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

It is not forgotten with what

verve and talent, as well as fine wit, he carried it on, during the

whole period of Lord Grey's Ministry, and what importance it assumed as

the principal representative, in the newspaper press, of Radical

opinions. The distinguishing character of the paper was given to it

entirely by his own articles, which formed at least three-fourths of all

the original writing contained in it: but of the remaining fourth I

contributed during those years a much larger share than anyone else. I

wrote nearly all the articles on French subjects, including a weekly

summary of French politics, often extending to considerable length;

together with many leading articles on general politics, commercial and

financial legislation, and any miscellaneous subjects in which I felt

interested, and which were suitable to the paper, including occasional

reviews of books. Mere newspaper articles on the occurrences or

questions of the moment, gave no opportunity for the development of any

general mode of thought; but I attempted, in the beginning of 1831, to

embody in a series of articles, headed "The Spirit of the Age," some of

my new opinions, and especially to point out in the character of the

present age, the anomalies and evils characteristic of the transition

from a system of opinions which had worn out, to another only in process

of being formed. These articles, were, I fancy, lumbering in style, and

not lively or striking enough to be, at any time, acceptable to

newspaper readers; but had they been far more attractive, still, at that

particular moment, when great political changes were impending, and

engrossing all minds, these discussions were ill-timed, and missed fire

altogether. The only effect which I know to have been produced by them,

was that Carlyle, then living in a secluded part of Scotland, read them

in his solitude, and, saying to himself (as he afterwards told me) "Here

is a new Mystic," inquired on coming to London that autumn respecting

their authorship; an inquiry which was the immediate cause of our

becoming personally acquainted.

 

I have already mentioned Carlyle's earlier writings as one of the

channels through which I received the influences which enlarged my early

narrow creed; but I do not think that those writings, by themselves,

would ever have had any effect on my opinions. What truths they

contained, though of the very kind which I was already receiving from

other quarters, were presented in a form and vesture less suited than

any other to give them access to a mind trained as mine had been. They

seemed a haze of poetry and German metaphysics, in which almost the only

clear thing was a strong animosity to most of the opinions which were

the basis of my mode of thought; religious scepticism, utilitarianism,

the doctrine of circumstances, and the attaching any importance to

democracy, logic, or political economy. Instead of my having been taught

anything, in the first instance, by Carlyle, it was only in proportion

as I came to see the same truths through media more suited to my mental

constitution, that I recognised them in his writings. Then, indeed, the

wonderful power with which he put them forth made a deep impression upon

me, and I was during a long period one of his most fervent admirers; but

the good his writings did me, was not as philosophy to instruct, but as

poetry to animate. Even at the time when our acquaintance commenced, I

was not sufficiently advanced in my new modes of thought to appreciate

him fully; a proof of which is, that on his showing me the manuscript of

_Sartor Resartus_, his best and greatest work, which he just then

finished, I made little of it; though when it came out about two years

afterwards in _Fraser's Magazine_ I read it with enthusiastic admiration

and the keenest delight. I did not seek and cultivate Carlyle less on

account of the fundamental differences in our philosophy. He soon found

out that I was not "another mystic," and when for the sake of my own

integrity I wrote to him a distinct profession of all those of my

opinions which I knew he most disliked, he replied that the chief

difference between us was that I "was as yet consciously nothing of a

mystic." I do not know at what period he gave up the expectation that I

was destined to become one; but though both his and my opinions

underwent in subsequent years considerable changes, we never approached

much nearer to each other's modes of thought than we were in the first

years of our acquaintance. I did not, however, deem myself a competent

judge of Carlyle. I felt that he was a poet, and that I was not; that he

was a man of intuition, which I was not; and that as such, he not only

saw many things long before me, which I could only, when they were

pointed out to me, hobble after and prove, but that it was highly

probable he could see many things which were not visible to me even

after they were pointed out. I knew that I could not see round him, and

could never be certain that I saw over him; and I never presumed to

judge him with any definiteness, until he was interpreted to me by one

greatly the superior of us both--who was more a poet than he, and more a

thinker than I--whose own mind and nature included his, and

infinitely more.

 

Among the persons of intellect whom I had known of old, the one with

whom I had now most points of agreement was the elder Austin. I have

mentioned that he always set himself in opposition to our early

sectarianism; and latterly he had, like myself, come under new

influences. Having been appointed Professor of Jurisprudence in the

London University (now University College), he had lived for some time

at Bonn to study for his Lectures; and the influences of German

literature and of the German character and state of society had made a

very perceptible change in his views of life. His personal disposition

was much softened; he was less militant and polemic; his tastes had

begun to turn themselves towards the poetic and contemplative. He

attached much less importance than formerly to outward changes; unless

accompanied by a better cultivation of the inward nature. He had a

strong distaste for the general meanness of English life, the absence of

enlarged thoughts and unselfish desires, the low objects on which the

faculties of all classes of the English are intent. Even the kind of

public interests which Englishmen care for, he held in very little

esteem. He thought that there was more practical good government, and

(which is true enough) infinitely more care for the education and mental

improvement of all ranks of the people, under the Prussian monarchy,

than under the English representative government: and he held, with the

French _Economistes_, that the real security for good government is un

_peuple éclairé_, which is not always the fruit of popular institutions,

and which, if it could be had without them, would do their work better

than they. Though he approved of the Reform Bill, he predicted, what in

fact occurred, that it would not produce the great immediate

improvements in government which many expected from it. The men, he

said, who could do these great things did not exist in the country.

There were many points of sympathy between him and me, both in the new

opinions he had adopted and in the old ones which he retained. Like me,

he never ceased to be a utilitarian, and, with all his love for the

Germans and enjoyment of their literature, never became in the smallest

degree reconciled to the innate-principle metaphysics. He cultivated

more and more a kind of German religion, a religion of poetry and

feeling with little, if anything, of positive dogma; while in politics

(and here it was that I most differed with him) he acquired an

indifference, bordering on contempt, for the progress of popular

institutions: though he rejoiced in that of Socialism, as the most

effectual means of compelling the powerful classes to educate the

people, and to impress on them the only real means of permanently

improving their material condition, a limitation of their numbers.

Neither was he, at this time, fundamentally opposed to Socialism in

itself as an ultimate result of improvement. He professed great

disrespect for what he called "the universal principles of human nature

of the political economists," and insisted on the evidence which history

and daily experience afford of the "extraordinary pliability of human

nature" (a phrase which I have somewhere borrowed from him); nor did he

think it possible to set any positive bounds to the moral capabilities

which might unfold themselves in mankind, under an enlightened direction

of social and educational influences. Whether he retained all these

opinions to the end of life I know not. Certainly the modes of thinking

of his later years, and especially of his last publication, were much

more Tory in their general character than those which he held at

this time.

 

My father's tone of thought and feeling, I now felt myself at a great

distance from: greater, indeed, than a full and calm explanation and

reconsideration on both sides, might have shown to exist in reality. But

my father was not one with whom calm and full explanations on

fundamental points of doctrine could be expected, at least with one whom

he might consider as, in some sort, a deserter from his standard.

Fortunately we were almost always in strong agreement on the political

questions of the day, which engrossed a large part of his interest and

of his conversation. On those matters of opinion on which we differed,

we talked little. He knew that the habit of thinking for myself, which

his mode of education had fostered, sometimes led me to opinions

different from his, and he perceived from time to time that I did not

always tell him _how_ different. I expected no good, but only pain to

both of us, from discussing our differences: and I never expressed them

but when he gave utterance to some opinion or feeling repugnant to mine,

in a manner which would have made it disingenuousness on my part to

remain silent.

 

It remains to speak of what I wrote during these years, which,

independently of my contributions to newspapers, was considerable. In

1830 and 1831 I wrote the five Essays since published under the title of

_Essays on some Unsettled Questions of political Economy_, almost as

they now stand, except that in 1833 I partially rewrote the fifth Essay.

They were written with no immediate purpose of publication; and when,

some years later, I offered them to a publisher, he declined them. They

were only printed in 1844, after the success of the _System of Logic_. I

also resumed my speculations on this last subject, and puzzled myself,

like others before me, with the great paradox of the discovery of new

truths by general reasoning. As to the fact, there could be no doubt. As

little could it be doubted, that all reasoning is resolvable into

syllogisms, and that in every syllogism the conclusion is actually

contained and implied in the premises. How, being so contained and

implied, it could be new truth, and how the theorems of geometry, so

different in appearance from the definitions and axioms, could be all

contained in these, was a difficulty which no, one, I thought, had

sufficiently felt, and which, at all events, no one had succeeded in

clearing up. The explanations offered by Whately and others, though they

might give a temporary satisfaction, always, in my mind, left a mist

still hanging over the subject. At last, when reading a second or third

time the chapters on Reasoning in the second volume of Dugald Stewart,

interrogating myself on every point, and following out, as far as I knew

how, every topic of thought which the book suggested, I came upon an

idea of his respecting the use of axioms in ratiocination, which I did

not remember to have before noticed, but which now, in meditating on it,

seemed to me not only true of axioms, but of all general propositions

whatever, and to be the key of the whole perplexity. From this germ grew

the theory of the Syllogism propounded in the Second Book of the

_Logic_; which I immediately fixed by writing it out. And now, with

greatly increased hope of being able to produce a work on Logic, of some

originality and value, I proceeded to write the First Book, from the

rough and imperfect draft I had already made. What I now wrote became

the basis of that part of the subsequent Treatise; except that it did

not contain the Theory of Kinds, which was a later addition, suggested

by otherwise inextricable difficulties which met me in my first attempt

to work out the subject of some of the concluding chapters of the