ing I now felt myself at a greater distance from: greater, indeed, than a full and calm explanation and reconsideration on both sides might have shown to exist in reality. But my father was not one with whom calm and full explanations on fundamental points of doctrine could be expected, at least with one whom he might consider as, in some sort, a deserter from his standard. Fortunately we were almost always in strong agreement on the political questions of the day, which engrossed a large part of his interest and of his conversation. On the matters of opinion on which we differed, we talked little. He knew that the habit of thinking for myself, which his mode of education had fostered, sometimes led me to opinions different from his [but not on the subject of religion], and he perceived from time to time [the business must have been cautiously gone about] that I did not always tell him how different. I expected no good, but only pain to both of us, from discussing our differences; and I never expressed them when he gave utterance to some opinion or feeling repugnant to mine, in a manner which would have made it disingenuousness on my part to remain silent (p. 180).

ble class in society, his isolation from it is apt to be greater than that of the late Dr. Thomas Guthrie, who started with a fair social position and training, example and associations, to say nothing of his natural gifts of observation and improvement in matters outside of his professional aspirations. It was fifteen years after he first went to college that he got a church, during five years of which, after he was licensed, he had "knocked about" a good deal, besides residing and studying in Paris, and acting in his twentysix and twenty-seventh years as agent or manager of a branch bank, which he described as 66 two busy, but not lost, years in that employment." And he says:"That, in point of fact, was not the least valuable part of my training and education. I became in this way conversant both with mercantile and agricultural affairs; and those who, both in the country and the town, afterwards became my people, did not respect me the less when - they found their minister was something else than a fine bodie,' who knew no more about the affairs, the hopes and disappointments, and temptations, and trials of men engaged in the business of the world than any old wife, or the 'man in the moon (Autobiography, p. 107).

It is certainly "useful that there should be some record of an education which was unusual and remarkable," to guard humanity against the ungodliness, the want of judgment, and the unnatural treatment or cruelty displayed in it, and but for which John Stuart Mill would doubtless have turned out, in some respects, a different man from what he did.

III.

A CRISIS IN HIS HISTORY.

We have seen what a singular training John Stuart Mill received from his father in the important questions of religion, education, and social life, so poorly calculated to qualify him for the real battle of life, and the law, for which he was originally intended. He informs us, as we have seen, that when fifteen he "had what might truly be called an object in life-to be a reformer of the world," when he had been brought up almost completely isolated from it, at least to such an extent as was apt to unfit him for taking

There are many ways in which students of divinity can acquire a little more knowledge of the world than they do, if they will but avail themselves of them. Indeed, "serpentine wisdom is not only allowed, but commanded. Romanists have a plan of their own in these matters. What they aim at is to make their stu dents priests, the most important part of whose work is to manage their people.

James Mill seems to have been a student like those described, perhaps a "boorish cub that was licked into shape," as Dr. Thomas Guthrie expressed it, whose time was exclusively given to his books. He would acquire little knowledge as a tutor beyond the ways of polite society, and have much of his Forfarshire roughness rubbed off him. He seems to have chosen a tutorship rather than a public school, for, had he taken the latter, he would have lost caste, and run a much greater risk of never getting a church. Had the gentlemen and noblemen who employed him as a tutor known of his ideas on religion, they would sooner have introduced a viper to the bosom of their families than had anything to do with him.

his own part in it in some things. | He missed the most valuable part of life for acquiring the foundation of real knowledge, in being separated from his kind; but that could have been to a great extent amended by his after intercourse with the world, however limited, and by his connection with the India House, had he not shown what appears to have been a natural deficiency in that respect; at least, he does not seem to have endeavoured to acquire that very important part of one's education by such means as presented themselves; and the deficiency remained with him to the last. His intercourse with his fellow-creatures was at first limited to a very few grown-up people, who visited his father (p. 53); and when he went anywhere it was generally with his father, which kept him from associating with others. He paid a visit of upwards of a year to France, before he had any experience of English life, or "knowledge of God and good manners," and returned with some crude ideas of things in both countries.

"At this point concluded what can properly be called my lessons: when I was about fourteen, I left England [for France] for more than a year; and after my return, though my studies went on under my father's general direction, he was no longer my school-master (p. 29). "I returned to England in July, 1821, and my education resumed its ordinary course" (p. 61). “Under my father's directions my studies were carried into the higher branches of analytic psychology" (p. 68). Having so little experience of English life, and the few people I knew being mostly such as had public objects, . . I could not then know or estimate the difference between this manner of existence [the English] and that of a people like the French (p. 58). "All these things [difference between English and French life] I did not perceive till long afterwards" (p. 59). He says that one of his greatest amusements during part of his childhood was experimental science, without ever seeing an experiment; and

"In

In May, 1823, when seventeen years old, he was engaged by the East India Company, in the office of Examiner of India Correspondence, immediately under his father, who apparently would hardly let him out of his sight, "with the understanding that I should be employed from the beginning in prethe dictation of others, it is presumparing drafts of despatches [from ed], and be thus trained up as a successor to those who then filled the higher departments of the office" (p. 82). And he says:1856, I was promoted to the rank of chief of the office in which I had served for upwards of thirty-three years. . . . I held this office as long as it continued to exist, being a little more than two years" (p. 249). For a few years after his appointment, he spent his month's vacation at his father's house in the country, and after that on the Continent, "chiefly in pedestrian excursions, with some one or more of the young men who were my chosen companions; and at a later period in longer

"From the winter of 1821 [when he was fifteen years of age] .. I had what might truly be called an object in life-to be a reformer of the world. My conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object" (p. 132). But in the year 1826 "I was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to the state, I should think, in which converts to Methodism usually are, when smitten by their first conviction of sin' [as if he knew anything about that subject]. In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to my self: Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which are looking forward to [!] could be completely effected at this very instant; would this be a great joy and happiness to you?'” (p. 133.)

you

This was a trifling enough question to be asked of himself by a lad so inexperienced in the ways of the world, and which would have had little or no effect on a young man differently brought up; or rather, his experience or common sense would have prevented him asking it at all. If he had inquired about God, his soul, and its future destiny -calling in question all his father had taught him on these subjects we could have understood his allusion to converts to Methodism when smitten by their first conviction of sin." That was a subject about which he was evidently profoundly ignorant, and apparently as indifferent; nor does it appear, in his many allusions to religion, that

he believed he even had a soul that would exist after leaving the body, whether to be saved or lost, or a God to be accountable to. But the odd question he asked himself, he answered thus :

"An irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, 'No.' At this my heart sank within me the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to suit of this end. The end had ceased to have been found in the continual purcharm, and how could there ever again be an interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing to live for. At first I hoped that the cloud would pass away of itself; but it did not. A night's sleep, the sovereign remedy for the smaller vexations of life, had no effect on it. I awoke to a renewed consciousness of the woful fact. I carried it with me into all companies, into all occupations. Hardly anything had power to cause me even a few minutes' oblivion of it. For some thicker months the cloud seemed to grow In vain I sought and thicker" (p. 134). relief from my favourite books, . . . and kind, and of excellence for its own sake, I became persuaded that my love of manhad worn itself out" (p. 135), [in doing what?]

"If I had loved anyone sufficiently [notwithstanding his love of mankind'] to make confiding my griefs a necessity,

I should not have been in the condition I was [rather an odd idea]. . . . But there was no one on whom I could

build the faintest hope of such assistance. My father, to whom it would have been natural to me to have recourse in any practical difficulties, was the last person [excepting a priest] to whom, in such a case as this, I looked for help. Everything convinced me that he had no knowledge of any such mental state as I was suffering from; and stand it, he was not the physician who could heal it. My education, which was wholly his work, had been conducted without any regard to the possibility of its ending in this result; and I saw no use in giving him the pain of thinking that his plans had failed, when the failall events, beyond the power of his ure was probably irremediable, and, at remedies. Of other friends, I had at that time none to whom I had any hope of making my condition intelligible.

that even if he could be made to under

[Where was the family physician?] It was, however, abundantly intelligible to myself; and the more I dwelt upon it the more hopeless it appeared" (p. 135).

Then for four pages (136 to 140) he goes on to philosophize on the phenomenon, and the cause of it, saying far more than can be inserted here; but the following are the principal words used, taking them in their order, which, as now given, are nearly as intelligible as Mill's four pages on the question treated :—

Course of study, mental and moral feelings and qualities, associations, love and hope, pleasure, action, contempla tion, pain, ideas, education, experience, corollary, associations of the salutary class, retrospect, instruments, praise and blame, reward and punishment, intense associations, desires, aversions, artificial and casual, intense and inveterate, practically indissoluble, natural tie, habitual exercise, power of analysis, incredulity, natural laws, complements and correctives, prejudice, dissolving force, permanent sequences, sympathy, object of existence, dissolving influence of analysis, intellectual cultivation, precocious and premature analysis, inveterate habit, blasé and indifferent, heavy dejection, melancholy winter.*

"The idiosyncrasies of my education had given to the general phenomenon a special character, which made it seem the natural effect of causes that it was

hardly possible for time to remove [although it went away of its own accord]. I frequently asked myself, if I could, or if I was bound to go on living, when life must be passed in this manner. I generally answered to myself that I did not think I could possibly bear it beyond a year. [Here we would have expected he would have made away with himself.] When, however, not more than half that duration of time had elapsed, a small ray

* Mill, as he left his region of recondite subjects for the sphere of every-day life, in which the most unsophisticated people feel at home, illustrated, in the “ crisis of his mental history," the character of an owl in daylight, with its large head, solemn eyes, imposing garb, and judicial air. The words now given, as the essence of what he wrote, are a specimen of the owl-like wisdom which he could display

on occasions.

of light broke in upon my gloom" (p. 140).

The reader will doubtless be anxious to learn how he got released from this " purgatory on earth," without a prayer being offered, or a miracle wrought, for the purpose, since no remedy seems to have been resorted to to dispel the evil spirit that possessed him. It was in this

way:

"I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel's Memoires, and came to the passage which relates his father's death, the distressed position of the family, then a mere boy [Mill was then twenty], and the sudden inspiration by which he, felt and made them feel that he would be everything to them--would supply the place of all that they had lost. [A case having no earthly resemblance to his own.] A vivid conception of the scene and its feelings came over me, and I was moved to tears. From this moment [!] my burden grew lighter. feeling was dead within me was gone. The oppression of the thought that all stock or a stone. I was no longer hopeless; I was not a [And then he became what he had been before.] "There was, once more, excitement, though of a moderate kind, in exerting myself for my opinions and for the public good [and figuring,' as before]. Thus the cloud gradually drew off, and I again enjoyed life : and [this is very significant] though I had several relapses, some of which lasted many months, I never again was as miserable as I had been" (p. 141).

Before this attack of the "blues' came on him, here were his ideas :

Ι

"My conception of my own happiness [not that of others] was entirely identiformer of the world, from the time he fied with this object [that of being a rewas fifteen]. The personal sympathies I wished for were those of fellow-labourers in this enterprise. the certainty of a happy life which I enwas accustomed to felicitate myself on joyed [in building castles in the air], through placing my happiness on something durable and distant, in which some progress might be always making, while it could never be exhausted by complete attainment" (p. 133). [So far

sensible till he asked himself the foolish 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:

“Hark ye, child, it is fit you should know philosophy; but it is fit, too, you nonsense. You learn syllogisms from philosophers; but how you are to act, you know better than they."—(Boston Translation, p. 66.)

should have common sense. All this is

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 my 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).

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. Had I gone on

termission..

writing, it would have much disturbed the important transformation in my opinions and character, which took place during those years" [of the "crisis"] (p. 132).

It would rather have hastened it, or made it more intense. The advice 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 counterfrom the India House, his short acted by the exercise going to and 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