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

Third

Book. At the point which I had now reached I made a halt, which lasted

five years. I had come to the end of my tether; I could make nothing

satisfactory of Induction, at this time. I continued to read any book

which seemed to promise light on the subject, and appropriated, as well

as I could, the results; but for a long time I found nothing which

seemed to open to me any very important vein of meditation.

 

In 1832 I wrote several papers for the first series of _Tait's

Magazine_, and one for a quarterly periodical called the _Jurist_, which

had been founded, and for a short time carried on, by a set of friends,

all lawyers and law reformers, with several of whom I was acquainted.

The paper in question is the one on the rights and duties of the State

respecting Corporation and Church Property, now standing first among the

collected _Dissertations and Discussions_; where one of my articles in

_Tait_, "The Currency Juggle," also appears. In the whole mass of what

I wrote previous to these, there is nothing of sufficient permanent

value to justify reprinting. The paper in the _Jurist_, which I still

think a very complete discussion of the rights of the State over

Foundations, showed both sides of my opinions, asserting as firmly as I

should have done at any time, the doctrine that all endowments are

national property, which the government may and ought to control; but

not, as I should once have done, condemning endowments in themselves,

and proposing that they should be taken to pay off the national debt. On

the contrary, I urged strenuously the importance of a provision for

education, not dependent on the mere demand of the market, that is, on

the knowledge and discernment of average parents, but calculated to

establish and keep up a higher standard of instruction than is likely to

be spontaneously demanded by the buyers of the article. All these

opinions have been confirmed and strengthened by the whole of my

subsequent reflections. 

CHAPTER VI. (WRITINGS AND OTHER PROCEEDINGS UP TO 1840)

 

It was the period of my mental progress which I have now reached that I

formed the friendship which has been the honour and chief blessing of my

existence, as well as the source of a great part of all that I have

attempted to do, or hope to effect hereafter, for human improvement. My

first introduction to the lady who, after a friendship of twenty years,

consented to become my wife, was in 1830, when I was in my twenty-fifth

and she in her twenty-third year. With her husband's family it was the

renewal of an old acquaintanceship. His grandfather lived in the next

house to my father's in Newington Green, and I had sometimes when a boy

been invited to play in the old gentleman's garden. He was a fine

specimen of the old Scotch puritan; stern, severe, and powerful, but

very kind to children, on whom such men make a lasting impression.

Although it was years after my introduction to Mrs. Taylor before my

acquaintance with her became at all intimate or confidential, I very

soon felt her to be the most admirable person I had ever known. It is

not to be supposed that she was, or that any one, at the age at which I

first saw her, could be, all that she afterwards became. Least of all

could this be true of her, with whom self-improvement, progress in the

highest and in all senses, was a law of her nature; a necessity equally

from the ardour with which she sought it, and from the spontaneous

tendency of faculties which could not receive an impression or an

experience without making it the source or the occasion of an accession

of wisdom. Up to the time when I first saw her, her rich and powerful

nature had chiefly unfolded itself according to the received type of

feminine genius. To her outer circle she was a beauty and a wit, with an

air of natural distinction, felt by all who approached her: to the

inner, a woman of deep and strong feeling, of penetrating and intuitive

intelligence, and of an eminently meditative and poetic nature. Married

at an early age to a most upright, brave, and honourable man, of liberal

opinions and good education, but without the intellectual or artistic

tastes which would have made him a companion for her, though a steady

and affectionate friend, for whom she had true esteem and the strongest

affection through life, and whom she most deeply lamented when dead;

shut out by the social disabilities of women from any adequate exercise

of her highest faculties in action on the world without; her life was

one of inward meditation, varied by familiar intercourse with a small

circle of friends, of whom one only (long since deceased) was a person

of genius, or of capacities of feeling or intellect kindred with her

own, but all had more or less of alliance with her in sentiments and

opinions. Into this circle I had the good fortune to be admitted, and I

soon perceived that she possessed in combination, the qualities which in

all other persons whom I had known I had been only too happy to find

singly. In her, complete emancipation from every kind of superstition

(including that which attributes a pretended perfection to the order of

nature and the universe), and an earnest protest against many things

which are still part of the established constitution of society,

resulted not from the hard intellect, but from strength of noble and

elevated feeling, and co-existed with a highly reverential nature. In

general spiritual characteristics, as well as in temperament and

organisation, I have often compared her, as she was at this time, to

Shelley: but in thought and intellect, Shelley, so far as his powers

were developed in his short life, was but a child compared with what she

ultimately became. Alike in the highest regions of speculation and in

the smaller practical concerns of daily life, her mind was the same

perfect instrument, piercing to the very heart and marrow of the matter;

always seizing the essential idea or principle. The same exactness and

rapidity of operation, pervading as it did her sensitive as well as her

mental faculties, would, with her gifts of feeling and imagination, have

fitted her to be a consummate artist, as her fiery and tender soul and

her vigorous eloquence would certainly have made her a great orator, and

her profound knowledge of human nature and discernment and sagacity in

practical life, would, in the times when such a _carrière_ was open to

women, have made her eminent among the rulers of mankind. Her

intellectual gifts did but minister to a moral character at once the

noblest and the best balanced which I have ever met with in life. Her

unselfishness was not that of a taught system of duties, but of a heart

which thoroughly identified itself with the feelings of others, and

often went to excess in consideration for them by imaginatively

investing their feelings with the intensity of its own. The passion of

justice might have been thought to be her strongest feeling, but for her

boundless generosity, and a lovingness ever ready to pour itself forth

upon any or all human beings who were capable of giving the smallest

feeling in return. The rest of her moral characteristics were such as

naturally accompany these qualities of mind and heart: the most genuine

modesty combined with the loftiest pride; a simplicity and sincerity

which were absolute, towards all who were fit to receive them; the

utmost scorn of whatever was mean and cowardly, and a burning

indignation at everything brutal or tyrannical, faithless or

dishonourable in conduct and character, while making the broadest

distinction between _mala in se_ and mere _mala prohibita_--between acts

giving evidence of intrinsic badness in feeling and character, and those

which are only violations of conventions either good or bad, violations

which, whether in themselves right or wrong, are capable of being

committed by persons in every other respect lovable or admirable.

 

To be admitted into any degree of mental intercourse with a being of

these qualities, could not but have a most beneficial influence on my

development; though the effect was only gradual, and many years elapsed

before her mental progress and mine went forward in the complete

companionship they at last attained. The benefit I received was far

greater than any which I could hope to give; though to her, who had at

first reached her opinions by the moral intuition of a character of

strong feeling, there was doubtless help as well as encouragement to be

derived from one who had arrived at many of the same results by study

and reasoning: and in the rapidity of her intellectual growth, her

mental activity, which converted everything into knowledge, doubtless

drew from me, as it did from other sources, many of its materials. What

I owe, even intellectually, to her, is in its detail, almost infinite;

of its general character a few words will give some, though a very

imperfect, idea.

 

With those who, like all the best and wisest of mankind, are

dissatisfied with human life as it is, and whose feelings are wholly

identified with its radical amendment, there are two main regions of

thought. One is the region of ultimate aims; the constituent elements of

the highest realizable ideal of human life. The other is that of the

immediately useful and practically attainable. In both these departments,

I have acquired more from her teaching, than from all other sources

taken together. And, to say truth, it is in these two extremes

principally, that real certainty lies. My own strength lay wholly in the

uncertain and slippery intermediate region, that of theory, or moral and

political science: respecting the conclusions of which, in any of the

forms in which I have received or originated them, whether as political

economy, analytic psychology, logic, philosophy of history, or anything

else, it is not the least of my intellectual obligations to her that I

have derived from her a wise scepticism, which, while it has not

hindered me from following out the honest exercise of my thinking

faculties to whatever conclusions might result from it, has put me on my

guard against holding or announcing these conclusions with a degree of

confidence which the nature of such speculations does not warrant, and

has kept my mind not only open to admit, but prompt to welcome and eager

to seek, even on the questions on which I have most meditated, any

prospect of clearer perceptions and better evidence. I have often

received praise, which in my own right I only partially deserve, for the

greater practicality which is supposed to be found in my writings,

compared with those of most thinkers who have been equally addicted to

large generalizations. The writings in which this quality has been

observed, were not the work of one mind, but of the fusion of two, one

of them as pre-eminently practical in its judgments and perceptions of

things present, as it was high and bold in its anticipations for a

remote futurity. At the present period, however, this influence was only

one among many which were helping to shape the character of my future

development: and even after it became, I may truly say, the presiding

principle of my mental progress, it did not alter the path, but only

made me move forward more boldly, and, at the same time, more

cautiously, in the same course. The only actual revolution which has

ever taken place in my modes of thinking, was already complete. My new

tendencies had to be confirmed in some respects, moderated in others:

but the only substantial changes of opinion that were yet to come,

related to politics, and consisted, on one hand, in a greater

approximation, so far as regards the ultimate prospects of humanity, to

a qualified Socialism, and on the other, a shifting of my political

ideal from pure democracy, as commonly understood by its partisans, to

the modified form of it, which is set forth in my _Considerations on

Representative Government_.

 

This last change,