ABSTRACT
A few decades ago, the writings of British philosophers were virtually unknown in our country — and perhaps this is still the case (of course, this ignorance was partly due to the fact that until very recently almost no instruction in English was given in our grammar schools). In general, no more was known of Locke and Hume than that they were both empiricists or materialists and had been ‘refuted by Kant’ — by his famous demonstration, unhappily since found to be erroneous, that ‘synthetic judgements’ such as mathematical propositions were also possible a priori, without the aid of experience. Bentham, James Mill and Bain were scarcely even known by name, John Stuart Mill was known as an economist, of course, but almost completely unknown as a philosopher; some forty years after publication, his Logic had still not made its way to Uppsala University Library. To be sure, On Liberty was translated into Swedish as early as the 1860s — in Finland (by F. Berndtson) — but I doubt if this rendering found many readers in Sweden, it being rather too unwieldy to appeal to public taste in this country, at least.
