them as a veritable gospel. In his very interesting autobiography he describes how the ideas adopted during his childhood and youth came into sharp conflict with the ideas and moods of a later period which likewise agitated his very soul, and how he was then compelled to struggle through a mental crisis. This contradiction not only appears in his life but likewise in his works, and the inconsistencies which, despite his vigorous intellectual effort, his theories reveal, are partly due to this fact. There likewise exist an intimate relation between his theoretical views and his efforts for social reform. The fact that in philosophy he seeks to derive everything from pure experience does not rest upon pure theoretical conviction alone, but he likewise regarded it as a weapon against the prejudices which impede progress (similar to the French philosophers of the eighteenth century).—Like his father, Mill was an officer of the India Company; after its dissolution he was a member of Parliament for a short time.
a. Stuart Mill's System of Logic (1843) contains the answer of the English school to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and at the same time the most radical form of empirical epistemology. According to Kant's fundamental principle, all real experience contains a rational element, which can be discovered by analysis. Mill now undertakes to show not only that all knowledge proceeds from experience, but that experience itself involves no antecedent presuppositions. He would make experience the standard of experience. "We make experience its own test!"—By experience (like Hume) he means a sum of impressions, and his problem consists in showing how universal principles can be derived from such a sum.
