A CRISIS IN HIS HISTOR Y. 



in the " Crisis in his mental his- 

 tory," in his twenty-first year : 



" 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 [or ballast] ; without 

 any real desire for the ends which I had 

 been so carefully fitted out to work for 

 [for which everyone was apparently to 

 blame but himself] : no delight in vir- 

 tue or the general good, but also just as 

 little in anything else [as if he had been 

 ' a stock or a stone ']. The fountains of 

 vanity and ambition seemed to have 

 dried up within me, as completely as 

 those of benevolence [for whom ?] . I had 

 had (as I reflected) some gratification 



of vanity at too early an age 



Like all pleasures enjoyed too soon, it 

 had made me blase and indifferent to 

 the pursuit" (p. 139). [Here we have 

 a strange jumble of love of himself and 

 love of his kind.] 



All this was said while he was in 

 the " blues," and it might have 

 meant little or nothing, or been 

 part of the " blues " themselves ; 

 still he attributes what he said to 

 his education, which had failed to 

 create 



" Feelings in sufficient strength to re- 

 sist the dissolving influence of analysis, 

 while the whole course of my intellectual 

 cultivation had made precocious and 

 premature analysis the inveterate habit 

 of my mind " (p. 138). 



But he never forsook his first love 

 his darling analysis, for thus he 

 wrote of it : 



" I never turned recreant to intellec- 

 tual culture, or ceased to consider the 

 power and practice of analysis, as an es- 

 sential condition both of individual and 

 of social [?] improvements. But I 

 thought that it had consequences which 

 required to be corrected, by joining 

 other kinds of cultivation with it" (p. 

 143). 



The crisis, however, led him to 

 " adopt a theory of life very unlike 

 that on which I had before acted, 

 and having much in common with 

 what at the time [when in his 

 twenty-first year] I certainly had 



95 



never heard of [now we have a 

 great discovery], the anti-self-con- 

 sciousness theory of Carlyle " (p. 

 142), that is, that happiness should 

 not be the direct end (for then it 

 would be selfishness) ; and we have 

 a good deal of philosophizing on 

 the point, the conclusion of which 

 was, that this theory which he 

 "certainly had never heard of" 

 " now became the basis of my phil- 

 osophy of life " (p. 143). This 

 seems to be that happiness should 

 not consist in contemplating an ob- 

 ject as an end, but in using the 

 means to reach it a true enough 

 principle if applied to the Creator, 

 and to our fellow-creatures individu- 

 ally and collectively, that is, that 

 we should place our happiness in 

 the discharge of our duties to them, 

 without regard to our own ultimate 

 advantage or profit, or the passing 

 pleasure or pain it may give us in 

 using the means ; although few 

 would question the right to place 

 our happiness in both the object 

 and the means of attaining to it, if 

 both are disinterested in their na- 

 ture. If the happiness has no re- 

 ference to the Creator or our fellow- 

 creature, but merely to such of our 

 own affairs as the laws of God, so- 

 ciety, and the land approve of, or do 

 not disapprove of, then it consists in 

 contemplating an object and in using 

 reasonable and virtuous means to 

 attain it; both the object aimed at 

 and the means of reaching it con- 

 stituting the happiness, although, 

 when the object has been secured, 

 very little happiness is frequently 

 found to have been gained. In 

 short, Mill's anti-self-consciousness 

 theory seems to be but one of the 

 many instances of " tumbling " to 

 be found in his Autobiography and 

 history generally. 



Mill then goes on to say that he 

 added to his limited dry and ab- 

 stract studies a number of others, 

 such as cultivation of the feelings, 

 and maintaining a due balance 

 among the faculties. 



