264 Proceedings of the Royal Society 
In these years various influences helped to show that he had 
a nature too deep and human to be satisfied with the hard 
Benthamite creed in which he was trained. For some years after 
1828 he wrote little, and nothing regularly, for publication. 
He congratulates himself on this. If he had gone on writing, it 
would have disturbed, he thinks, an important transformation in 
his opinions and character which was taking place about this time. 
For years his one object in life had been to be a reformer of 
society. He was now awakened from this as from a dream. All 
his happiness was to have been found in the steady pursuit of 
this end : the end, he found, had ceased to charm him, and he 
seemed to himself to have nothing left to live for. He was weighed 
down by melancholy. Part of the explanation probably was that 
his nerves were exhausted by an early life too purely intellectual. 
His condition so far reminds one of the account which David Hume 
gives of himself in the very curious letter to a physician, written 
at a corresponding period of life, and preserved among the papers 
in the possession of this Society, published by Mr Burton in his 
u Life of David Hume.” It is interesting to compare Hume’s story, 
in that letter, and Mr Mill’s in his “Autobiography.” The health 
of both seems to have been broken for the time by a too ardent 
application to abstract studies. The truth, however, was that Mill 
had discovered in some degree the narrowness of the theory of life 
on which his early training had been based. It had left him 
nothing worth living for. Mill, like Hume, gradually recovered, 
but with a more marked change in his mental tone and opinions 
afterwards than one finds in Hume. His early Utilitarianism was 
modified. While still convinced that happiness was the chief end 
of human life, he now, with doubtful consistency, thought that this 
was to be attained by not making it the direct end ; and that those 
only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other 
than their own happiness — the philanthropic improvement of man- 
kind, for instance. He found, too, that the emotions needed to be 
cultivated as well as the intellect. He began to feel the import- 
ance of poetry and art, especially music, as instruments of human 
culture. He was always very fond of music, and a scientific pro- 
ficient. 
The reading of Wordsworth for the first time, in the autumn of 
