James Mill's History of British India (1817) confronts us with a paradox. Mill intended to put British administrators of India at the service of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’, the latter being the people of India themselves. He was ‘anxious to do them good’.Footnote 1 The book aimed to teach British governors, the historian claimed, to assign correctly India's place on the scale of civilizations, from ‘the most rude to the most perfect’:Footnote 2 India had advanced just short of the civilizational stage of Britain under the rule of Henry IV.Footnote 3 That could be ascertained, Mill argued, by sifting through reports from travellers, official documents and translations of native works: ‘a man who is duly qualified may obtain more knowledge of India in one year in his closet in England, than he could obtain during the course of the longest life, by the use of his eyes and his ears in India’.Footnote 4
There was no need for the historian ‘in the closet’ either to visit India or to speak any of its languages. ‘With characteristic force and arrogance’, Bruch Mazlish noted, Mill ‘transformed these faults into virtues’.Footnote 5 After all, Mill – the ‘zealous’, ‘affectionate’ and the ‘most faithful and fervent disciple’ of Jeremy BenthamFootnote 6 – did achieve notoriety for his abstract, a priori and deductive theory, preaching the Master's gospel. Such reputation allowed Eric Stokes to argue that Mill, in History, above all ‘strove to deduce the Indian problem and its solution from a single principle, to break through the loose arguments and suggestions of ordinary opinion and to reason with the rigorous logic of his “abstract or geometrical method” ’.Footnote 7 History, as James Burns has put it quoting the author himself, was fraught with ‘a theory invented to preserve as much as actual observation would allow to be preserved of a pre-established and favourite creed’.Footnote 8 Therein lies the rub: scholars argue that Mill's was a history in which theory trumped experience. That ‘theory’ has been diversely identified as authoritarian utilitarianism, enlightenment parochialism, and liberal imperialism, or imperial liberalism, depending on the point of view of readers.Footnote 9
In this article, I examine Mill's attempt to address an expected, and potent, objection, i.e. that he lacked first-hand knowledge of India. Commentators have not failed to notice that the way that he chose to deal with this objection, i.e. the danger of imposing the spectator's preconceptions onto the spectacle, calling for critical examination of eyewitness accounts, was more than a rhetorical device: the skills essential to such a critical examination were of greater importance to the historian than those exercised in observation. As I try to show first, different points of view of readers notwithstanding, Mill's claim has invariably been explained away as a symptom of his theorizing – rationalist and universalist – utilitarianism. However, to argue that Mill, in History, opted for theory over experience because he subscribed to a theorizing utilitarianism begs, rather than answers, questions of authorial intention. Mill did employ the vocabulary of the ‘science of man’, in its associationist psychology variant. However, that vocabulary was quite broad. To this effect, second, I argue that Mill's ‘Preface’ registers his reaction to a well-known methodological concern in eighteenth-century historiography and comparative studies: the problems of preconception and self-deception. Prominent philosophers and authors warned against the ‘illusions’ of perception, from Plato to Hartley. Thus, third, I submit that Mill's way of dealing with this inherent limitation in the human constitution, i.e. that only a competent judge can see through the mist of conflicting representations of facts, also drew on ancient historiographical, rhetorical and philosophical traditions. As ancient forensic rhetoric steps into the foreground, Mill's claim that his was a ‘judging’ history acquires a more literal meaning than has been hitherto supposed.
Rationalism, universalism, utilitarianism
Mill's History is the most studied of his writings, perhaps not excepting the essay on government (1820). Some turn to Mill's methodological and sociological analyses with an interest in the book primarily as a work of history, either in the Scottish historiographical tradition and/or in the utilitarian tradition. However, most are interested in the History primarily for its colonialist (or imperialist) function, with reference to its place either in the story of constructing and subduing ‘the Orient’ in general or in the administration of or hegemony over India in particular.Footnote 10 Yet, little scholarly attention has been paid to Mill's actual words on the limitations of individual observation, or on the early modern and ancient traditions that informed them.
James Mill was ‘the last of the eighteenth century’, according to John Stuart Mill, extending ‘its tone of thought and sentiment into the nineteenth (though not unmodified nor unimproved)’.Footnote 11 For the younger Mill, his father was the last survivor of the ‘great school’ of Henry Home and Adam Ferguson.Footnote 12 As such, the elder Mill was the philosophic historian ‘who first threw the light of reason on Hindoo society’.Footnote 13 For Burns, the ‘light of reason’ is not what shines through, from page to page, in Mill's History – it is rather dogmatism and passionate prejudice that prevails. ‘There is no doubt’, Burns thought, ‘that the Utilitarian, and specifically the Benthamite theory of law and government is focused to a great extent upon the notion of the legislator as Condillac's machiniste or social engineer’. But Mill's book, Burns concluded, ‘may have more to do with rationalism than with reason’.Footnote 14 Jeng-Guo Chen is thus not alone in thinking that ‘Mill's rationalism was in opposition to the argument that personal experience could help historians to verify reports that they read.’ His ‘strong intellectualism’, Chen argued, pushed ‘Newtonian rationalism to its limits’.Footnote 15 Despite the confused orientations of these categories, it is, I think, worth briefly pursuing Mill's relationship to rationalism.
In 1819 Mill aligned himself with those ‘who think that these [i.e. feelings ‘which we have when we say, I hear, I see, I feel, I taste, I smell, corresponding to the five senses’] are the only simple feelings, and that the rest are merely combinations of them’. He acknowledged, but did not identify himself with, a different school of philosophers, such as ‘Dr Reid and his followers in this country, Kant and the German school of metaphysics in general on the Continent’, who thought ‘that there are original feelings beside impressions and ideas; as those which correspond to the words remember, believe, judge, space, time, & c’.Footnote 16 If Mill was not a ‘Rationalist’ as far as his theory of knowledge is concerned, in what sense was he a rationalist? In the only extended study of his theory of knowledge, William Burston painted Mill as an ‘extreme environmentalist’.Footnote 17 Still, Burston pointed out three ways in which utilitarianism's, and Mill's, rationalism manifested itself: first, instrumental rationality, i.e. finding the best means for the desired end; second, intellectualism, i.e. adopting an end or course of action, once it is proved that it is indeed the best; and third, that argument, logic, or reason can indeed demonstrate the goodness of an ideal, that is, an ultimate end of action.Footnote 18 These categories have no bearing on the issue at hand, alas. Perhaps a different passage from the essay on education is more relevant:
it is education wholly which constitutes the … remarkable difference between the most cultivated European and the wildest savage. Whatever is made of any class of men, we may then be sure is possible to be made of the whole human race. What a field for exertion! What a prize to be won!Footnote 19
Mill's concluding words adhere to the familiar version of the ‘Enlightenment’ as seeking or promulgating ‘an objective, eternal, transcultural standard of right and wrong, one that would apply to all people (and peoples) in all times and places’.Footnote 20 And that would make Mill a political rationalist, as Dennis Rasmussen has defined the term: one who seeks to ‘bring all laws, institutions, and practices before the supposedly infallible tribunal of reason, and to discard those found wanting by its standards’, while also harbouring ‘naive faith in the possibility, or even inevitability, of endless progress – not only scientific progress …, but also economic, moral, and political progress’.Footnote 21 A rationalist historian would thus not study the past sympathetically; s/he would not try to understand it in its own terms, but measure it against an ‘objective’ – presupposed – standard of progress. And against this standard, non-Europeans did not fare well, at least, ‘not yet’.Footnote 22
In his seminal article on Mill's History, Duncan Forbes situated Mill squarely in the rationalist camp in the contest ‘for the intellectual control of India’.Footnote 23 In light of his ‘Rationalist presupposition of the uniformity of human nature’, Forbes claimed, ‘first-hand knowledge was not essential’ to Mill. All that was essential, as Forbes quoted Mill, was acquiring ‘knowledge of the laws of human nature, which is the end as well as the instrument of everything’.Footnote 24 Setting aside the question of how one acquires such knowledge, Forbes argued that Mill's rationalism, complemented by a firm belief in progress, led to the historical uniformitarianism of the History’s scale of nations.Footnote 25 The operative words here are progress and uniformity, rather than rationalism. For Bruce Mazlish, Mill's historical method was compromised not only by the History’s present-mindedness, but also by the fact that ‘it never seems to have occurred to him that Utilitarian principles themselves were merely representative of one stage in the evolution of human society, and not therefore of eternal validity’.Footnote 26 Mazlish argued that even though Mill widened Bentham's ahistorical utilitarian theory with a philosophy of history, History transformed the descriptive laws of historical development of the Scottish theoretical historiography into prescriptive ones.Footnote 27 Javed Majeed has put Mill's methodological comment in the most appropriate perspective: privileging comprehensiveness over individual observation was part of a world-levelling, unificatory epistemology.Footnote 28 Such an epistemology, according to Ernest Gellner (from whom Majeed adopts the term), grew as ‘a reaction to the erosion, fragmentation and destibilisation’ of early modern world views. As an ‘empiricist theory of one-kind-of-evidence-only’, it tries to homogenize and standardize evidence, in order to evaluate it. A necessary corollary of such an instrumental rationality, Gellner adds, is that, ‘if various beliefs are to be compared, they must be in a similar idiom’.Footnote 29 Adam Knowles concludes that Mill ‘transformed utility into both a material-developmental concept and a cognitive-developmental concept’.Footnote 30 For example, as Mill's comments on Hindu astrology suggested, no manifestation of astronomical or mathematical skill, ingenuity or conceptual complexity counted as progress or advancement, if it were for ‘one of the most irrational of all imaginable pursuits’.Footnote 31 For all the aforementioned writers, Mill's ‘unificatory epistemology’ was evidenced in his execution of a ‘philosophical history’: making use of the toolset of a scale of civilizations and a science of human nature. As Jane Rendall has argued, Mill did not share the sympathetic views of ‘Scottish Orientalists’, even though he was exposed to a similar education in Edinburgh.Footnote 32
Mary Poovey's recent discussion of the limitations of the ‘Universal Knowledge Project’ suggests that Mill ignored existing data about India, whenever those did not support the theoretical and political assumptions with which he began. According to Poovey, the universalist project was associated with liberal reform, which made it imperative, as Ranajit Guha has put it, ‘for Utilitarian discourse to create a void, since none was given’.Footnote 33 Mill thus could not escape the contradiction inherent in the universalist knowledge project: in the Baconian tradition, Poovey argued, empirical observations transform into useful information through taxonomical, numerical or statistical representation, but when such data ‘is either too copious or too antithetical to prevailing assumptions’, they fail to make the grade as information. Mill's theorizing utilitarianism discarded data which should have been transformed into information. Poovey thus argues that Mill acknowledged that there was a wealth of data on India, but it ‘was too copious and too scattered to be useful, and it dealt with a region too heterogeneous to submit to orderly description by a single or multiple observers’.Footnote 34 For Poovey, Mill supported ‘an epistemological position that would have rendered any amount of empirical observation worthless’:
no eyewitness account, no matter how intimate the conditions under which it was produced, could overcome the inherent limitations of the human senses or the ‘constitution of the human mind.’ This ‘constitution,’ which Mill considered to be universal, dictates that any observer, when bombarded by ‘an infinite number of objects,’ will fix his attention on details that confirm the impressions with which he began. … To counteract this tendency, according to Mill, judicious observers should read books instead of looking around; and they should allow their thoughts to be directed not by what they see but by what they simply know.Footnote 35
Mill's abstract theory trumped experience. In his ‘self-conscious rejection of the senses, the claim to a “philosophical” evaluation of civilizations becomes unmoored from its basis in experience’.Footnote 36
The attempt to avoid criticism by inter alia appealing to a supposed limitation in the constitution of the human mind as regards observation has earned Mill ‘scorn and ridicule’.Footnote 37 Rarely do commentators acknowledge that Mill saw value in ‘seeing the country and conversing with its people’.Footnote 38 The rhetorical pedigree of Mill's flights into self-justification in the ‘Preface’ fades into the background.Footnote 39 In 1819, he confessed to Walker that,
It would have been very absurd in me not fully to admit, that great advantages were given by being in India. And my sole object was to prevent those advantages from being valued so high, that a history of India, from a man who had not been in India, might not be looked upon a priori as a thing only to be contemned. This chance was not very small, judging by the remarks which I was accustomed to hear. But it is not impossible that I may have urged the evidence on the other side a little too far & have given real cause to imagine that I valued the advantage of local knowledge, & the means of improvement in India much less than I do.Footnote 40
The interpretations sketched earlier do not seem to have room for Mill's own revelations about his intentions in writing History. The question to consider is whether Mill's philosophical apparatus (i.e. universalist and unificatory in defining an idiom to compare, arrange and order dissimilar cultures) in History can be disassociated from the quasi-psychological, quasi-methodological claim made in anticipation of criticism. I think it can. But in two steps: first, we need to establish that Mill's claim was not part and parcel of utilitarian discourse; second, we need to establish that its implications on how Mill defined the task of the historian were corroborated by sources which went beyond his unificatory, post-Cartesian epistemology.
Bias, preconception, self-deception
Mill claimed that his lack of ‘ocular knowledge of the country, or acquaintance with its languages’ was not detrimental to ‘produc[ing] a work, of considerable utility, on the subject of India’. He was to perform the task as a judge, ‘putting together the fragments of information which he has severally received from the several witnesses’. The judge obtains a ‘more perfect conception’ of a reported incident, sifting the ‘chaos of materials’, than those who witnessed its various parts. Such a comprehensive approach to evidence was all the more necessary because of a known law of human nature:
In a cursory survey, it is understood, that the mind, unable to attend to the whole of an infinite number of objects, attaches itself to a few; and overlooks the multitude that remain. But what, then, are the objects to which the mind, in such a situation, is in preference attracted? Those which fall in with the current of its own thoughts; those which accord with its former impressions; those which confirm its previous ideas.
The ‘superiority of the comprehensive student over the partial observer’ was undeniable, if not indispensable, to Mill's mind.Footnote 41
In 1830 Mill restated the above ‘law’ in a slightly different way: ‘Men judge of an object by the things in it to which they direct their attention. A strong bias of the mind directs the attention to that part of the circumstances to which, the bias inclines; and upon that part exclusively the opinions of ordinary men are formed.’Footnote 42 In his manuscripts, Mill made a further distinction about bias between preconception and self-deception. On the one hand, the fallacy of preconception had to do with fitting new data to old notions. Quoting Laurence Sterne, Mill noted: ‘it is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has conceived it, that it assimilates every thing to itself as proper nourishment; and from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows the stronger by every thing you see, hear, read, or understand’.Footnote 43 On the other hand, self-deception involved resisting the force of evidence when it came into conflict with received views. This process involved contracting a habit in viewing evidence only in so far it is confirming, rather than contradictory.Footnote 44 Quoting from a speech by the duke of Argyll (20 May 1742), as reported in Samuel Johnson's Parliamentary Debates, Mill took note of the tendency to believe what one wishes to believe:
inclination may be sometimes mistaken for conviction; and men even wise and honest, may imagine themselves to believe what, in reality, they only wish: but this, my lords, can only happen for want of attention, or on sudden emergencies, when it is necessary to determine with little consideration, while the passions have not yet time to subside, and reason is yet struggling with the emotions of desire.
Believing what one wishes to believe is something which Mill's source thought (and Mill highlighted) no one imposed on him/herself wilfully, at least without ‘conniving at the fraud’.Footnote 45
In History, right at the outset, Mill cautioned that matters of fact may not be easily discriminated from matters of opinion in the minds of those who report them: ‘L'on ne sent que trop, says Mr. Gibbon, combien nous sommes portés à mêler nos idées avec celles que nous raportons.’Footnote 46 For Edward Gibbon, this was the ‘paradox of historical creativity’. The philosophic historian must be careful to ‘limit the distortions of … extraneous explanatory connectives’ which s/he uses in the process of recreating the past.Footnote 47 As Gibbon put it:
When it comes to a history, whose variations permit some freedom for critique and even conjecture, the philosopher historian will choose among the disputed facts those which best accord with his principles and his views. The desire to use them will even give them a degree of evidence they do not have; and the logic of the heart will prevail only too often over that of the mind.Footnote 48
According to Gibbon, the philosopher historian attempts to reconstruct the past in the most probable and possible manner. As her/his ‘hypotheses become facts’, they must not acquire an evidentiary degree they do not have; still these ‘facts’ need to ‘follow from general and proven facts’.Footnote 49 Gibbon's reference to ‘the logic of the heart’ resonated well with what Mill called ‘self-deception’ via the Duke of Argyle. So did Gibbon's warning about interpreting contested facts in accordance with pre-established principles and views, with reference to the fallacy of preconception.
One of Mill's sources in History and in projects undertaken parallel to it,Footnote 50 Johann Jakob Brucker's Historia Critica Philosophiae (1742–4), identified a similar problem in dealing with past or foreign philosophical systems. The historian, according to Brucker, ought to be ‘particularly careful not to ascribe modern ideas and opinions to the antients, nor to torture their expressions into a meaning which probably never entered into their thoughts, in order to accommodate them to a modern hypothesis or system’.Footnote 51 The key lay in being ‘philosophical’ when dealing with the past. According to Mario Longo, Brucker transformed philosophy into a methodological concept which specified the limits of historiographical investigation. It was meant as a tool which avoided imposing ‘its categories and judgements on the work of the historian’.Footnote 52 Adhering to his predecessors’ example, Brucker thought, first, the historian needed to collect sources in an orderly and comprehensive manner; second, to analyse their authenticity as well as the accuracy of their references. Finally, the historian needed to identify the theoretical presuppositions and polemical intentions of the authors when comparing and discussing testimonies.Footnote 53 History thus needed philosophy, understood both as critical questioning of reports, evidence and testimony, and as a guard against modern prejudices, biases and preconceptions.
Not only was Brucker's Historia a source for Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89) on ancient philosophy; no less than forty-three articles on philosophers and philosophical movements drawing from Brucker's work have been identified in the Encyclopédie (1751–72).Footnote 54 This is important because when Mill went on to identify the stage of civilizational development of India, he told Walker that he tried
to institute comparisons, as extensive as possible, embracing all the circumstances which constitute the grand features of human society, & by observing the nations with whom the Hindus had the greatest number of circumstances in common, & appealing to the common opinions of mankind with respect to these nations, ascertain whereabouts among the other inhabitants of the globe they might in respect to valuable arguments be supposed to be placed.Footnote 55
The scholar interested in making comparisons would know, as the Encyclopédie article on comparison explained, that in such a process: ‘We compare the least familiar ideas with those which are more so; and the connections which we find between them establish links very apt to increase and to strengthen the memory, the imagination, and, consequently, the reflection.’ The article cautioned about this process:
It is convenient for the human mind to find, in a familiar idea, the resembling image of a new object; that is why these images, which come from such connections, please the mind; the mind likes them, because they spare it work, it does not tire to examine them, and it easily convinces itself that they are exact. Soon it gives itself up to the charms of this idea, which, however, can only tend to spoil judgement, and to make the mind false.Footnote 56
Thus, Mill had ample warning about the dangers of bias on the part of the ‘partial observer’ and the historian himself. Echoing both Gibbon and Brucker, he noted that ‘[o]f the ideas which we profess to report, and which we believe that we merely report, it often happens that many are our own ideas, and never entered the mind of the man to whom we ascribe them’.Footnote 57
As we saw, Mill charged the Orientalists with promulgating ‘a theory invented to preserve as much as actual observation would allow to be preserved of a pre-established and favourite creed’.Footnote 58 He criticized William Jones especially for ‘fasten[ing] a theory of his own creation upon the vague and unmeaning jargon which [the Brahmans] delivered to him’. He immediately added: ‘If in all minds the propensity be strong, and in weak minds irresistible, to see only through the medium of a theory; we need not wonder if theory manufactures the ideas of the other senses, of hearing, for example, after the same manner.’Footnote 59 Thus, had the ‘chaos’ indeed been carnivalesque in India, it would have been more, not less, difficult for either the Orientalists or Mill to trust their principles over their eyes.Footnote 60 What is more important, however, is that Mill here seemed to combine indiscriminately all of Bacon's famous idola.Footnote 61 For example, according to Mill, discussing the idols of the tribe, Bacon drew attention to the natural tendency of authority ‘to corrupt the intellectual produce’. Partiality was defined as ‘attention to the facts which make for the opinion, inattention to those, howsoever superior in number and importance, which make against it’.Footnote 62 For Bacon:
Once a man's understanding has settled on something (either because it is an accepted belief or because it pleases him), it draws everything else also to support and agree with it. And if it encounters a larger number of more powerful countervailing examples, it either fails to notice them, or disregards them, or makes fine distinctions to dismiss and reject them, and all this with much dangerous prejudice, to preserve the authority of its first conceptions.Footnote 63
Bacon's idola tribus referred explicitly to an inherent limitation in how the human mind perceives sensory data: ‘The human understanding is like an uneven mirror receiving rays from things and merging its own nature with the nature of things, which thus distorts and corrupts it.’Footnote 64 Bacon's point was that with a stricter method of evidence examination – the ‘art of judgment’, i.e. logical analysis – these ‘illusions’ in perception can be overcome.
The danger of imposing the observer's preconceptions on what is being observed was not Mill's invention. That Mill appealed to the authority of Gibbon and drew on well-known, accepted and commonplace methodological tenets to anticipate a criticism speaks more to Mill's rhetorical than historiographical method. A philosophical history, Mill argued in good company, was the solution to problems of bias. For Mill, however, philosophic comprehensiveness came to involve a strict protocol: that of the judge. In this case too, Mill seemed to draw from familiar sources.
Historian, philosopher, judge
The thread that connects Mill's views on the dangers of bias lurking in observing, the consequent necessity for the critical examination of reports about what is/was observed and the comprehensive task of the historian/ philosopher/ judge is not as loose as it may appear. But neither is it as self-evident as he seemed to think. In this section, I try to bring these ideas together by considering how Mill could speak of the possibility of a theory ‘manufacturing’ perceptions. But let us work our way backwards.
According to Mill, the historian ‘is in a situation very analogous to that of the judge, in regard to the witnesses who give their evidence before him’:
In the investigation of any of those complicated scenes of action, on which a judicial decision is sometimes required, one thing has commonly been observed by one witness, another thing has been observed by another witness; the same thing has been observed in one point of view by one, in another point of view by another witness; some things are affirmed by one, and denied by another. In this scene, the judge, putting together the fragments of information which he has severally received from the several witnesses, marking where they agree and where they differ, exploring the tokens of fidelity in one, of infidelity in another; of correct conception in one, of incorrect conception in another; comparing the whole collection of statements with the general probabilities of the case, and trying it by the established laws of human nature, endeavours to arrive at a complete and correct conception of the complicated transaction, on which he is called to decide. Is it not understood, that in such a case as this, where the sum of the testimony is abundant, the judge, who has seen no part of the transaction, has yet, by his investigation, obtained a more perfect conception of it, than is almost ever possessed by any of the individuals from whom he has derived his information?Footnote 65
In Mill's courthouse, facts are extracted from testimonies, witnesses and different points of view, as plaintiffs and defendants present their competing versions of what happened.
Mill's imaginary judge could never preside over a court set on exclusionary principles. Scholars who stress Mill's Benthamite credentials as a ground for excluding evidence in his sifting of reports on India fail to take into consideration that Bentham's Rationale of Judicial Evidence (originally written between 1802 and 1812) attacked quite emphatically the traditional exclusionary rules on the admission of proof at trials.Footnote 66 Had Mill been a good Benthamite, as commentators argue, he would have sought to ground his ‘judicial decisions’ on the widest possible consideration of evidence, on long ‘induction[s] of particulars’.Footnote 67 Further, had the History been compiled on exclusionary principles, its author would not have rushed in August 1817, while the third volume was being printed, upon the publication of two new volumes of Mark Wilks's Historical Sketches of the South of India (1810, 1817), to compare ‘what I have said with what he has said upon the same ground – and the facts which he has added to those got from my former authorities, have even made me write several passages, a-fresh’.Footnote 68
Writing to Alexander Walker, Mill once again revealed his debt to the metaphor of the judge:
Nothing can be more to my heart's desire than the mode in which you pen for me your remarks. I see that they are the immediate unvarnished transcript of your mind, the exact copy of your feelings & opinions at the moment; which are a far more valuable source of evidence to me than the most laboured discussions which your genius could produce; as the judge gathers more from the unpremeditated tones, looks & gestures of the witness, than he does from his words. The immediate results of the recollection of gentlemen from India of men of feeling & of understanding combined, are the materials by which I can best supply the disadvantage of not having been there, & by which I become as near as possible a percipient witness of the people whom I wish so truly to understand.Footnote 69
A person judging history, Mill argued in History, makes two kinds of judgments: ‘the things given by the historian, as things really done, really said, or really thought’ and the evidence ‘by which the reality of the saying, the doing, or thinking, is ascertained’.Footnote 70 The problem with the second kind of judgments was simple: ‘Nobody needs to be informed, how much more vivid, in general, is the conception of an object which has been presented to our senses, than that of an object which we have only heard another man describe.’ Associationist psychology, Mill seemed to argue, proves that when someone tries to combine first-hand experience with second-hand reports on a scene of action, which s/he only witnessed in part, the impressions received from the senses, being more vivid, exert ‘immoderate influence, hang a bias on the mind, and render the conception of the whole erroneous’.Footnote 71
Mill explicitly invoked associationist psychology to support his claim that a judge, rather than an observer, can adequately guard her/his judgments from bias: people find pleasure in proving they are in the right, which may lead to ‘yielding’ to the temptation of overlooking proof that they are in the wrong.Footnote 72 However, the idea that judges or juries (kritai or dikastai) must ‘become as near as possible a percipient witness’ themselves was not new. Ancient historians acknowledged the need to collect and scrutinize evidence from reliable sources, especially when they themselves were not eyewitnesses. At the same time, orators were praised for their ability to make the past or future present, turning their audience into spectators. Even though that ability was especially useful in a judicial setting, historians and poets were as much praised for achieving such an effect through their productions.Footnote 73 Thus, the language of associationism may not be the sole language that lays an explanatory claim to what Mill is trying to say to his readers in his preface. By using words/phrases such as ‘vivid’, ‘presented to our senses’, ‘heard another man describe’, Mill employed a distinctively ancient rhetorical vocabulary. As George Nadel has pointed out, scholars often view ‘as new and revolutionary certain ideas put forward by men like Bayle and Hume which, in fact, were merely paraphrases or quotations from the classics, drearily familiar to any educated person living between the Renaissance and the nineteenth century’.Footnote 74
The classics functioned as authoritative sources for any sort of argument in Mill's corpus.Footnote 75 After all, ‘Old Mill’ was ‘one of the best Greek scholars of the day’.Footnote 76 For example, the Magna Charta of historians, Mill noted in 1803, was found in Cicero's On the Orator (II.62):
For who does not know history's first law to be that an author must not dare to tell anything but the truth? And its second that he must make bold to tell the whole truth? That there must be no suggestion of partiality anywhere in his writings? Nor of malice?Footnote 77
To Mill's contemporary readers, his claim that the observer and the judge do not engage in the same kind of activity and that the activity of the judge is much more important than that of the observer, would allude to the oldest extant system of rhetoric, according to Mill, Aristotle's Rhetoric (I 3, 1358b2): ‘ἀνάγκη δὲ τὸν ἀκροατὴν ἢ θεωρὸν εἶναι ἢ κριτήν’.Footnote 78 Similarly in a collection of notes on religion, Mill quoted Horace's Ars Poetica (180–1): ‘What is unseen – its feeble effect compared with what is seen. Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem quam quæ sunt oculis subiecta fidelibus’.Footnote 79 Mill's quote from Horace agrees with his discussion in History, where he claimed, as we saw, that ‘the conception of an object which has been presented to our senses’ (in Horace's text, ‘the trustworthy eye’), is much more vivid ‘than that of an object which we have only heard another man describe’ (in Horace's text, ‘what comes through the ear’).
Further, Mill cited Lucian's Hermotimus in an attempt to show a common error among the learned: trusting authority too much. Hermotimus asked Lucinus how can one know which (philosophical) authority is in the right. Lucinus replied that one should act in a judge's manner (δικαστικῶς): to let both sides speak, while staying clear-headed and remembering to question the evidence, to disbelieve (μέμνησο ἀπιστεῖν).Footnote 80 This could have been Mill's credo in History. In his How to write History, Lucian referred to the historian as an impartial judge a number of times. But he also implied it in his brief discussion on how to treat testimonies, when the historian was not an eyewitness her/himself: the historian ‘should listen to those who tell the more impartial story, those whom one would suppose least likely to subtract from the facts or add to them out of favour or malice. When this happens let him show shrewdness and skill in putting together the more credible story.’Footnote 81 For Lucian, favour and malice were the primary sources of bias on the part of both the historian and the eyewitness.Footnote 82 The historian's only allegiance ought to be to the truth. Being a historian thus meant being
fearless, incorruptible, free, a friend of free expression and the truth, intent … giving nothing to hatred or to friendship, sparing no one, showing neither pity nor shame nor obsequiousness, an impartial judge, well disposed to all men up to the point of not giving one side more than its due, in his books a stranger and a man without a country, independent, subject to no sovereign, not reckoning what this or that man will think, but stating the facts.Footnote 83
In History Mill cited Thucydides,Footnote 84 who had already made a similar claim, yet with two important differentiations. First, Thucydides noted that historians often commit the mistake of not adequately putting testimonies to the test, with the consequent result of basing their narration of facts on hearsay (Hist. I 21, 1). Second, he pointed out that he himself had worked hard to ascertain facts, when he was not an eyewitness, ‘because those who were eye-witnesses of the several events did not give the same reports about the same things, but reports varying according to their championship of one side or the other, or according to their recollection’ (Hist. I 22, 3).Footnote 85
Thucydides was frequently quoted in rhetorical treatises as an exemplary writer in bringing before the eyes of his reader – that is, as if the reader was present – a scene of action.Footnote 86 Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, a work which frequently appears throughout the Commonplace Books, but especially in Mill's ‘Collections respecting Oratory’,Footnote 87 showed that this skill was as necessary for the orator as for the historian and the poet. Quintilian argued that ‘the orator should display the full strength of his case before the eyes of the judge’.Footnote 88 For Mill,
In studying what to say in the proem, the object of which is to render the judge, benevolum, attentum, docilem [Quintilian, Inst. Or. IV 1, 5], we ought particularly consider, and form as accurate a conception as possible, before hand, what the judge thinks before we begin, ‘quid iudicem sentire credibile sit, antequam incipimus’ [Quintilian, Inst. Or. IV 1, 52].Footnote 89
Adhering to Quintilian's views on forensic rhetoric, Mill thought the question of ‘how to accommodate what we have to say to the minds of those whom we address’ (Inst. Or. III 9, 7), a vital part of a persuasive speech. The orator, Quintilian had argued – and Mill diligently noted – must think how s/he her/himself would be affected by the speech as if s/he was the judge her/himself.Footnote 90 According to Quintilian, the orator makes her/his case more persuasive ‘before the eyes of the judge’ through ἐνάργεια, i.e. evidentia. He wrote:
The ornaments of style raise it above the character of either perspicuity or probability. The first step towards it is, a vigorous conception; next is, a proper expression; and this leads to a third, which consists in the embellishment of both, and is what we properly term ornament. As the force of colouring (which I have taken notice of in the rules I have laid down concerning the narrative), is of more efficacy than a bare delineation; or, as some express it, as representation excels perspicuity; the former realizing, the latter only describing, the object; I, therefore, reckon representation among the ornaments of style. There is a great beauty in describing a thing in so lively a manner, as to make us think, we actually see it. For eloquence does not exert all her powers, or assert her dominion to the full, if she informs us through the ears only, by giving the judge a bare narrative of the matter that is to be tried, without drawing and colouring it, so as to strike the mental eye. (Inst. Or. VIII 3, 61–2)Footnote 91
When Quintilian first introduced enargeia, he characterized it as ‘a certain powerful operation of language, which not only speaks the truth, but in some measure paints it to our eyes’ (Inst. Or. IV 2, 63–4).Footnote 92 Enargeia was something more potent than narratio, the statement or description of facts. However, Quintilian admitted that this ‘powerful operation’ was as indispensable in trying to force the truth upon the mind's eye (‘oculis mentis’, VIII 3, 61–2) as in the attempt to obscure the truth (IV 2, 65).Footnote 93
The transition from enargeia to apatē, that is, deception, was not difficult to make in Mill's mind. Another quite revealing note makes its way into the same section in which Mill's remarks on self-deception, Bacon's idola and Lucian, that is his collected notes on fallacies, appear. Mill commented on Plato's Gorgias (466a–473e):
Personalities, Hobgoblins, Authority, Ridicule: In the dispute between Polus and Socrates in the Gorgias, Polus brings all these forward against Socrates; and is finely rebuked. When Polus exclaims instead of answering, and cries bad, wicked, foolish: Socrates says, you are scolding, O Polus, not refuting; you are taking upon you the character of a judge, and inflicting punishment before trial and without proof. – When Polus says, But does not the opinion of all mankind refute you; who is of your opinion? who is not of mine? Socrates answers, you reply to me, O Polus, with rhetoric, not with logic: the rhetoricians in the forum produce witnesses to prove what they affirm, and those who produce the greatest number, are allowed to prevail; but this is not a criterion of truth when truth is the question, this is not a criterion, for often the greatest number of witnesses are against the truth: the virtue of logic is to make the contending party himself confess the truth. – When Polus strings together a number of supposed absurd, and wicked consequences; Socrates says, you are conjuring up ghosts to frighten me, and not given reasons to refute me. instead of bringing witnesses against me, you are now bringing Ghosts: Ghosts are to serve as refutation. – When Polus laughed; Socrates says, you laugh O Polus; is that another of your modes of refuting; when any body states any thing, not to adduce evidence against him, but only to laugh?Footnote 94
Polus and Socrates disagreed on the task of the judge. For Socrates, the judge, equipped with logos (reason) in his search after truth, was not easily swayed by the false representations of numerous witnesses. Mill's rendering of μορμολύττῃ αὖ … καὶ οὐκ ἐλέγχεις (Plato, Gorgias 473d) in the deleted, more literal translation as ‘you are conjuring up ghosts to frighten me, and not given reasons to refute me’ brings to the fore an attempt at enargeia by Polus, that is an attempt to make something present – a hobgoblin in the case at hand – vivid enough to turn the justice's scale in his favour. But Polus failed because he only envisaged how he could win over the judge, had he himself been the judge. Unlike Socrates, he did not think in terms of winning over a philosopher judge.
The adoption in the History of a vocabulary of forensic rhetoric was to be expected from someone with Mill's classical background.Footnote 95 Fictional speeches in his Commonplace Books reveal Mill's thorough acquaintance with ancient rhetorical theory and practice. In one such fictional defence in front of a jury, much like Socrates's Apologia, Mill's Socrates-like defendant urged his audience not to be misled by his accusers:
When therefore gentlemen you shall hear and see produced before you (as I have no doubt that you will hear and see) the strongest outward expressions that can be conveyed to your eyes and ears, in words, in tones, in features, and gestures, of the strongest belief in my having done something to an extraordinary degree mischievous, let not any other man's belief be the cause of your belief; for this would only be to do what the meanest and weakest of mankind would do.
The defendant had already explained that such intellectual freedom would not be easy to achieve due to a sort of contagious thinking, an ‘imitative belief’ which, although natural enough,
The belief of another man merely because it is his belief, and without a thought of any other reason, is often the cause of our belief. The stronger the expression of his belief, the more apt we are to be infected. When a man comes forward, and with countenance and tone and gesture exhibits all the marks of a vehement belief, it is but rarely we resist the contagion. This happens when the man has no peculiar dignity or authority. But when it also occurs, that he is a person to whom we look with reverence, that he is vested with those circumstances of power and authority which captivate and awe the imagination, when he is a person to whom wisdom and knowledge is ascribed, whom we think it safe to follow, and unsafe to relinquish, then gentlemen our belief is for the most part as surely captivated and enthralled by the bold and imposing declaration of his belief as if he had a physical power over our instruments of thought.
Mill's defendant then asked his audience not to content themselves with an uncritical, animal-like, mimetic acceptance of what is presented to them, not to be, in Aristotle's jargon, theōroi but kritai, not passive observers but active judges:
if you are not men of stronger heads and finer hearts, if you are not men of better intellects and higher virtue than is found in many men, you will be unequal to the struggle – you will not make the distinctions which ought to be made – you will not resist the tide – you will not ask yourself what is this the man presents to me – is it reasons, cries, mere words? Is it facts or mere declarations of his own opinion and belief? Let him cry, scandalous, malicious, mischievous, as long as he pleases – this expresses his opinion, but it does nothing more.Footnote 96
Enargeia, powerful a technique as it is – since ‘visual impressions hit directly into the emotions of man, making him act immediately and without reflection’, as Jens Kjeldsen has arguedFootnote 97 – made it all the more necessary to keep one's guard when it was employed by people with authority. And that seems to account for why Mill was eager to note in History that the reputation of William Jones had been so ‘imposing’ and ‘brilliant’ as to have made ‘obtain[ing] a hearing against it’ nearly impossible.Footnote 98 In the context of forensic rhetoric, Mill did not mix metaphors using ‘brilliant’ and ‘hearing’ together. More importantly, this remark resonates with the rhetorical underpinnings of his argument in the ‘Preface’, as evident in his correspondence with Walker, aiming ‘that a history of India, from a man who had not been in India, might not be looked upon a priori as a thing only to be contemned’.Footnote 99
Conclusion
The contemporary reception of Mill's History presents us with a paradox. In the process of historicizing Mill's utterances in History, commentators limit their explanatory framework to Mill's close association with Bentham. Even when they try to widen that framework to include Mill's Scottish background, most agree that Mill's Benthamism resulted in a disfigurement of the tradition of Scottish conjectural historiography. By focusing on Mill's claims on the limitations of ‘ocular knowledge’, I have tried to show that we need to cast our explanatory net even wider, without wishing to underplay the importance of these traditions. In the process, that Mill opted for the phrase ‘ocular knowledge’ itself, but also in conjunction with his view that theory could manufacture perception, proved important.
As Kathy Eden suggests, the need to ‘represent a scene enargically’ had risen originally in court-related activities and forensic oratory, since, in the absence of first-hand knowledge on the part of judges and jurors, ‘the vividness of ocular proof’ had to be reproduced through language.Footnote 100 Thus, not only was Mill's methodological argument in ‘Preface’ neither new nor revolutionary; it drew from classical sources ‘drearily familiar to any educated person living between the Renaissance and the nineteenth century’, as Nadel put it. No reviewer of History questioned his version of the task of the historian. And only after the attack on his essay on government did the balance on whether he fulfilled that task turn from an emphatic ‘yes’ (in the first round of reviews of History between 1818 and 1821) to an emphatic ‘no’ (in the second round between 1827 and 1829, on the occasion of the 1826 edition of the History).Footnote 101
Most commentators argue that Mill's methodological claims in ‘Preface’, especially on the limits of ‘ocular knowledge’, were a natural consequence of his theorizing utilitarianism. This was not the case. I have argued in this article that the metaphor of the judge was much more literal and relevant to how Mill framed the task of the historian than is usually admitted. It was more than just a vivid illustration itself, an act of enargeia on the part of Mill. He drew both from rather commonplace methodological traditions, thinking himself in the company of Bacon, Gibbon and other celebrated authors, and from ancient historiographical, rhetorical and philosophical traditions. These traditions warned about the danger of competent (and authoritative) advocates imposing a ‘manufactured’ spectacle upon the audience's ‘mind's eye’. Mill's thesis was that a competent historian/philosopher/judge ought not be carried away by deceptive bringing-before-the-eyes attempts, that is, attempts to imprint false sights on her/his phantasia, by either self-interested or self-deceived parties. Whether he succeeded or failed to meet the standard he set for the historian, however, is a completely different question.Footnote 102
