MiLL's LoGic

Apart from On Liberty Mill's best known work is his essay on The Subjection of Women, written in collaboration with his wife Harriet Taylor. But Mill's reputation as a philosopher does not depend on his moral and political writings alone. He was highly learned and very industrious; he began learning Greek at the age of three, and published voluminous philosophical works while holding, for thirtyfive years, a full-time job with the East India Company. In theoretical philosophy his most important work was A System of Logic, which he published in 1843 and which went through eight editions in his lifetime.  Mill continued in the nineteenth century the traditions of the eighteenthcentury British Empiricists. He admired Berkeley, and tried to detach his theory of matter from its theological context: our belief that physical objects persist in existence when they are not perceived, he said, amounts to no more than our continuing expectation of further perceptions of the objects. Matter is defined by Mill as ‘a permanent possibility of sensation'; the external world is ‘the world of possible sensations succeeding one another according to laws'.