ABSTRACT
When nineteenth-century public intellectual John Stuart Mill turns his philosophical craft upon himself he encounters the immobilising weight of an ‘incubus,’ a metaphorical ogre he associates with the Doctrine of Necessity as implicated in his ‘Logic of the Moral Sciences.’ Committed to an empiricist and mechanistic view of human nature, he wonders how to surmount the proposition that we are ‘the helpless slaves of antecedent circumstances.’ The perennial struggle over free will versus determinism pervades Mill’s life story. For he must rid himself of the ‘incubus’ if he is to successfully defend cherished principles of self-determination and individual liberty. Mill’s first-person narrative turns out to embody the central features of the philosophical autobiography: one or more scenes of self-transformation triggered by conceptual and emotional impasses, a theory of life stages linked to a philosophy of historical change, and the effort to reconcile the dialectical tension of reason and emotion and, in Mill’s case, empiricism and Romanticism.
