James Mill

James Mill (1773–1836), a Scotsman, was educated for the ministry at the University of Edinburgh. In 1802 he moved to London to start a literary career, becoming the editor of the Literary Journal and writing for various periodicals. With the publication of perhaps his greatest tome, The History of British India, which he began writing in 1806 and finished in 1817, Mill entered a successful career with the East India Company. Mill’s most significant contribution to psychology was Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, which originally appeared in 1829 and was revised under the editorship of his son John Stuart Mill in 1869. We use the 1869 edition of Analysis as our primary source of Mill’s ideas. Mill’s Analysis is regarded as the most complete summary of associationism ever offered.

Mill’s Analysis of Association. Following Hartley, Mill attempted to show that the mind consisted of only sensations and ideas held together by contiguity. Also following Hartley, Mill said that complex ideas are composed of simple ideas. However, when ideas are continuously experienced together, the association among them becomes so strong that they appear in consciousness as one idea:

The word gold, for example, or the word iron, appears to express as simple an idea, as the word colour, or the word sound. Yet it is immediately seen, that the idea of each of those metals is made up of the separate ideas of several sensations;

colour, hardness, extension, weight. Those ideas, however, present themselves in such intimate union, that they are constantly spoken of as one, not many. We say, our idea of iron, our idea of gold; and it is only with an effort that reflecting men perform the decomposition. … It is to this great law of association, that we trace the formation of our ideas of what we call external objects; that is, the ideas of a certain number of sensations, received together so frequently that they coalesce as it were, and are spoken of under the idea of unity. Hence, what we call the idea of a tree, the idea of a stone, the idea of a horse, the idea of a man.