13
was no active believer in his later life, but it is not clear whether he held, as suggested by
his son, that “concerning the origin of things nothing whatever can be known,” or
whether his first biographer Alexander Bain was closer to the truth when he described
his position as “negation, pure and simple.”
54
His private notes show that he entertained
the intellectual possibility of a divine creator, but also display a pointed disdain for any
belief not based upon evidence.
55
They also convey his conviction that lack of active
atheism was commonly confused for religious faith: he ascribed to Montesquieu the
notion that “men may profess a religion, and with a sort of good faith without believing
it.”
56
Mill displayed, in fact, a striking lack of interest for the Scottish Enlightenment’s
pervasive preoccupation with natural theology. Indeed, the secular enquiries into the
links between religion and society developed in eighteenth-century Scotland were far
from incompatible with Moderate Calvinism. Thomas Ahnert has shown that Scotland’s
enlightened clerical writers were generally “more skeptical about a natural religion of
reason” than has often been argued, and in his Edinburgh lectures Stewart claimed that
post-Baconian natural science would reveal increasing evidence of design in nature, thus
providing a “bulwark against atheism.”
57
But the same was not true of Mill, whose
rationalist worldview left little room for natural theology or even deism. It is not clear
when his skeptical approach developed, or what role (if any) Bentham played in shaping
it.
58
What is clear, however, is that from the start he consistently approached the question
of religion from the same “sociological” angle as Montesquieu, Hume, Smith, Millar and
Robertson. Taken together, their accounts offered a natural history of religion whose
most innovative quality was its treatment of religion as a social and psychological
phenomenon that was both an agent, and a product of the progress of society: religious
institutions and beliefs were shaped by human psychology as embedded in a specific
society, and in turned helped shaped human manners and human history. In a positive
feedback loop, Protestantism was both the product of pre-Enlightenment concerns for
54
John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (London, 1989), v. Bain, James Mill, 90.
55
“This no better proof that there is a God, than the universal pursuit of pleasure is, that pleasure is the
supreme good;” “To believe there is any merit in believing is a thing wholly immoral. If there is a merit in
any thing, connected with belief, it is the merit of attending to evidence.” “Religion”, in James Mill,
Common Place Books (
, 2010), vol. 3, Ch. 8.
56
Bentham is also cited as entertaining the opinion that most men “rather do not disbelieve, than …
believe.” Ibid.
57
Ahnert, The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, 1690-1805 (New Haven, 2015), 13. Dugald Stewart,
“Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Vol. II,” in The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, ed. Sir
William Hamilton, 11 vols. (London, 1994), 3: 338.
58
Bain cites General Miranda as “the instrument of his final transformation,” but there is no evidence to
back up his claim. Bain, James Mill, 89.
14
knowledge and individual liberty, and the ferment that had precipitated the progress of
ideas and politics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A logical consequence of
this account was that religion would continue to evolve, and possibly improve along with
society. While Hume considered this a remote possibility, Robertson's providentialist
perspective assured him that the Word would be further revealed through the progress
of society, and ensure the establishment of a more tolerant and less dogmatic form of
Protestantism.
These accounts were easily adaptable to the perfectibilist theory of progress taught by
Dugald Stewart in 1790s Edinburgh. Stewart's own account of the social utility of the
Protestant reformation was very similar to that of Millar and Robertson, and drawn from
the same Scottish sources.
59
His narrative of religious change, however, was reframed
within a Reidian, perfectibilist theory of progress. It combined earlier Scottish narratives
of societal and religious progress with a strong sense of divine providence derived from
Reid's Christian moral philosophy. From Stewart's optimistic and teleological standpoint,
society, religion and human happiness would improve as knowledge was gradually
revealed by scientists and philosophers, working as “fellow-workers with God in forwarding
the gracious purpose of his government.”
60
This was the approach initially adopted by a young James Mill in the early 1800s, as he
started out a new life in London following the completion of his studies at the University
of Edinburgh. From Reid and Stewart, Mill had taken on the ideas that all philosophical
knowledge must be based on principles of moral philosophy common to all men, and
that there existed a “tendency in the condition of the human species toward
improvement.”
61
But in the context of the post-revolutionary upheavals that had
engulfed Europe in war, the promise of a long-term “tendency” was no longer good
enough. Smith’s recommendation of scientific education for the middling ranks as the
antidote to enthusiasm and superstition also now appeared clearly insufficient. For many
reformists in Britain as in France, the failure of France’s democratic experiment in the
59
See for instance Stewart’s identification of Burnet's History as the source of the idea that the Reformation
had wielded far-reaching intellectual, social and political consequences, and his characterization of the
Reformation as both an “effect” and a “cause” of the revival of letters. Dugald Stewart, “Dissertation
Exhibiting the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political Philosophy, Since the Revival of Letters in
Europe,” in The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, ed. Sir William Hamilton, 11 vols. (London, 1994), 1:39n,
1:28.
60
Ibid, 1:492.
61
James Mill, in An Essay on the Spirit and Influence of the Reformation of Luther, trans. James Mill (London,
1805), 25n.