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

lesson of the "Choice of

Hercules." At a somewhat later period the lofty moral standard

exhibited in the writings of Plato operated upon me with great force.

My father's moral inculcations were at all times mainly those of the

"Socratici viri"; justice, temperance (to which he gave a very

extended application), veracity, perseverance, readiness to encounter

pain and especially labour; regard for the public good; estimation of

persons according to their merits, and of things according to their

intrinsic usefulness; a life of exertion in contradiction to one of

self-indulgent ease and sloth. These and other moralities he conveyed

in brief sentences, uttered as occasion arose, of grave exhortation,

or stern reprobation and contempt.

 

But though direct moral teaching does much, indirect does more; and

the effect my father produced on my character, did not depend solely

on what he said or did with that direct object, but also, and still

more, on what manner of man he was.

 

In his views of life he partook of the character of the Stoic, the

Epicurean, and the Cynic, not in the modern but the ancient sense of

the word. In his personal qualities the Stoic predominated. His

standard of morals was Epicurean, inasmuch as it was utilitarian,

taking as the exclusive test of right and wrong, the tendency of

actions to produce pleasure or pain. But he had (and this was the

Cynic element) scarcely any belief in pleasure; at least in his later

years, of which alone, on this point, I can speak confidently. He was

not insensible to pleasures; but he deemed very few of them worth the

price which, at least in the present state of society, must be paid

for them. The greater number of miscarriages in life he considered to

be attributable to the overvaluing of pleasures. Accordingly,

temperance, in the large sense intended by the Greek philosophers

--stopping short at the point of moderation in all indulgences--was

with him, as with them, almost the central point of educational

precept. His inculcations of this virtue fill a large place in my

childish remembrances. He thought human life a poor thing at best,

after the freshness of youth and of unsatisfied curiosity had gone by.

This was a topic on which he did not often speak, especially, it may

be supposed, in the presence of young persons: but when he did, it

was with an air of settled and profound conviction. He would sometimes

say that if life were made what it might be, by good government and

good education, it would be worth having: but he never spoke with

anything like enthusiasm even of that possibility. He never varied in

rating intellectual enjoyments above all others, even in value as

pleasures, independently of their ulterior benefits. The pleasures of

the benevolent affections he placed high in the scale; and used to

say, that he had never known a happy old man, except those who were

able to live over again in the pleasures of the young. For passionate

emotions of all sorts, and for everything which bas been said or

written in exaltation of them, he professed the greatest contempt.

He regarded them as a form of madness. "The intense" was with him a

bye-word of scornful disapprobation. He regarded as an aberration of

the moral standard of modern times, compared with that of the ancients,

the great stress laid upon feeling. Feelings, as such, he considered

to be no proper subjects of praise or blame. Right and wrong, good and

bad, he regarded as qualities solely of conduct--of acts and omissions;

there being no feeling which may not lead, and does not frequently lead,

either to good or to bad actions: conscience itself, the very desire to

act right, often leading people to act wrong. Consistently carrying

out the doctrine that the object of praise and blame should be the

discouragement of wrong conduct and the encouragement of right, he

refused to let his praise or blame be influenced by the motive of the

agent. He blamed as severely what he thought a bad action, when the

motive was a feeling of duty, as if the agents had been consciously

evil doers. He would not have accepted as a plea in mitigation for

inquisitors, that they sincerely believed burning heretics to be an

obligation of conscience. But though he did not allow honesty of purpose

to soften his disapprobation of actions, it had its full effect on his

estimation of characters. No one prized conscientiousness and rectitude

of intention more highly, or was more incapable of valuing any person

in whom he did not feel assurance of it. But he disliked people quite

as much for any other deficiency, provided he thought it equally likely

to make them act ill. He disliked, for instance, a fanatic in any bad

cause, as much as or more than one who adopted the same cause from

self-interest, because he thought him even more likely to be practically

mischievous. And thus, his aversion to many intellectual errors, or what

he regarded as such, partook, in a certain sense, of the character of a

moral feeling. All this is merely saying that he, in a degree once common,

but now very unusual, threw his feelings into his opinions; which truly

it is difficult to understand how anyone who possesses much of both, can

fail to do. None but those who do not care about opinions will confound

this with intolerance. Those who, having opinions which they hold to be

immensely important, and their contraries to be prodigiously hurtful,

have any deep regard for the general good, will necessarily dislike, as

a class and in the abstract, those who think wrong what they think right,

and right what they think wrong: though they need not therefore be, nor

was my father, insensible to good qualities in an opponent, nor governed

in their estimation of individuals by one general presumption, instead

of by the whole of their character. I grant that an earnest person,

being no more infallible than other men, is liable to dislike people

on account of opinions which do not merit dislike; but if he neither

himself does them any ill office, nor connives at its being donc by

others, he is not intolerant: and the forbearance which flows from a

conscientious sense of the importance to mankind of the equal freedom

of all opinions, is the only tolerance which is commendable, or, to the

highest moral order of minds, possible.

 

It will be admitted, that a man of the opinions, and the character,

above described, was likely to leave a strong moral impression on any

mind principally formed by him, and that his moral teaching was not

likely to err on the side of laxity or indulgence. The element which

was chiefly deficient in his moral relation to his children was that

of tenderness. I do not believe that this deficiency lay in his own

nature. I believe him to have had much more feeling than he habitually

showed, and much greater capacities of feeling than were ever

developed. He resembled most Englishmen in being ashamed of the signs

of feeling, and, by the absence of demonstration, starving the

feelings themselves. If we consider further that he was in the trying

position of sole teacher, and add to this that his temper was

constitutionally irritable, it is impossible not to feel true pity for

a father who did, and strove to do, so much for his children, who

would have so valued their affection, yet who must have been

constantly feeling that fear of him was drying it up at its source.

This was no longer the case later in life, and with his younger

children. They loved him tenderly: and if I cannot say so much of

myself, I was always loyally devoted to him. As regards my own

education, I hesitate to pronounce whether I was more a loser or

gainer by his severity. It was not such as to prevent me from having a

happy childhood. And I do not believe that boys can be induced to

apply themselves with vigour, and--what is so much more

difficult--perseverance, to dry and irksome studies, by the sole force

of persuasion and soft words. Much must be done, and much must be

learnt, by children, for which rigid discipline, and known liability

to punishment, are indispensable as means. It is, no doubt, a very

laudable effort, in modern teaching, to render as much as possible of

what the young are required to learn, easy and interesting to them.

But when this principle is pushed to the length of not requiring them

to learn anything _but_ what has been made easy and interesting, one

of the chief objects of education is sacrificed. I rejoice in the

decline of the old brutal and tyrannical system of teaching, which,

however, did succeed in enforcing habits of application; but the new,

as it seems to me, is training up a race of men who will be incapable

of doing anything which is disagreeable to them. I do not, then,

believe that fear, as an element in education, can be dispensed with;

but I am sure that it ought not to be the main element; and when it

predominates so much as to preclude love and confidence on the part of

the child to those who should be the unreservedly trusted advisers of

after years, and perhaps to seal up the fountains of frank and

spontaneous communicativeness in the child's nature, it is an evil for

which a large abatement must be made from the benefits, moral and

intellectual, which may flow from any other part of the education.

 

During this first period of my life, the habitual frequenters of my

father's house were limited to a very few persons, most of them little

known to the world, but whom personal worth, and more or less of

congeniality with at least his political opinions (not so frequently

to be met with then as since), inclined him to cultivate; and his

conversations with them I listened to with interest and instruction.

My being an habitual inmate of my father's study made me acquainted

with the dearest of his friends, David Ricardo, who by his benevolent

countenance, and kindliness of manner, was very attractive to young

persons, and who, after I became a student of political economy,

invited me to his house and to walk with him in order to converse on

the subject. I was a more frequent visitor (from about 1817 or 1818)

to Mr. Hume, who, born in the same part of Scotland as my father, and

having been, I rather think, a younger schoolfellow or college

companion of his, had on returning from India renewed their youthful

acquaintance, and who--coming, like many others, greatly under the

influence of my father's intellect and energy of character--was

induced partly by that influence to go into Parliament, and there

adopt the line of conduct which has given him an honourable place in

the history of his country. Of Mr. Bentham I saw much more, owing to

the close intimacy which existed between him and my father. I do not

know how soon after my father's first arrival in England they became

acquainted. But my father was the earliest Englishman of any great

mark, who thoroughly understood, and in the main adopted, Bentham's

general views of ethics, government and law: and this was a natural

foundation for sympathy between them, and made them familiar

companions in a period of Bentham's life during which he admitted much

fewer visitors than was the case subsequently. At this time Mr.

Bentham passed some part of every year at Barrow Green House, in a

beautiful part of the Surrey Hills, a few miles from Godstone, and

there I each summer accompanied my father in a long visit. In 1813 Mr.

Bentham, my father, and I made an excursion, which included Oxford,

Bath and Bristol, Exeter, Plymouth, and Portsmouth. In this journey I

saw many things which were instructive to me, and acquired my first

taste for natural scenery, in the elementary form of fondness for a

"view." In the succeeding winter we moved into a house very near Mr.

Bentham's, which my father rented from him, in Queen Square,

Westminster. From 1814 to 1817 Mr. Bentham lived during half of each

year at Ford Abbey, in Somersetshire (or rather in a part of

Devonshire surrounded by Somersetshire), which intervals I had the

advantage of passing at that place. This sojourn was, I think, an

important circumstance in my education. Nothing contributes more to

nourish elevation of sentiments in a people, than the large and free

character of their habitations. The middle-age architecture, the

baronial hall, and the spacious and lofty rooms, of this fine old

place, so unlike the mean and cramped externals of English

middle-class life, gave the sentiment of a larger and freer existence,

and were to me a sort of poetic cultivation, aided also by the

character of the grounds in which the Abbey stood; which were _riant_

and secluded, umbrageous, and