Although best known as a philosopher and political theorist, John Stuart Mill made important contributions to psychology as well. In this he followed his father, James Mill, whose two-volume Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829) relied upon and updated the “associationist” research program initiated by John Locke and further developed by Dr. David Hartley and David Hume, among others. The Mills pere et fils shared an abiding interest in how human character is formed (and too often deformed) along associationist lines. The elder Mill couched this in “educational” terms, and his son in “ethological” ones. J.S. Mill's new science of Ethology, or character-formation differed in important respects from his father's theory. The most significant of these was that James Mill held that an individual can play no part in the formation of his own character, while his son disagreed vehemently. Here I trace the sources and implications of this disagreement.
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