question, already given, when he "was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to ".]

What has been commented on could easily have been allowed for had it been written at the time, even by a man of education, upwards of twenty years of age, but it is difficult to account for it when penned fully forty-five years afterwards. It, as well as the whole Autobiography, goes to show that Mill was very deficient in common sense, and sadly required Mrs. Taylor, or some other person, to be at his side, to keep him right in that respect. Philosophers, or some so-called philosophers at least, have often been of that character. Thus Epictetus

writes:

my

This deficiency in Mill's case is well accounted for by the education he received, and which he never remedied by exertions of his own, for he said, as we have already seen "The education which father gave me was in itself much more fitted for training me to know than to do" (p. 37) [or really think, he might have added]. I was constantly meriting reproof by inattention, inobservance, and general slackness of mind in matters of daily life" (p. 36).

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His trouble was doubtless of a nervous nature, either hereditary or personal, brought on or superinduced by the life, physical and mental, he had been leading, although he says:

"For some years after this time [that is, some years before the attack] I wrote very little, and nothing regularly, for publication: and great were the advantages which I derived from the in

termission.

Had I gone on

the important transformation in my opinions and character, which took place during those years" [of the 'crisis "] (p. 132).

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It would rather have hastened it, or made it more intense. The ad

vice of a physician, or the physical and mental habits of ordinary life, would doubtless have cured him;

about which he says nothing. The case would have been an interesting one, had the real circumstances connected with it been given. He does not seem to have been annoyed by the important questions affecting the state of his soul, nor his prospects in life, for these were well secured by his official appointment; and he says nothing about his private history while dwelling under the roof of his despotic father. The isolated way in which he had been brought up, his exclusive habits afterwards, and his peculiar education and studies, were doubtless the causes of the disease manifesting itself; but the evil effects of these should have been to some extent counter

acted by the exercise going to and from the India House, his short hours, and his duties there, for these

were

"Sufficiently intellectual not to be distasteful drudgery, without being such as to cause any strain upon the mental powers of a person used to abstract thought, or the labour of careful literary composition" (p. 83).

In giving an account of his education, he said, as we have already seen :-" I started, I may fairly say, with an advantage of a quarter of a century over my contemporaries (p. 31); and that "most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them [but he said that that was not the case with him] are crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions or phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own (p. 31). And here is what he said of himself

in the "Crisis in his mental history," in his twenty-first year :—

"I was thus, as I said to myself, left stranded at the commencement of my voyage, with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but no sail [or ballast]; without any real desire for the ends which I had been so carefully fitted out to work for [for which everyone was apparently to blame but himself]: no delight in virtue or the general good, but also just as little in anything else [as if he had been ' a stock or a stone']. The fountains of vanity and ambition seemed to have dried up within me, as completely as those of benevolence [for whom?]. Ihad had (as I reflected) some gratification of vanity at too early an age.

Like all pleasures enjoyed too soon, it had made me blasé and indifferent to

the pursuit" (p. 139). [Here we have a strange jumble of love of himself and love of his kind.]

All this was said while he was in the "blues," and it might have meant little or nothing, or been part of the "blues" themselves; still he attributes what he said to his education, which had failed to

create

"Feelings in sufficient strength to resist the dissolving influence of analysis, while the whole course of my intellectual cultivation had made precocious and premature analysis the inveterate habit of my mind" (p. 138).

But he never forsook his first love -his darling analysis, for thus he wrote of it:

"I never turned recreant to intellectual culture, or ceased to consider the power and practice of analysis, as an essential condition both of individual and of social [?] improvements. But I thought that it had consequences which required to be corrected, by joining other kinds of cultivation with it" (P.

143).

The crisis, however, led him to "adopt a theory of life very unlike that on which I had before acted, and having much in common with what at the time [when in his twenty-first year] I certainly had

66

never heard of [now we have a great discovery], the anti-self-consciousness theory of Carlyle" (p. not be the direct end (for then it 142), that is, that happiness should would be selfishness); and we have a good deal of philosophizing on the point, the conclusion of which was, that this theory - which he " certainly had never heard of”— now became the basis of my philThis osophy of life" (p. 143). seems to be that happiness should not consist in contemplating an object as an end, but in using the means to reach it-a true enough principle if applied to the Creator, and to our fellow-creatures individually and collectively, that is, that we should place our happiness in the discharge of our duties to them, without regard to our own ultimate advantage or profit, or the passing pleasure or pain it may give us in using the means; although few would question the right to place our happiness in both the object. and the means of attaining to it, if both are disinterested in their nature. If the happiness has no reference to the Creator or our fellowcreature, but merely to such of our own affairs as the laws of God, society, and the land approve of, or do not disapprove of, then it consists in contemplating an object and in using reasonable and virtuous means to attain it; both the object aimed at and the means of reaching it constituting the happiness, although, when the object has been secured, very little happiness is frequently found to have been gained. In short, Mill's anti-self-consciousness theory seems to be but one of the be found in his Autobiography and many instances' of tumbling" to history generally.

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Mill then goes on to say that he added to his limited dry and abstract studies a number of others, such as cultivation of the feelings, and maintaining a due balance among the faculties.

"The cultivation of the feelings be- | came one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed. And my thoughts and inclinations turned in an increasing degree towards whatever seemed capable of being instrumental to that object" (p. 144) [such as poetry, but nothing in regard to religion].

"The only one of the imaginative arts in which I had from childhood taken great pleasure was music. But, like all my pleasurable susceptibilities, it was suspended during the gloomy period. I had sought relief again and again from this quarter, but found none. After the tide had turned, and I was in process of recovery, I had been helped forward by music, but in a much less elevated manner" (p. 144), for "I was seriously tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of musical combinaThis source of anxiety may, perhaps, be thought to resemble that of the philosophers of Laputa, who feared lest the sun should be burnt out " (p. 145).

tions.

This cultivation of the feelings, which began at so late an age, contrasts finely with his father's ideas on the subject:

“He regarded as an aberration of the moral standard of modern times, compared with that of the ancients, the great stress laid upon feeling. Feelings, as such, he considered to be no proper subjects of praise or blame [whatever the occasion of their exercise] (p. 49). "My father's teachings tended to the undervaluing of feeling" (p. 110). "I needed to be made to feel that there was real permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in, the common feelings and common destiny of human beings. And the delight which these poems gave me proved that, with culture of this sort [human affections], there was nothing to dread from the most confirmed habit of analysis. The result was that I gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it" (p. 148).

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Although we were generally in the right, as against those who were opposed to us, the effect was that the cultivation of feeling (except the feelings of public and private duties) was not

in much esteem among us [the little society with utility for its standard in ethics and politics], and had very little place in the thoughts of most of us, myself in particular" (p. 111). "I disliked any sentiments in poetry which I should have disliked in prose; and that included a great deal. And I was wholly blind to its place in human culture, as a means of educating the feelings" (p. 112). But after the crisis "it so fell out that the

merits of Wordsworth were the occasion of my public declaration of my new way of thinking, and separation from those of my habitual companions who had not undergone a similar change (p. 149).

It is difficult to assign a reason for his separating from his friends "who had not undergone a similar change." If his state had really been that in which "converts to Methodism usually are when smitten by their first conviction of sin," leading him to "renounce the world, the flesh and the devil," it could be understood why he should have separated from his habitual companions; but his behaviour was incomprehensible, unless we hold that Mill, in addition to going to extremes, like the pendulum of a clock, was quarrelsome, domineering, intolerant, supercilious, or touchy in his disposition. He admitted that a schism took place between him and Roebuck, which widened from that time more and more, the chief divergence in the beginning relating to the "cultivation of the feelings," his new hobby (p. 150).

All that Mill said of the "crisis in his mental history" could have been stated in a very few words. As already mentioned, it was doubtless a nervous disorder, which (it would be absurd to deny it) could not have been cured by his merely "reading accidentally a short passage in Marmontel's Memoires. It had the effect, however, of directing his attention to other subjects than his grinding anal

ysis.

The treatment of it should have extended to internal and external remedies, exercises, amusements, change of air, and diversified

IV.

. HIS WIFE.

97

life," but nothing of the refining or seductive influences of girls or female society. There seems every reason to think that this acquaintance, from the date of its commencement in 1830, till the death of his father in 1836, or at least the influence which the lady exercised over him, was kept secret from his jealous and despotic parent; for it is hardly possible that he would have tolerated any one, and especially a

was

ac

He was first introduced to her in 1830, when he was in his twentyfifth, and she in her twenty-third year (p. 184), and he was married to her after a friendship of twenty-one years. But it was "years" after his introduction to her before his 66 quaintance with her became at all intimate or confidential," although he "very soon felt her to be the most admirable person he had ever known" (p. 185). He seems to have fought shy of her at first, and it is difficult to think how he could have got so far as he did, unless the nature of things was reversed by her forcing the acquaintance to a head. He told us of the solicitude of his father in keeping him from the "corrupting influence which boys exercise over boys," and the consequent "contagion of vulgar modes of thought and feeling," as well as the "demoralizing effects of school 'J

come in between him and his son in the formation of his mind. Mill's acquaintance with female society at that time must have been exceedingly limited, and it seems to have continued so till the end. Hence the adoration he lavished on Mrs. Taylor, as we have seen, making her memory his religion, and almost exhausting the English language in her praises. She seems to have been a woman of decided talent and originality, tact and accomplishments, sufficient at least to have enabled her, in many things, to turn him round her little finger. But we must deduct a large-indeed an extraordinarily large-discount from the draft he has drawn on posterity in favour of her capacity and divine qualities

no, not divine qualities, for she (like himself) apparently recognized nothing as divine. However, it is time to introduce the goddess herself. Mill says that she was

"Married at an early age to a most upright, brave, and honourable man, of without the intellectual or artistic tastes liberal opinions and good education, but which would have made him a companion for her, though a steady and affectionate friend, for whom she had true esteem, and the strongest affection through life, and whom she most deeply lamented when dead" (p. 185).

"Her intellectual gifts did but minister to a moral character at once the noblest and the best balanced which I have ever met with in life. Her unselfishness was not that of a taught system of duties [was it inspired?], but of a heart which thoroughly identified itself

with the feelings of others, and often went to excess in consideration for them by imaginatively investing their feelings with the intensity of its own. The passion of justice might have been thought to be her strongest feeling, but for her boundless generosity, and a lovingness ever ready to pour itself forth upon any or all human beings who were capable of giving the smallest feeling in return. The rest of her moral characteristics were such as naturally accompany these qualities of mind and heart: the most genuine modesty combined with the loftiest pride; a simplicity and sincerity which were absolute towards all who were fit to receive them; the utmost scorn of whatever was mean and cowardly, and a burning indignation at anything brutal or tyrannical, faithless, or dishonourable in conduct and character" (p. 187).

"This incomparable friend" "lived mostly with one young daughter in a quiet part of the country [in a house of her own or her husband's?], and only occasionally in town with her first husband, Mr. Taylor. I visited her equally in both places; and was greatly indebted to the strength of character which enabled her [was he the tempter?] to disregard the false [but natural] interpretations liable to be put [and that were actually put] on the frequency of my visits to her while living generally apart from Mr. Taylor [did she leave him and return to him at pleasure ?], and on our occasionally travelling together [with or without the husband's consent or approval?], though in all other respects our conduct during these years gave not the slightest ground [or guarantee beyond their own assertions] for any other supposition than the true one, that our relation to each other at that

time was one of strong affection and confidential intimacy only [with which the husband had no right to interfere]. For though we did not consider the ordinances of society binding on a subject so entirely personal [what does society exist for? what 'subjects' does it bind but 'personal ones?'], we did feel bound that our conduct should be such as in no degree to bring discredit on her husband, nor therefore on herself" (p. 229). [But how he did that to the satisfaction of the public is not stated.]

We can easily believe that the man who wrote this, in addition to his never having had any religion, or feeling of religion, as he admitted, was equally destitute of any really moral or manly sensibility. Apart from the solemn obligations of the marriage contract and relation, the common instinct of humanity, even when found in the breast of a savage, would condemn him; for all nations have recognized the binding nature of marriage in every aspect of it, to prevent the wild disorder, even bloodshed, that would ensue from its conditions being violated even to the extent admitted. Mill said in substance that he took great care to prevent the world from forming an idea of actual criminality in the relation, but told us nothing of how he accomplished that, or how he could have convinced society that nothing If there is criminal had resulted. anything in the demands of society binding on us, it is what refers to marriage in particular, and the sexes in general; the common instinct of mankind requiring no explanations on the subject. It is wonderful how even the dumb animals respect a similar habit; the slightest infringement of it resulting in the most terrific combats. Mill's nature, notwithstanding his professions, and many of his actions, to the contrary, was apparently nothing but selfishhis relation with Mrs. Taylor, which ness, as particularly illustrated by seems to have been begun or carried on, with a total disregard for the