INDUCTION: WITH MILL’S AUTOGRAPH PRESENTATION LETTER
MILL, John Stuart.
A System of Logic ratiocinative and inductive, being a connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of scientific Investigation.
London, Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1868.
Vol. I only (of 2), 8vo, pp. xviii (including half-title), 541, [1], [2, publisher’s advertisements]; some light foxing to the preliminaries and to the final quires, a few very light stains, some light uniform toning, but a very good copy in the original publisher’s green cloth, sides panelled in blind, flat spine with printed paper lettering-piece; joints cracked but holding, spine lifted from bookblock, extremities rubbed with small losses to cover at corners and spine extremities, further chip to spine cover, label chipped, abrasions to pastedown and endpapers; with short presentation letter from John Stuart Mill to ‘Mr. Grothier’ pasted on to front free endpaper, including envelope, and printed presentation card ‘From the author’ pasted along the inner margin before the half title.
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A System of Logic ratiocinative and inductive, being a connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of scientific Investigation.
Presentation copy, with Mill’s autograph letter and printed presentation slip.
Volume I of the seventh edition of Mill’s Logic, the work containing ‘the first major instalment of [Mill’s] comprehensive restatement of an empiricist and utilitarian position’ (Encyclopaedia of Philosophy V, p. 315). In a revolutionary approach to logic, Mill here outlines the five principles of inductive reasoning. The book ‘had a rapid success, beyond the expectations of its author, and was for many years the standard authority with all who took his side in the main philosophical questions. Mill, in fact, was recognized as the great leader of the empirical school’ (DNB). The Logic enjoyed wide success, and greatly influenced successive philosophers: Venn, John Neville Keynes, Frege and Bertrand Russell, among others.
‘The statement that John Stuart Mill was Britain’s most important philosopher in the 19th century looks like a bold assertion, but in fact it should not be even mildly controversial: Mill has no serious rivals’ (Dictionary of 19th-Century Philosophers II, p. 792).
