James, was born on the 6th of April 1773, in the parish of Logie Pert, near Montrose, where his father united the occupations of shoemaker and small farmer. After receiving his elementary education at the parochial school of Logie Pert, and at the grammar-school of Montrose, he was sent by Sir John Stuart, Bart. of Fettercairn, to the University of Edinburgh, to study for the church. After completing his theological course, he received license as a preacher, but as accident rather than choice had led him into the profession, he never contracted any particular liking for it, and was not promoted to a charge. The study which chiefly delighted him, and exercised his thoughts during the period of his academical course, was that of metaphysical and ethical philosophy. The class of moral philosophy was then taught by Mr Dugald Stewart, to whose noble eloquence and animated exhortations to mental study Mill always listened with profound attention and enthusiastic admiration. In a letter to a friend in 1821, Mill, speaking of Stewart, from whose system of speculation he was then widely separated, remarked, "The taste for the studies which have formed my favourite pursuits, and which will be so to the end of my life, I owe to him."

After having officiated for a considerable time as a private tutor, Mill removed to London in 1800, where he became editor of the Literary Journal, which did not, however, long survive. From the period of his arrival in the metropolis till the year 1819, when he received a valuable appointment in the India House, he supported himself and his increasing family entirely by his pen. Much of his time was employed in writing for periodical publications. For several years he was an occasional contributor to the Edinburgh, British, Eclectic, and Monthly Review. He early made the acquaintance of Jeremy Bentham, and actively co-operated with the supporters of the Philanthropist in those exertions to which the Lancastrian and Infant Schools owed their origin; and at a later period he was one of the founders of the London University.

His principal work, the History of British India, had been commenced as far back as the year 1806, but the greatness of the work itself, and the variety and weight of his other avocations, prevented its completion for upwards of ten years. It was at last published in five volumes, Svo, in the winter of 1817-18. It was the smallest merit of this book, that it was the only single work calculated to convey to the general reader any intelligible notion whatever of India, or Indian affairs as a whole, and which rendered it, therefore, indispensable to all Englishmen who would possess even the most general knowledge of one great department of their country's interest. But it achieved far more. It gave a new turn to the thoughts of all the most eminent leading men engaged in the administration of Indian affairs; and the measures of government in that country for many years bore testimony to the high merit of this valuable history.

Although he had very freely censured the conduct of the East India Company, yet the powers of mind and knowledge of the subject which he displayed induced the Court of Directors, in the spring of 1819, when they were desirous of strengthening their home establishment, to introduce him into it (though personally unknown to most of them, and having little or no interest), and to intrust to him the chief conduct of their correspondence with India, in the revenue branch of administration. He was subsequently made head of the department of correspondence with India in the India House, or, in other words, chief minister for Indian affairs to the East India Company; and he lived to see almost all the great principles which he had advocated, not merely recognised, but practically employed in the government of India.

Mill's official duties might well have furnished him with an excuse for relinquishing his pen as an author. But his mind was not of a cast to stop short in the career of inquiry, or to allow the calls of business to suppress the fruits of his reflections. He became a contributor to the Supplement to the former editions of the present work about three years before his appointment to the India House; and his contributions were continued nearly till the completion of that publication in the year 1824. His most striking articles were those on Colonies, Education, Government, Jurisprudence, Law of Nations, Liberty of the Press, and Prison Discipline. These essays were also widely disseminated by separate republications of them, at a very cheap rate, and proved not the least effective of his writings in stirring the thoughts of his contemporaries.

In 1821-22 he published his Elements of Political Economy, a treatise in which the science, as remodelled by Ricardo, was for the first time, and without any pretensions to originality, brought into a systematic form, and arranged in strict scientific order.

Mill's originality and acuteness as a metaphysician were abundantly displayed in his Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, published in 1829. He belongs to the sensational school of philosophy, and there is perhaps no English writer since Locke who has employed so much energy and acuteness in analyzing our mental phenomena upon purely sensational principles. As a sensationalist he stands midway between Locke and the French ideologists. The latter held that all mental phenomena were but different forms of sensation; while the former, although maintaining that the material of our knowledge was derivable from sensation, nevertheless asserted the existence of certain powers of reflection by which this primitive material is moulded. While differing essentially from both, Mill resembled Locke in tracing our mental phenomena to two primitive elements, viz., sensations and ideas; but under the latter term he included much less than did the English philosopher under the word reflection. By sensations he understands "that which exists when the object of sense is present;" and by ideas, "that which exists after the object of the sense has ceased to be present." (Analysis, &c., vol. i., p. 41.) These two classes of "feelings," as forming the whole material of our thoughts and emotions, are the basis of all our mental operations. But these phenomena do not recur arbitrarily; on the contrary, they are under the regulation of a law called the association of ideas, which marshals them in synchronous or successive order, giving rise to "complex notions" and "trains of thought." Again, in order to be able to communicate our sensations and ideas to others, we require to assign to them certain "names." These elementary processes, then, of "sensation, ideation, association, and naming," form the groundwork of Mill's analysis. The rest of his work is occupied in showing how, out of these elements, all the complex phenomena of the mind can be formed. The subtle ingenuity of the writer is here strikingly brought out, but no amount of dexterity can make a false system true. Accordingly, the reader, while continually constrained to admire the manly independence of thought, and clear forcible style of the author, is nevertheless compelled to dissent from the most important results of his system. To take a single specimen of the shifts to which Mill is frequently and unconsciously driven. Memory and judgment are not of course with him original faculties; they are generated according to the fourfold process already indicated. But how is it possible to derive judgment and memory from such processes, seeing that these very powers are involved in the formation of those sensations and ideas which lie at the basis of the whole system? Mill's definition of an idea necessarily involves the recognition and distinction of a present and a past object; but it is the judgment which distinguishes, and it is the memory which renders a past possible. Here, then, at the very threshold of the system, the faculties which he afterwards tries so ingeniously to account for are found in full operation. Such specimens of analysis are not peculiar to Mill, however; they belong to the entire sensational school; and it was the radical vice of the system, rather than an intellectual defect in the analyst, which led this philosopher astray.

Mill's last work was a fragment published anonymously in 1835, containing a criticism of a very severe kind upon the Dissertation on the History of Ethical Philosophy, contributed by Sir James Mackintosh to the present publication. Most even of those who agree in the general opinions expressed by Mr Mill have admitted that the degree of bitterness which he manifested towards this eminent and singularly candid writer was in a great measure uncalled for.

Mr Mill wrote several of the principal articles in the early numbers of the Westminster Review, among which may be specially mentioned the one on the Formation of Opinions, and, after an interval of some years, the celebrated article on the Ballot. After the union of the Westminster with the London Review, he wrote, among other racy and characteristic articles, one entitled Aristocracy, which was the last of his literary labours.

For some winters previously to his death he had an obstinate cough, which, by ending in pulmonary consumption, carried him off on the 23rd of June 1836. His remains were buried in Kensington church, he having lived at Kensington during the last five years of his life.

The high reputation of Mill is honourably sustained in the person of his son, the present John Stuart Mill, author of the System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, who is one of the profoundest thinkers of the age.

Mill, John, was the son of Thomas Mill of Bampton, and was born about the year 1645, at Shapp, in Westmoreland. He studied at Queen's College, Oxford, which he entered as servitor in 1661; and took his degree of M.A. in 1669. Mill was soon after made a fellow of his college; and having subsequently entered the church, he obtained great reputation as a preacher. In 1681 he became rector of Blechingden, in Oxfordshire; and during the same year he was made Doctor of Divinity and chaplain to Charles II. The work by which Mill is best known is his edition of the Greek Testament, a performance of great labour and erudition, on which he spent the last thirty years of his life. He had the benefit of the counsel and encouragement, in this work, of Dr Fell, Bishop of Oxford, at whose expense the publication of it was begun; but this divine having died, Mill not only continued the work at his own cost, but repaid to the executors the sum furnished by the bishop. In 1685 he became principal of St Edmund's Hall in Oxford; and in 1704 he was appointed by Queen Anne a prebend of Canterbury. Mill died in 1707, just a fortnight after the publication of his Greek Testament. This edition, which is the best proof of the industry, learning, and scholarship of its author, is based on those of Robert Stephens, 1550, and of Bishop Fell, 1675; and contains a collection of more than 30,000 various readings from MSS., versions, quotations from the fathers, &c. The number of these variations excited the alarm of many, and especially of Dr Whitley, who, imagining that they would destroy the validity of the text, wrote a work in order to reduce their number and importance. The same subject was taken up by Antony Collins, for a different purpose, in his Discourse on Free-Thinking, in which he contends that "these numerous variations destroy the authority of the New Testament." But this book was answered by Whiston and Bentley with great ability and success; showing that the variety of readings is no objection to the authority of the Scriptures, being only a necessary result of the number and variety of the MSS. Their arguments are briefly summed up in the irony of Swift; that the multitude of readings renders the Bible quite useless; and of course the works of Livy, Horace, and other ancient authors, are all likewise worthless, for a similar reason.