ruth. J. S. Mill seems to
suppose that association can explain the imagination of a centaur or a
Falstaff, but cannot explain the belief in a horse or Lafayette. The
imagination or 'ideation,' he should have said, accounts in both cases
for the mere contents of the thought; but in neither case can it by
itself explain the judgment as to 'reality.' That is to say, James
Mill may have described accurately a part of the process by which the
mental picture is constructed, but has omitted to explain the action
of the mind itself. Belief, we may agree, is a 'primordial' or
ultimate faculty; but we must not interpret it as belief in a 'real
fact' as distinguished from belief in 'a thought': that is a secondary
and incidental distinction.

This confusion, as I have said, apparently prevents J. S. Mill from
seeing how deeply his very frank admissions cut into the very
structure of his father's system. He has, as I have said, remarked
upon the singular absence of any reference to 'belief,' 'abstraction,'
and so forth; but he scarcely observes how much is implied by the
omission. His criticism should have gone further. James Mill has not
only omitted a faculty which enables us to distinguish between
'thoughts' and 'things,' images of fancy and pictures of reality, but
also the faculty which is equally present whenever we properly think
instead of simply seeing images passively; and equally whether we
refer an image to fact or fancy. His 'analysis of the mind' seems to
get rid of the mind itself.

The omission becomes important at the next step. 'Under the modest
title of an explanation of the meaning of several names,' says his
son, James Mill discusses 'some of the deepest and most intricate
questions in all metaphysics.' A treatise on chemistry might almost as
well be 'described as an explanation of the names, air, water, potass,
sulphuric acid, and so forth.'[547] Why does the chapter come in this
place and in this peculiar form? Probably because James Mill was
partly conscious of the inadequacy of his previous chapters. The
problems which he has been considering could not be adequately treated
by regarding ideas as 'things' bound together by association. What,
after all, is a proposition? What is meant by 'true' or 'false,' as
distinguished from real and unreal? If an association actually _is_ a
truth, what is the difference between right and wrong associations?
Both are facts, and the very words 'right' and 'wrong,' that is