Mill’s argument was straightforward: both individual and social wellbeing depends upon individual action. Actions depend upon one’s feelings and thoughts (the last step in the chain of association prior to action). Education must thus be structured upon the “knowledge of the sequences which take place in the human feelings or thought.” Such knowledge enables the preceptor “to make certain feelings or thoughts take place instead of others” in the student. The kinds of mental succession, upon which education works, Mill urged, make “all the difference between the extreme of madness and of wickedness, and the greatest attainable heights of wisdom and virtue” (Mill 1992, 147; Mill 1813a, 98). As one’s bent of mind is revealed in the sequences of its ideas, the object of education is “to provide for the constant production of certain sequences, rather than others,” either through repetition and the inculcation of certain habits, or through association with ideas of pleasure or pain, including those of praise and blame (Mill 1992, 151).