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

full of the sound of falling waters.

 

I owed another of the fortunate circumstances in my education, a

year's residence in France, to Mr. Bentham's brother, General Sir

Samuel Bentham. I had seen Sir Samuel Bentham and his family at their

house near Gosport in the course of the tour already mentioned (he

being then Superintendent of the Dockyard at Portsmouth), and during a

stay of a few days which they made at Ford Abbey shortly after the

Peace, before going to live on the Continent. In 1820 they invited me

for a six months' visit to them in the South of France, which their

kindness ultimately prolonged to nearly a twelvemonth. Sir Samuel

Bentham, though of a character of mind different from that of his

illustrious brother, was a man of very considerable attainments and

general powers, with a decided genius for mechanical art. His wife, a

daughter of the celebrated chemist, Dr. Fordyce, was a woman of strong

will and decided character, much general knowledge, and great

practical good sense of the Edgeworth kind: she was the ruling spirit

of the household, as she deserved, and was well qualified, to be.

Their family consisted of one son (the eminent botanist) and three

daughters, the youngest about two years my senior. I am indebted to

them for much and various instruction, and for an almost parental

interest in my welfare. When I first joined them, in May, 1820, they

occupied the Château of Pompignan (still belonging to a descendant of

Voltaire's enemy) on the heights overlooking the plain of the Garonne

between Montauban and Toulouse. I accompanied them in an excursion to

the Pyrenees, including a stay of some duration at Bagnères de

Bigorre, a journey to Pau, Bayonne, and Bagnères de Luchon, and an

ascent of the Pic du Midi de Bigorre.

 

This first introduction to the highest order of mountain scenery made

the deepest impression on me, and gave a colour to my tastes through

life. In October we proceeded by the beautiful mountain route of

Castres and St. Pons, from Toulouse to Montpellier, in which last

neighbourhood Sir Samuel had just bought the estate of Restinclière,

near the foot of the singular mountain of St. Loup. During this

residence in France I acquired a familiar knowledge of the French

language, and acquaintance with the ordinary French literature; I took

lessons in various bodily exercises, in none of which, however, I made

any proficiency; and at Montpellier I attended the excellent winter

courses of lectures at the Faculté des Sciences, those of M. Anglada

on chemistry, of M. Provençal on zoology, and of a very accomplished

representative of the eighteenth century metaphysics, M. Gergonne, on

logic, under the name of Philosophy of the Sciences. I also went

through a course of the higher mathematics under the private tuition

of M. Lenthéric, a professor at the Lycée of Montpellier. But the

greatest, perhaps, of the many advantages which I owed to this episode

in my education, was that of having breathed for a whole year, the

free and genial atmosphere of Continental life. This advantage was not

the less real though I could not then estimate, nor even consciously

feel it. Having so little experience of English life, and the few

people I knew being mostly such as had public objects, of a large and

personally disinterested kind, at heart, I was ignorant of the low

moral tone of what, in England, is called society; the habit of, not

indeed professing, but taking for granted in every mode of

implication, that conduct is of course always directed towards low and

petty objects; the absence of high feelings which manifests itself by

sneering depreciation of all demonstrations of them, and by general

abstinence (except among a few of the stricter religionists) from

professing any high principles of action at all, except in those

preordained cases in which such profession is put on as part of the

costume and formalities of the occasion. I could not then know or

estimate the difference between this manner of existence, and that of

a people like the French, whose faults, if equally real, are at all

events different; among whom sentiments, which by comparison at least

may be called elevated, are the current coin of human intercourse,

both in books and in private life; and though often evaporating in

profession, are yet kept alive in the nation at large by constant

exercise, and stimulated by sympathy, so as to form a living and

active part of the existence of great numbers of persons, and to be

recognised and understood by all. Neither could I then appreciate the

general culture of the understanding, which results from the habitual

exercise of the feelings, and is thus carried down into the most

uneducated classes of several countries on the Continent, in a degree

not equalled in England among the so-called educated, except where an

unusual tenderness of conscience leads to a habitual exercise of the

intellect on questions of right and wrong. I did not know the way in

which, among the ordinary English, the absence of interest in things

of an unselfish kind, except occasionally in a special thing here and

there, and the habit of not speaking to others, nor much even to

themselves, about the things in which they do feel interest, causes

both their feelings and their intellectual faculties to remain

undeveloped, or to develop themselves only in some single and very

limited direction; reducing them, considered as spiritual beings, to

a kind of negative existence. All these things I did not perceive till

long afterwards; but I even then felt, though without stating it

clearly to myself, the contrast between the frank sociability and

amiability of French personal intercourse, and the English mode of

existence, in which everybody acts as if everybody else (with few, or

no exceptions) was either an enemy or a bore. In France, it is true,

the bad as well as the good points, both of individual and of national

character, come more to the surface, and break out more fearlessly in

ordinary intercourse, than in England: but the general habit of the

people is to show, as well as to expect, friendly feeling in every one

towards every other, wherever there is not some positive cause for the

opposite. In England it is only of the best bred people, in the upper

or upper middle ranks, that anything like this can be said.

 

In my way through Paris, both going and returning, I passed some time

in the house of M. Say, the eminent political economist, who was a

friend and correspondent of my father, having become acquainted with

him on a visit to England a year or two after the Peace. He was a man

of the later period of the French Revolution, a fine specimen of the

best kind of French Republican, one of those who had never bent the

knee to Bonaparte though courted by him to do so; a truly upright,

brave, and enlightened man. He lived a quiet and studious life, made

happy by warm affections, public and private. He was acquainted with

many of the chiefs of the Liberal party, and I saw various noteworthy

persons while staying at this house; among whom I have pleasure in the

recollection of having once seen Saint-Simon, not yet the founder

either of a philosophy or a religion, and considered only as a clever

original. The chief fruit which I carried away from the society I saw,

was a strong and permanent interest in Continental Liberalism, of

which I ever afterwards kept myself _au courant_, as much as of

English politics: a thing not at all usual in those days with

Englishmen, and which had a very salutary influence on my development,

keeping me free from the error always prevalent in England--and from

which even my father, with all his superiority to prejudice, was not

exempt--of judging universal questions by a merely English standard.

After passing a few weeks at Caen with an old friend of my father's,

I returned to England in July, 1821 and my education resumed its

ordinary course. 

CHAPTER III (LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, AND FIRST OF SELF-EDUCATION)

For the first year or two after my visit to France, I continued my old

studies, with the addition of some new ones. When I returned, my

father was just finishing for the press his _Elements of Political

Economy_, and he made me perform an exercise on the manuscript, which

Mr. Bentham practised on all his own writings, making what he called

"marginal contents"; a short abstract of every paragraph, to enable

the writer more easily to judge of, and improve, the order of the

ideas, and the general character of the exposition. Soon after, my

father put into my hands Condillac's _Traité des Sensations_, and the

logical and metaphysical volumes of his _Cours d'Etudes_; the first

(notwithstanding the superficial resemblance between Condillac's

psychological system and my father's) quite as much for a warning as

for an example. I am not sure whether it was in this winter or the

next that I first read a history of the French Revolution. I learnt

with astonishment that the principles of democracy, then apparently in

so insignificant and hopeless a minority everywhere in Europe, had

borne all before them in France thirty years earlier, and had been the

creed of the nation. As may be supposed from this, I had previously a

very vague idea of that great commotion. I knew only that the French

had thrown off the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV. and XV., had put

the King and Queen to death, guillotined many persons, one of whom was

Lavoisier, and had ultimately fallen under the despotism of Bonaparte.

From this time, as was natural, the subject took an immense hold of my

feelings. It allied itself with all my juvenile aspirations to the

character of a democratic champion. What had happened so lately,

seemed as if it might easily happen again: and the most transcendent

glory I was capable of conceiving, was that of figuring, successful or

unsuccessful, as a Girondist in an English Convention.

 

During the winter of 1821-2, Mr. John Austin, with whom at the time of

my visit to France my father had but lately become acquainted, kindly

allowed me to read Roman law with him. My father, notwithstanding his

abhorrence of the chaos of barbarism called English Law, had turned

his thoughts towards the bar as on the whole less ineligible for me

than any other profession: and these readings with Mr. Austin, who had

made Bentham's best ideas his own, and added much to them from other

sources and from his own mind, were not only a valuable introduction

to legal studies, but an important portion of general education. With

Mr. Austin I read Heineccius on the Institutes, his _Roman Antiquities_,

and part of his exposition of the Pandects; to which was added a

considerable portion of Blackstone. It was at the commencement of these

studies that my father, as a needful accompaniment to them, put into my

hands Bentham's principal speculations, as interpreted to the Continent,

and indeed to all the world, by Dumont, in the _Traité de Législation_.

The reading of this book was an epoch in my life; one of the turning

points in my mental history.

 

My previous education had been, in a certain sense, already a course

of Benthamism. The Benthamic standard of "the greatest happiness" was

that which I had always been taught to apply; I was even familiar

with an abstract discussion of it, forming an episode in an

unpublished dialogue on Government, written by my father on the

Platonic model. Yet in the first pages of Bentham it burst upon me

with all the force of novelty. What thus impressed me was the chapter

in which Bentham passed judgment on the common modes of reasoning in

morals and legislation, deduced from phrases like "law of nature,"

"right reason," "the moral sense," "natural rectitude," and the like,

and characterized them as dogmatism in disguise, imposing its

sentiments upon others under cover of sounding expressions which

convey no reason for the sentiment, but set up the sentiment as its

own reason. It had not struck me before, that Bentham's principle put

an