94 



JOHN STUART MILL. 



sensible till he asked himself the foolish 

 question, already given, when he "was 

 in a dull state of nerves, such as every- 

 body 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 diffi- 

 cult 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 de- 

 ficient in common sense, and sadly 

 required Mrs. Taylor, or some other 

 person, to be at his side, to keep 

 him right in that respect. Philoso- 

 phers, or some so-called philoso- 

 phers 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 

 should have common sense. All this is 

 nonsense. You learn syllogisms from 

 philosophers ; but how you are to act, 

 you know better than they." (Boston 

 Translation, p. 66.) 



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 in- 

 attention, 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 superin- 

 duced by the life, physical and men- 

 tal, 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 ad- 

 vantages which I derived from the in- 

 termission Had I gone on 



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 ad- 

 vice 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 con- 

 nected 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 his- 

 tory 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 counter- 

 acted by the exercise going to and 

 from the India House, his short 

 hours, and his duties there, for these 

 were 



" Sufficiently intellectual not to be dis- 

 tasteful 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 liter- 

 ary composition " (p. 83). 



In giving an account of his edu- 

 cation, 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 know- 

 ledge 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 



