 We might call this Mill’s anti apriorism about knowledge—the view runs deep, giving an anthropological and empirical character to all of his philosophy. Mill adds to it a psychological account of the underlying mechanism by which we form ideas. Here, he follows very much in the tradition of the British Empiricists—the theory being traced by Mill back to Hobbes, through Locke and Hartley, and to James Mill’s publication of The Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind—in endorsing what has become known as associationist psychology: “the theory which resolves all the phenomena of the mind into ideas of sensation connected together by the law of association” (Blakey’s History of Moral Science, X: 23).