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

itself in inextricable difficulties from the joint

operation of the old evils and the quack remedy it is indebted for its

deliverance to that most unexpected and surprising fact, the

depopulation of ireland, commenced by famine, and continued by

emigration.

 

The rapid success of the _Political Economy_ showed that the public

wanted, and were prepared for such a book. Published early in 1848, an

edition of a thousand copies was sold in less than a year. Another

similar edition was published in the spring of 1849; and a third, of

1250 copies, early in 1852. It was, from the first, continually cited

and referred to as an authority, because it was not a book merely of

abstract science, but also of application, and treated Political Economy

not as a thing by itself, but as a fragment of a greater whole; a branch

of Social Philosophy, so interlinked with all the other branches, that

its conclusions, even in its own peculiar province, are only true

conditionally, subject to interference and counteraction from causes not

directly within its scope: while to the character of a practical guide

it has no pretension, apart from other classes of considerations.

Political Economy, in truth, has never pretended to give advice to

mankind with no lights but its own; though people who knew nothing but

political economy (and therefore knew that ill) have taken upon

themselves to advise, and could only do so by such lights as they had.

But the numerous sentimental enemies of political economy, and its still

more numerous interested enemies in sentimental guise, have been very

successful in gaining belief for this among other unmerited imputations

against it, and the _Principles_ having, in spite of the freedom of many

of its opinions, become for the present the most popular treatise on the

subject, has helped to disarm the enemies of so important a study. The

amount of its worth as an exposition of the science, and the value of

the different applications which it suggests, others of course must

judge.

 

For a considerable time after this, I published no work of magnitude;

though I still occasionally wrote in periodicals, and my correspondence

(much of it with persons quite unknown to me), on subjects of public

interest, swelled to a considerable bulk. During these years I wrote or

commenced various Essays, for eventual publication, on some of the

fundamental questions of human and social life, with regard to several

of which I have already much exceeded the severity of the Horatian

precept. I continued to watch with keen interest the progress of public

events. But it was not, on the whole, very encouraging to me. The

European reaction after 1848, and the success of an unprincipled usurper

in December, 1851, put an end, as it seemed, to all present hope for

freedom or social improvement in France and the Continent. In England, I

had seen and continued to see many of the opinions of my youth obtain

general recognition, and many of the reforms in institutions, for which

I had through life contended, either effected or in course of being so.

But these changes had been attended with much less benefit to human

well-being than I should formerly have anticipated, because they had

produced very little improvement in that which all real amelioration in

the lot of mankind depends on, their intellectual and moral state: and

it might even be questioned if the various causes of deterioration which

had been at work in the meanwhile, had not more than counterbalanced the

tendencies to improvement. I had learnt from experience that many false

opinions may be exchanged for true ones, without in the least altering

the habits of mind of which false opinions are the result. The English

public, for example, are quite as raw and undiscerning on subjects of

political economy since the nation has been converted to free-trade, as

they were before; and are still further from having acquired better

habits of thought and feeling, or being in any way better fortified

against error, on subjects of a more elevated character. For, though

they have thrown off certain errors, the general discipline of their

minds, intellectually and morally, is not altered. I am now convinced,

that no great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a

great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes

of thought. The old opinions in religion, morals, and politics, are so

much discredited in the more intellectual minds as to have lost the

greater part of their efficacy for good, while they have still life

enough in them to be a powerful obstacle to the growing up of any better

opinions on those subjects. When the philosophic minds of the world can

no longer believe its religion, or can only believe it with

modifications amounting to an essential change of its character, a

transitional period commences, of weak convictions, paralysed

intellects, and growing laxity of principle, which cannot terminate

until a renovation has been effected in the basis of their belief

leading to the evolution of some faith, whether religious or

merely human, which they can really believe: and when things are in this

state, all thinking or writing which does not tend to promote such a

renovation, is of very little value beyond the moment. Since there was

little in the apparent condition of the public mind, indicative of any

tendency in this direction, my view of the immediate prospects of human

improvement was not sanguine. More recently a spirit of free speculation

has sprung up, giving a more encouraging prospect of the gradual mental

emancipation of England; and concurring with the renewal under better

auspices, of the movement for political freedom in the rest of Europe,

has given to the present condition of human affairs a more hopeful

aspect.[3]

 

Between the time of which I have now spoken, and the present, took place

the most important events of my private life. The first of these was my

marriage, in April, 1851, to the lady whose incomparable worth had made

her friendship the greatest source to me both of happiness and of

improvement, during many years in which we never expected to be in any

closer relation to one another. Ardently as I should have aspired to

this complete union of our lives at any time in the course of my

existence at which it had been practicable, I, as much as my wife, would

far rather have foregone that privilege for ever, than have owed it to

the premature death of one for whom I had the sincerest respect, and she

the strongest affection. That event, however, having taken place in

July, 1849, it was granted to me to derive from that evil my own

greatest good, by adding to the partnership of thought, feeling, and

writing which had long existed, a partnership of our entire existence.

For seven and a-half years that blessing was mine; for seven and a-half

only! I can say nothing which could describe, even in the faintest

manner, what that loss was and is. But because I know that she would

have wished it, I endeavour to make the best of what life I have left,

and to work on for her purposes with such diminished strength as can be

derived from thoughts of her, and communion with her memory.

 

When two persons have their thoughts and speculations completely in

common; when all subjects of intellectual or moral interest are

discussed between them in daily life, and probed to much greater depths

than are usually or conveniently sounded in writings intended for

general readers; when they set out from the same principles, and arrive

at their conclusions by processes pursued jointly, it is of little

consequence in respect to the question of originality, which of them

holds the pen; the one who contributes least to the composition may

contribute more to the thought; the writings which result are the joint

product of both, and it must often be impossible to disentangle their

respective parts, and affirm that this belongs to one and that to the

other. In this wide sense, not only during the years of our married

life, but during many of the years of confidential friendship which

preceded, all my published writings were as much here work as mine; her

share in them constantly increasing as years advanced. But in certain

cases, what belongs to her can be distinguished, and specially

identified. Over and above the general influence which her mind had over

mine, the most valuable ideas and features in these joint

productions--those which have been most fruitful of important results,

and have contributed most to the success and reputation of the works

themselves--originated with her, were emanations from her mind, my part

in them being no greater than in any of the thoughts which I found in

previous writers, and made my own only by incorporating them with my own

system of thought! During the greater part of my literary life I have

performed the office in relation to her, which from a rather early

period I had considered as the most useful part that I was qualified to

take in the domain of thought, that of an interpreter of original

thinkers, and mediator between them and the public; for I had always a

humble opinion of my own powers as an original thinker, except in

abstract science (logic, metaphysics, and the theoretic principles of

political economy and politics), but thought myself much superior to

most of my contemporaries in willingness and ability to learn from

everybody; as I found hardly anyone who made such a point of examining

what was said in defence of all opinions, however new or however old, in

the conviction that even if they were errors there might be a substratum

of truth underneath them, and that in any case the discovery of what it

was that made them plausible, would be a benefit to truth. I had, in

consequence, marked this out as a sphere of usefulness in which I was

under a special obligation to make myself active; the more so, as the

acquaintance I had formed with the ideas of the Coleridgians, of the

German thinkers, and of Carlyle, all of them fiercely opposed to the

mode of thought in which I had been brought up, had convinced me that

along with much error they possessed much truth, which was veiled from

minds otherwise capable of receiving it by the transcendental and

mystical phraseology in which they were accustomed to shut it up, and

from which they neither cared, nor knew how, to disengage it; and I did

not despair of separating the truth from the error, and exposing it in

terms which would be intelligible and not repulsive to those on my own

side in philosophy. Thus prepared, it will easily be believed that when

I came into close intellectual communion with a person of the most

eminent faculties, whose genius, as it grew and unfolded itself in

thought, continually struck out truths far in advance of me, but in

which I could not, as I had done in those others, detect any mixture of

error, the greatest part of my mental growth consisted in the

assimilation of those truths, and the most valuable part of my

intellectual work was in building the bridges and clearing the paths

which connected them with my general system of thought.[4]

 

The first of my books in which her share was conspicious was the

_Principles of Political Economy_. The _System of Logic_ owed little to

her except in the minuter matters of composition, in which respect my

writings, both great and small, have largely benefited by her accurate

and clear-sighted criticism.[5] The chapter of the _Political Econonomy_

which has had a greater influence on opinion than all the rest, that on

'the Probable Future of the Labouring Classes,' is entirely due to her;

in the first draft of the book, that chapter did not exist. She pointed

out the need of such a chapter, and the extreme imperfection of the book

without it; she was the cause of my writing it; and the more general

part of the chapter, the statement and discussion of the two opposite

theories respecting the proper condition of the labouring classes, was

wholly an exposition of her thoughts, often in words taken from her own

lips. The purely scientific part of the _Political Economy_ I did not

learn from her; but it was chiefly her influence that gave to the book

that general tone by which it is distinguished from all previous

expositions of Political Economy that had any pretension to being

scientific, and which has made it so useful in conciliating minds which

those previous expositions had repelled. This tone consisted chiefly in

making the proper distinction between the laws of the Production of

Wealth--which are laws of nature, dependent on the properties of

objects--and the modes of its Distribution, which, subject to certain

conditions, depend on human will. The commom run of political economists

confuse these together, under the designation of economic laws, which

they deem