Autobiography, John Stuart Mill [best fiction books of all time txt] 📗

end to all this. The feeling rushed upon me, that all previous

moralists were superseded, and that here indeed was the commencement

of a new era in thought. This impression was strengthened by the

manner in which Bentham put into scientific form the application of

the happiness principle to the morality of actions, by analysing the

various classes and orders of their consequences. But what struck me

at that time most of all, was the Classification of Offences, which is

much more clear, compact, and imposing in Dumont's _rédaction_ than in

the original work of Bentham from which it was taken. Logic and the

dialectics of Plato, which had formed so large a part of my previous

training, had given me a strong relish for accurate classification.

This taste had been strengthened and enlightened by the study of

botany, on the principles of what is called the Natural Method, which

I had taken up with great zeal, though only as an amusement, during my

stay in France; and when I found scientific classification applied to

the great and complex subject of Punishable Acts, under the guidance

of the ethical principle of Pleasurable and Painful Consequences,

followed out in the method of detail introduced into these subjects by

Bentham, I felt taken up to an eminence from which I could survey a

vast mental domain, and see stretching out into the distance

intellectual results beyond all computation. As I proceeded further,

there seemed to be added to this intellectual clearness, the most

inspiring prospects of practical improvement in human affairs. To

Bentham's general view of the construction of a body of law I was not

altogether a stranger, having read with attention that admirable

compendium, my father's article on Jurisprudence: but I had read it

with little profit, and scarcely any interest, no doubt from its

extremely general and abstract character, and also because it

concerned the form more than the substance of the _corpus juris_, the

logic rather than the ethics of law. But Bentham's subject was

Legislation, of which Jurisprudence is only the formal part: and at

every page he seemed to open a clearer and broader conception of what

human opinions and institutions ought to be, how they might be made

what they ought to be, and how far removed from it they now are. When

I laid down the last volume of the _Traité_, I had become a different

being. The "principle of utility," understood as Bentham understood

it, and applied in the manner in which he applied it through these

three volumes, fell exactly into its place as the keystone which held

together the detached and fragmentary component parts of my knowledge

and beliefs. It gave unity to my conceptions of things. I now had

opinions; a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy; in one among the best

senses of the word, a religion; the inculcation and diffusion of which

could be made the principal outward purpose of a life. And I had a

grand conception laid before me of changes to be effected in the

condition of mankind through that doctrine. The _Traité de Legislation_

wound up with what was to me a most impressive picture of human life as

it would be made by such opinions and such laws as were recommended in

the treatise. The anticipations of practicable improvement were

studiously moderate, deprecating and discountenancing as reveries of

vague enthusiasm many things which will one day seem so natural to human

beings, that injustice will probably be done to those who once thought

them chimerical. But, in my state of mind, this appearance of superiority

to illusion added to the effect which Bentham's doctrines produced on me,

by heightening the impression of mental power, and the vista of improvement

which he did open was sufficiently large and brilliant to light up my life,

as well as to give a definite shape to my aspirations.

 

After this I read, from time to time, the most important of the other

works of Bentham which had then seen the light, either as written by

himself or as edited by Dumont. This was my private reading: while,

under my father's direction, my studies were carried into the higher

branches of analytic psychology. I now read Locke's _Essay_, and wrote

out an account of it, consisting of a complete abstract of every

chapter, with such remarks as occurred to me; which was read by, or

(I think) to, my father, and discussed throughout. I performed the same

process with _Helvetius de L'Esprit_, which I read of my own choice.

This preparation of abstracts, subject to my father's censorship, was

of great service to me, by compelling precision in conceiving and

expressing psychological doctrines, whether accepted as truths or only

regarded as the opinion of others. After Helvetius, my father made me

study what he deemed the really master-production in the philosophy

of mind, Hartley's _Observations on Man_. This book, though it did

not, like the _Traité de Législation_, give a new colour to my

existence, made a very similar impression on me in regard to its

immediate subject. Hartley's explanation, incomplete as in many points

it is, of the more complex mental phenomena by the law of association,

commended itself to me at once as a real analysis, and made me feel by

contrast the insufficiency of the merely verbal generalizations of

Condillac, and even of the instructive gropings and feelings about for

psychological explanations, of Locke. It was at this very time that my

father commenced writing his _Analysis_ of the Mind, which carried

Hartley's mode of explaining the mental phenomena to so much greater

length and depth. He could only command the concentration of thought

necessary for this work, during the complete leisure of his holiday

for a month or six weeks annually: and he commenced it in the summer

of 1822, in the first holiday he passed at Dorking; in which

neighbourhood, from that time to the end of his life, with the

exception of two years, he lived, as far as his official duties

permitted, for six months of every year. He worked at the _Analysis_

during several successive vacations, up to the year 1829, when it was

published, and allowed me to read the manuscript, portion by portion,

as it advanced. The other principal English writers on mental

philosophy I read as I felt inclined, particularly Berkeley, Hume's

_Essays_, Reid, Dugald Stewart and Brown on Cause and Effect. Brown's

_Lectures_ I did not read until two or three years later, nor at that

time had my father himself read them.

 

Among the works read in the course of this year, which contributed

materially to my development, I owe it to mention a book (written on

the foundation of some of Bentham's manuscripts and published under

the pseudonyme of Philip Beauchamp) entitled _Analysis of the Influence

of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind_. This was an

examination not of the truth, but of the usefulness of religious belief,

in the most general sense, apart from the peculiarities of any special

revelation; which, of all the parts of the discussion concerning

religion, is the most important in this age, in which real belief in

any religious doctrine is feeble and precarious, but the opinion of

its necessity for moral and social purposes almost universal; and when

those who reject revelation, very generally take refuge in an

optimistic Deism, a worship of the order of Nature, and the supposed

course of Providence, at least as full of contradictions, and

perverting to the moral sentiments, as any of the forms of

Christianity, if only it is as completely realized. Yet very little,

with any claim to a philosophical character, has been written by

sceptics against the usefulness of this form of belief. The volume

bearing the name of Philip Beauchamp had this for its special object.

Having been shown to my father in manuscript, it was put into my hands

by him, and I made a marginal analysis of it as I had done of the

_Elements of Political Economy_. Next to the Traité de Législation_,

it was one of the books which by the searching character of its

analysis produced the greatest effect upon me. On reading it lately

after an interval of many years, I find it to have some of the defects

as well as the merits of the Benthamic modes of thought, and to

contain, as I now think, many weak arguments, but with a great

overbalance of sound ones, and much good material for a more

completely philosophic and conclusive treatment of the subject.

 

I have now, I believe, mentioned all the books which had any

considerable effect on my early mental development. From this point

I began to carry on my intellectual cultivation by writing still more

than by reading. In the summer of 1822 I wrote my first argumentative

essay. I remember very little about it, except that it was an attack

on what I regarded as the aristocratic prejudice, that the rich were,

or were likely to be, superior in moral qualities to the poor. My

performance was entirely argumentative, without any of the declamation

which the subject would admit of, and might be expected to suggest to

a young writer. In that department, however, I was, and remained, very

inapt. Dry argument was the only thing I could, manage, or willingly

attempted; though passively I was very susceptible to the effect of

all composition, whether in the form of poetry or oratory, which

appealed to the feelings on any basis of reason. My father, who knew

nothing of this essay until it was finished, was well satisfied, and,

as I learnt from others, even pleased with it; but, perhaps from a

desire to promote the exercise of other mental faculties than the

purely logical, he advised me to make my next exercise in composition

one of the oratorical kind; on which suggestion, availing myself of

my familiarity with Greek history and ideas, and with the Athenian

orators, I wrote two speeches, one an accusation, the other a defence

of Pericles, on a supposed impeachment for not marching out to fight

the Lacedemonians on their invasion of Attica. After this I continued

to write papers on subjects often very much beyond my capacity, but

with great benefit both from the exercise itself, and from the

discussions which it led to with my father.

 

I had now also begun to converse, on general subjects, with the

instructed men with whom I came in contact: and the opportunities of

such contact naturally became more numerous. The two friends of my

father from whom I derived most, and with whom I most associated, were

Mr. Grote and Mr. John Austin. The acquaintance of both with my father

was recent, but had ripened rapidly into intimacy. Mr. Grote was

introduced to my father by Mr. Ricardo, I think in 1819 (being then

about twenty-five years old), and sought assiduously his society and

conversation. Already a highly instructed man, he was yet, by the side

of my father, a tyro in the great subjects of human opinion; but he

rapidly seized on my father's best ideas; and in the department of

political opinion he made himself known as early as 1820, by a

pamphlet in defence of Radical Reform, in reply to a celebrated

article by Sir James Mackintosh, then lately published in he

_Edinburgh Review_. Mr. Grote's father, the banker, was, I believe,

a thorough Tory, and his mother intensely Evangelical; so that for

his liberal opinions he was in no way indebted to home influences.

But, unlike most persons who have the prospect of being rich by

inheritance, he had, though actively engaged in the business of

banking, devoted a great portion of time to philosophic studies; and

his intimacy with my father did much to decide the character of the

next stage in his mental progress. Him I often visited, and my

conversations with him on political, moral, and philosophical subjects

gave me, in addition to much valuable instruction, all the pleasure

and benefit of sympathetic communion with a man of the high

intellectual and moral eminence which his life and writings have since

manifested to the world.

 

Mr. Austin, who was four or five years older than Mr. Grote, was the

eldest son of a retired miller in Suffolk, who had made money by

contracts during the war, and who must have been a man of remarkable

qualities, as I infer from the fact that all his sons were of more

than common ability and all eminently gentlemen. The one with whom we

are now concerned, and whose writings on jurisprudence have made him

celebrated, was for some time in the army, and served in Sicily under

Lord William Bentinck. After the Peace he sold his commission and

studied for the bar, to which he had been called for some time before

my father knew him. He was not, like Mr. Grote, to any extent, a pupil

of my father, but he had attained, by reading and thought, a

considerable number of the same opinions, modified by