THE eighteenth-century quality in the elder Utilitarians comes out in their extraordinary positiveness on psychological and metaphysical points. In 1817 James Mill was beginning to plan the Analysis of the Human Mind, which he published in 1829. 'If I had time to write a book,' he says, 'I would make the human mind as plain as the road from Charing Cross to St. Paul's.' A year earlier he wrote, 'I am reading, at least I have begun to read, the Critique of Pure Reason. I see clearly enough what poor Kant is about'
From Graham Wallas, The Life of Francis Place (rev. edn., New York, 1951), pp. 90-1.