Ideas and Ideologies of Mill Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Ideas and Ideologies of Mill - Essay Example Later at the age of twenty Mill suffered a mental break down which made him conscious, that more was needed in life than devotion to the public good and an analytical intellect. He turned towards Coleridge, Carlyle, Wordsworth, and Goethe to cultivate his aesthetic sensibilities. From 1830 to his death, he tried to persuade the British public of the necessity of a scientific approach, h to understanding social, political and economic change while not neglecting the insights of poets and other imaginative writers. (The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy ed.) Mill was also strongly influenced by his wife Harriet Taylor and became more inclined and sympathetic towards socialism, womens rights and political and social reforms such as proportional representation, labour unions, and farm co-operatives. Mill use logic derived from the principles of the natural sciences to address questions of language and logic, induction, the relativity of knowledge, the structure of the scientific method, the structure of arithmetic and geometry, and the principles of the moral sciences. Mill was committed to the idea that our best methods of explaining the world are those employed by the natural sciences. His System of Logic 1843 was an account not only of logic, as the title implies, but of the methods of science and their applicability to social as well as purely natural phenomena. ‘The object of logic â€Å"is to ascertain how we come by that portion of our knowledge (much the greatest portion) which is not intuitive: and by what criterion we can, in matters not self-evident, distinguish between things proved and things not proved, between what is worthy and what is unworthy of belief.† (A System of Logic [System], I.i.1).