive People’s Editions of the Principles, RepresentativeGovernment, and On Liberty were published in 1865. In April only 137 copies of the Logic were unsold. (See LL, CW, XVI, 1040n2, 1041nn3,5.) For the People’s Edition of the Logic, see lxxxvi and n111 below.

[105 ]LL, CW, XVI, 1041 (30/4/65).

[106 ]John Stuart Mill, 126.

[107 ]Book II, Chapter vii, controverting Spencer, which Mill added in the 4th edition (Bain, John Stuart Mill, 126, mistakenly says it was introduced in the 6th), begins somewhat disingenuously: “Polemical discussion is foreign to the plan of this work. But . . .” (262 below).

[108 ]The main weight of the argument against the intuitionists is of course carried in the Hamilton, but Mill was fully aware of the close dependence of the two works on one another. See, for example, his comments to Bain, in 1861 and 1863: “The great recommendation of this project [writing the Hamilton] is, that it will enable me to supply what was prudently left deficient in the Logic, and to do the kind of service which I am capable of to rational psychology, namely, to its Polemik”; and: “I mean in this book to do what the nature & scope of the Logic forbade me to do there, to face the ultimate metaphysical difficulties of every question on which I touch.” (LL, CW, XV, 752, 816.) Mill’s prudence may be seen as early as the concluding paragraphs of the “Introductory Matter” in the Early Draft (967 below), which should be compared with the conclusion of the Introduction and its variants (13ff. below). Even so, he knew from the beginning that his loyalties would be evident; see, for example, his letter to Maurice of 9 Sept., 1842 (LL, CW, XVII, 1998), where he says: “. . . I am afraid you will not be able to look upon [the Logic] or its tendency with any favour, as though I do not concern myself with ontological questions directly the whole effect of the book where it produces any, must be anti-ontological.”

One of the footnotes (62n) referring to the Hamilton may be specially mentioned, as it also contains a reference to a work by George Grote’s brother, John, the Exploratio Philosophica (see also Mill’s letter to George Grote, LL, CW, XVI, 1095-6), and to Ferrier’s Institutes of Metaphysic.

[109 ]See LL, CW, XV, 808-9; XVI, 1084, 1088, 1107.

[110 ]In a letter of 12 Dec., 1867, Longmans reported that 271 copies had sold since 1 June, and that only 193 were on hand (see LL, CW, XVI, 1336n).

[111 ]The number of copies of the two-volume Library Edition of the Logic had risen to 1500 by the time of the 6th edition from the original 750. Longmans proposed a People’s Edition of 10,000 copies, to sell at 7s. 6d. Mill refused on 9 Jan., 1868 (LL, CW, XVI, 1351). The suggestion in 1870 came from William Trant, one of Mill’s working-class correspondents; in refusing it, Mill referred to the potential financial loss, with little useful effect to offset it, and sent complimentary copies for distribution by Trant to Workingmen’s Clubs and Institutes (ibid., XVII, 1756, 1765-6, 1773). Helen Taylor’s agreement to the publication of a People’s Edition in 1884 is noted on a letter to her from Longmans (22/3/84), Mill-Taylor Collection, British Library of Political and Economic Science, V, 218. On the verso there is a list apparently giving her understanding of the dates of the various Library Editions, as follows: “1st ed. Feb. 1843. 2. May 46. 3. Nov. 50. 4. Aug. 56. 5. Mch. 62. 6. Sep. 65. 7. Mch. 68. 8. July 72. 9. Dec. 75. 10. Ap. 79.”

[112 ]See LL, CW, XVI, 1357, 1374-5, to Gomperz (21/1/68 and 18/3/68).

[113 ]Bain, who was an intimate and admirer of Grote, says of him: “I doubt if any living man conned and thumbed the book as he did. ‘John Mill’s Logic,’ I remember his saying, ‘is the best book in my library’; he had not the same high opinion of any of Mill’s other books.” (John Stuart Mill, 83.)

[114 ]A.l.s. in the collection of Dr. Gordon Ray. The memorandum has a note by Mill: “Grote on Aristotle & Porphyry (used in 7th ed.).” (Grote, who was using the 5th edition, also notes a typographical error in the Greek that had, in fact, been corrected in the 6th edition, after persisting from the 2nd through the 5th.) In sending the sheets of the 7th edition to Gomperz for the German translation, Mill says that this change is the only one worth a translator’s attention, and attributes it to Grote (LL, CW, XVI, 1375).

[115 ]See LL, CW, XVI, 1437, where De Morgan’s letter, with its other criticisms (not acted upon), is quoted by Professor Mineka in notes.

[116 ]Ibid., 1360-1; see also ibid., 1376-7, and XVII, 1574, 1881. Concerning other philosophers whose writings began to alter logical thought at this time, but did little to modify Mill’s views, one should see Mill’s letter to Cairnes of 5 December 1871, where, saying he has not yet seen Jevon’s Theory of Political Economy (1871), he comments that Jevons “seems to me to have a mania for encumbering questions with useless complications, and with a notation implying the existence of greater precision in the data than the questions admit of. His speculations on Logic, like those of Boole and De Morgan, and some of those of Hamilton, are infected in an extraordinary degree with this vice. It is one preeminently at variance with the wants of the time, which demand that scientific deductions should be made as simple and as easily intelligible as they can be made without ceasing to be scientific.” (Ibid., 1862-3.)

[117 ]Ibid., XV, 813; cf. 831.

[118 ]See Bentham, Rationale of Judicial Evidence, 5 vols., ed. J. S. Mill (London: Hunt and Clarke, 1827), I, 137, and “Theism,” CW, X, 470ff.

[119 ]Mill was actively revising the Logic, this time in conjunction with the Hamilton (for its 4th edition, also 1872), from late 1871 through the spring of 1872: see LL, CW, XVII, 1862, 1879, to Cairnes, in the former of which he responds to Cairnes’ comments on the Laws of Coexistence. Some of the variants, however, especially those concerning the Conservation of Force, are based on long consideration (see, e.g., ibid., XV, 871, to Glennie, of 23/7/63).

[120 ]Some of the footnotes deal with disagreements: see, e.g., 76n, 166n. But one should end with a tribute; writing to Cliffe Leslie on 8 Feb., 1869, Mill says: “The physical illustrations in my Logic were all reviewed & many of them suggested by Bain, who has a very extensive & accurate knowledge of physical science. He has promised me to revise them thoroughly for the next edition [the 8th], & to put them sufficiently in harmony with the progress of science, which I am quite aware that they have fallen behind.” (LL, CW, XVII, 1558.)

[121 ]While the Books are surprisingly consistent in the frequency and distribution of variants, Book IV most closely approximates the overall pattern, having the same order of frequency (3rd, 1st, 2nd, 5th, 4th, 8th, 6th, and 7th editions), and also less variation from the norm, in percentage of variants, from edition to edition (there is a relatively higher percentage in the 1st and 2nd editions, and a lower in the 3rd).

[122 ]“Mill’s Logic,” British Critic, XXIV (Oct., 1843), 427n. Bain says (John Stuart Mill, 69) that at Ward’s “instigation, Mill expunged from his second edition an objectionable anecdote”; there seems to be no deletion in 1846 that meets this description, and it is most likely that Bain has simply mistaken the edition, though there is no apparent reason why Mill should have overlooked the criticism in 1846 and heeded it in 1851, except again that Harriet played a large part in the revisions for the 3rd edition.

[123 ]Actually these changes, more than sixty in all, are most frequent in Books III and VI (nearly a quarter of them appearing in Chapters ix and x of Book VI, the last part of the Logic to be written, and under the immediate influence of Vol. VI of Comte’s Cours).

[124 ]For changes in 1862, see 391f-f, 396k-k; in 1865, 166g-g, 227i-i, j-j, 252d-d; in 1868, 686b-b, d (cited above); and in 1872 (in a passage added in 1856, concerning Spencer), 271i-i. The student interested in these changes should also see Professor McRae’s comments, xxxii ff., the discussion in the text on 338ff., the change in 1851 at 620e, the letter to Ward (LL, CW, XV, 647-8), and the following places in CW, X: 123u-u (a change of 1859 in “Coleridge”), 258n (an addition in 1863 to Utilitarianism concerning Spencer’s use of “necessarily”), and 269g (a change of 1865 in Auguste Comte and Positivism).

[125 ]Was Mill influenced in part by the events of the Franco-Prussian War, and the English sympathy—which he shared—for the German cause?

For a series of variants that illustrate how a large number of this third type may add up to a significant change, see 681n-nff., where the relation between the revisions of the Logic and the composition of other of Mill’s writings (“Coleridge” and On Liberty), and his revised view of Benthamism, may be perceived.

There being so many variants of this third type, a selection of “interesting” ones from outside Book IV would principally reveal the editor’s bias; attentive readers will find significances of their own.

[126 ]One should remember, in this context, Mill’s proposed amendment to the Second Reform Bill in 1867, to replace “man” with “person.” For an interpretation, see Robson, “ ‘Joint Authorship’ Again,” Mill News Letter, VI (Spring, 1971), 15-20, which undoubtedly shows that bias may be revealed in discussions of the fourth type of variant; again readers will find their own favourites.

[127 ]Actually in the manuscript Mill first wrote “mankind shall see & recognize their mea” [sic] and then cancelled the words after “mankind” and substituted “now” to give the final manuscript reading.

[128 ]As the dominant practice of analytical bibliographers is to present an “eclectic” text, incorporating the earliest form of the accidentals with later forms of authorial substantives, a few comments on the departure from that practice here are necessary. The painstaking and productive biblographic analysis that has made it possible in many circumstances to determine the responsibility for accidentals grew out of concern with early printed works, especially literary texts, in which printing-house corruption was manifest, for which the author seldom read proof, and in which the current technology and working habits led to texts of a mixed and unreliable kind. Most of the applications of analytical techniques to later, machine-set works have dealt with literary texts in which there are comparatively few substantive variants, and these generally short ones, and in which, because of the importance of slight shades of meaning to literary scholars, the accidentals are more significant than in non-imaginative works.

In the text here printed the “conservative” position is adopted of accepting the accidental as well as the substantive readings of the last edition in Mill’s lifetime, returning to earlier readings only when there is demonstrable corruption. The rationale is that (a) none of the conditions mentioned above applies with great force to Mill’s Logic; (b) we know he was concerned over accidentals; (c) the manuscript does not give adequate readings (for example, the end of a line serves for punctuation in some places, essential commas are omitted in interlineations and elsewhere, and many points are ambiguous in form) where later editions do; and (d) a vast number of the substantives include accidentals, to accept the form of which, in conjunction with those of the manuscript, would be to introduce an obviously inconsistent kind of eclecticism. Even those who accept this reasoning might argue for standardization of spelling and word division, but since Mill (in the manuscript and elsewhere) and the printers (who are undoubtedly responsible for some changes) were not consistent, it has been thought best to give these inconsistencies as they passed, repeatedly, through Mill’s detailed proof-reading.

[129 ]In view of the influence of printing-house practice on accidentals, it should be noted that Harrison and Co. were the printers for the 1st edition; Woodfall and Son for the 2nd; Savill and Edwards for the 3rd through the 8th. Parker published the first five editions; Longmans, after taking over Parker’s business, the final three (and the posthumous 9th and People’s).

[130 ]The K/k confusion is particularly annoying because of the different meanings of “Kind” and “kind.” As the list of typographical errors in Appendix I shows, some corrections are here necessary. In a few places in the manuscript Mill, evidently aware of the problem, used proof-reader’s underlinings to indicate majuscule K’s.

[131 ]All these examples include cognate forms. Both “shew” and “enquire” occur in passages added in 1851, but were altered in 1856 to the standard form.

[132 ]Though affected in many ways by Whewell’s views, it is not likely that Mill knew of his strong opinions on “t,” “d,” and “ed” forms: see Mrs. Stair Douglas, The Life and Selections from the Correspondence of William Whewell (London: Kegan Paul, 1881), 202-3.

[133 ]With the exception of Comte (whose importance is referred to frequently in the text), all these are mentioned in one Preface or another, with some indication of debts and disagreements. The strongest references, apart from that to Bain in the 8th edition, are in the 1st (retained through the 8th), where Mill says that without Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences “the corresponding portion of this work would probably not have been written,” and in the 1st (retained in the 2nd), where he recommends Whately’s Logic, the earlier portion of Brown’s Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, and his Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect.

[134 ]Martineau’s essay appeared in the Monthly Repository in the same year (1833) as Mill’s “What is Poetry?” and “The Two Kinds of Poetry.” Mill wrote to Martineau on 26 May, 1835 (LL, CW, XVII, 1961), saying that the last two pages of Martineau’s paper (from which he quotes in the Logic) “made an impression upon [him] which will never be effaced,” and that in “The Two Kinds of Poetry” he had “attempted to follow out [Martineau’s] speculation into some of those ulterior consequences wh [he] had rather indicated than stated.”

[135 ]For arguments supporting the choice of this edition as copy-text, see n128 above, the Textual Introduction to Mill’s Principles (CW, II, lxxixff.), and my “Principles and Methods in the Collected Edition of John Stuart Mill,” in John M. Robson, ed., Editing Nineteenth-Century Texts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), 96-122.

[136 ]To avoid annoyance, some slight and easily described changes are not reproduced. Of these the most frequent are changes from “upon” to “on” (most commonly after “grounded,” “founded,” “dependent,” and “rest,” but also after other words, the changes being made in 1851; there is only one case of the reverse change, at 514.3), and of “although” to “though” (occurring in the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th editions); both forms of each are however found in all editions. Two other non-recorded changes are from “Sir William Hamilton” to “Sir W. Hamilton” (173.n21, changed in 1865), and “viz.” to “namely” (102.38, in 1843). Four other changes are recorded only on their first appearance (and so noted): (i) the consistent and frequent change of “Mr. Whewell” to “Dr. Whewell” in 1851 (see cxiiip-p); this matter gave Mill some trouble, for in the Press-copy Manuscript “Dr.” is often cancelled for “Mr.”, occasionally “Professor” is also cancelled, and in a few places both “Professor” and “Mr.” are cancelled for “Dr.” which became always “Mr.” in 1843; Whewell actually took the degree of Doctor of Divinity in 1844, and having been Professor of Mineralogy at Cambridge from 1828 to 1832, he became Professor of Moral Theology in 1838 (similar changes in the text of “Mr.” to “Professor” Bain are too infrequent to justify an exception); (ii) “necessarian” to “necessitarian” in 1872 (see 838h-h); (iii) “mode” (of a syllogistic figure) to “mood” in 1856 (see 165d-d); and (iv) “A,” “B,” “C,” to “As,” “Bs,” “Cs” in 1865 (see 598g-g)—the final three appear only in limited contexts. And finally, eight changes from “a” to “an” (before “universe” and “universal” in 1851, 52.26 and 132.13; before “hypothetical” in 1843, 84.1, and in 1862, 710.10; and before “historical” in 1851, 724.25), or from “an” to “a” (before “hundred” in 1846, 515.11, and twice on 610.24 and 25) are not recorded.

[137 ]LL, CW, XVI, 1108 (25/10/65). Occasionally in late works, especially the Hamilton (the editions coming after this letter, it may be noted), Mill put square brackets around added matter in footnotes, sometimes giving some verbal indication of when the matter was added; in other footnotes he simply indicates why the matter did not appear earlier.

[138 ]One could wish for a definite explanation of these apparently unnecessary changes, of which there are other examples. It will be noticed that a female name is introduced in 1851 (and retained thereafter), and that apart from Peter (who disappeared in 1856) the names derive from Mill’s immediate family, though Mill objected strenuously to his brother George’s and his sister Mary’s responses to his marriage in 1851.

There are not many related changes in the wording of logical examples; one stands out sufficiently for comment. At 26f-f Mill, in 1851, substituted the opening of Johnson’s Rasselas for a passage from Paradise Lost. The reason may well be inferred from his description of Milton, in a letter to John Lalor (27/6/52), as having “with all his republicanism . . . the soul of a fanatic a despot & tyrant” (LL, CW, XIV, 91).

[139 ]The following list gives the corrected references, in this form: page and line reference to the present text. JSM’s reference] The corrected reference in the present text.

72.n26 p.298] pp.298-300

85.n2 81] 81-2

86.n4 82] 82-3

101.n15 407] 107

104.n1 103-105] 103, 105

167.n16 148] 48

181.n1 157] 157-8

203n.1 367] 366-7

228.n7 pp.149 et seqq.] p.149

236.n11 222] 222-3

241.26-7 Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences] Novum Organon Renovatum [altered because JSM altered his footnote reference; in subsequent references to Whewell’s Novum Organon corrections have been made, as necessary (often JSM abbreviated the title), from the erroneous Novum Organum Renovatum (presumably on the Baconian rather than the Aristotelian model)]

242.n1 32, 33] 33, 32-3

251.6 Discourses] Discussions

300.n4 p.231] pp. 251-2

304.n1 p. 256] pp. 256-7

364.24 211] 211n

426.nn4, 5; 427.n1 pp. 156-8, and 171] pp. 156-7, 171-2, 158 [placed after separate passages, the first two in square brackets, the third where the original note occurs]

442.n1 Chap. vii, §1] Chap. vi, §2

475.n3 1862] 1861

489.n1 656] 655-7

497.n1 434-437] 437-8, 434

518.n1 §7] §8 [JSM did not change when another section was added to III, v]

598.n2 224] 224n

672.n2 35-37] 35-6 [JSM includes the following quotations, which are here footnoted separately to avoid confusion]

676.n21 173-4] 173, 174

725.n1 274] 274-5

725.n2 i] Vol. II [as in 62]

766.n3 43-5] 43

778.n1 21] 21n

779.n1 23-4] 22-4

783.n5 76-7] 76n-77n

885.n1 214 214-15