History's (Un)Reason Victorian Intellectualism from J.S. Mill to Leslie Stephen

Conceptions of progress abounded in the Victorian period, and works of intellectual history were instrumental in illustrating and interrogating the laws of the progressive development of modern societies. Among the axioms that informed progressive historiography was the ““intellectualist”” assumption of the privileged and incremental historical agency of speculation, knowledge, and ideas. This paper considers the role of John Stuart Mill's System of Logic (1843) in shaping an intellectualist paradigm in Victorian liberal historiography. It focuses on Leslie Stephen's methodological reflections in the History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876), which it analyzes in terms of a revision of Mill's concept of regulative ideas that suggests how intellectual history was fully caught up in the mid-Victorian ““crisis of reason.””