III.

John Stuart Mill in the nature of the case could not, and, as a matter of fact, did not, remain very long satisfied with the system of ideas he had been defending so vociferously. A broadening-out process began very soon. It can be seen in the story of Mill's inner experience during these years, and in the story of his friendships. Of the inner experiences that went with his developing point of view, Mill provides a detailed account in the Autobiography in the chapter on the "Mental Crisis." In his own words, he 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." It occurred to him to ask himself whether if "all the changes in institutions and opinions" which he had been looking forward to were realized, he would be really happy. “And an irrepressible selfconsciousness distinctly answered 'No'."

He says:

"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."

Mill goes on to give at some length his theory of the cause of this melancholy episode. His account must not be taken uncritically. It was written a long time after, and is in terms of his father's psychology. But it is true in general that Mill's later accounts of his earlier mental processes as given in the Autobiography, are pretty accurate. And his account of the mental crises, however untrue it may be as a matter of fact, may, at least, be accepted as a trustworthy

* Autobiography, p. 94.

statement of what Mill thought was the trouble with him at the time. He had been brought up to believe that

“all mental and moral feelings and qualities, whether of a good or bad kind, were the results of association."

"We love one thing, and hate another, take pleasure in one sort of action or contemplation and pain in another sort, through the clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to those things, from the effect of education or of experience. As a corollary from this,” he says, "I had always heard it maintained by my father, and was myself convinced, that the object of education should be to form the strongest possible associations of the salutary class; associations of pleasure with all things beneficial to the great whole, and of pain with all things hurtful to it."

But now he made the discovery that the "habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings." If, for instance, you know that your feeling of pleasure over work well done is just the result of the long habit of associating work well done with the pleasure of praise and reward, there is a danger that the association between pleasure and work well done will be broken down. Thus Mill goes on to say, analytical habits are a

"perpetual worm at the root both of the passions and of the virtues; and, above all, fearfully undermine all desires, and all pleasures, which are the effects of association, that is, according to the theory I held,' all except the purely physical and organic; of the entire insufficiency of which to make life desirable, no one had a stronger conviction than I had.”

99 27

It seemed to him that his father had taught him habits of analysis before these valuable associations had had time to become sufficiently strongly cemented:

"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; without any real desire for the ends which I had been so carefully fitted out to work for; no delight in virtue, or the general good, but also just as little in anything else. The

fountains of vanity and ambition seemed to have dried up within me, as completely as those of benevolence."

"Neither selfish nor unselfish pleasures were pleasures to me. And there seemed no power in nature sufficient to begin the formation of my character anew, and create in a mind now irretrievably analytic, fresh associations of pleasure with any of the objects of human desire. . . . These were the thoughts which mingled with the dry heavy dejection of the melancholy winter of 1826-7.” “

With the Spring of 1827 came some relief. Mill was reading Marmontel's Memoirs, and came upon the passage where Marmontel, still a boy, comforted his family on the occasion of his father's death by telling them that he would take his father's place. Mill says:

"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. The oppression of the thought that all feeling was dead within me, was gone. I was no longer hopeless; I was not a stock or a stone. I had still, it seemed, some of the material out of which all worth of character, and all capacity for happiness, are made."

The importance of this episode is not so much that Mill was inspired by the example of the young Marmontel, as that he found that he could be moved to tears. He was not a stock or a stone. He was not a machine governed by reason and with pleasures "purely physical and organic” for motive power. He had honestly thought that he was. He had taken the doctrine of Bentham and his father literally, and found that it did not work. This is what makes the mental crisis so important in the development of his thought.

It was at this time that he began to read Wordsworth. And in Wordsworth's portrayal of objects of natural beauty, in his appeal to the finer sensibilities, Mill found a medicine for his unhappy state of mind. He discovered that there was "real permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation."

He tells us that this experience had two marked effects "Autobiography, p. 98.

upon his "opinion and character." In the first place, it convinced him that happiness was to be found not by seeking happiness, but by "aiming at something else"; and in the second place, he now saw the importance of the "internal culture of the individual."" But more important still, or perhaps underlying these two conclusions, was the discovery that associations of pleasure and pain with acts that are socially valuable are not purely artificial and arbitrary, but have, as Mill says in a passage in Utilitarianism which we will quote again before the end of this paper, “a firm foundation" in a "powerful natural sentiment"-"the social feelings of mankind." The habit of analysis in Mill's case had done its worst, but had not succeeded in entirely wiping out the feeling side of his nature after all.

So much for Mill's own story. But there were other causes for his trouble which he does not take into account. The trouble was partly physical, a matter of overwork with which the editing of Bentham on Evidence must have had not a little to do, and this was complicated by the spiritual readjustment involved when Mill began to find out that the scheme of salvation for the world which had seemed so completely satisfactory wasn't so satisfactory after all. He had simply been juggling a lot of technical terms-individual, happiness, liberty, democracy. Now he was beginning to want to know what they meant. He was discovering that "groping, perplexing research, hopeless, thankless toil," was going to be required after all. He had to start out on an exploring expedition of his own, which involved at the start great hospitality to new points of view very different from the traditional Utilitarian philosophy, new friendships, new experiences. The story of his intellectual development is the story of his attempt to adapt the philosophy of his early years to the life and thought of a new age.

Chapter III.

Some Important Friendships.

I.

Writing to Carlyle in 1834, Mill mentions a review in an "early number of Tait" (1832 to be exact) which shows the change that had taken place in his point of view. "It was," Mill says in his letter to Carlyle, "the truest paper I had ever written, for it was the most completely an outgrowth of my own mind and character; not that what is there taught was the best I even then had to teach, nor perhaps did I even think it so, but it contained what was uppermost in me at that time, and differed from most also that I knew in having emanated from me, not, with more or less perfect assimilation, merely worked itself into me.""

It is hardly possible to imagine a greater contrast between the author of this review and the cocksure young prodigy who wrote the article on the Edinburgh Magazine and the review of Brodie's History of England four or five years before. The article is a kind of confession. It is his own early sins that Mill is declaiming against. The book reviewed is the Use and Abuse of Political Terms by G. C. Lewis. As the title indicates, it is a criticism of the use of certain political terms (as Right, State of Nature, Liberty, Force) by political writers of the time, with a view to arriving at clear concepts and a common understanding of the things

'J. S. Mill, Letters, Vol. I. p. 89. This review will be found reprinted in full as an appendix to this dissertation.