In 1843 John Stuart Mill publishes A System of Logic, the century's manual of the empirical method: all knowledge, of mind and morals as of matter, is to be built from experience by induction. Mill's logic gives the naturalist program its methodical form, the moral sciences placed under the same laws of evidence as the physical.
Tagged: Naturalism
The Event
- Date
- 1843 (exact)
- Era
- The Enlightenment System; Standard periodization of naturalist history
- Location
- London; today London, England
- Traditions
- Naturalism
- Streams
- Naturalism
- Key figures
- John Stuart Mill
- Key texts
- A System of Logic
Primary Sources
- Mill, John Stuart. A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive. London, 1843.
Secondary Sources
- De Caro, Mario, and David Macarthur, eds. Naturalism in Question. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
- Gregory, Frederick. Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century Germany. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1977.
- Papineau, David. Philosophical Naturalism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
Provenance: HIST-1404; confidence 0.95; accessed 2026-10-30.
Related on This Site
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Büchner's Force and Matter
1855
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D'Holbach's System of Nature
1770
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Darwin's The Descent of Man
1871
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Huxley's Man's Place in Nature
1863
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La Mettrie's Man a Machine
1747
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Laplace's Exposition of the System of the World
1796
History Event
Newton's Principia Mathematica
1687
World View
Naturalism
Naturalism holds that nature is all there is: the universe of matter, energy, and natural law needs no god, soul, or purpose beyond itself.