ABSTRACT
This is John Mill’s judgment on himself; it is frank and accurate. Born in 1806, he had been trained by his father from earliest boyhood to weigh arguments and evidence. “The education which my father gave me was in itself much more tted for training me to know than to do” (Autob., p. 37). But we cannot wish this fault undone, the issue of it being so proper. The boy grew up in the habit of thinking for himself, and by following his father’s rules arrived in manhood at conclusions very dierent from his father’s (Autob., p. 179). At rst it was not so. From about 1821 to 1826 he was devoted heart and soul to Bentham’s principles; his aim in life was to be a reformer (Autob., p. 132); his philosophy was Bentham’s Utilitarianism in conjunction with Ricardo’s Political Economy, Malthus’s doctrine of Population, and James Mill’s Psychology (ib., 64 seq., pp. 105, 108, etc.) “No youth of the age I then was can be expected (he himself says) to be more than one thing,” and the thing he then most desired to be was an eighteenth century philosophe (ib., p. 109). After his great mental “awakening” in 1826, he ceased to be “only one thing,” and became really a philosopher. He discovered the value of feeling and of a “due balance among the faculties.” He gained the habit of avoiding half-truths, and of looking at questions from his opponent’s point of view, with a constant sense of his own fallibility (Autob., pp. 132-162). The beginning of the change seems to have been a reection on the results of “victorious analysis” in his own person; he feared it had worn away his power of feeling. One result of the change was a correction of his old Utilitarianism. He now thought that the way to attain happiness is not to pursue it directly, but “to treat some end external to it as the purpose of life” (ib., p. 142).
