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

his own very

decided individuality of character. He was a man of great intellectual

powers, which in conversation appeared at their very best; from the

vigour and richness of expression with which, under the excitement of

discussion, he was accustomed to maintain some view or other of most

general subjects; and from an appearance of not only strong, but

deliberate and collected will; mixed with a certain bitterness, partly

derived from temperament, and partly from the general cast of his

feelings and reflections. The dissatisfaction with life and the world,

felt more or less in the present state of society and intellect by

every discerning and highly conscientious mind, gave in his case a

rather melancholy tinge to the character, very natural to those whose

passive moral susceptibilities are more than proportioned to their

active energies. For it must be said, that the strength of will of

which his manner seemed to give such strong assurance, expended itself

principally in manner. With great zeal for human improvement, a strong

sense of duty, and capacities and acquirements the extent of which is

proved by the writings he has left, he hardly ever completed any

intellectual task of magnitude. He had so high a standard of what

ought to be done, so exaggerated a sense of deficiencies in his own

performances, and was so unable to content himself with the amount of

elaboration sufficient for the occasion and the purpose, that he not

only spoilt much of his work for ordinary use by overlabouring it, but

spent so much time and exertion in superfluous study and thought, that

when his task ought to have been completed, he had generally worked

himself into an illness, without having half finished what he

undertook. From this mental infirmity (of which he is not the sole

example among the accomplished and able men whom I have known),

combined with liability to frequent attacks of disabling though not

dangerous ill-health, he accomplished, through life, little in

comparison with what he seemed capable of; but what he did produce is

held in the very highest estimation by the most competent judges; and,

like Coleridge, he might plead as a set-off that he had been to many

persons, through his conversation, a source not only of much

instruction but of great elevation of character. On me his influence

was most salutary. It was moral in the best sense. He took a sincere

and kind interest in me, far beyond what could have been expected

towards a mere youth from a man of his age, standing, and what seemed

austerity of character. There was in his conversation and demeanour a

tone of high-mindedness which did not show itself so much, if the

quality existed as much, in any of the other persons with whom at that

time I associated. My intercourse with him was the more beneficial,

owing to his being of a different mental type from all other

intellectual men whom I frequented, and he from the first set himself

decidedly against the prejudices and narrownesses which are almost

sure to be found in a young man formed by a particular mode of thought

or a particular social circle.

 

His younger brother, Charles Austin, of whom at this time and for the

next year or two I saw much, had also a great effect on me, though of

a very different description. He was but a few years older than

myself, and had then just left the University, where he had shone with

great _éclat_ as a man of intellect and a brilliant orator and

converser. The effect he produced on his Cambridge contemporaries

deserves to be accounted an historical event; for to it may in part be

traced the tendency towards Liberalism in general, and the Benthamic

and politico-economic form of it in particular, which showed itself in

a portion of the more active-minded young men of the higher classes

from this time to 1830. The Union Debating Society, at that time at

the height of its reputation, was an arena where what were then

thought extreme opinions, in politics and philosophy, were weekly

asserted, face to face with their opposites, before audiences

consisting of the _élite_ of the Cambridge youth: and though many

persons afterwards of more or less note (of whom Lord Macaulay is the

most celebrated) gained their first oratorical laurels in those

debates, the really influential mind among these intellectual

gladiators was Charles Austin. He continued, after leaving the

University, to be, by his conversation and personal ascendency, a

leader among the same class of young men who had been his associates

there; and he attached me among others to his car. Through him I

became acquainted with Macaulay, Hyde and Charles Villiers, Strutt

(now Lord Belper), Romilly (now Lord Romilly and Master of the Rolls),

and various others who subsequently figured in literature or politics,

and among whom I heard discussions on many topics, as yet to a certain

degree new to me. The influence of Charles Austin over me differed

from that of the persons I have hitherto mentioned, in being not the

influence of a man over a boy, but that of an elder contemporary. It

was through him that I first felt myself, not a pupil under teachers,

but a man among men. He was the first person of intellect whom I met

on a ground of equality, though as yet much his inferior on that

common ground. He was a man who never failed to impress greatly those

with whom he came in contact, even when their opinions were the very

reverse of his. The impression he gave was that of boundless strength,

together with talents which, combined with such apparent force of will

and character, seemed capable of dominating the world. Those who knew

him, whether friendly to him or not, always anticipated that he would

play a conspicuous part in public life. It is seldom that men produce

so great an immediate effect by speech, unless they, in some degree,

lay themselves out for it; and he did this in no ordinary degree. He

loved to strike, and even to startle. He knew that decision is the

greatest element of effect, and he uttered his opinions with all the

decision he could throw into them, never so well pleased as when he

astonished anyone by their audacity. Very unlike his brother, who made

war against the narrower interpretations and applications of the

principles they both professed, he, on the contrary, presented the

Benthamic doctrines in the most startling form of which they were

susceptible, exaggerating everything in them which tended to

consequences offensive to anyone's preconceived feelings. All which,

he defended with such verve and vivacity, and carried off by a manner

so agreeable as well as forcible, that he always either came off

victor, or divided the honours of the field. It is my belief that much

of the notion popularly entertained of the tenets and sentiments of

what are called Benthamites or Utilitarians had its origin in paradoxes

thrown out by Charles Austin. It must be said, however, that his example

was followed, _haud passibus aequis_, by younger proselytes, and that to

_outrer_ whatever was by anybody considered offensive in the doctrines

and maxims of Benthamism, became at one time the badge of a small coterie

of youths. All of these who had anything in them, myself among others,

quickly outgrew this boyish vanity; and those who had not, became tired

of differing from other people, and gave up both the good and the bad part

of the heterodox opinions they had for some time professed.

 

It was in the winter of 1822-3 that I formed the plan of a little

society, to be composed of young men agreeing in fundamental

principles--acknowledging Utility as their standard in ethics and

politics, and a certain number of the principal corollaries drawn from

it in the philosophy I had accepted--and meeting once a fortnight to

read essays and discuss questions conformably to the premises thus

agreed on. The fact would hardly be worth mentioning, but for the

circumstance, that the name I gave to the society I had planned was the

Utilitarian Society. It was the first time that anyone had taken the

title of Utilitarian; and the term made its way into the language, from

this humble source. I did not invent the word, but found it in one of

Galt's novels, the _Annals of the Parish_, in which the Scotch

clergyman, of whom the book is a supposed autobiography, is represented

as warning his parishioners not to leave the Gospel and become

utilitarians. With a boy's fondness for a name and a banner I seized

on the word, and for some years called myself and others by it as a

sectarian appellation; and it came to be occasionally used by some

others holding the opinions which it was intended to designate. As those

opinions attracted more notice, the term was repeated by strangers and

opponents, and got into rather common use just about the time when those

who had originally assumed it, laid down that along with other sectarian

characteristics. The Society so called consisted at first of no more

than three members, one of whom, being Mr. Bentham's amanuensis,

obtained for us permission to hold our meetings in his house. The number

never, I think, reached ten, and the Society was broken up in 1826. It

had thus an existence of about three years and a half. The chief effect

of it as regards myself, over and above the benefit of practice in oral

discussion, was that of bringing me in contact with several young men at

that time less advanced than myself, among whom, as they professed the

same opinions, I was for some time a sort of leader, and had considerable

influence on their mental progress. Any young man of education who fell

in my way, and whose opinions were not incompatible with those of the

Society, I endeavoured to press into its service; and some others I

probably should never have known, had they not joined it. Those of the

members who became my intimate companions--no one of whom was in any sense

of the word a disciple, but all of them independent thinkers on their own

basis--were William Eyton Tooke, son of the eminent political economist,

a young man of singular worth both moral and intellectual, lost to the

world by an early death; his friend William Ellis, an original thinker in

the field of political economy, now honourably known by his apostolic

exertions for the improvement of education; George Graham, afterwards

official assignee of the Bankruptcy Court, a thinker of originality and

power on almost all abstract subjects; and (from the time when he came

first to England to study for the bar in 1824 or 1825) a man who has made

considerably more noise in the world than any of these, John Arthur Roebuck.

 

In May, 1823, my professional occupation and status for the next

thirty-five years of my life, were decided by my father's obtaining for

me an appointment from the East India Company, in the office of the

Examiner of India Correspondence, immediately under himself. I was

appointed in the usual manner, at the bottom of the list of clerks, to

rise, at least in the first instance, by seniority; but with the

understanding that I should be employed from the beginning in preparing

drafts of despatches, and be thus trained up as a successor to those who

then filled the higher departments of the office. My drafts of course

required, for some time, much revision from my immediate superiors, but

I soon became well acquainted with the business, and by my father's

instructions and the general growth of my own powers, I was in a few

years qualified to be, and practically was, the chief conductor of the

correspondence with India in one of the leading departments, that of the

Native States. This continued to be my official duty until I was

appointed Examiner, only two years before the time when the abolition of

the East India Company as a political body determined my retirement. I

do not know any one of the occupations by which a subsistence can now be

gained, more suitable than such as this to anyone who, not being in

independent circumstances, desires to devote a part of the twenty-four

hours to private intellectual pursuits. Writing for the press cannot be

recommended as a permanent resource to anyone qualified to accomplish

anything in the higher departments of literature or thought: not only on

account of the uncertainty of this means of livelihood, especially if

the writer has a conscience, and will not consent to serve any opinions

except his own; but also because the writings by which one can live are

not the writings which themselves live, and are never those in which the

writer does his best. Books destined to form future thinkers take too

much time to write, and when written come, in general, too slowly into

notice and repute, to be relied on