Autobiography by John Stuart Mill (easy books to read txt) 📖

the movement of opinion among the most cultivated part of

the new generation. Our debates were very different from those of common

debating societies, for they habitually consisted of the strongest

arguments and most philosophic principles which either side was able to

produce, thrown often into close and _serré_ confutations of one

another. The practice was necessarily very useful to us, and eminently

so to me. I never, indeed, acquired real fluency, and had always a bad

and ungraceful delivery; but I could make myself listened to: and as I

always wrote my speeches when, from the feelings involved, or the nature

of the ideas to be developed, expression seemed important, I greatly

increased my power of effective writing; acquiring not only an ear for

smoothness and rhythm, but a practical sense for _telling_ sentences,

and an immediate criterion of their telling property, by their effect on

a mixed audience.

 

The Society, and the preparation for it, together with the preparation

for the morning conversations which were going on simultaneously,

occupied the greater part of my leisure; and made me feel it a relief

when, in the spring of 1828, I ceased to write for the _Westminster_.

The _Review_ had fallen into difficulties. Though the sale of the first

number had been very encouraging, the permanent sale had never, I

believe, been sufficient to pay the expenses, on the scale on which the

_Review_ was carried on. Those expenses had been considerably, but not

sufficiently, reduced. One of the editors, Southern, had resigned; and

several of the writers, including my father and me, who had been paid

like other contributors for our earlier articles, had latterly written

without payment. Nevertheless, the original funds were nearly or quite

exhausted, and if the _Review_ was to be continued some new arrangement

of its affairs had become indispensable. My father and I had several

conferences with Bowring on the subject. We were willing to do our

utmost for maintaining the _Review_ as an organ of our opinions, but not

under Bowring's editorship: while the impossibility of its any longer

supporting a paid editor, afforded a ground on which, without affront to

him, we could propose to dispense with his services. We and some of our

friends were prepared to carry on the _Review_ as unpaid writers, either

finding among ourselves an unpaid editor, or sharing the editorship

among us. But while this negotiation was proceeding with Bowring's

apparent acquiescence, he was carrying on another in a different quarter

(with Colonel Perronet Thompson), of which we received the first

intimation in a letter from Bowring as editor, informing us merely that

an arrangement had been made, and proposing to us to write for the next

number, with promise of payment. We did not dispute Bowring's right to

bring about, if he could, an arrangement more favourable to himself than

the one we had proposed; but we thought the concealment which he had

practised towards us, while seemingly entering into our own project, an

affront: and even had we not thought so, we were indisposed to expend

any more of our time and trouble in attempting to write up the _Review_

under his management. Accordingly my father excused himself from

writing; though two or three years later, on great pressure, he did

write one more political article. As for me, I positively refused. And

thus ended my connexion with the original _Westminster_. The last

article which I wrote in it had cost me more labour than any previous;

but it was a labour of love, being a defence of the early French

Revolutionists against the Tory misrepresentations of Sir Walter Scott,

in the introduction to his _Life of Napoleon_. The number of books which

I read for this purpose, making notes and extracts--even the number I

had to buy (for in those days there was no public or subscription

library from which books of reference could be taken home)--far exceeded

the worth of the immediate object; but I had at that time a half-formed

intention of writing a History of the French Revolution; and though I

never executed it, my collections afterwards were very useful to Carlyle

for a similar purpose. 

CHAPTER V (CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY. ONE STAGE ONWARD)

For some years after this time I wrote very little, and nothing

regularly, for publication: and great were the advantages which I

derived from the intermission. It was of no common importance to me, at

this period, to be able to digest and mature my thoughts for my own mind

only, without any immediate call for giving them out in print. Had I

gone on writing, it would have much disturbed the important

transformation in my opinions and character, which took place during

those years. The origin of this transformation, or at least the process

by which I was prepared for it, can only be explained by turning some

distance back.

 

From the winter of 1821, when I first read Bentham, and especially from

the commencement of the _Westminster Review_, I had what might truly be

called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world. My conception

of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object. The

personal sympathies I wished for were those of fellow labourers in this

enterprise. I endeavoured to pick up as many flowers as I could by the

way; but as a serious and permanent personal satisfaction to rest upon,

my whole reliance was placed on this; and I was accustomed to felicitate

myself on the certainty of a happy life which I enjoyed, through placing

my happiness in something durable and distant, in which some progress

might be always making, while it could never be exhausted by complete

attainment. This did very well for several years, during which the

general improvement going on in the world and the idea of myself as

engaged with others in struggling to promote it, seemed enough to fill

up an interesting and animated existence. But the time came when I

awakened from this as from a dream. It was in the autumn of 1826. I was

in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to;

unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods

when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent;

the state, I should think, in which converts to Methodism usually are,

when smitten by their first "conviction of sin." In this frame of mind

it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: "Suppose that

all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in

institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be

completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and

happiness to you?" And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly

answered, "No!" At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on

which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have

been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to

charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I

seemed to have nothing left to live for.

 

At first I hoped that the cloud would pass away of itself; but it did

not. A night's sleep, the sovereign remedy for the smaller vexations of

life, had no effect on it. I awoke to a renewed consciousness of the

woful fact. I carried it with me into all companies, into all

occupations. Hardly anything had power to cause me even a few minutes'

oblivion of it. For some months the cloud seemed to grow thicker and

thicker. The lines in Coleridge's _Dejection_--I was not then acquainted

with them--exactly describe my case:

 

   "A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,

   A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,

   Which finds no natural outlet or relief

   In word, or sigh, or tear."

 

In vain I sought relief from my favourite books; those memorials of past

nobleness and greatness from which I had always hitherto drawn strength

and animation. I read them now without feeling, or with the accustomed

feeling minus all its charm; and I became persuaded, that my love of

mankind, and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself out. I

sought no comfort by speaking to others of what I felt. If I had loved

anyone sufficiently to make confiding my griefs a necessity, I should

not have been in the condition I was. I felt, too, that mine was not an

interesting, or in any way respectable distress. There was nothing in it

to attract sympathy. Advice, if I had known where to seek it, would have

been most precious. The words of Macbeth to the physician often occurred

to my thoughts. But there was no one on whom I could build the faintest

hope of such assistance. My father, to whom it would have been natural

to me to have recourse in any practical difficulties, was the last

person to whom, in such a case as this, I looked for help. Everything

convinced me that he had no knowledge of any such mental state as I was

suffering from, and that even if he could be made to understand it, he

was not the physician who could heal it. My education, which was wholly

his work, had been conducted without any regard to the possibility of

its ending in this result; and I saw no use in giving him the pain of

thinking that his plans had failed, when the failure was probably

irremediable, and, at all events, beyond the power of _his_ remedies. Of

other friends, I had at that time none to whom I had any hope of making

my condition intelligible. It was, however, abundantly intelligible to

myself; and the more I dwelt upon it, the more hopeless it appeared.

 

My course of study had led me to believe, that all mental and moral

feelings and qualities, whether of a good or of a bad kind, were the

results of association; that we love one thing, and hate another, take

pleasure in one sort of action or contemplation, and pain in another

sort, through the clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to those

things, from the effect of education or of experience. As a corollary

from this, I had always heard it maintained by my father, and was myself

convinced, that the object of education should be to form the strongest

possible associations of the salutary class; associations of pleasure

with all things beneficial to the great whole, and of pain with all

things hurtful to it. This doctrine appeared inexpugnable; but it now

seemed to me, on retrospect, that my teachers had occupied themselves

but superficially with the means of forming and keeping up these

salutary associations. They seemed to have trusted altogether to the old

familiar instruments, praise and blame, reward and punishment. Now, I

did not doubt that by these means, begun early, and applied unremittingly,

intense associations of pain and pleasure, especially of pain, might be

created, and might produce desires and aversions capable of lasting

undiminished to the end of life. But there must always be something

artificial and casual in associations thus produced. The pains and

pleasures thus forcibly associated with things, are not connected with

them by any natural tie; and it is therefore, I thought, essential to

the durability of these associations, that they should have become so

intense and inveterate as to be practically indissoluble, before the

habitual exercise of the power of analysis had commenced. For I now saw,

or thought I saw, what I had always before received with incredulity

--that the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings:

as indeed it has, when no other mental habit is cultivated, and the

analysing spirit remains without its natural complements and

correctives. The very excellence of analysis (I argued) is that it tends

to weaken and undermine whatever is the result of prejudice; that it

enables us mentally to separate ideas which have only casually clung

together: and no associations whatever could ultimately resist this

dissolving force, were it not that we owe to analysis our clearest

knowledge of the permanent sequences in nature; the real connexions

between Things,