AUTOBIOGRAPHY

London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1873. First Edition, second issue with erratum in the rear. Tall 8vo, pp. 313 + adv. Bookplate, a very good tight clean copy. PMM345. "On Liberty" was Mill's most widely read book and the one that Mill himself thought most likely to be of enduring value. It represents the final stage in the growth of Utilitarian doctrine, and its central point is that the 'greatest good' of the community is inseparable from the liberty of the individual. He was the first to recognize the tendency of a democratically elected majority (truncated) to tyrannize over a minority, and his warning against it has a contemporary ring: 'We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and, if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.' Mill's greatest work, and his first book publication in America was A System of Logic. It is "the first major installment of his comprehensive restatement of an empiricist and utilitarian position. It presents...a fairly complete outline of what would now be called an 'empiricist' epistemology...It begins the attack on 'intuitionism' which Mill carried on throughout his life, and it makes plain his belief that social planning and political action should rely primarily on scientific knowledge, not on authority, custom, revelation, or prescription... With the publication of the Logic, Mill took a major step toward showing that the philosophy of experience, which had hitherto been identified primarily as a skeptical position, could offer at least as much in the way of constructive thinking as any other kind of view...Mill held that the philosophy of experience was more likely than any other to encourage the development of society along liberal lines. He therefore held that it was a matter of considerable importance to show that empiricism was a viable alternative to the less progressive views notably, Scottish common-sense philosophy and German idealism which were then dominant. The Logic succeeded in doing this" (J.B. Schneewind, writing in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy). (Inventory #: 57747)