The Character of J.S.Mill

J.S. Mill introduces a new conception of a person’s character as the control system governing choice of action in, as he thought of it, the human deterministic machine. Did this leave any room for him to think that a person was nevertheless essentially different from the ‘automatons’ of his time? Yes. Mill thought of the human ‘machine’ as featuring ‘feedback’: and, foreshadowing the electronic feedback circuits of early electronic computers, this allowed him to think of human beings as working their way automatically towards Utopia. Mill’s term for what he thinks of as the bit of human ‘machinery’ responsible for ‘deciding’ what action to take is: ‘character’. The Millian ‘control system’ character was taken up widely in the 19th Century and beyond. Illustrative examples: William Temple, Thomas Arnold, Stowe, George Eliot, The Millian sense of character is modified but hardly superseded in subsequent decades.