ABSTRACT
We have now established that Mill, contrary to claims based on anachronistic misreadings of parts of his work, was in the forefront of attempts to discredit the deterministic implications of racial theories and assert the ascendancy of “mind over matter”; that he went out of his way to insist that the racial factor was far from being the most important factor in the formation of “national character.” We now need to come to the meaning, development, and significance in Mill’s thought of the category of national character itself. Thus, in the following pages it will be shown, first, that the category of national character came to be, eventually, considerably more significant in Mill’s thought than the cursory nature of references to it by subsequent students would suggest. Second, it will be shown that it was Mill’s life-long study of France and the French, and the conclusions to which this study led him regarding both the French and what he called the “English national character,” that informed decisively his views on this concept and its significance.1
