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Volume 25:

Autobiography (full text) & On Liberty (full text) by John Stuart Mill

The education of John Stuart Mill, as outlined in his Autobiography, would make a great Frank Capra -- or perhaps Ron Howard -- movie. Mill's father, John Mill, was a leading Utilitarian thinker in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Mill pere seems to have had all of the moral authority and emotional coldness still associated with that school. (Benthamites, they were still called then.) He treated the education of his son like an experiment. No summary of the process could quite do it justice, so I'll quote at length a typical passage from the early pages of the Autobiography:

I have no remembrance of the time when I began to learn Greek. I have been told that it was when I was three years old. My earliest recollection on the subject, is that of committing to memory what my father termed Vocables, being lists of common Greek words, with their signification in English, which he wrote out for me on cards. Of grammar, until some years later, I learnt no more than the inflexions of the nouns and verbs, but, after a course of vocables, proceeded at once to translation; and I faintly remember going through Aesop's Fables, the first Greek book which I read. The Anabasis, which I remember better, was the second. I learnt no Latin until my eighth year. At that time I had read, under my father’s tuition, a number of Greek prose authors, among whom I remember the whole of Herodotus, and of Xenophon's Cyropaedia and Memorials of Socrates; some of the lives of the philosophers by Diogenes Laertius; part of Lucian, and Isocrates ad Demonicum and Ad Nicoclem. I also read, in 1813, the first six dialogues (in the common arrangement) of Plato, from the Euthyphron to the Theaetetus inclusive: which last dialogue, I venture to think, would have been better omitted, as it was totally impossible I should understand it. But my father, in all his teaching, demanded of me not only the utmost that I could do, but much that I could by no possibility have done.

This method continued until Mill was, perhaps literally, the best read thirteen-year-old in Britain, without having gone to any school but his father's study. Eventually, he took a job in his father's office at the East India Company. He also fell, like his father, under Bentham's influence. He even founded a group called the Utilitarian Club, which gave the movement its lasting name, and dedicated himself to liberal reform. All of this would be interesting enough in its own right, but the real drama comes with the inevitable crisis.

But the time came when I awakened from this as from a dream. It was in the autumn of 1826 [i.e., when Mill was 20 years old]. I was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent ... In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: "Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?" And 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 have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

In his desperation, he returns to the favorite books that his father has pressed on him, and finds nothing there. As for human companionship: If I had loved any one sufficiently to make confiding my griefs a necessity, I should not have been in the condition I was. And the man who had been his closest companion in his life to that point?

My father, to whom it would have been natural to me to have recourse in any practical difficulties, was the last person 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 that even if he could be made to understand 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 failure was probably irremediable, and, at all events, beyond the power of his remedies.

Here's where Capra and Howard come in, because the solution that Mill find is so simple and heartwarming as almost to defy belief. He discovers that there is more to life than diligent study. There is such a thing as feeling. He reads Wordsworth. He read Coleridge. He listens to music. He decides that a man's internal culture matters as much as his action in the world. Perhaps most strikingly, he continues on a path much like the one his father laid out for him, but does so with a sense of well being that his father could never teach him.

Characteristics (full text), Inaugural Address at Edinburgh (full text) & Sir Walter Scott (full text) by Thomas Carlyle

At the depth of his depression, Mill read Thomas Carlyle, and the experience played a major part in his return to good health. Carlyle, who wrote under the sway of German Romanticism, was the tempermental opposite of the elder Mill. Like him, Carlyle abandoned Christianity, but unlike Mill, he missed it, and he lamented living in an age of disbelief. (In the Autobiography's funniest moment, Carlyle writes to tell J.S. Mill that he sees in him another mystic, forcing Mill to admit that he was as yet consciously nothing of a mystic.)

But Carlyle appealed to Mill because he diagnosed Mill's disease -- frigid over-intellectualizing -- as the disease of the age:

The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick: this is the Physician’s Aphorism; and applicable in a far wider sense than he gives it. We may say, it holds no less in moral, intellectual, political, poetical, than in merely corporeal therapeutics; that wherever, or in what shape soever, powers of the sort which can be named vital are at work, herein lies the test of their working right or working wrong. ... We might pursue this question into innumerable other ramifications; and everywhere, under new shapes, find the same truth, which we here so imperfectly enunciate, disclosed; that throughout the whole world of man, in all manifestations and performances of his nature, outward and inward, personal and social, the Perfect, the Great is a mystery to itself, knows not itself; whatsoever does know itself is already little, and more or less imperfect. Or otherwise, we may say, Unconsciousness belongs to pure unmixed life; Consciousness to a diseased mixture and conflict of life and death.

Carlyle ranks among the high points for me of the Classics so far. Reading him reminded me, once again, how much of what we consider quintessentially post-modern (in this case, a crippling self-consciousness that overwhelms authentic vitality) was not only present but written about long before our time.


--CRB, July 25, 2007

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