to solve problems, which were impossible, as the son is careful to record, through want of the necessary previous knowledge. Time, however, pressed; for when the determined object-before which all instincts and motives, even those of humanity, must be sternly repressed-is to train a mind which shall be "a quarter of a century in advance," even infantine minutes are precious. Accordingly, Roman, Grecian, and ancient universal history absorbed his hours of recreation. In his eleventh and twelfth year he wrote for his own amusement, besides other works, as much of a history of the Roman government as would have made an octavo volume, discussing all constitutional points, vindicating the agrarian laws, and upholding the Roman democratic party. Compulsory verse composition completed this bill of child-fare, which it must be admitted was one of overflowing liberality. We must add, however, that one of his greatest amusements was experimental science without the advantage of experiments; and he devoured treatises on chemistry without attending a lecture or seeing an experiment. At the age of twelve he was advanced to the science of logic, beginning with the Organon. He read at the same time several of the Latin treatises on the scholastic logic, giving each day to his father during his walks a minute account of what he had read. Both father and son recognised the value of an early practical familiarity with the school logic. "The first intellectual operation in which I arrived at any proficiency was dissecting a bad argument and finding in what part the fallacy lay; and though whatever capacity of this sort I attained was due to the fact that it was an intellectual exercise in which I was most perseveringly drilled by my father, yet it is also true that the

school logic, and the mental habits acquired in studying it, were among the principal instruments in this drilling." Numerous Latin and Greek authors of the higher order were also read by him at this time; and the book which contributed largely to his education was his father's History of India, published in 1818, when Mill was twelve years old. In fact, the chief work of his twelfth year was to assist in the publication of this book. Next year, at the age of thirteen, he was taken through a complete course of political economy, the father delivering lectures during their walks, the son giving a written account of them the next day. In reading Adam Smith, his father made him apply the superior lights of Ricardo in order to detect what was fallacious in argument or erroneous in conclusion. "Such a mode of instruction was excellently calculated to form a thinker, but it required to be worked by a thinker as close and vigorous as my father. The path was a thorny one even to him, and I am sure it was so to me, notwithstanding the strong interest I took in the subject. He was often and much beyond reason provoked by my failures in cases where success could not have been expected; but in the main his method was right, and it succeeded."

Next year, when the young Mill had reached the age of fourteen, he left England for more than twelve months; "and after my return, though my studies went on under my father's general direction, he was no longer my schoolmaster."

The purely educational experiment, the endeavour to stimulate by unnatural forcing the growth of pure intellect, was finished at fourteen. Throughout the whole of that time the successive stages of forced precocity had been such that neither school nor school life

was possible. The child was never fit to mix with children; he had absorbed and assimilated knowledge at a rate and in quantities which would, unless Mr Mill's recollections are altogether exaggerated, have made schoolmasters eject him with terror from their schools. He lived in a world of abstract principles and elaborate theories. Fit to converse on even terms with his father's friends, David Ricardo, Joseph Hume, and Mr Bentham, he could neither play a game nor form a friendship. In him metaphysics and analysis were incarnate; but the gulf between him and the world in which he lived was already impassable. Common-sense and current experience were absent; the hand and the heart were untaught; manners were unformed; while the feelings which flow from society and the intercourse of lives-the instincts which are born in us, or flow from contact with nature were to all appearance stamped out of his very being by the iron heel of his father.

The effect of the education to the age of fourteen shows, according to Mr Mill, the ease with which knowledge, in what are considered the higher branches of education, can be imparted during childhood. He denies that he was by nature extremely quick of apprehension, or possessed a very accurate and retentive memory, or was of a remarkably active and energetic character. In those natural gifts he describes himself as rather below than above par.

out by thinking I never was told until I had exhausted my efforts to find it out for myself." This assertion, together with the statement that after the age of seven, the greater part of every day was consumed in teaching his brothers and sisters, incline us to receive with considerable doubt and hesitation the enormous list of books and subjects said to have been mastered during his childhood.

But

His father most anxiously guarded him against self-conceit, keeping him out of the way of hearing himself praised, or being led to make self- flattering comparisons between himself and others. Mill asserts with confidence that he did not estimate himself at all, either highly or lowly; his father having completely succeeded in preserving him from the sort of influences which he so much dreaded. Mr Mill describes "the impression of various persons who saw me in my childhood. They, as I have since found, thought me greatly and disagreeably self- conceited probably because I was disputatious, and did not scruple to give direct contradictions to things which I heard said. I suppose I acquired this bad habit from having been encouraged in an unusual degree to talk on matters beyond my age, and with grown persons, while I never had inculcated in me the usual respect for them. father did not correct this ill-breeding and impertinence, probably from not being aware of it; for I was always too much in awe of him to be otherwise than extremely subdued and quiet in his presence."

My

It was at the close of this childhood education, on the eve of going abroad, that his father (the very place in Hyde Park where he did so being remembered by the son all his life) pointed out to him the superiority over all his contempo

raries which he had derived from his training. The son felt that what his father said respecting his peculiar advantages "was exactly the truth and common-sense of the matter, and it fixed his opinion and feeling from that time forward." The frankness of this statement is well borne out by several passages in his book. There is abundant evidence in the exaggerated recollection of his childish achievements, in the implied meaning of his exalted compliments to his wife, in the estimate of his books, in his remarks upon his official relations and his relations to society, that notwithstanding some self-depreciatory observations, a consuming but not altogether obtrusive vanity had been developed during his childhood, and remained as the basis of his character through life.

Now let us examine the negative side of this marvellous training. The child was carefully kept from intercourse with other boys, in order to escape "the contagion of vulgar modes of thought and feeling." He paid the price of inferiority in schoolboy accomplishments. He had no holidays, and no boy companions. His daily leisure for amusement was devoted to occupations of a bookish turn. He was through life inexpert in anything requiring manual dexterity, his mind as well as his hands did its work very lamely when applied to practical details, and he "was constantly meriting reproof by inattention, inobservance, and general slackness of mind in matters of daily life." His education was limited to training him to know rather than to do. The son's deficiencies arose from absence of school life; yet, both as a boy and as a youth, he smarted incessantly under his father's severe admonitions. "Here, as well as in some other points in my tuition, he

seems to have expected effects without causes."

It is impossible to imagine a state of more complete isolation from the life and the world which he was intended to regenerate. He was cast from his father's workshop, fearfully and wonderfully fashioned, upon a world of which he knew nothing in its ordinary experiences, daily life, and natural human interests and sympathies. The power of knowing men and characters, of understanding the real nature which had been crushed out of him, was lost and never afterwards acquired. In later life he knew no more of men and women than at fourteen he knew of schoolboys.

The whole moral influence which centred upon the child appears, so far as this Autobiography reveals it, to have been exercised by the father. The mother's influence, at all events, is not remembered. The brothers and sisters are recalled as the unwilling victims of his instruction, who bored him and probably disliked him. Of companions and playfellows he had none. The father was ubiquitous, bent on moulding him, never relaxing his vigilance. "My father's senses and mental faculties were always on the alert; he carried decision and energy of character in his whole manner, and into every action of life, and this as much as his talents contributed to the strong impression which he always made upon those with whom he came into personal contact." Mill describes his father as having produced an enormous effect upon his character. He gravely exhorted or sternly reproved conduct with a view to "justice, temperance (to which he gave a very extended application), veracity, perseverance, readiness to encounter pain, and especially labour-regard for the public good, estimation of persons according to their merits, and of

things according to their intrinsic usefulness, a life of exertion in contradiction to one of self-indulgent ease and sloth." He was not insensible to pleasure, but he attributed the greater number of the miscarriages in life to the overvaluing of pleasure. He thought human life a poor thing at best, after the freshness of youth and of unsatisfied curiosity had gone by. For passionate emotions of all sorts he professed the greatest contempt. Feelings, as such, were no proper subjects of praise or blame; even a feeling of duty as a motive did not mitigate the severity of his censure upon what he considered a bad action. He was constitutionally irritable; and Mr Mill says "it is impossible not to feel true pity for a father who did and strove to do so much for his children, who would have so valued their affection, yet who must have been constantly feeling that fear of him was drying it up at its source. This was no long'er the case later in life and with his younger children-they loved him tenderly; and if I cannot say as much of myself, I was always loyally devoted to him." Mr Mill pointedly says that he rejoices "in the decline of the old brutal and tyrannical system of teaching;" that fear ought not to be the main element in education; and that when it predominates so as to preclude love and seal up the fountains of frank communicativeness in the child's nature, it is an evil which detracts from the other educational benefits which may have been received.

The father looked upon religion as the greatest enemy of morality, first by setting up fictitious excellences-belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies not connected with the good of human kind-and causing them to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtues; but above all, by radically vitiating the subject of morals."

Accordingly, Mill was brought up from the first without any religious belief. His father considered that the creed of Christianity embodied the ne plus ultra of wickedness in the conception which it presented of God. Mill describes himself as one of the very few examples in this country of one who has not thrown off religious belief, but never had it. "I grew up in a negative state with regard to it. I locked upon the modern exactly as I did upon the ancient religion, as something which in no way concerned me. It did not seem to me more strange that English people should believe what I did not than that the men whom I read of in Herodotus should have done so." The father, while implanting in the son opinion contrary to that of the world, thought it necessary to give it as one which could not be prudently avowed. To the last, people were in doubt as to the late Mr Mill's religious belief or disbelief. He refused to say anything about it at his election at Westminster. This Autobiography dispels all obscurity upon the subject, and adds, that

an

the world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its greatest ornaments, of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete sceptics in religion."

It is easy to see from the record of this education what the father's training had effected in point of formation or development. The subsequent years of life must be consulted in order to see what that training had crushed or smothered. Had his education been allowed to proceed in the ordinary healthy course, it is reasonable to conclude that Mill's life would have been fuller, happier, and more useful than it was. He had the ardent sympathies, the imaginative faculty, the love of nature, and the disposition

to worship and revere which would have united him to his kind. His father failed to crush them out, but he fixed a gulf between his son and the world which was never afterwards passed or passable; he made a gap in the child's character and capacities which was never afterwards filled up. Mill went through life fitted to excel in the pursuit of abstract science; but hopelessly wrong in his estimate of men and women, and unversed in practical life.

At the age of fourteen the pupil left his father's house and entered the world. No youth ever embarked on the voyage of life so singularly equipped. The abnormal development of intellect, joined to singular ignorance of life and all its incidents, rendered him a portent; but the fact that a rich vein of poetry, and a real tenderness of nature, lay beneath, oppressed but not driven out by the iron discipline he had endured, gives the real and enduring interest to the subsequent pages of the book. year's residence in France under the care of Mr Bentham's brother, varied by an excursion to the Pyrenees, where "the mountain scenery made the deepest impression on me, and gave a colour to my tastes through life," afforded an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the French language and literature, and attending lectures on chemistry, zoology, and the philosophy of the sciences. The frank sociability and amiability of French personal intercourse evidently delighted him; and he contrasted French sentiment and sympathy with what he subsequently discovered to be the apathy and indifference of Englishmen.

From the age of fifteen onwards, when he first read Bentham and helped to start the Westminster Review,' he had what might be called an object in life-to be a

VOL. CXV.-NO. DCXCIX.

reformer of the world. For five years, that object and the happy consciousness of fulfilling it, formed the basis of his happiness, a permanent personal satisfaction on which to place his whole reliance. A dull state of nervous exhaustion then supervened; and the end in view ceased to charm. Life suddenly seemed without object, hope, or motive; the love of mankind in general did not compensate for the absence of all sympathy with any individual. The state of mind was one of deep and hopeless dejection. There was no hope of sympathy from his father; the stream of that father's education had ended in a mud-bank. Mill saw, or thought he saw, what he had always before received with incredulity-" that the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings—as, indeed, it has when no other mental habit is cultivated, and the analysing spirit remains without its natural complements and correctives."

Analytic habits tend to weaken those associations which are mere matter of feeling. They are therefore favourable to prudence and clearsightedness, but a perpetual worm at the root, both of the passions and of the virtues. The whole course of his education had made precocious and premature analysis the inveterate habit of his mind. He feared that he had not sufficient fund of feeling, natural or acquired, to resist its dissolving influence. He felt that he had no real desire for the ends which he had been trained to work for; "no delight in virtue, or the general good, but also just as little in anything else." As for vanity, ambition, the desire of distinction and importance, satiety had preceded desire. morbid intellectual development had incapacitated him for physical, sympathetic, or sensual plea

F

A