OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

AUTOBIOGRAPHY
JOHN STUART MILL (1806–73), philosopher, economist, and political thinker, was the most prominent
figure of nineteenth-century English intellectual life and his work has continuing significance for
contemporary debates about ethics, politics, and economics. His father, James Mill, a close associate of
the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, took upon himself responsibility for his eldest son’s
education, teaching him ancient Greek at the age of 3 and equipping him with a deep and an extremely
broad knowledge of the physical and moral sciences of the day. In his late teens Mill became a
passionate advocate and proselytizer for Bentham’s ideas, but his Autobiography, published after his
death, confesses to a ‘mental crisis’ in his early twenties that left him concerned to develop what he
saw as a more complex, liberal, utilitarian philosophy. In the subsequent forty-five years he produced
major works on logic and political economy, and numerous essays and studies. He held senior positions
for many years at the East India Company, was owner and editor of the London Review and then the
London and Westminster Review, and, towards the end of his life, served as a Member of Parliament for
the seat of Westminster. Mill’s relationship with Harriet Taylor, which began in 1830 and culminated in
their marriage in 1851, two years after the death of her husband, was one of the most significant of his
life, and she was acknowledged as a profound influence on his thinking, most especially his Principles
of Political Economy, On Liberty, and The Subjection of Women.
Mill’s Autobiography was written both to give an account of the extraordinary education he received
at the hands of his father and to express his gratitude to those he saw as influencing his thought. This
edition of the Autobiography includes additional manuscript materials from earlier drafts which
demonstrate the conflicting imperatives that influenced Mill’s choice of exactly what to say about some
of the most significant episodes and relationships in his life and that help us to appreciate that the
resulting narrative is framed by very firmly established purposes. The Autobiography also helps us
understand more fully some of the principal commitments that Mill’s political philosophy has become
famous for, in particular his appreciation of the diversity, plurality, and complexity of ways of life and
their possibilities.
MARK PHILP holds a chair in History and Politics at the University of Warwick. He is Emeritus Fellow
of Oriel College, Oxford. His recent books include Political Conduct (2007) and Reforming Ideas in
Britain (2013). He has edited Mill’s On Liberty, Utilitarianism and Other Essays with Fred Rosen for
Oxford World’s Classics, and has also published editions of Thomas Paine and William Godwin in the
series.
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 OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

JOHN STUART MILL

Autobiography

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

MARK PHILP
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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THIS edition owes a great debt to Lisa Jemison at University of Toronto Press and for the Press’s
permission to reprint material from the Collected Works; to Jack Stillinger, for the use of the text from
his edition of the Autobiography; to the Library of King’s College, Cambridge, for permission to use the
manuscripts of Reverend Compton in the Keynes Papers; and to Yale University Library for a copy of
the ‘Yale Fragment’. My personal thanks are owed in particular to Judith Luna, without whom this
edition would not have happened (and I do say this with gratitude, not in reproach); to Fred Rosen and
Helen McCabe for Mill teas; and to Hannah Philp, Peter Gibbs, Lisa Eaton, and Rowena Anketell for
their editorial labours.
 CONTENTS

Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of John Stuart Mill

AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Appendix: Additional Textual Material
Explanatory Notes
Index and Glossary of Persons
 INTRODUCTION

I
JOHN STUART MILL was one of the most important philosophers, political economists, and essayists of his
time and his ideas have had an enduring influence on the development of contemporary liberalism and
on the institutions of liberal democratic states. He was born in London in 1806. His father, James Mill,
was a political economist and essayist, who worked as an official in the East India Office and was a
close friend of the utilitarian philosopher and legal theorist Jeremy Bentham. John Stuart was the eldest
of James and Harriet Mill’s nine children, and it was he to whom his father principally devoted his
energy and attention, educating him at home and bringing him up to assume the mantle of a leading
intellectual radical. He had some success: when John Stuart Mill died in 1876, he left a legacy of work
that continues to exert a wide influence in the modern world.
Mill’s Autobiography was written in the 1850s, completed in 1869–70, and published only after his
death. It is a relatively brief text in which Mill gives an account of his education under the direction of
his father; his involvement in radical and liberal debates in his twenties; his engagement in a series of
philosophical, economic, and political debates; his mental crisis; his relationship with his future wife,
Harriet Taylor; and, after her death, his activities in Parliament after being elected as an MP and
holding office from 1865 to 1868. Modern readers can find the Victorian prose stodgy, the cast of
characters over-extensive, and the work unrewardingly detailed in some areas and frustratingly sparse
in others. Yet it is a unique, important, and, in almost equal measure, puzzling text that gives us a
reflective account of Mill’s development as a thinker, and reveals some of the formative influences
behind the ideas in his work.
The Autobiography opens with an account of the extraordinary education Mill received in his early
years at the hands of his father. By the age of 3 he was reading Greek; at 8 he learnt Latin by teaching
it to his younger sister; he mastered chemistry, physics, and mathematics to a high standard and was
widely read in the Classics and history by the time he was 14, when he went to France for a year,
meeting a number of Parisian intellectuals through his host, the political economist Jean-Baptiste Say,
and studying with several eminent professors in the arts and sciences in Montpellier, where he stayed
for several months at the house of Jeremy Bentham’s brother Sir Samuel Bentham. By his late teens he
was versed in pretty much every field of intellectual endeavour, and he began his publishing career first
with letters to newspapers and subsequently with longer pieces and reviews, from the age of 16.
Having known Bentham from his childhood, he read his work more systematically in Dumont’s French
edition at the age of 15 and became a stalwart convert to Bentham’s utilitarianism, founding a debating
society in the winter of 1822–3 which he christened the Utilitarian Society. When he was 19 he worked
with Bentham to prepare for publication a five-volume edition of Bentham’s work on evidence,
published in 1825. Utilitarianism remained a central feature of Mill’s intellectual life, although it was a
doctrine he subsequently did much to transform. That he did so was partly owing to what he referred to
as a ‘crisis in my mental history’ when he was 20 years old. That crisis led him at first to react against
Benthamism, and then to forge a distinctive perspective within a broadly utilitarian philosophy, which
retained happiness as the final goal of life, but which dramatically enriched the concept by drawing on
ancient ethical thought, Romanticism, poetry and music, fused with a conception of individuality and
self-development.
Nonetheless, on Mill’s own account, the key turning point in his life came not with his crisis but
several years later when at the age of 25 he met Harriet Taylor, the wife of John Taylor and mother of
two—soon to be three—children. Harriet, who was a year younger than Mill, was the daughter of a male
midwife and was educated entirely at home, although her political convictions, including a long-
standing commitment to equal rights for women, seem to have developed partly through her
participation in the Unitarian circle around William J. Fox, a prominent if unconventional minister. Mill’s
relationship with Harriet, although apparently strictly platonic, was hardly orthodox, and he reacted
strongly to those who sought to warn him of the reputational dangers he ran by pursuing it. Despite
these warnings the relationship became increasingly central to Mill’s life. As a result, while he wrote
prolifically, and edited the London and Westminster Review from 1834 to 1840 while also working in
the offices of the East India Company, he became increasingly reclusive and more focused on his
friendship with Harriet. While there are some areas of Mill’s writings, such as his System of Logic,
which he regarded as largely his own work, in many other fields to which he contributed, such as his
major work on the Principles of Political Economy, and his essays on liberty, the subjection of women,
and utilitarianism, his Autobiography expressly attributed an often more than equal contribution in
their composition to Harriet. Indeed, their relationship also undoubtedly extended and shaped Mill’s
intellectual commitments. For example, it is difficult to resist seeing his hostility to the invasive
character of public opinion as fuelled by his and Harriet’s sense of exposure to censure as a
consequence of their mutual love. The essay on the Subjection of Women, published long after Harriet’s
death, was also something that they had worked on together extensively for more than twenty years—
having set down their respective thoughts on marriage for each other only a year or two after they first
met. Indeed, part of that thinking helped to forge an understanding (for the most part stable) with John
Taylor by which the three managed their relationships. Nonetheless, Mill and Harriet spent the
eighteen years after they first met in a shifting but increasingly privatized world, which led Mill to
break with many of his former associates and eventually with his family. John Taylor died in 1849 and
the couple married in 1851, but they were almost constantly ill. In the summer of 1858 they travelled
together to the south of France to restore their health, only for Harriet to die while they were in
Avignon.
After his wife’s death, Mill went on to publish some of his most influential works, although many were
essays that he had planned out, executed, and developed in collaboration with Harriet: On Liberty
appeared in exactly the form in which he had received it back after Harriet’s last comments. The ‘Life’
(as they referred to his Autobiography) was also something that the couple had worked on together—as
a result it has a multiply amended ‘Early Draft’ arising from their deliberations. This too Mill kept in its
final form from Harriet’s hand, adding only a final chapter and a half to account for his activities after
Harriet’s death.

II
The Autobiography is not a ‘confession’ in the mode of St Augustine or Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Particularly in contrast with the latter, it is an immensely controlled text, and its aim is not at all to
reveal secrets or to practise candour or self-reflection in the public domain. In a letter to Harriet of 12
February 1854 referring to the Autobiography and to what it should say about some of his ‘defects’, Mill
wrote: ‘Of course one does not, in writing a life, either one’s own or another’s, undertake to tell
everything—& it will be right to put something into this which shall prevent any one from being able to
suppose or to pretend, that we undertake to keep nothing back.’1 This alone should alert us to the fact
that the text was conceived of as having a particular set of purposes, and that it was not intended
comprehensively to cover all aspects of his life or experience. Mill himself describes his purpose as
being to set out an account of his upbringing as a testament to his distinctive education and to
demonstrate ‘how much more than is commonly supposed may be taught, and well taught, in those
early years which, in the common modes of what is called instruction, are little better than wasted’.
And he adds that he wants to record his obligations to others for his intellectual and moral
development, ‘some of them of recognized eminence, others less well known than they deserve to be,
and the one to whom most of all is due, on whom the world had no opportunity of knowing’ (that is,
Harriet Taylor) (p. 5).
The work was, then, to be a record of that education, and an account of his most important
acquaintance and influences. It is certainly that; but it is not only that. One additional current that runs
throughout the text is Mill’s concern to vindicate himself as an independent and autonomous person
and to demonstrate that he was not simply a product of cramming.2 This issue recurs throughout the
text, both in direct statement and in a general anxiety that pervades the account of the early years, to
make clear that while some ‘grow up mere parroters of what they have learnt, incapable of using their
minds except in the furrows traced for them’, his ‘was not an education of cram’ (p. 21). For example,
when he describes his education in political economy at the age of 13, he says: his father ‘by a sort of
lectures . . . expounded each day a portion of the subject’, which Mill then wrote up, and then amended
until it was ‘clear, precise, and tolerably complete’ (p. 19) (and his father subsequently used Mill’s notes
when writing up his own work on Elements of Political Economy). To emphasize the independence of his
understanding, Mill describes his father as
Striving, even in an exaggerated degree, to call forth the activity of my faculties, by making me find out everything for
myself, he gave his explanations not before, but after, I had felt the full force of the difficulties . . . I thought for myself
almost from the first, and occasionally thought differently from him, though for a long time only on minor points, and
making his opinion the ultimate standard. (p. 20)

Notwithstanding, he also acknowledged that his father ‘was often, and much beyond reason, provoked
by my failures in cases where success could not have been expected; but in the main his method was
right, and it succeeded’ (p. 20). These passages are evidence of some of the multiple (and sometimes
conflicting) concerns that influence the opening chapters of the Autobiography—to claim his
independence and candidly acknowledge his debts to his father’s methods which he praised, while
acknowledging that they cost him a good deal of anxiety as a child, not unrelated to his father’s
frustration. Indeed, the ‘Early Draft’ contains constructions that suggest that the net effect of his
father’s teaching was rather more damaging, and Mill’s independence more fragile, than is claimed in
the final version:
To have been through childhood under the constant rule of a strong will certainly is not favourable to strength of will. I
was so much accustomed to be told what to do either in the form of direct command or of rebuke for not doing it that I
acquired the habit of leaving my responsibility as a moral agent to rest on my father and my conscience never
speaking to me except by his voice.3

If one purpose in giving us an account of his education and subsequent life was to rebut accusations of
being a fabricated person, the account also needs to be understood, at a more theoretical level, as an
exercise in ‘ethology’—the scientific study of character formation and change that Mill sketched in
outline in his A System of Logic (1843).4 The Logic is, in many respects, Mill’s towering philosophical
achievement, and its understanding both of the character of the social sciences and of the principles of
morality, played a major part in Mill’s reflections on his life, and in his most influential essays. In the
work, Mill distinguishes psychology, which he takes as the study of the elementary laws of mind, from
ethology, which is concerned with the interaction between general laws and the particular
circumstances of the individual or nation. Understanding this interaction gives us the possibility of
some mastery of our lives:
When the circumstances of an individual or of a nation are in any considerable degree under our control, we may, by
our knowledge of tendencies, be enabled to shape those circumstances in a manner much more favourable to the ends
we desire, than the shape that they would of themselves assume. This is the limit of our power; but within this limit
the power is a most important one.5

Mill was making himself the subject of one such ethological study in his Autobiography, using it to
account for, understand, and vindicate his belief that he had come to exercise the power of self-
direction and to benefit from his extraordinary education. Part of that account attempts to show that he
had been able to do so by emancipating himself from some of the deficiencies of that education through
a conscious process of self-development, achieved by opening himself up to a range of new influences.
It must be said, however, that the text itself raises questions about how successfully and completely he
achieved that emancipation.
The sense of a struggle taking place as Mill related the details of his extraordinary upbringing is
confirmed by some of the material that he eventually excluded from his account. He made several
attempts to write a section detailing his own considerable physical awkwardness and incompetence,
which he referred to as his ‘defects’. He began by enumerating a series of incapacities: not being able
to dress himself until long after most children; difficulties with knots; poor articulation, to the point of
not being able to pronounce the letter ‘r’ until he was 16; and not being able to do anything ‘requiring
the smallest manual dexterity’.6 He was eventually dissuaded, in large part by Harriet, from all but the
mildest statement. The various different versions suggest his own uncertainties about absolute candour,
Harriet’s concerns about him exposing himself to the contempt of enemies, and also Mill’s own doubts
about how far it was fair to lay his difficulties to any extent at the door of his father’s methods or to the
absence of much of a normal childhood. Indeed, the recurrent revisions add to the picture he paints,
perhaps not wholly intentionally, of his subjection to a man to whom it was possible to feel ‘loyally
devoted’, but not tenderly attached (p. 32). So too does his deleted suggestion that ‘I thus grew up in
the absence of love and in the presence of fear: and many and indelible are the effects of this bringing-
up, in the stunting of my moral growth’ (Appendix, p. 180). At the same time, he remained committed to
convincing us that he did not believe that ‘fear, as an element in education, can be dispensed with’;
although he goes on to say that ‘when it predominates so much as to preclude love and confidence on
the part of the child . . . 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 other parts of the education’ (p. 33).
These undercurrents and tensions within Mill’s account render the Autobiography a much more
compelling and troubling text than it has appeared to some commentators. There remains a sense that
Mill is struggling to articulate, and simultaneously to appreciate, the truth about his upbringing.
Moreover, cases where the tensions are evident also prompt questions about other claims about which
Mill seems less troubled. To the modern reader, for example, his suggestion that the result of the
experiment to equip him during his childhood with a degree of knowledge that is ‘seldom acquired until
the age of manhood’ demonstrates what can be done by education, seems as extraordinary as the
summary claim that follows: ‘If I had been by nature extremely quick of apprehension, or possessed of a
very accurate or retentive memory, or of a remarkably active and energetic character, the trial would
not be conclusive; but in all these natural gifts I am rather below than above par’ (p. 21). Should we
believe that he believed this? Moreover, given his commitment to individual development and self-
direction, how should we understand Mill’s letter to Harriet Taylor in about 1850 when he reflects: ‘As
for me, nothing but the division of labour could make me useful—if there were not others with
capacities of intellect which I have not, where would be the use of those I have—I am but fit to be one
wheel in an engine not to be the self-moving engine itself.’7 At the same time, he clearly also believed
that he had developed a depth of understanding of the modern world that few could rival. Such tensions
raise questions both about how candid Mill was being with his readers, and how candid he was being
with himself!
There are other instances where we might be doubtful about Mill’s account. In some cases this is
because he communicates an uneasiness about the consequences of his education by things he later
says. The absence of boyhood friends or indeed any companions of his own age is mentioned largely in
passing (p. 23), but its emotional consequences are intensified by the deleted comment that ‘I had no
one to whom I desired to express everything which I felt; and the only person I was in communication
with, to whom I looked up, I had too much fear of, to make the communication to him of any act or
feeling ever a matter of frank impulse or spontaneous inclination’ (Appendix, p. 180). Moreover, the
final version of the text effectively eliminated Mill’s mother from the picture entirely, while deleted
sections often sound hostile: he denied that she was warm-hearted and suggests that she was reduced
to drudging for children who liked her ‘because she was kind to them, but to make herself loved, looked
up to, or even obeyed, required qualities which she unfortunately did not possess’ (Appendix, p. 180).8
Yet outsiders could describe Mill as being ‘evidently very fond of his mother and sisters’ and as
manifesting ‘a sunny brightness and gaiety of heart and behaviour which were singularly fascinating’,
suggesting that Mill was writing partly with a later animus deriving from his sense that his mother had
failed to demonstrate an appropriate degree of respect towards Harriet after they married.9 Certainly,
relationships with his family seem to have collapsed around the time of his marriage, to the apparent
incomprehension of his mother and his siblings, who experienced Mill’s behaviour as ‘bitterly cruel’,
but there is little in Mill’s correspondence or other writings that adequately explains his conduct
towards them.10
The account that the Autobiography gives us of what has come to be referred to as Mill’s ‘mental
crisis’ is similarly elusive. Mill portrays it in such a way as to suggest that it is an intellectual crisis
rather than a psychological malady and it is only incidentally that the reader learns that this was far
from being a one-off moment in his life, but was recurrent, albeit without the same intensity, suggesting
that the intellectual and emotional dimensions of his life might have been more closely and directly
related (with the emotional less subordinate to the intellectual ) than he implies. Indeed, Mill’s crisis
clearly involved a rupture with his father’s system of education and his authority, and should be
understood as part of his struggle to attain his own conception of how he should live his life. It is also a
break with some of the philosophical tenets of utilitarianism, but that seems more symptomatic of this
deeper conflict (and, indeed, his understanding of this break certainly changed over time, as did his
philosophical ethics, becoming more complex both in its understanding of the ends to be pursued and in
its account of the relationship between means and ends).
Mill describes the crisis in the following terms: ‘in a dull state of nerves, such as everyone is
occasionally liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement’; but he moves quickly to
represent the crisis as an intellectual question:
In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself, ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were
realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you were looking forward to, could be completely and
instantly effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-
consciousness distinctly answered ‘No!’ (pp. 77–8)

In a long period of intense self-examination Mill came to the view that he was deficient in feeling, and it
was only in response to a passage in Marmontel’s Memoirs (strikingly, where Marmontel narrates his
response to the death of his father, and decides he will fill his father’s absence) that Mill found that all
feeling was not dead in him, and he gradually developed again a capacity for pleasure (pp. 81–2).
Mill’s distancing from his father’s and Bentham’s systems was less a break with their
consequentialism and more with their (in Mill’s view) limited understanding of the richness and
diversity of human aesthetic and ethical experience. In response, he undertook to cultivate within
himself a receptivity to a more extensive range of pleasure and feeling, while at the same time
increasingly grasping that these arise incidentally in the pursuit of other activities, rather than being
themselves the direct end to be pursued. That insight into the way that pleasure is incidental to the
pursuit of other goals and activities is a major element in the final sections of Mill’s System of Logic, in
which he underlines the importance of happiness as the justification and controller of all ends, but
denies that it is the sole end. The end that Mill fixes for himself, and which he regards as the highest
end for human beings, is the full development of human powers and capacities, of which there can be
no single account, but which was for Mill a system that was ‘something much more complex and many
sided than I had previously had any idea of’ (p. 92).
If the account he gives emphasized the way in which his crisis was resolved partly by emphasizing the
role of feeling and the importance of its cultivation, it must be said that there is little warmth in the way
Mill talks about most of those who figure in the text. His family, as we have seen, are barely mentioned;
later drafts shed all mention of his mother; he is brief to the point of obfuscation in relation to the
history of his relationship with Harriet Taylor; and the final version was also largely stripped of his
reactions to his father and of his sense of the emotionally barren childhood that he clearly believed he
had had. What is often underappreciated is the extent to which, in this as in much else, ‘not telling all’
became a very strongly delimited exercise to tell a particular story—one that sheds very little light on
some of Mill’s key relationships and commitments. Mill’s reticence about so much should encourage us
to read what he does say with the greatest care.
The one person about whom Mill is unreservedly positive is his wife and the Autobiography raises
deep questions about the impact and significance of Harriet Taylor’s influence on Mill’s thinking and
writing. The philosophical tradition tends to regard Taylor as of rather little significance in comparison
with Mill’s powerful originating intelligence. But one issue that the work seems to invite us to explore is
the extent to which we might better understand some of Mill’s seminal later texts, including On Liberty,
Subjection of Women, and Utilitarianism—and, indeed, the Autobiography itself—if we see them as the
product of this remarkable intellectual partnership.

III
Mill and Harriet Taylor had a deeply unconventional relationship, even if its exact character remains
open to speculation. Their correspondence strongly suggests that the relationship was purely, as
Carlyle described it, ‘platonic’. In a letter to Mill about the ‘Life’, Harriet suggests that the work is
not half written, and the half that is written will not do. Should there not be a summary of our relationship from its
commencement in 1830. . . . This ought to be done in genuine truth and simplicity—strong affection, intimacy of
friendship, and no impropriety. It seems to me an edifying picture for those poor wretches who cannot conceive of
friendship but in sex—nor believe that expediency and the consideration for feelings of others can conquer
sensuality.11

Mill’s experience of their relationship, and of the responses of others to it, undoubtedly reinforced his
hostility to received opinion and confirmed his sense of the stultifying impact of custom and tradition.
Yet the Autobiography negotiates this territory largely silently. In the hands of some writers, especially
since it was to be published only after their deaths, the work might have become a clarion call for
unconventionality and a robust defence of the choices they made. But it is not that kind of work.
Indeed, it is far from candid: for example, Mill claims that ‘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’ (p. 105), which betrays an economy with the
truth, since the letters suggest an intense relationship from very early on, and less than three years
after their first meeting Mill spent six weeks in Paris in close communication with Harriet while she
was undergoing a trial separation from her husband, arising from her friendship with Mill. The text’s
discussion of their relationship, such as it is, seems to be there largely to allow Mill to express his
effusive praise for Harriet’s qualities and abilities (despite this being toned down, at Harriet’s
prompting, from Mill’s first version, in which she eclipses Shelley—who was ‘but a child compared with
what she ultimately became’) (p. 106). The praise seems to most readers to be overdrawn, if sincere,
and most philosophers who write about Mill largely ignore Harriet’s role in Mill’s writing, despite the
fact that Mill himself attributes an equal share—sometimes more than equal—to her in some of his most
influential works: especially On Liberty,12 Subjection of Women, and the essay on ‘The Probable Future
of the Labouring Classes’ in the second edition of Principles of Political Economy. Mill himself seems to
have a clear view of her influence on him: ‘on the one hand, she was much more courageous and
farsighted than without her I should have been . . . But while she rendered me bolder in speculation on
human affairs, her practical turn of mind, and her almost unerring estimate of practical obstacles,
repressed in me all tendencies that were really visionary’ (p. 141). On Liberty in particular is
represented as their joint product, worked by each in turn over and over again. He acknowledges
Harriet’s influence as driving him to avoid his self-acknowledged ‘tendency towards over-government’
and without which he might have become ‘a less thorough radical and democrat’ (p. 142).13
Modern scepticism about such claims largely ignores the clear conviction with which Mill makes
them, alongside his deeper ethological understanding of his own thinking and character that he
developed in the Autobiography and in some of his correspondence. For example, he notes:
My great readiness and eagerness to learn from everybody, and to make room in my opinions for every new acquisition
by adjusting the old and the new to one another, might, but for her steadying influence, have seduced me into
modifying my early opinions too much . . . her just measure of the relative importance of different considerations . . .
often protected me from allowing to truths I had only recently learnt to see, a more important place in my thoughts
than was properly their due. (p. 142)

Mill shows considerable and appropriately ethological insight here, recognizing the character that his
father’s educational system had cultivated, and his consequent susceptibility to adapt to the opinions of
those around him. At the same time, he never seems to question the value or impact of Harriet’s more
decided convictions in the same way.
Mill’s first encounter with Harriet Taylor took place some four or five years after his crisis, by which
time he had done much to extricate himself from his melancholy. But it is clear that she introduced him
to a fuller range of feeling and more intuitive ways of thinking than he had previously experienced.
Moreover, it was an experience of an intensity whose absence in his life he had come to acknowledge
and regret. About a year before meeting Harriet Taylor, he wrote to John Sterling about the
comparative loneliness of my probable future lot . . . By loneliness I mean the absence of that feeling which . . . one
fellow traveller, or one fellow soldier, has toward another—the feeling of being engaged in the pursuit of a common
object, and of mutually cheering one another on, and helping one another in an arduous undertaking.14

Mill went on to explain that he had no fellow human being with whom to acknowledge a common
object, without feeling that he ‘was only using a man, whose purposes are different, as an instrument
for the furtherance of my own’.15 It is difficult not to conclude from the evidence that we have of the
beginning of Mill and Harriet Taylor’s friendship and then their mutual love, that she was precisely the
companion he felt he needed—strong enough to challenge him and to make him an equal partner in the
formation of projects, but being neither subordinate to him nor subordinating him to her projects.
Indeed, the extent of their correspondence with each other, even after their marriage, is part testament
to the considerable practical independence they had from each other and, at the same time, the
intensity of their shared intellectual interests and commitments. If his acknowledgements to her seem
overblown to modern readers, we should not ignore his sense that she had remained entirely unknown
to the wider literary public, that he had garnered a reputation from work at least some of which was
substantively shared with her, and that he owed it to her to acknowledge her contribution and to make
society see that women deserved such recognition. In what was to be a posthumous statement he felt
duty-bound to acknowledge precisely the fact that a great deal of his writing had genuinely been the
product of an intellectual and emotional partnership to which they brought very contrasting intellectual
qualities.
This should not lead us to think that the relationship suddenly solved Mill’s problems. Hayek rightly
draws our attention to Carlyle’s account of Mill in 1831 as a ‘rather tall and elegant youth, with a small
clear Roman-nosed face, two earnestly-smiling eyes; modest, yet remarkably gifted with precision of
utterance, enthusiastic, yet lucid, calm; not a great, yet a distinctly gifted and amiable youth’.16 Ten
years later he seems to have lost most of his hair and acquired a nervous twitch in his eyes. Illness, and
his melancholia, prematurely aged him, and its effects were exacerbated by long stints of very intensive
work, writing and editing for the Westminster Review, and subsequently the London and Westminster
Review, his employment in the office of the Examiner of Indian Correspondence in the East India
Company, his continuing responsibilities for the education of his seven siblings, and the strains that his
relationship with Harriet created with his family and friends. Indeed, both Mill and Harriet developed
long-term illnesses which, if not brought on by the unorthodox choices they made, must have been
compounded by the consequent strains. These tensions surface repeatedly in the Autobiography: in
Mill’s finally deleted remarks about his mother and in the exclusion of much in the way of reference to
his siblings;17 in the extensive sketch of Roebuck that he gives, and then largely omits, having cut him
out of his life following Roebuck’s misjudged attempt to advise Mill against his developing relationship
with Harriet; and in the account he gives and then deletes of Sarah Austin—whom Mill used to write to
as his ‘Liebes Mütterlein’ (dear little mother). Roebuck is accused of becoming involved in ‘the petty
vanities & entanglements of what is called society’ following his marriage; and Sarah Austin, who was
certainly a gossip, was dismissed with almost clinical contempt:
Having known me from a boy, she made great profession of a kind of maternal interest in me. But I never for an
instant supposed she really cared for me; nor perhaps for anybody beyond the surface; . . . The good nature, in the
sense in which that quality can be ascribed to a person of so little feeling, was I dare say, to a certain extent genuine;
but it was not inconsistent with her having, at times, a very mischievous tongue, which sowed médisance far & wide
by expressions so guarded as almost to elude responsibility for any distinct statement.18

Other relationships about which the ‘Life’ remains silent, were not spared in the correspondence
between Mill and Harriet,19 and still others seem to have been excluded to avoid reviving memories
and speculation, like the close friendship they had in the early 1830s with William J. Fox and Eliza
Flower. Fox had been made a trustee for Eliza and her sister Sarah by their father, but he subsequently
set up Eliza as his partner while his wife was still living in the home, leading to his dismissal by his
congregation.
Mill deeply resented comment on his relationship with Taylor, and was ruthless with those whom he
thought spread gossip about the couple. This speaks not only to his sensitivity but also to his concern
about social ostracism and the destruction of his hopes for success that might follow a loss of social
reputation.20 There is little doubt about his continuing vulnerability to social intrusion in what he
wanted to see as an intensely and entirely private matter. Indeed, while trips abroad did both Mill and
Taylor some good, this might have been as much a function of being out of London with its intense
interest in the pair, as of the benefit of a change of climate. Mill’s cutting comments about Roebuck and
Sarah Austin are in part in contrast to some of his other work on individuals with whom he was
acquainted or with whom he corresponded, with whom he disagreed. The essays on Bentham (1838)
and Coleridge (1840), for example, are very fair-minded assessments of their work, to the point that
Mill seems concerned to make the best of their positions as he sees them. But Mill’s displeasure with
people could produce some savage turns of phrase. His Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865) bristles
with Mill’s sense of emancipation from Comte’s attempts to enlist him as a disciple, with Mill describing
him as a ‘morality intoxicated man (every question with him is one of morality, and no motive but that of
morality is permitted)’ and a ‘liberticide’.21 Equally, his characterization of Macaulay, whom Mill had
first attacked in defence of his father—‘a man without genius, who has observed what people of genius
do when they write history, & tries his very best to do the same’—has an edge that rather belies his
protestations of his own lack of intellectual originality.22 Indeed, there is a wider issue about how to
square the certainty, almost arrogance, of some of Mill’s judgements of people,23 his clear hostility to
many of those whom he thought had descended to gossip about him, and his protestations of his own
incapacity and lack of originality, especially in contrast to Harriet, with his clear sense of his (and their)
importance to the advancement of society. In a letter to Harriet of 29 January 1854 Mill refers to works
in progress and the need for two years to get the material in ‘a state fit for printing—if not in the best
form for popular effect, yet in the state of concentrated thought—a sort of mental pemican, which
thinkers, when there are any after us, may nourish themselves with & then dilute for other people’.24
What seems to hold much of this together is that Mill saw his partnership with Harriet Taylor as
transformative for him, and of major longer term significance for liberal thought, and that it enabled
him both to see the weaknesses in others and to detect an underlying malevolence in those who failed
to acknowledge his wife’s capacities or who turned the couple into material for common gossip.

IV
The strains associated with their relationship remained throughout the twenty years from their first
meeting until after their marriage following John Taylor’s death. When, in 1848, Mill wanted to dedicate
his Principles of Political Economy to Harriet in recognition of her contribution, Harriet consulted her
husband, who thought it demonstrated a
want of tact and taste which I could not have believed possible. It is not only ‘a few common people’ who will make
vulgar remarks, but all who know any of us—The dedication will revive recollections now forgotten & will create
observations and talk that cannot but be extremely unpleasant to me.25

He remained unmoveable despite Harriet’s and Mill’s wishes, so the book was published without the
dedication—except that one was pasted into a small number of gift copies for special friends. That read,
‘To Mrs John Taylor as the person most eminently qualified of all persons known to the author either to
originate or to appreciate speculations on social improvement, this attempt to explain and diffuse ideas
many of which were first learned from herself is with the highest respect and regard dedicated.’ As
John Taylor’s reaction suggests, tensions in the relationships continued to make their mark, as did
Mill’s touchiness with his family and friends after his marriage. (One symptom was Mill’s excessively
anxious state about whether the marriage was wholly proper because of the way in which he had
signed his name in the register.26) Later reference in the Autobiography to the omission of the
dedicatory lines claimed that it was Harriet’s ‘dislike of publicity alone [that] prevented their insertion
in the other copies of the work’ (p. 141 n. 1), but that is not the story that the correspondence supports,
and that in itself is telling.
In the last two months of John Taylor’s life in May–June 1849, when Harriet nursed her husband
intensively, Mill and Harriet did not see each other and Harriet barely responded to Mill’s letters. This
was followed by agonizing about whether Mill should attend the funeral, and at what point they could
again be seen to associate with each other. Little correspondence survives from this period, and the
circumstances that led to the breakdown of Mill’s relationship with his family remain obscure. His
sister Harriet later wrote, ‘up to the time of his marriage he had been everything to us . . . It was a
frightful blow to lose him at once and forever, without even a word of explanation,—only in evident
anger.’27 Indeed, although there is a little correspondence with his mother, Mill’s main concern in it
was to persuade her to appoint another executor in his place. Moreover, when she died he was out of
the country, despite being aware of her ill health. His initial reaction to the division of her estate was to
reject his share of the property that she had had from her own mother, ‘Considering how they have
behaved, it is a matter of pride more than of anything else—but I have a very strong feeling about it.’
Nonetheless, Harriet’s ‘directly contrary’ reaction led Mill to give up his initial plan, although he
protested that ‘it was not the vanity of “acting on the supposition of being a man of fortune” . . . it was
wishing that they should not be able to say that I had taken anything from their resources’.28
Following their marriage, and a trip to France, the couple settled in Blackheath in south-east London.
Mill continued to work in India House, and maintained his prodigious work rate, but both were
increasingly unwell and in the subsequent years spent a good deal of time recuperating, often apart,
with Mill working in London, and Harriet staying by the coast or in France. In 1854 Mill was ordered
abroad for eight months for his health, when he visited Italy, Sicily, and Greece, while Harriet remained
in England, too ill to accompany him. In the autumn of 1858, following the government’s decision to
place Indian affairs firmly under the Crown, Mill resigned his post at East India House, and he and
Harriet left England, heading south for their health, only for Harriet’s condition to deteriorate
progressively, watched over helplessly by Mill.
When Harriet died in Avignon on 3 November 1858, Mill wrote:
My wife, the companion of all my feelings, the prompter of all my best thoughts, the guide of all my actions, is gone! . .
. It is doubtful if I shall ever be fit for anything public or private again. The spring of my life is broken. But I shall best
fulfil her wishes by not giving up the attempt to do something useful, and I am not quite alone. I have with me her
daughter, the one person besides myself who most loved her & whom she most loved, & we help each other to bear
what is inevitable.29

Mill was clearly distraught, and he came to rely heavily on his stepdaughter Helen Taylor (whom he
called Lily) who clearly inherited much of her mother’s ability. He resolved to complete the various
projects with which Harriet had been most closely associated and published On Liberty (1859) with a
fulsome dedication to her; and he wrapped up the Autobiography as if that would have no further
additions. In fact, he lived a further twelve years and had reason to take up the narrative again to
record what was an extremely productive and active period in his later life, publishing several of his
major essays, responding to and resisting the rush of liberal sympathy for the Southern states in the
American Civil War, and following up and defending the findings of his own System of Logic, his father’s
Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829), and his friend Alexander Bain’s The Senses and
the Intellect (1855) and The Emotions and the Will (1859), in his An Examination of Sir William
Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865).
There were several years between the couple’s construction of the bulk of the Autobiography and the
final section by Mill of the seventh chapter, ‘General View of the Remainder of My Life’. This later
section also seems to change in tone: the account given, even of events before his marriage to Taylor, is
more relaxed and open, and the encomiums on Harriet seem more measured and, at the same time,
more tied to general advances in public understanding on a range of issues, in particular in respect to
the couple’s concern with socialism. Indeed, Mill expresses his sense that society will make further
progress only with the emancipation of mankind from the ‘old opinions in religion, morals, and politics’
which ‘have still life enough in them to be a powerful obstacle to the growing up of any better opinions
on those subjects’ but what also comes across is his sense that he still had some part to play in that
process, even though he was now alone (p. 134).
In 1865 he was also approached by some Westminster electors who asked him to stand as their
candidate, and at their expense, and he was duly elected as an uncompromising candidate committed to
saying what he thought and defending his principles, and expressly declining to devote his time to local
interests (p. 158). For three parliamentary sessions he was a ‘tolerably frequent speaker’, tackling a
wide range of issues over which other liberals differed with him, such as capital punishment and the
seizing of enemy shipping in war, or developing issues which attracted little liberal attention, such as
women’s suffrage, proportional representation, and the development of municipal government in the
capital. Mill was clearly proud of the part he played in Parliament, with cause, and he became an
increasingly respected parliamentarian, playing a part in the extensive debates on Ireland and on
Jamaica. He was nominated again in the 1868 election but was not re-elected—which surprised him not
at all—and he retired permanently from all but literary contributions to public life, to alternate between
Avignon and London and to develop a series of further works. While Mill stepped down with some
element of relief, his account of his time in Parliament suggests that he found it more rewarding than
many other periods of his life.

V
In opening the Autobiography, Mill emphasized his sense of the work as charting the successive phases
of a mind ‘which was always ready to learn and unlearn either from its own thoughts or from those of
others’ in ‘an age of transition’ (p. 5). This larger sense of the nature of the age and his own
construction by it, allowed Mill to see himself as a barometer for a range of new thinking, and as a
contributor to these developments. Following the initial resolution of his crisis he recounts that ‘The
influences of European, that is to say, Continental, thought, and especially those of the reaction of the
nineteenth century against the eighteenth, were now streaming in upon me’ (p. 92). These powerful
currents in social and political philosophy that Mill engaged with in trying to understand the direction
of social change in nineteenth-century Europe meant that he played a major role in bringing European
thinking into the more empirical and analytical traditions of British philosophy. Many readers still see
him as the most English of thinkers, but he was actively engaged in a wide Continental correspondence
and his work is deeply marked by the influence of late Romanticism and European—especially French—
social thought as developed by the Saint-Simonians, Ideologues, and the Doctrinaires. His voracious
appetite for ideas and experience led him to explore many avenues and he was sometimes mistaken by
others as a potential disciple—by Thomas Carlyle and Auguste Comte, for example. But Mill’s education
and crisis seems to have taught him to distrust simple answers and the direction of others. It had left
him more broadly curious and more actively self-developing. He sought out and responded to new
influences and ideas, but the thought of discipleship probably terrified him, threatening him once more
with parroting the ideas of others. At the same time, he recognized and acknowledged his own
vulnerability to influence. Indeed, the account he gives of the crisis underlines his own sense that it was
only through considerable struggle that he was successful in forging his own path through his
despondency so as to come to play an active part in shaping his own experience and self. Several of
Mill’s early essays, such as ‘Spirit of the Age’ (1831) and ‘Civilisation’ (1836), show evidence of his
reading of French social thought in presenting a contrast between an old order marked by
differentiations on the basis of status and power and a new era in which public and popular opinion
dominated, but in which it might do so in ways that submerged the individual in the mass, with the
mass being driven by the half-formed ideas and prejudices of an uneducated and intolerant majority.
Tocqueville’s analysis of Democracy in America (1835, 1840) profoundly impressed Mill,30 especially in
its depiction of the enervation of originality and individuality in democratic society and the
transformation of the people into a compliant herd, unwilling and increasingly unable to demonstrate
any independence or innovation in thought or action. It had this impact on Mill in part because it
helped him see his own struggle for individuality, not simply as a personal battle (waged against an
education that threatened to become dogma), but as connected to a larger set of issues in the
emergence of modern society and its pressures to conformity and against the full and free development
of the individual.
The Autobiography is also an important text for charting the fortunes of liberal and radical thought in
Britain in the middle of the century. Mill was a central figure in debates on reform and the proper end
and organization of government. He debated with Owenite socialists in the 1820s and 1830s and he
maintained relationships with people with very diverse political opinions. He came to describe himself
in his later life as practically a socialist, and he thought economic growth was no more than an interim
goal in the development of society and of the human potential it contained. Indeed, his commitment to
socialism is one of those areas in which he felt Harriet’s influence most, finding her a stalwart defender
of the view that an economic order that was more equal, less exploitative, and more genuinely adjusted
to meeting the needs of all, must emerge from the more democratic order that they saw evolving. While
modern commentators insist on calling him a liberal, Mill’s liberalism is a far richer and more
ecumenical diet than that which we now associate with the term. This is evident from the short period
he spent in Parliament, where he combined an uncompromising commitment to his principles with a
certain resignation to being, in consequence, a minority voice.
 The central principles that underpin Mill’s mature thought are the commitment to the value of
individuality and to its full and free development, and his belief that there is a plurality of values which
generate different and potentially competing ways of life. His understanding of the age of transition in
which he saw himself as living enhanced his sense of the fragility of that individuality, and its risk of
being undercut by social forces and the influence of opinion. That is not to say that he sought a
complete emancipation from socialization or the influence of culture. In Utilitarianism he makes it clear
that people’s moral feelings have to be respected, even though they are largely acquired rather than
innate. Indeed, people can be led to treat even the most pernicious principles as demands of conscience
with ‘sufficient use of the external sanctions and of the force of early impressions’. Nonetheless, with
the development of intellectual culture and ‘the dissolving force of analysis’, we can emancipate
ourselves from feelings that have no natural basis in our sentiments, and can come to recognize the
natural sentiment that underlines utilitarian morality.31 This process, then, is a further case of Mill’s
sense that we need ethology and an informed education to strengthen our intelligence and help us gain
some ascendancy over the otherwise determining force of society and the stultifying conformism that
membership of the mass threatens to impose upon us. The Subjection of Women is similarly based on a
conviction that it is the cultural and social subjection of women that has driven them to exercise their
capacities largely in the domestic sphere, and that we can have little idea of whether there is any
natural basis for the existing inequality in intellectual accomplishments between men and women.
Mill’s Autobiography also grew out of this mature position and should be understood as in itself a part
of his case for individuality and the importance of self-cultivation. It was written with a deep awareness
of the difficulty of attaining independence and of defending oneself against an often powerfully
determinist social world—a world that in many respects he felt he had nearly succumbed to, and from
which his emancipation had been extremely hard fought. His conception of human flourishing—indeed,
his own sense of the ends of his own life and development—was not prescriptive in detail, it entailed
that people should be free to chart their own course and to explore ideas and practices for themselves,
as he had taught himself to do: ‘Mankind are the greater gainers by suffering each other to live as
seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.’32 If a person
possesses any tolerable amount of common sense and experience, his own mode of laying out his
existence is the best, not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode.33 As Mill goes
on to say, it is not simply that people have a diversity of tastes—this in itself is not a sufficient reason
for non-interference—it is that they require different conditions for their spiritual development:
The same things which are helps to one person towards the cultivation of his higher nature, are hindrances to another.
The same mode of life is a healthy excitement to one, keeping all his faculties of action and enjoyment in their best
order, while to another it is a distracting burthen, which suspends or crushes all internal life.34

If the differences between human beings are not reflected in a diversity of modes of life, ‘they will
neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of
which their nature is capable’.35 And the fact of that diversity is partly a function of the development of
the more cultivated and civilized society that opens up in prospect in the modern world.
In On Liberty Mill defends the view that truth is served by freedom of opinion, but he also believed
that truth also served freedom, and a key component of the Autobiography is its case for that inference:
as we make progress in understanding, so we gain in freedom. As Mill came to understand himself and
came to a rapprochement with his childhood and youth, so he came more fully to understand the
operation of the social world and the influence of opinion, and felt himself able to emancipate himself
from error, dogma, prejudice, and unreflecting commitments. There could be, for Mill, no complete
emancipation since the very process of self-cultivation draws on the conditions in which we find
ourselves, to which we develop our own personal response, and within which we become ‘enabled to
shape those circumstances in a manner much more favourable to the ends we desire, than the shape
which they would of themselves assume. This is the limit of our power; but within this limit the power is
a most important one.’36 If it is the limit of our power, it is also the limit of our freedom. But it is by
pushing those limits that we develop more fully our particular character as progressive beings so that it
becomes possible for us to live as free, self-determining beings. Mill’s Autobiography is simultaneously
a study of that process, an attempt at a systematic self-analysis directed to facilitating his achievement
of freedom, and a defence of his claim that he was successful in achieving that end. As with so many of
his writings, it is an account that is as relevant today as it was when he wrote it.

1 Letter 127, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (hereafter CW), ed. J. M. Robson, 33 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963–91), xiv. 154; F. A. Hayek, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their Friendship
and Subsequent Marriage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), 194; but see also Mill’s letter to Harriet on 23 Jan. 1854
in which he says: ‘you only can decide what more is necessary or desirable to say in order to stop the mouths of our enemies
hereafter’. Letter 120, in CW xiv. 138; Hayek, Mill and Taylor, 190.
2 In a letter to Thomas Carlyle, 22 Oct. 1832, in CW xii. 128, he insists: ‘I was not crammed; my own thinking faculties were
called into strong though partial play; & by their means I have been enabled to remake all my opinions.’
3 The Early Draft of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, ed. Jack Stillinger (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 185.
4 Bk. vi, ch. 5, in CW viii. 870–4.
5 CW viii. 869–70.
6 Early Draft, ed. Stillinger, 179. The latter point is difficult to square with his apparent proficiency on the piano, even if in
adulthood he seems to have played almost entirely his own compositions and improvisations.
 7 Letter 23, in CW xiv. 42; Hayek, Mill and Taylor, 165.
8 As his sister Harriet pointed out in a note to Revd J. Crompton in 1875, Mill also almost entirely banishes his siblings from
his account. King’s College Cambridge, Keynes Papers, MS 170.
9 Hayek cites letters by H. Solly and J. Crompton, both classmates of J. S. Mill’s younger brother James at University College:
Mill and Taylor, 32–3. Crompton’s comments come in the introduction he wrote to Harriet Mill (Mill’s younger sister), now in
the Keynes Papers in King’s College, Cambridge.
10 Mary E. Coleman to J. S. Mill, 18 July 1851, in Hayek, Mill and Taylor, 173.
11 Harriet Taylor Mill to J. S. Mill, 14 and 15 February 1854, in Hayek, Mill and Taylor, 196.
12 His sister Harriet comments that she fears that her ‘brother will make but a queer impression on the public by his
exaltation of his wife’. King’s College, Cambridge, Keynes Papers, MS 170, fol. 9. Mill wrote: ‘The “Liberty” was more directly
and literally our joint production than anything else which bears my name, for there was not a sentence of it that was not
several times gone through by us together, turned over in many ways, and carefully weeded of any faults, either in thought or
expression, that we detected in it. It is in consequence of this that, although it never underwent her final revision, it far
surpasses, as a mere specimen of composition, anything which has proceeded from me either before or since’ (p. 141).
13 See Hayek, Mill and Taylor, 222–3, citing Mill’s letter to Harriet from Naples, 17 February 1855, in which he refers to a
plan for a volume on liberty, couched wholly in terms of ‘we’: ‘We have got a power of which we must try to make good use
during the few years of life we have left . . . We must cram into it as much as possible of what we wish not to leave unsaid.’
14 Mill to John Sterling, 15 April 1829, letter 25, in CW xii. 29; Hayek, Mill and Taylor, 34.
15 Hayek, Mill and Taylor, 34.
16 Hayek, Mill and Taylor, 29.
17 See also Mill’s letters to his sister Clara and to his mother, 5 Mar. 1852, letters 69 and 70, in CW xiv. 82–3.
18 Early Draft, ed. Stillinger, 148. Médisance is malicious gossip.
19 See e.g. the comments on Mrs Grote in Mill to Harriet, 16 January 1854, letter 118, in CW xiv. 133; Hayek, Mill and
Taylor, 188.
20 A letter from Harriet Taylor to Mill, c.1835, seems to quote him expressing anxiety, were they to abscond together, that he
would have to live a ‘life obscure insignificant & useless’. Hayek, Mill and Taylor, 97. Harriet’s response was robust.
21 CW x, 335; 15 January 1855, letter 213, in CW xiv. 291.
22 Mill to Harriet Taylor, 27 January 1849, letter 2, in CW xiv. 5–6; Hayek, Mill and Taylor, 132–3. Although, see letter of 17
February 1855, in Hayek, Mill and Taylor, 223, where Mill is rather more (yet still not much more) ‘in charity with’ Mr
Macaulay.
23 See e.g. his characterization of Mr Pope (‘though he does not seem to me to have any talent, he is better informed than
common Englishmen’), whom Mill meets, and then sets out to instruct, while in Brittany in 1854. Mill to Harriet, 24 June 1854,
letter 168, in CW xiv. 217–18.
24 Letter 122, in CW xiv. 141–2; Hayek, Mill and Taylor, 191.

25 Hayek, Mill and Taylor, 121.

26 Mill signed J. S. Mill, rather than John Stuart Mill, and wrote to Harriet an anxious letter on 13
July 1852 suggesting they needed to get married again to ensure that the marriage was properly legal.
Indeed, he also suggests that they should marry in church. Harriet seems to have demurred. Letter 83,
in CW xiv. 96–7; Hayek, Mill and Taylor, 169–70.
27 King’s College, Cambridge, Keynes Papers, MS 170, fols. 6–7; Hayek, Mill and Taylor, 171.
28 J. S. Mill to Harriet Taylor Mill, 4 July 1854, letter 172, in CW xiv. 223; Hayek, Mill and Taylor,
210.
29J. S. Mill to William Thomas Thornton, 9 November 1858, letter 332, in CW xv. 574. Hayek, Mill
and Taylor, 263–4.
30 As is clear from his reviews of Tocqueville’s two-part Democracy in America (1835, 1840), in CW
xviii. 47–90, 153–204.
31‘Utilitarianism’, in On Liberty, Utilitarianism, and other Essays, ed. Mark Philp and Fred Rosen
(Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2015), 144.
32 ‘On Liberty’, in On Liberty, Utilitarianism, and other Essays, ed. Philp and Rosen, 14.
33 ‘On Liberty’, 66.
34 ‘On Liberty’, 66–7.
35 ‘On Liberty’, 67.
36 CW viii. 870.
 NOTE ON THE TEXT

THE primary text for this edition is that used for the Oxford paperback (1971) of the Houghton Mifflin
Riverside edition published in 1969 and edited by Professor Jack Stillinger.
The first edition of the Autobiography, published in 1873, was based on a manuscript largely in the
hands of Mill’s stepdaughter Helen Taylor, Mill’s youngest sister Mary Elizabeth Colman, and a French
copyist who remains to be identified. The manuscript is now in the John Rylands Library in Manchester.
It contains a number of ‘suppressed passages’—passages that were not printed in the published
version. A second manuscript, in Mill’s hand, is held in Columbia University Library and is known as the
‘Columbia manuscript’. An edition of this was published in 1924 by Columbia University Press. A third
manuscript, known as the ‘Early Draft’, contains an earlier account of Mill’s life to 1851, and covers the
period dealt with in the first 168 pages of the Columbia edition. This manuscript was transcribed,
edited by Professor Stillinger, and published as The Early Draft of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography by
the University of Illinois Press in 1961. A full critical edition of the Autobiography was painstakingly
assembled by Stillinger and John Robson, the General Editor of Mill’s Collected Works, with the texts of
both the Early Draft and the Columbia edition, together with material rejected by Mill (often on the
advice of other readers of the manuscript, most notably Harriet Taylor-Mill), and published in 1963 (see
below). This edition also includes a transcription of several pages held by Yale University, known as the
‘Yale fragment’, which is draft material by Mill relating to the influence of Harriet Taylor on his
thinking.
Stillinger’s Houghton Mifflin text is taken from the Columbia manuscript, although it corrected the
original Columbia edition of 1924 in a great number of minor instances (see below). Readers who want
a complete set of all the material relating to Mill’s Autobiography should refer to the authoritative
critical edition in volume i of Robson’s Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, edited by Robson and
Stillinger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963). The volume is
currently published by the Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, and that edition can also be accessed at the
Liberty Fund’s Online Library of Liberty website: http://oll.libertyfund.org/people/john-stuart-mill.
The present edition reproduces Stillinger’s transcription of the Columbia manuscript. Stillinger notes
that he has
silently amended the MS text in lowering superscript letters to the line; adding periods after abbreviations and (where
they are missing) at the ends of sentences; adding commas and in a few instances other marks of punctuation where
they were necessary or especially desirable (mainly to complete Mill’s revisions but also in places where he used some
other device—most often at the end of the line in the MS—as a substitute for punctuation); expanding ampersand to
‘and’ and spelling out most numbers and one abbreviation (‘U.States becomes United States’). I have also corrected a
title (‘Système’ to ‘Cours’ on p. 147 n. [p. 139 in this edition]), a date (‘1861’ to ‘1862’ on p. 160 [p. 151 in this
edition]), and the spelling of a few foreign words. In other respects I have followed the MS verbatim, retaining Mill’s
oddities in spelling (‘superintendance,’ ‘transcendant’), inconsistencies (e.g., ‘stile’ and ‘style,’ ‘developement’ and
‘development’), and one archaism (‘council’ for ‘counsel’ on p. 177 [p. 168 in this edition]) just as he wrote them.1

Stillinger’s footnotes that included material from other manuscripts have been incorporated in the
‘Appendix: Additional Textual Material’ at the back of the book. These notes have been considerably
expanded with further material drawn from the manuscript sources identified above, whose location in
both the Robson Collected Works and Stillinger’s edition of the Early Draft is identified for each
selection. The Appendix precedes the Explanatory Notes and the subsequent Index and Glossary of
Persons.
In adding this material the concern has been to provide readers with evidence of Mill’s changing
thinking about what he wants to say on a series of key issues, most notably in relation to his parents,
his relationship to Harriet (and subsequently to his stepdaughter Helen Taylor), and his intellectual
debts to her. The material included is a selection only: it does not identify minor changes of expression
or description and consists for the most part of passages of some length, both because these are easier
to make sense of and because they are more easily linked to the final text. The Autobiography is a
carefully crafted work, and our appreciation of it is enhanced by seeing how some aspects of it were
drafted and then refined until a final form was determined on.
In the text, numbers in square brackets refer to the numbered manuscript and suppressed passages
reproduced in the Appendix. The editor’s Explanatory Notes are indicated by asterisks. Mill’s own
footnotes are reproduced on the page. Further biographical and bibliographical information concerning
the many individuals and works cited by Mill can be found in the Index and Glossary of Persons.
Anyone working on Mill’s Autobiography—indeed, on any aspect of Mill—is hugely indebted to the
editorial work of Stillinger and Robson, and to the editors of the other volumes in the Collected Works.

1 Stillinger, in his Houghton Mifflin edition of the Autobiography, p. xxi.

 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mill, J. S., Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson, 33 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963–91).
Mill, J. S., The Early Draft of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, ed. Jack Stillinger (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1961).

General Works on Mill’s Thought

Berger, F., Happiness, Justice, and Freedom: The Moral and Political Philosophy of John Stuart Mill
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).
Donner, W., The Liberal Self: John Stuart Mill’s Moral and Political Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1991).
Duncan, G., Marx and Mill: Two Views of Social Conflict and Social Harmony (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1973).
Eggleston, B., Miller, D., and Weinstein, D. (eds.), John Stuart Mill and the Art of Life (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Eisenach, E. (ed.), Mill and the Moral Character of Liberalism (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1998).
Hamburger, J., John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
Himmelfarb, G., On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1974).
Lewisohn, D., ‘Mill and Comte on the Methods of Social Science’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 33
(1972), 315–24.
Lively, J., and Rees, J. C. (eds.), Utilitarian Logic and Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).
Lyons, D., Rights, Welfare, and Mill’s Moral Theory (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1994).
Miller, D. E., J. S. Mill, Moral, Social, and Political Thought (Cambridge and Malden, Mass.: Polity Press,
2010).
Robson, J. M., The Improvement of Mankind: The Social and Political Thought of John Stuart Mill
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969).
Rosen, F., Mill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Ryan, A., J. S. Mill (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974).
Ryan, A., The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (1970; 2nd edn., Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987).
Scarre, G., Logic and Reality in the Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1989).
Semmel, B., John Stuart Mill and the Pursuit of Virtue (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1984).
Skorupski, J., John Stuart Mill (London and New York: Routledge, 1989).
Skorupski, J., Why Read Mill Today? (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).
Skorupski, J. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Stafford, W., John Stuart Mill (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988).
Urbinati, N., and Zakaras, A., J. S. Mill’s Political Thought: A Bicentennial Reassessment (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Varouxaki, G., and Kelly, P. (eds.), John Stuart Mill, Thought and Influence: The Saint of Rationalism
(London and New York: Routledge, 2010).

Biography and Context

Bain, A., John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections (London: Longmans, Green, and Co.,
1882).
Capaldi, N., John Stuart Mill: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Collini, S., Public Moralists, Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–1930 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1991).
Collini, S., Winch, D., and Burrow, J., That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century
Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Demetriou, K., Studies on the Reception of Plato and Greek Political Thought in Victorian Britain
(Farnham, Surrey, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 2011).
Demetriou, K., and Loizides, A., John Stuart Mill: A British Socrates (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2013).
Halévy, E., The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism (London: Faber and Faber, 1972).
Hamburger, J., Intellectuals in Politics: John Stuart Mill and the Philosophic Radicals (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1965).
Hayek, F., John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their Correspondence and Subsequent Marriage
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951).
Jones, H. S., ‘John Stuart Mill as a Moralist’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 53 (1992), 287–308.
Kinzer, B., J. S. Mill Revisited: Biographical and Political Explorations (New York and Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Kinzer, B., Robson, A., and Robson, J., A Moralist In and Out of Parliament: John Stuart Mill at
Westminster 1865–8 (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1992).
Loizides, A., John Stuart Mill’s Platonic Heritage: Happiness Through Character (Lanham, Md.:
Lexington Books, 2013).
Moir, M., Peers, D., and Zastoupil, L. (eds.), J. S. Mill’s Encounter with India (Toronto, Buffalo, and
London: University of Toronto Press, 1999).
Nicholson, P., ‘The Reception and Early Reputation of Mill’s Political Thought’, in J. Skorupski (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Mill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 464–96.
Packe, M. St John, The Life of John Stuart Mill (London: Secker and Warburg, 1954).
Pappé, H., John Stuart Mill and the Harriet Taylor Myth (Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1960).
Robson, A., and Robson, J. (eds.), Sexual Equality: Writings by John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill, and
Helen Taylor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994).
Rosen, F., ‘Parallel Lives in Logic: The Benthams and the Mills’, in G. Varouxakis and P. Kelly (eds.),
John Stuart Mill, Thought and Influence: The Saint of Rationalism (London: Routledge, 2010), 67–83.
Thomas, W., The Philosophic Radicals: Nine Studies in Theory and Practice, 1817–1841 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1979).
Zastoupil, L., John Stuart Mill and India (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994).

Further Reading in Oxford World’s Classics

Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty, Utilitarianism, and Other Essays, ed. Mark Philp and Frederick Rosen.
Mill, John Stuart, Principles of Political Economy and Chapters on Socialism, ed. Jonathan Riley.
 A CHRONOLOGY OF JOHN STUART MILL

1806 (20 May) John Stuart Mill born in London.

1809–20 Educated at home by his father, James Mill (1773–1836), beginning Greek at the age of 3.
Spends a year in France with Sir Samuel Bentham (1757–1831), the brother of the
1820–1
philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), the close associate of Mill’s father.
Reads Roman law with the jurist John Austin (1790–1859) and is encouraged by his father to
1821–2
read Étienne Dumont’s collection of Bentham’s writing, Traités de législation.
Mill founds a Utilitarian Society for the fortnightly discussion of utilitarian ethics and
politics at Bentham’s house. He writes five letters on freedom of opinion in response to the
1822–3
trials of the radical deist Richard Carlisle and his wife and sister for publishing material
hostile to Christianity.
Mill is arrested for distributing pamphlets advocating contraception and spends a night in
1823 police cells. He is employed as a clerk in the East India Company, where his father also
works.
Mill assists Bentham in publishing his Rationale of Judicial Evidence, 5 vols., ed. J. S. Mill
(London, 1827). He learns German and reads widely in political economy and logic with
1825–6 members of the Utilitarian Society. Engages in debate with the Cooperative Society founded
by followers of Robert Owen (1771–1858); and subsequently founds a fortnightly debating
society.
Begins writing for the Westminster Review. The Utilitarian Society breaks up and Mill has
1826–7
what he described as a crisis in his mental history.
1829 Mill withdraws from the debating society.
Visits Paris during the 1830 Revolution in France, writing extensively for The Examiner on
French matters. These lead to a friendship with Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881). First meets
Harriet Taylor (1807–58) (then married to John Taylor). Mill reads a range of works by the
1830 Saint-Simonian school in France (Claude Henri Saint-Simon (1760–1825); Amand Bazard
(1791–1832), Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin (1796–1864) ), who originated socialism and
included, initially, Auguste Comte (1798–1857) with whom Mill subsequently corresponded
extensively.
Edits, and subsequently (1837) owns, first the London Review, and then the London and
1834–40
Westminster Review.
Reads Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la démocratie en Amérique (part I), 2 vols. (Paris, 1835) (a
1835
further two volumes were published in 1840).
1836 James Mill dies.
1843 Publishes A System of Logic.
1848 Publishes Principles of Political Economy.
1849 Harriet Taylor’s husband, John, dies.
1851 (April) John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor marry.
( June 1854) Mill’s mother dies while Mill is away for six months travelling alone in southern
1854–5
Europe for relief from consumption.
Promoted to chief of the office of the Examiner of India Correspondence, the second highest
1856
position in the East India Company’s home service.
Following the Indian Mutiny, the East India Company is dissolved. Mill leads the opposition
to this move and, though offered a position on the new Indian Council, he retires. Harriet
1858
Taylor Mill dies while they are travelling for her health at Avignon in November. Mill returns
to Avignon each year for extensive visits for his own health.
Mill publishes On Liberty, dedicating it to the memory of his wife. Publishes Thoughts on
1859
Parliamentary Reform, on which he draws in Considerations on Representative Government.
1861 Publishes Considerations on Representative Government and Utilitarianism.
Publishes August Comte and Positivism in which he criticizes Comte. Elected as an
1865
independent Liberal Member of Parliament for Westminster.
1868 Mill loses his seat in the House of Commons in the general election.
Publishes The Subjection of Women with the encouragement of his stepdaughter Helen
1869
Taylor.
(May) Dies at Avignon, and is buried with his wife. Helen Taylor arranges the posthumous
1873 publication of several works including the Autobiography (1873) and the Chapters on
Socialism (1879).
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
 CONTENTS

I. Childhood, and Early Education

II. Moral Influences in Early Youth. My Father’s Character and Opinions
III. Last Stage of Education, and First of Self-Education
IV. Youthful Propagandism. The Westminster Review
V. A Crisis in My Mental History. One Stage Onward
VI. Commencement of the Most Valuable Friendship of My Life. My Father’s Death. Writings and
Other Proceedings up to 1840105
VII. General View of the Remainder of My Life
 CHAPTER I

CHILDHOOD, AND EARLY EDUCATION

It seems proper that I should prefix to the following biographical sketch, some mention of the reasons
which have made me think it desirable that I should leave behind me such a memorial of so uneventful
a life as mine. I do not for a moment imagine that any part of what I have to relate, can be interesting
to the public as a narrative, or as being connected with myself. But I have thought that in an age in
which education, and its improvement, are the subject of more, if not of profounder study than at any
former period of English history, it may be useful that there should be some record of an education
which was unusual and remarkable, and which, whatever else it may have done, has proved how much
more than is commonly supposed may be taught, and well taught, in those early years which, in the
common modes of what is called instruction, are little better than wasted. It has also seemed to me that
in an age of transition in opinions, there may be somewhat both of interest and of benefit in noting the
successive phases of any mind which was always pressing forward, equally ready to learn and to
unlearn either from its own thoughts or from those of others. But a motive which weighs more with me
than either of these, is a desire to make acknowledgment of the debts which my intellectual and moral
development owes to other persons; some of them of recognized eminence, others less known than they
deserve to be, and the one to whom most of all is due, one whom the world had no opportunity of
knowing.* The reader whom these things do not interest, has only himself to blame if he reads farther,
and I do not desire any other indulgence from him than that of bearing in mind, that for him these
pages were not written.*
I was born in London, on the 20th of May 1806, and was the eldest son of James Mill, the author of
the History of British India. My father, the son of a petty tradesman and (I believe) small farmer, at
Northwater Bridge, in the county of Angus, was, when a boy, recommended by his abilities to the notice
of Sir John Stuart, of Fettercairn, one of the Barons of the Exchequer in Scotland, and was, in
consequence, sent to the University of Edinburgh at the expense of a fund established by Lady Jane
Stuart (the wife of Sir John Stuart) and some other ladies for educating young men for the Scottish
Church. He there went through the usual course of study, and was licensed as a Preacher, but never
followed the profession; having satisfied himself that he could not believe the doctrines of that or any
other Church. For a few years he was a private tutor in various families in Scotland, among others that
of the Marquis of Tweeddale; but ended by taking up his residence in London, and devoting himself to
authorship. Nor had he any other means of support until 1819, when he obtained an appointment in the
India House.*
In this period of my father’s life there are two things which it is impossible not to be struck with: one
of them unfortunately a very common circumstance, the other a most uncommon one. The first is, that
in his position, with no resource but the precarious one of writing in periodicals, he married and had a
large family; conduct than which nothing could be more opposed, both as a matter of good sense and of
duty, to the opinions which, at least at a later period of life, he strenuously upheld.[1]* The other
circumstance, is the extraordinary energy which was required to lead the life he led, with the
disadvantages under which he laboured from the first, and with those which he brought upon himself
by his marriage. It would have been no small thing, had he done no more than to support himself and
his family during so many years by writing, without ever being in debt, or in any pecuniary difficulty;
holding, as he did, opinions,[2] both in politics and in religion, which were more odious to all persons of
influence, and to the common run of prosperous Englishmen, in that generation than either before or
since; and being not only a man whom nothing would have induced to write against his convictions, but
one who invariably threw into everything he wrote, as much of his convictions as he thought the
circumstances would in any way permit: being, it must also be said, one who never did anything
negligently; never undertook any task, literary or other, on which he did not conscientiously bestow all
the labour necessary for performing it adequately. But he, with these burthens on him, planned,
commenced, and completed, the History of India; and this in the course of about ten years, a shorter
time than has been occupied (even by writers who had no other employment) in the production of
almost any other historical work of equal bulk, and of anything approaching to the same amount of
reading and research. And to this is to be added, that during the whole period, a considerable part of
almost every day was employed in the instruction of his children: in the case of one of whom, myself, he
exerted an amount of labour, care, and perseverance rarely, if ever, employed for a similar purpose, in
endeavouring to give, according to his own conception, the highest order of intellectual education.
A man who, in his own practice, so vigorously acted up to the principle of losing no time, was likely to
adhere to the same rule in the instruction of his pupil. I have no remembrance of the time when I began
to learn Greek. I have been told that it was when I was three years old. My earliest recollection on the
subject, is that of committing to memory what my father termed Vocables, being lists of common Greek
words, with their signification in English, which he wrote out for me on cards. Of grammar, until some
years later, I learnt no more than the inflexions of the nouns and verbs, but, after a course of vocables,
proceeded at once to translation; and I faintly remember going through Æsop’s Fables, the first Greek
book which I read. The Anabasis,* which I remember better, was the second. I learnt no Latin until my
eighth year. At that time I had read, under my father’s tuition, a number of Greek prose authors, among
whom I remember the whole of Herodotus, and of Xenophon’s Cyropædia and Memorials of Socrates;
some of the lives of the philosophers by Diogenes Laertius; part of Lucian, and Isocrates ad Demonicum
and ad Nicoclem. I also read, in 1813, the first six dialogues (in the common arrangement) of Plato,
from the Euthyphron to the Theætetus inclusive: which last dialogue, I venture to think, would have
been better omitted, as it was totally impossible I should understand it.* But my father, in all his
teaching, demanded of me not only the utmost that I could do, but much that I could by no possibility
have done. What he was himself willing to undergo for the sake of my instruction, may be judged from
the fact, that I went through the whole process of preparing my Greek lessons in the same room and at
the same table at which he was writing: and as in those days Greek and English Lexicons were not, and
I could make no more use of a Greek and Latin Lexicon than could be made without having yet begun to
learn Latin, I was forced to have recourse to him for the meaning of every word which I did not know.
This incessant interruption he, one of the most impatient of men, submitted to, and wrote under that
interruption several volumes of his History and all else that he had to write during those years.
The only thing besides Greek, that I learnt as a lesson in this part of my childhood, was arithmetic:
this also my father taught me: it was the task of the evenings, and I well remember its
disagreeableness. But the lessons were only a part of the daily instruction I received. Much of it
consisted in the books I read by myself, and my father’s discourses to me, chiefly during our walks.
From 1810 to the end of 1813 we were living in Newington Green,* then an almost rustic
neighbourhood. My father’s health required considerable and constant exercise, and he walked
habitually before breakfast, generally in the green lanes towards Hornsey.* In these walks I always
accompanied him, and with my earliest recollections of green fields and wild flowers, is mingled that of
the account I gave him daily of what I had read the day before. To the best of my remembrance, this
was a voluntary rather than a prescribed exercise. I made notes on slips of paper while reading, and
from these, in the morning walks, I told the story to him; for the books were chiefly histories, of which I
read in this manner a great number: Robertson’s histories, Hume, Gibbon; but my greatest delight,
then and for long afterwards, was Watson’s Philip the Second and Third. The heroic defence of the
Knights of Malta against the Turks, and of the revolted provinces of the Netherlands against Spain,
excited in me an intense and lasting interest. Next to Watson, my favorite historical reading was
Hooke’s History of Rome. Of Greece I had seen at that time no regular history, except school
abridgments and the last two or three volumes of a translation of Rollin’s Ancient History, beginning
with Philip of Macedon. But I read with great delight Langhorne’s translation of Plutarch. In English
history, beyond the time at which Hume leaves off, I remember reading Burnet’s History of his Own
Time, though I cared little for anything in it except the wars and battles; and the historical part of the
Annual Register, from the beginning to about 1788,* where the volumes my father borrowed for me
from Mr. Bentham left off. I felt a lively interest in Frederic of Prussia during his difficulties, and in
Paoli, the Corsican patriot; but when I came to the American War, I took my part, like a child as I was
(until set right by my father) on the wrong side, because it was called the English side.* In these
frequent talks about the books I read, he used, as opportunity offered, to give me explanations and
ideas respecting civilization, government, morality, mental cultivation, which he required me
afterwards to restate to him in my own words. He also made me read, and give him a verbal account of,
many books which would not have interested me sufficiently to induce me to read them of myself:
among others, Millar’s Historical View of the English Government, a book of great merit for its time,
and which he highly valued; Mosheim’s Ecclesiastical History, McCrie’s Life of John Knox, and even
Sewell’s and Rutty’s Histories of the Quakers. He was fond of putting into my hands books which
exhibited men of energy and resource in unusual circumstances, struggling against difficulties and
overcoming them: of such works I remember Beaver’s African Memoranda,* and Collins’s account of
the first settlement of New South Wales. Two books which I never wearied of reading were Anson’s
Voyage, so delightful to most young persons, and a Collection (Hawkesworth’s, I believe) of Voyages
round the World, in four volumes, beginning with Drake and ending with Cook and Bougainville. Of
children’s books, any more than of playthings, I had scarcely any, except an occasional gift from a
relation or acquaintance: among those I had, Robinson Crusoe was preeminent, and continued to
delight me through all my boyhood. It was no part however of my father’s system to exclude books of
amusement, though he allowed them very sparingly. Of such books he possessed at that time next to
none, but he borrowed several for me; those which I remember are, the Arabian Nights,* Cazotte’s
Arabian Tales, Don Quixote, Miss Edgeworth’s “Popular Tales,” and a book of some reputation in its day,
Brooke’s Fool of Quality.
In my eighth year I commenced learning Latin, in conjunction with a younger sister, to whom I taught
it as I went on, and who afterwards repeated the lessons to my father: and from this time, other sisters
and brothers being successively added as pupils, a considerable part of my day’s work consisted of this
preparatory teaching. It was a part which I greatly disliked; the more so, as I was held responsible for
the lessons of my pupils, in almost as full a sense as for my own: I however derived from this discipline
the great advantage, of learning more thoroughly and retaining more lastingly the things which I was
set to teach: perhaps, too, the practice it afforded in explaining difficulties to others, may even at that
age have been useful. In other respects, the experience of my boyhood is not favorable to the plan of
teaching children by means of one another. The teaching, I am sure, is very inefficient as teaching, and
I well know that the relation between teacher and taught is not a good moral discipline to either. I went
in this manner through the Latin grammar, and a considerable part of Cornelius Nepos and Cæsar’s
Commentaries, but afterwards added to the superintendance of these lessons, much longer ones of my
own.
In the same year in which I began Latin, I made my first commencement in the Greek poets with the
Iliad. After I had made some progress in this, my father put Pope’s translation into my hands. It was the
first English verse I had cared to read, and it became one of the books in which for many years I most
delighted: I think I must have read it from twenty to thirty times through. I should not have thought it
worth while to mention a taste apparently so natural to boyhood, if I had not, as I think, observed that
the keen enjoyment of this brilliant specimen of narrative and versification is not so universal with
boys, as I should have expected both a priori and from my individual experience. Soon after this time I
commenced Euclid, and somewhat later, algebra, still under my father’s tuition.
From my eighth to my twelfth year the Latin books which I remember reading were, the Bucolics of
Virgil, and the first six books of the Æneid; all Horace except the Epodes; the fables of Phædrus; the
first five books of Livy (to which from my love of the subject I voluntarily added, in my hours of leisure,
the remainder of the first decad); all Sallust; a considerable part of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; some plays
of Terence; two or three books of Lucretius; several of the Orations of Cicero, and of his writings on
oratory; also his letters to Atticus, my father taking the trouble to translate to me from the French the
historical explanations in Mongault’s notes. In Greek I read the Iliad and Odyssey through; one or two
plays of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, though by these I profited little; all Thucydides; the
Hellenics of Xenophon; a great part of Demosthenes, Æschines, and Lysias; Theocritus; Anacreon;* part
of the Anthology;* a little of Dionysius; several books of Polybius; and lastly, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which,
as the first expressly scientific treatise on any moral or psychological subject which I had read, and
containing many of the best observations of the ancients on human nature and life, my father made me
study with peculiar care, and throw the matter of it into synoptic tables. During the same years I learnt
elementary geometry and algebra thoroughly, the differential calculus and other portions of the higher
mathematics far from thoroughly: for my father, not having kept up this part of his early acquired
knowledge, could not spare time to qualify himself for removing my difficulties, and left me to deal with
them, with little other aid than that of books: while I was continually incurring his displeasure by my
inability to solve difficult problems for which he did not see that I had not the necessary previous
knowledge.
As to my private reading, I can only speak of what I remember. History continued to be my strongest
predilection, and most of all ancient history. Mitford’s Greece I read continually. My father had put me
on my guard against the Tory prejudices of this writer, and his perversions of facts for the whitewashing
of despots, and blackening of popular institutions. These points he discoursed on, exemplifying them
from the Greek orators and historians, with such effect that in reading Mitford, my sympathies were
always on the contrary side to those of the author, and I could, to some extent, have argued the point
against him: yet this did not diminish the ever new pleasure with which I read the book. Roman history,
both in my old favorite, Hooke, and in Ferguson, continued to delight me. A book which, in spite of what
is called the dryness of its stile, I took great pleasure in, was the Ancient Universal History:* through
the incessant reading of which, I had my head full of historical details concerning the obscurest ancient
people, while about modern history, except detached passages such as the Dutch war of independence,
I knew and cared comparatively little. A voluntary exercise to which throughout my boyhood I was
much addicted, was what I called writing histories. I successively composed a Roman history, picked
out of Hooke; an abridgment of the Ancient Universal History; a History of Holland, from my favorite
Watson and from an anonymous compilation; and in my eleventh and twelfth year I occupied myself
with writing what I flattered myself was something serious. This was no less than a history of the
Roman Government, compiled (with the assistance of Hooke) from Livy and Dionysius: of which I wrote
as much as would have made an octavo volume, extending to the epoch of the Licinian Laws. It was, in
fact, an account of the struggles between the patricians and plebeians, which now engrossed all the
interest in my mind which I had previously felt in the mere wars and conquests of the Romans. I
discussed all the constitutional points as they arose: though quite ignorant of Niebuhr’s researches, I,
by such lights as my father had given me, vindicated the Agrarian Laws on the evidence of Livy, and
upheld to the best of my ability the Roman democratic party.* A few years later, in my contempt of my
childish efforts, I destroyed all these papers, not then anticipating that I could ever feel any curiosity
about my first attempts at writing and reasoning. My father encouraged me in this useful amusement,
though, as I think judiciously, he never asked to see what I wrote; so that I did not feel that in writing it
I was accountable to any one, nor had the chilling sensation of being under a critical eye.
But though these exercises in history were never a compulsory lesson, there was another kind of
composition which was so, namely writing verses, and it was one of the most disagreeable of my tasks.
Greek or Latin verses I did not write, nor learnt the prosody of those languages. My father, thinking this
not worth the time it required, contented himself with making me read aloud to him, and correcting
false quantities. I never composed at all in Greek, even in prose, and but little in Latin: not that my
father could be indifferent to the value of this practice, in giving a thorough knowledge of those
languages, but because there really was not time for it. The verses I was required to write were
English. When I first read Pope’s Homer, I ambitiously attempted to compose something of the same
kind, and achieved as much as one book of a continuation of the Iliad. There, probably, the spontaneous
promptings of my poetical ambition would have stopped; but the exercise, begun from choice, was
continued by command. Conformably to my father’s usual practice of explaining to me, as far as
possible, the reasons for what he required me to do, he gave me, for this, as I well remember, two
reasons highly characteristic of him. One was, that some things could be expressed better and more
forcibly in verse than in prose: this, he said, was a real advantage. The other was, that people in
general attached more value to verse than it deserved, and the power of writing it was, on this account,
worth acquiring. He generally left me to choose my own subjects, which, as far as I remember, were
mostly addresses to some mythological personage or allegorical abstraction; but he made me translate
into English verse many of Horace’s shorter poems: I also remember his giving me Thomson’s “Winter”
to read, and afterwards making me attempt (without book) to write something myself on the same
subject. The verses I wrote were of course the merest rubbish, nor did I ever attain any facility of
versification, but the practice may have been useful in making it easier for me, at a later period, to
acquire readiness of expression.1 I had read, up to this time, very little English poetry. Shakespeare my
father had put into my hands, chiefly for the sake of the historical plays, from which however I went on
to the others. My father never was a great admirer of Shakespeare, the English idolatry of whom he
used to attack with some severity. He cared little for any English poetry except Milton (for whom he had
the highest admiration), Goldsmith, Burns, and Gray’s Bard, which he preferred to his Elegy: perhaps I
may add Cowper and Beattie. He had some value for Spenser, and I remember his reading to me (unlike
his usual practice of making me read to him) the first book of the Fairie Queene; but I took little
pleasure in it. The poetry of the present century he saw scarcely any merit in, and I hardly became
acquainted with any of it till I was grown up to manhood, except the metrical romances of Walter Scott,
which I read at his recommendation and was intensely delighted with; as I always was with animated
narrative. Dryden’s Poems were among my father’s books, and many of these he made me read, but I
never cared for any of them except Alexander’s Feast, which, as well as many of the songs in Walter
Scott, I used to sing internally, to a music of my own: to some of the latter indeed I went so far as to
compose airs, which I still remember. Cowper’s short poems I read with some pleasure, but never got
far into the longer ones; and nothing in the two volumes interested me like the prose account of his
three hares. In my thirteenth year I met with Campbell’s Poems, among which Lochiel, Hohenlinden,
the Exile of Erin, and some others, gave me sensations I had never before experienced from poetry.
Here, too, I made nothing of the longer poems, except the striking opening of Gertrude of Wyoming,
which long kept its place in my feelings as the perfection of pathos.
During this part of my childhood, one of my greatest amusements was experimental science; in the
theoretical, however, not the practical sense of the word; not trying experiments, a kind of discipline
which I have often regretted not having had—nor even seeing, but merely reading about them. I never
remember being so wrapt up in any book, as I was in Joyce’s Scientific Dialogues; and I was rather
recalcitrant to my father’s criticisms of the bad reasoning respecting the first principles of physics
which abounds in the early part of that work. I devoured treatises on Chemistry, especially that of my
father’s early friend and schoolfellow Dr. Thomson, for years before I attended a lecture or saw an
experiment.
From about the age of twelve, I entered into another and more advanced stage in my course of
instruction; in which the main object was no longer the aids and appliances of thought, but the
thoughts themselves. This commenced with Logic, in which I began at once with the Organon, and read
it to the Analytics inclusive, but profited little by the Posterior Analytics,* which belong to a branch of
speculation I was not yet ripe for. Contemporaneously with the Organon, my father made me read the
whole or parts of several of the Latin treatises on the scholastic logic; giving each day to him, in our
walks, a minute account of what I had read, and answering his numerous and searching questions.
After this, I went, in a similar manner, through the “Computatio sive Logica” of Hobbes, a work of a
much higher order of thought than the books of the school logicians, and which he estimated very
highly; in my own opinion beyond its merits, great as these are. It was his invariable practice, whatever
studies he exacted from me, to make me as far as possible understand and feel the utility of them: and
this he deemed peculiarly fitting in the case of the syllogistic logic, the usefulness of which had been
impugned by so many writers of authority. I well remember how, and in what particular walk, in the
neighbourhood of Bagshot Heath (where we were on a visit to his old friend Mr. Wallace, then one of
the Mathematical Professors at Sandhurst)* he first attempted by questions to make me think on the
subject, and frame some conception of what constituted the utility of the syllogistic logic, and when I
had failed in this, to make me understand it by explanations. The explanations did not make the matter
at all clear to me at the time; but they were not therefore useless; they remained as a nucleus for my
observations and reflections to crystallize upon; the import of his general remarks being interpreted to
me, by the particular instances which came under my notice afterwards. My own consciousness and
experience ultimately led me to appreciate quite as highly as he did, the value of an early practical
familiarity with the school logic. I know of nothing, in my education, to which I think myself more
indebted for whatever capacity of thinking I have attained. The first intellectual operation in which I
arrived at any proficiency, was dissecting a bad argument, and finding in what part the fallacy lay: and
though whatever capacity of this sort I attained, was due to the fact that it was an intellectual exercise
in which I was most perseveringly drilled by my father, yet it is also true that the school logic, and the
mental habits acquired in studying it, were among the principal instruments of this drilling. I am
persuaded that nothing, in modern education, tends so much, when properly used, to form exact
thinkers, who attach a precise meaning to words and propositions, and are not imposed on by vague,
loose, or ambiguous terms. The boasted influence of mathematical studies is nothing to it; for in
mathematical processes, none of the real difficulties of correct ratiocination occur. It is also a study
peculiarly adapted to an early stage in the education of philosophical students, since it does not
presuppose the slow process of acquiring, by experience and reflection, valuable thoughts of their own.
They may become capable of disentangling the intricacies of confused and self-contradictory thought,
before their own thinking faculties are much advanced; a power which, for want of some such
discipline, many otherwise able men altogether lack; and when they have to answer opponents, only
endeavour, by such arguments as they can command, to support the opposite conclusion, scarcely even
attempting to confute the reasonings of their antagonists; and therefore, at the utmost, leaving the
question, as far as it depends on argument, a balanced one.
During this time, the Latin and Greek books which I continued to read with my father were chiefly
such as were worth studying not for the language merely, but also for the thoughts. This included much
of the orators, and especially Demosthenes, some of whose principal orations I read several times over,
and wrote out, by way of exercise, a full analysis of them. My father’s comments on these orations when
I read them to him were very instructive to me. He not only drew my attention to the insight they
afforded into Athenian institutions, and the principles of legislation and government which they often
illustrated, but pointed out the skill and art of the orator—how everything important to his purpose was
said at the exact moment when he had brought the minds of his audience into the state most fitted to
receive it; how he made steal into their minds, gradually and by insinuation, thoughts which if
expressed in a more direct manner would have roused their opposition. Most of these reflections were
beyond my capacity of full comprehension at the time; but they left seed behind, which germinated in
due season. At this time I also read the whole of Tacitus, Juvenal, and Quintilian. The latter, owing to his
obscure stile and to the scholastic details of which many parts of his treatise are made up, is little read
and seldom sufficiently appreciated. His book is a kind of encyclopædia of the thoughts of the ancients
on the whole field of education and culture; and I have retained through life many valuable ideas which
I can distinctly trace to my reading of him, even at that early age. It was at this period that I read, for
the first time, some of the most important dialogues of Plato, in particular the Gorgias, the Protagoras,
and the Republic. There is no author to whom my father thought himself more indebted for his own
mental culture, than Plato, or whom he more frequently recommended to young students. I can bear
similar testimony in regard to myself. The Socratic method, of which the Platonic dialogues are the
chief example, is unsurpassed as a discipline for correcting the errors, and clearing up the confusions
incident to the intellectus sibi permissus,* the understanding which has made up all its bundles of
associations under the guidance of popular phraseology. The close, searching elenchus* by which the
man of vague generalities* is constrained either to express his meaning to himself in definite terms, or
to confess that he does not know what he is talking about; the perpetual testing of all general
statements by particular instances; the siege in form which is laid to the meaning of large abstract
terms, by fixing upon some still larger classname which includes that and more, and dividing down to
the thing sought—marking out its limits and definition by a series of accurately drawn distinctions
between it and each of the cognate objects which are successively parted off from it—all this, as an
education for precise thinking, is inestimable, and all this, even at that age, took such hold of me that it
became part of my own mind. I have felt ever since that the title of Platonist belongs by far better right
to those who have been nourished in, and have endeavoured to practise Plato’s mode of investigation,
than to those who are distinguished only by the adoption of certain dogmatical conclusions, drawn
mostly from the least intelligible of his works, and which the character of his mind and writings makes
it uncertain whether he himself regarded as anything more than poetic fancies, or philosophic
conjectures.[3]
In going through Plato and Demosthenes, since I could now read these authors, as far as the
language was concerned, with perfect ease, I was not required to construe them sentence by sentence,
but to read them aloud to my father, answering questions when asked: but the particular attention
which he paid to elocution (in which his own excellence was remarkable) made this reading aloud to
him a most painful task. Of all things which he required me to do, there was none which I did so
constantly ill, or in which he so perpetually lost his temper with me. He had thought much on the
principles of the art of reading, especially the most neglected part of it, the inflexions of the voice, or
modulation as writers on elocution call it (in contrast with articulation on the one side, and expression
on the other), and had reduced it to rules, grounded on the logical analysis of a sentence. These rules
he strongly impressed upon me, and took me severely to task for every violation of them: but I even
then remarked (though I did not venture to make the remark to him) that though he reproached me
when I read a sentence ill, and told me how I ought to have read it, he never, by reading it himself,
shewed me how it ought to be read. A defect running through his otherwise admirable modes of
instruction, as it did through all his modes of thought, was that of trusting too much to the
intelligibleness of the abstract, when not embodied in the concrete. It was at a much later period of my
youth, when practising elocution by myself, or with companions of my own age, that I for the first time
understood the object of his rules, and saw the psychological grounds of them. At that time I and others
followed out the subject into its ramifications, and could have composed a very useful treatise,
grounded on my father’s principles. He himself left those principles and rules unwritten. I regret that
when my mind was full of the subject, from systematic practice, I did not put them, and our
improvements of them, into a formal shape.
A book which contributed largely to my education, in the best sense of the term, was my father’s
History of India. It was published in the beginning of 1818. During the year previous, while it was
passing through the press, I used to read the proofsheets to him; or rather, I read the manuscript to him
while he corrected the proofs. The number of new ideas which I received from this remarkable book,
and the impulse and stimulus as well as guidance given to my thoughts by its criticisms and
disquisitions on society and civilization in the Hindoo part, on institutions and the acts of governments
in the English part,* made my early familiarity with it eminently useful to my subsequent progress. And
though I can perceive deficiencies in it now as compared with a perfect standard, I still think it, if not
the most, one of the most instructive histories ever written, and one of the books from which most
benefit may be derived by a mind in the course of making up its opinions.
The Preface, among the most characteristic of my father’s writings, as well as the richest in materials
of thought, gives a picture which may be entirely depended on, of the sentiments and expectations with
which he wrote the History. Saturated as the book is with the opinions and modes of judgment of a
democratic radicalism then regarded as extreme; and treating with a severity at that time most unusual
the English Constitution, the English law, and all parties and classes who possessed any considerable
influence in the country; he may have expected reputation, but certainly not advancement in life, from
its publication; nor could he have supposed that it would raise up anything but enemies for him in
powerful quarters: least of all could he have expected favour from the East India Company, to whose
commercial privileges he was unqualifiedly hostile, and on the acts of whose government he had made
so many severe comments: though, in various parts of his book, he bore a testimony in their favour,
which he felt to be their just due, namely, that no government had on the whole given so much proof, to
the extent of its lights, of good intention towards its subjects; and that if the acts of any other
government had the light of publicity as completely let in upon them, they would, in all probability, still
less bear scrutiny.
On learning, however, in the spring of 1819, about a year after the publication of the History, that the
East India Directors desired to strengthen the part of their home establishment which was employed in
carrying on the correspondence with India, my father declared himself a candidate for that
employment, and, to the credit of the Directors, successfully. He was appointed one of the Assistants of
the Examiner of India Correspondence; officers whose duty it was to prepare drafts of despatches to
India, for consideration by the Directors, in the principal departments of administration. In this office,
and in that of Examiner, which he subsequently attained, the influence which his talents, his reputation,
and his decision of character gave him, with superiors who really desired the good government of India,
enabled him to a great extent to throw into his drafts of despatches, and to carry through the ordeal of
the Court of Directors and Board of Control, without having their force much weakened, his real
opinions on Indian subjects. In his History he had set forth, for the first time, many of the true
principles of Indian administration: and his despatches, following his History, did more than had ever
been done before to promote the improvement of India, and teach Indian officials to understand their
business. If a selection of them were published, they would, I am convinced, place his character as a
practical statesman fully on a level with his eminence as a speculative writer.
This new employment of his time caused no relaxation in his attention to my education.* It was in this
same year, 1819, that he took me through a complete course of political economy. His loved and
intimate friend, Ricardo, had shortly before published the book which formed so great an epoch in
political economy;* a book which never would have been published or written, but for the entreaty and
strong encouragement of my father; for Ricardo, the most modest of men, though firmly convinced of
the truth of his doctrines, deemed himself so little capable of doing them justice in exposition and
expression, that he shrank from the idea of publicity. The same friendly encouragement induced
Ricardo, a year or two later, to become a member of the House of Commons; where during the few
remaining years of his life, unhappily cut short in the full vigour of his intellect, he rendered so much
service to his and my father’s opinions both in political economy and on other subjects.
Though Ricardo’s great work was already in print, no didactic treatise embodying its doctrines, in a
manner fit for learners, had yet appeared. My father, therefore, commenced instructing me in the
science by a sort of lectures, which he delivered to me in our walks. He expounded each day a portion
of the subject, and I gave him next day a written account of it, which he made me rewrite over and over
again until it was clear, precise, and tolerably complete. In this manner I went through the whole extent
of the science; and the written outline of it which resulted from my daily compte rendu,* served him
afterwards as notes from which to write his Elements of Political Economy. After this I read Ricardo,
giving an account daily of what I read, and discussing, in the best manner I could, the collateral points
which offered themselves in our progress. On Money, as the most intricate part of the subject, he made
me read in the same manner Ricardo’s admirable pamphlets, written during what was called the Bullion
controversy. To these succeeded Adam Smith; and in this reading it was one of my father’s main objects
to make me apply to Smith’s more superficial view of political economy, the superior lights of Ricardo,
and detect what was fallacious in Smith’s arguments, or erroneous in any of his conclusions. Such a
mode of instruction was excellently calculated to form a thinker; but it required to be worked by a
thinker, as close and vigorous as my father. The path was a thorny one even to him, and I am sure it was
so to me, notwithstanding the strong interest I took in the subject. He was often, and much beyond
reason, provoked by my failures in cases where success could not have been expected; but in the main
his method was right, and it succeeded. I do not believe that any scientific teaching ever was more
thorough, or better fitted for training the faculties, than the mode in which logic and political economy
were taught to me by my father. Striving, even in an exaggerated degree, to call forth the activity of my
faculties, by making me find out everything for myself, he gave his explanations not before, but after, I
had felt the full force of the difficulties; and not only gave me an accurate knowledge of these two great
subjects, as far as they were then understood, but made me a thinker on both. I thought for myself
almost from the first, and occasionally thought differently from him, though for a long time only on
minor points, and making his opinion the ultimate standard. At a later period I even occasionally
convinced him, and altered his opinion on some points of detail: which I state to his honour, not my
own. It at once exemplifies his perfect candour, and the real worth of his method of teaching.
At this point concluded what can properly be called my lessons. When I was about fourteen I left
England for more than a year;* and after my return, though my studies went on under my father’s
general direction, he was no longer my schoolmaster. I shall therefore pause here, and turn back to
matters of a more general nature connected with the part of my life and education included in the
preceding reminiscences.
In the course of instruction which I have partially retraced, the point most superficially apparent is
the great effort to give, during the years of childhood, an amount of knowledge in what are considered
the higher branches of education, which is seldom acquired (if acquired at all) until the age of
manhood. The result of the experiment shews the ease with which this may be done, and places in a
strong light the wretched waste of so many precious years as are spent in acquiring the modicum of
Latin and Greek commonly taught to schoolboys; a waste, which has led so many educational reformers
to entertain the ill-judged proposal of discarding these languages altogether from general education. If
I had been by nature extremely quick of apprehension, or had possessed a very accurate and retentive
memory, or were of a remarkably active and energetic character, the trial would not be conclusive; but
in all these natural gifts I am rather below than above par. What I could do, could assuredly be done by
any boy or girl of average capacity and healthy physical constitution: and if I have accomplished
anything, I owe it, among other fortunate circumstances, to the fact that through the early training
bestowed on me by my father, I started, I may fairly say, with an advantage of a quarter of a century
over my cotemporaries.
There was one cardinal point in this training, of which I have already given some indication, and
which, more than anything else, was the cause of whatever good it effected. Most boys or youths who
have had much knowledge drilled into them, have their mental capacities not strengthened, but
overlaid by it. They are crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions or phrases of other people, and
these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own. And thus, the sons of
eminent fathers, who have spared no pains in their education, so often grow up mere parroters of what
they have learnt, incapable of using their minds except in the furrows traced for them. Mine, however,
was not an education of cram. My father never permitted anything which I learnt, to degenerate into a
mere exercise of memory. He strove to make the understanding not only go along with every step of the
teaching, but if possible, precede it. Anything which could be found out by thinking, I never was told,
until I had exhausted my efforts to find it out for myself. As far as I can trust my remembrance, I
acquitted myself very lamely in this department; my recollection of such matters is almost wholly of
failures, hardly ever of success. It is true, the failures were often in things in which success in so early a
stage of my progress, was almost impossible. I remember at some time in my thirteenth year, on my
happening to use the word idea, he asked me what an idea was; and expressed some displeasure at my
ineffectual efforts to define the word: I recollect also his indignation at my using the common
expression that something was true in theory but required correction in practice; and how, after making
me vainly strive to define the word theory, he explained its meaning, and shewed the fallacy of the
vulgar form of speech which I had used; leaving me fully persuaded that in being unable to give a
correct definition of Theory, and in speaking of it as something which might be at variance with
practice, I had shewn unparalleled ignorance. In this he seems, and perhaps was, very unreasonable;
but I think, only in being angry at my failure. A pupil from whom nothing is ever demanded which he
cannot do, never does all he can.
One of the evils most liable to attend on any sort of early proficiency, and which often fatally blights
its promise, my father most anxiously guarded against. This was self conceit. He kept me, with extreme
vigilance, out of the way of hearing myself praised, or of being led to make self-flattering comparisons
between myself and others. From his own intercourse with me I could derive none but a very humble
opinion of myself; and the standard of comparison he always held up to me, was not what other people
did, but what a man could and ought to do. He completely succeeded in preserving me from the sort of
influences he so much dreaded. I was not at all aware that my attainments were anything unusual at my
age. If I accidentally had my attention drawn to the fact that some other boy knew less than myself—
which happened less often than might be imagined—I concluded, not that I knew much, but that he, for
some reason or other, knew little, or that his knowledge was of a different kind from mine. My state of
mind was not humility, but neither was it arrogance. I never thought of saying to myself, I am, or I can
do, so and so. I neither estimated myself highly nor lowly: I did not estimate myself at all. If I thought
anything about myself, it was that I was rather backward in my studies, since I always found myself so,
in comparison with what my father expected from me. I assert this with confidence, though it was not
the impression of various persons who saw me in my childhood. They, as I have since found, thought me
greatly and disagreeably self-conceited; probably because I was disputatious, and did not scruple to
give direct contradictions to things which I heard said. I suppose I acquired this bad habit from having
been encouraged in an unusual degree to talk on matters beyond my age, and with grown persons,
while I never had inculcated on me the usual respect for them.[4] My father did not correct this ill
breeding and impertinence, probably from not being aware of it, for I was always too much in awe of
him to be otherwise than extremely subdued and quiet in his presence.[5] Yet with all this I had no
notion of any superiority in myself; and well was it for me that I had not. I remember the very place in
Hyde Park where, in my fourteenth year, on the eve of leaving my father’s house for a long absence, he
told me that I should find, as I got acquainted with new people, that I had been taught many things
which youths of my age did not commonly know; and that many persons would be disposed to talk to
me of this, and to compliment me upon it. What other things he said on this topic I remember very
imperfectly; but he wound up by saying, that whatever I knew more than others, could not be ascribed
to any merit in me, but to the very unusual advantage which had fallen to my lot, of having a father who
was able to teach me, and willing to give the necessary trouble and time; that it was no matter of praise
to me, if I knew more than those who had not had a similar advantage, but the deepest disgrace to me if
I did not. I have a distinct remembrance, that the suggestion thus for the first time made to me, that I
knew more than other youths who were considered well educated, was to me a piece of information, to
which, as to all other things which my father told me, I gave implicit credence, but which did not at all
impress me as a personal matter. I felt no disposition to glorify myself upon the circumstance that there
were other persons who did not know what I knew; nor had I ever flattered myself that my
acquirements, whatever they might be, were any merit of mine: but, now when my attention was called
to the subject, I felt that what my father had said respecting my peculiar advantages was exactly the
truth and common sense of the matter, and it fixed my opinion and feeling from that time forward.
It is evident that this, among many other of the purposes of my father’s scheme of education, could
not have been accomplished if he had not carefully kept me from having any great amount of
intercourse with other boys. He was earnestly bent upon my escaping not only the ordinary corrupting
influence which boys exercise over boys, but the contagion of vulgar modes of thought and feeling; and
for this he was willing that I should pay the price of inferiority in the accomplishments which
schoolboys in all countries chiefly cultivate. The deficiencies in my education were principally in the
things which boys learn from being turned out to shift for themselves, and from being brought together
in large numbers. From temperance and much walking, I grew up healthy and hardy, though not
muscular; but I could do no feats of skill or physical strength, and knew none of the ordinary bodily
exercises. It was not that play, or time for it, was refused me. Though no holidays were allowed, lest the
habit of work should be broken, and a taste for idleness acquired, I had ample leisure in every day to
amuse myself; but as I had no boy companions, and the animal need of physical activity was satisfied by
walking, my amusements, which were mostly solitary, were in general of a quiet, if not a bookish turn,
and gave little stimulus to any other kind even of mental activity than that which was already called
forth by my studies. I consequently remained long, and in a less degree have always remained, inexpert
in anything requiring manual dexterity; my mind, as well as my hands, did its work very lamely when it
was applied, or ought to have been applied, to the practical details which, as they are the chief interest
of life to the majority of men, are also the things in which whatever mental capacity they have, chiefly
shews itself. I was constantly meriting reproof by inattention, inobservance, and general slackness of
mind in matters of daily life. My father was the extreme opposite in these particulars: his senses and
mental faculties were always on the alert; he carried decision and energy of character in his whole
manner, and into every action of life: and this, as much as his talents, contributed to the strong
impression which he always made upon those with whom he came into personal contact. But the
children of energetic parents, frequently grow up unenergetic, because they lean on their parents, and
the parents are energetic for them. The education which my father gave me, was in itself much more
fitted for training me to know than to do. Not that he was unaware of my deficiencies; both as a boy and
as a youth I was incessantly smarting under his severe admonitions on the subject. There was anything
but insensibility or tolerance on his part towards such shortcomings: but, while he saved me from the
demoralizing effects of school life, he made no effort to provide me with any sufficient substitute for its
practicalizing influences. Whatever qualities he himself, probably, had acquired without difficulty or
special training, he seems to have supposed that I ought to acquire as easily. He had not, I think,
bestowed the same amount of thought and attention on this, as on most other branches of education;
and here, as well as in some other points of my tuition, he seems to have expected effects without
causes.[6]

1 In a subsequent stage of boyhood, when these exercises had ceased to be compulsory, like most youthful writers I wrote
tragedies; under the inspiration not so much of Shakespeare as of Joanna Baillie, whose “Constantine Paleologus” in particular
appeared to me one of the most glorious of human compositions. I still think it one of the best dramas of the last two centuries.
 CHAPTER II

MORAL INFLUENCES IN EARLY YOUTH. MY FATHER’S CHARACTER AND

OPINIONS

IN my education, as in that of every one, the moral influences, which are so much more important than
all others, are also the most complicated, and the most difficult to specify with any approach to
completeness. Without attempting the hopeless task of detailing the circumstances by which, in this
respect, my early character may have been shaped, I shall confine myself to a few leading points, which
form an indispensable part of any true account of my education.
I was brought up from the first without any religious belief, in the ordinary acceptation of the term.
My father, educated in the creed of Scotch presbyterianism, had by his own studies and reflexions been
early led to reject not only the belief in revelation, but the foundations of what is commonly called
Natural Religion. I have heard him say, that the turning point of his mind on the subject was reading
Butler’s Analogy. That work, of which he always continued to speak with respect, kept him, as he said,
for some considerable time, a believer in the divine authority of Christianity; by proving to him, that
whatever are the difficulties in believing that the Old and New Testaments proceed from, or record the
acts of, a perfectly wise and good being, the same and still greater difficulties stand in the way of the
belief, that a being of such a character can have been the Maker of the universe. He considered
Butler’s argument as conclusive against the only opponents for whom it was intended. Those who admit
an omnipotent as well as perfectly just and benevolent maker and ruler of such a world as this, can say
little against Christianity but what can, with at least equal force, be retorted against themselves.
Finding, therefore, no halting place in Deism, he remained in a state of perplexity, until, doubtless after
many struggles, he yielded to the conviction, that concerning the origin of things nothing whatever can
be known. This is the only correct statement of his opinion; for dogmatic atheism he looked upon as
absurd; as most of those, whom the world has considered atheists, have always done. These particulars
are important, because they shew that my father’s rejection of all that is called religious belief, was not,
as many might suppose, primarily a matter of logic and evidence: the grounds of it were moral, still
more than intellectual. He found it impossible to believe that a world so full of evil was the work of an
Author combining infinite power with perfect goodness and righteousness. His intellect spurned the
subtleties by which men attempt to blind themselves to this open contradiction. The Sabæan, or
Manichæan theory of a Good and an Evil Principle,* struggling against each other for the government
of the universe, he would not have equally condemned; and I have heard him express surprise, that no
one revived it in our time. He would have regarded it as a mere hypothesis; but he would have ascribed
to it no depraving influence. As it was, his aversion to religion, in the sense usually attached to the
term, was of the same kind with that of Lucretius: he regarded it with the feelings due not to a mere
mental delusion, but to a great moral evil. He looked upon it as the greatest enemy of morality: first, by
setting up factitious excellencies,—belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected
with the good of human kind,—and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtues: but
above all, by radically vitiating the standard of morals; making it consist in doing the will of a being, on
whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently
hateful. I have a hundred times heard him say, that all ages and nations have represented their gods as
wicked, in a constantly increasing progression; that mankind have gone on adding trait after trait till
they reached the most perfect conception of wickedness which the human mind could devise, and have
called this God, and prostrated themselves before it. This ne plus ultra of wickedness* he considered to
be embodied in what is commonly presented to mankind as the creed of Christianity. Think (he used to
say) of a being who would make a Hell—who would create the human race with the infallible
foreknowledge, and therefore with the intention, that the great majority of them were to be consigned
to horrible and everlasting torment. The time, I believe, is drawing near when this dreadful conception
of an object of worship will be no longer identified with Christianity; and when all persons, with any
sense of moral good and evil, will look upon it with the same indignation with which my father regarded
it. My father was as well aware as any one that Christians do not, in general, undergo the demoralizing
consequences which seem inherent in such a creed, in the manner or to the extent which might have
been expected from it. The same slovenliness of thought, and subjection of the reason to fears, wishes,
and affections, which enable them to accept a theory involving a contradiction in terms, prevents them
from perceiving the logical consequences of the theory. Such is the facility with which mankind believe
at one and the same time things inconsistent with one another, and so few are those who draw from
what they receive as truths, any consequences but those recommended to them by their feelings, that
multitudes have held the undoubting belief in an Omnipotent Author of Hell, and have nevertheless
identified that being with the best conception they were able to form of perfect goodness. Their
worship was not paid to the demon which such a Being as they imagined would really be, but to their
own ideal of excellence. The evil is, that such a belief keeps the ideal wretchedly low; and opposes the
most obstinate resistance to all thought which has a tendency to raise it higher. Believers shrink from
every train of ideas which would lead the mind to a clear conception and an elevated standard of
excellence, because they feel (even when they do not distinctly see) that such a standard would conflict
with many of the dispensations of nature, and with much of what they are accustomed to consider as
the Christian creed. And thus morality continues a matter of blind tradition, with no consistent
principle, nor even any consistent feeling, to guide it.
It would have been wholly inconsistent with my father’s ideas of duty, to allow me to acquire
impressions contrary to his convictions and feelings respecting religion: and he impressed upon me
from the first, that the manner in which the world came into existence was a subject on which nothing
was known: that the question “Who made me?” cannot be answered, because we have no experience or
authentic information from which to answer it; and that any answer only throws the difficulty a step
further back, since the question immediately presents itself, Who made God? He, at the same time, took
care that I should be acquainted with what had been thought by mankind on these impenetrable
problems. I have mentioned at how early an age he made me a reader of ecclesiastical history; and he
taught me to take the strongest interest in the Reformation, as the great and decisive contest against
priestly tyranny for liberty of thought.
I am thus one of the very few examples, in this country, of one who has, not thrown off religious
belief, but never had it: I grew up in a negative state with regard to it. I looked upon the modern exactly
as I did upon the ancient religion, as something which in no way concerned me. It did not seem to me
more strange that English people should believe what I did not, than that the men whom I read of in
Herodotus should have done so. History had made the variety of opinions among mankind a fact
familiar to me, and this was but a prolongation of that fact. This point in my early education had
however incidentally one bad consequence deserving notice. In giving me an opinion contrary to that of
the world, my father thought it necessary to give it as one which could not prudently be avowed to the
world. This lesson of keeping my thoughts to myself, at that early age, was attended with some moral
disadvantages; though my limited intercourse with strangers, especially such as were likely to speak to
me on religion, prevented me from being placed in the alternative of avowal or hypocrisy. I remember
two occasions in my boyhood, on which I felt myself in this alternative, and in both cases I avowed my
disbelief and defended it. My opponents were boys, considerably older than myself: one of them I
certainly staggered at the time, but the subject was never renewed between us: the other, who was
surprised and somewhat shocked, did his best to convince me for some time, without effect.
The great advance in liberty of discussion, which is one of the most important differences between
the present time and that of my childhood, has greatly altered the moralities of this question; and I
think that few men of my father’s intellect and public spirit, holding with such intensity of moral
conviction as he did, unpopular opinions on religion, or on any other of the great subjects of thought,
would now either practise or inculcate the withholding of them from the world, unless in the cases,
becoming fewer every day, in which frankness on these subjects would either risk the loss of means of
subsistence, or would amount to exclusion from some sphere of usefulness peculiarly suitable to the
capacities of the individual. On religion in particular the time appears to me to have come, when it is
the duty of all who being qualified in point of knowledge, have on mature consideration satisfied
themselves that the current opinions are not only false but hurtful, to make their dissent known; at
least, if they are among those whose station, or reputation, gives their opinion a chance of being
attended to. Such an avowal would put an end, at once and for ever, to the vulgar prejudice, that what
is called, very improperly, unbelief, is connected with any bad qualities either of mind or heart. The
world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments—of those most
distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue—are complete sceptics in religion;
many of them refraining from avowal, less from personal considerations, than from a conscientious,
though now in my opinion a most mistaken apprehension lest by speaking out what would tend to
weaken existing beliefs, and by consequence (as they suppose) existing restraints, they should do harm
instead of good.
Of unbelievers (so called) as well as of believers, there are many species, including almost every
variety of moral type. But the best among them, as no one who has had opportunities of really knowing
them will hesitate to affirm (believers rarely have that opportunity), are more genuinely religious, in the
best sense of the word religion, than those who exclusively arrogate to themselves the title. The
liberality of the age, or in other words the weakening of the obstinate prejudice, which makes men
unable to see what is before their eyes because it is contrary to their expectations, has caused it to be
very commonly admitted that a Deist may be truly religious: but if religion stands for any graces of
character and not for mere dogma, the assertion may equally be made of many whose belief is far short
of Deism. Though they may think the proof incomplete that the universe is a work of design, and though
they assuredly disbelieve that it can have an Author and Governor who is absolute in power as well as
perfect in goodness, they have that which constitutes the principal worth of all religions whatever, an
ideal conception of a Perfect Being, to which they habitually refer as the guide of their conscience; and
this ideal of Good is usually far nearer to perfection than the objective Deity of those, who think
themselves obliged to find absolute goodness in the author of a world so crowded with suffering and so
deformed by injustice as ours.
My father’s moral convictions, wholly dissevered from religion, were very much of the character of
those of the Greek philosophers; and were delivered with the force and decision which characterized all
that came from him. Even at the very early age at which I read with him the Memorabilia of Xenophon,
I imbibed from that work and from his comments a deep respect for the character of Socrates; who
stood in my mind as a model of ideal excellence: and I well remember how my father at that time
impressed upon me the 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 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 greatest 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
has 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 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 any one,
who possesses much of both, can fail to do. None but those who do not care about opinions, will
confound it 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 done 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 shewed, 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.[7] 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 honorable 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.[8] 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.[9]
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
full of the sound of falling waters.[10]
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 Superintendant 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 recognized 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 develope 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 shew, 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 his 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 transcendant 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 end to all this. The feeling rushed
upon me, that all previous moralists were superseded, and that here indeed was the commencement of
a new era in thought. This impression was strengthened by the manner in which Bentham put into
scientific form the application of the happiness principle to the morality of actions, by analyzing the
various classes and orders of their consequences. But what struck me at that time most of all, was the
Classification of Offences; which is much more clear, compact, and imposing, in Dumont’s rédaction,*
than in the original work of Bentham from which it was taken. Logic, and the dialectics of Plato, which
had formed so large a part of my previous training, had given me a strong relish for accurate
classification. This taste had been strengthened and enlightened by the study of botany, on the
principles of what is called the Natural Method, which I had taken up with great zeal, though only as an
amusement, during my stay in France;* and when I found scientific classification applied to the great
and complex subject of Punishable Acts, under the guidance of the ethical principle of Pleasurable and
Painful Consequences, followed out in the method of detail introduced into these subjects by Bentham, I
felt taken up to an eminence from which I could survey a vast mental domain, and see stretching out
into the distance intellectual results beyond all computation. As I proceeded farther, there seemed to be
added to this intellectual clearness, the most inspiring prospects of practical improvement in human
affairs. To Bentham’s general views of the construction of a body of law I was not altogether a stranger,
having read with attention that admirable compendium, my father’s article “Jurisprudence”: but I had
read it with little profit, and scarcely any interest, no doubt from its extremely general and abstract
character, and also because it concerned the form more than the substance of the corpus juris, the logic
rather than the ethics of law. But Bentham’s subject was Legislation, of which Jurisprudence is only the
formal part: and at every page he seemed to open a clearer and broader conception of what human
opinions and institutions ought to be, how they might be made what they ought to be, and how far
removed from it they now are. When I laid down the last volume of the Traité I had become a different
being. The “principle of utility” understood as Bentham understood it, and applied in the manner in
which he applied it through these three volumes, fell exactly into its place as the keystone which held
together the detached and fragmentary component parts of my knowledge and beliefs. It gave unity to
my conceptions of things. I now had opinions; a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy; in one among the best
senses of the word, a religion; the inculcation and diffusion of which could be made the principal
outward purpose of a life. And I had a grand conception laid before me of changes to be effected in the
condition of mankind through that doctrine. The Traité de Législation wound up with what was to me a
most impressive picture of human life as it would be made by such opinions and such laws as were
recommended in the treatise. The anticipations of practicable improvement were studiously moderate,
deprecating and discountenancing as reveries of vague enthusiasm many things which will one day
seem so natural to human beings, that injustice will probably be done to those who once thought them
chimerical. But, in my state of mind, this appearance of superiority to illusion added to the effect which
Bentham’s doctrines produced on me, by heightening the impression of mental power. And the vista of
improvement which he did open was sufficiently large and brilliant to light up my life, as well as to give
a definite shape to my aspirations.
After this I read, from time to time, the most important of the other works of Bentham which had then
seen the light, either as written by himself or as edited by Dumont. This was my private reading: while,
under my father’s direction, my studies were carried into the higher branches of analytic psychology. I
now read Locke’s Essay, and wrote out an account of it, consisting of a complete abstract of every
chapter, with such remarks as occurred to me: which was read by, or (I think) to, my father, and
discussed throughout. I performed the same process with Helvetius de l’Esprit, which I read of my own
choice. This preparation of abstracts, subject to my father’s censorship, was of great service to me, by
compelling precision in conceiving and expressing psychological doctrines, whether accepted as truths
or only regarded as the opinions of others. After Helvetius, my father made me study what he deemed
the really master-production in the philosophy of mind, Hartley’s Observations on Man. This book,
though it did not, like the Traité de Législation, give a new colour to my existence, made a very similar
impression on me in regard to its immediate subject. Hartley’s explanation, incomplete as in many
points it is, of the more complex mental phenomena by the law of association, commended itself to me
at once as a real analysis, and made me feel by contrast the insufficiency of the merely verbal
generalizations of Condillac, and even of the instructive gropings and feelings about for psychological
explanations, of Locke. It was at this very time that my father commenced writing his Analysis of the
Mind, which carried Hartley’s mode of explaining the mental phenomena to so much greater length and
depth. He could only command the concentration of thought necessary for this work, during the
complete leisure of his holiday of a month or six weeks annually; and he commenced it in the summer of
1822, in the first holiday he passed at Dorking; in which neighbourhood, from that time to the end of
his life, with the exception of two years, he lived, as far as his official duties permitted, for six months of
every year. He worked at the Analysis during several successive vacations, up to the year 1829 when it
was published, and allowed me to read the manuscript, portion by portion, as it advanced. The other
principal English writers on mental philosophy I read as I felt inclined, particularly Berkeley, Hume’s
Essays, Reid, Dugald Stewart, and Brown on Cause and Effect. Brown’s Lectures I did not read until
two or three years later, nor at that time had my father himself read them.
Among the works read in the course of this year, which contributed materially to my development, I
ought to mention a book (written on the foundation of some of Bentham’s manuscripts and published
under the pseudonyme of Philip Beauchamp)* entitled “Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on
the Temporal Happiness of Mankind.” This was an examination not of the truth, but of the usefulness of
religious belief, in the most general sense, apart from the peculiarities of any special Revelation; which,
of all the parts of the discussion concerning religion, is the most important in this age, in which real
belief in any religious doctrine is feeble and precarious, but the opinion of its necessity for moral and
social purposes almost universal; and when those who reject revelation, very generally take refuge in
an optimistic Deism, a worship of the order of Nature and the supposed course of Providence, at least
as full of contradictions, and perverting to the moral sentiments, as any of the forms of Christianity, if
only it is as completely realized. Yet, very little, with any claim to a philosophical character, has been
written by sceptics against the usefulness of this form of belief. The volume bearing the name of Philip
Beauchamp had this for its special object. Having been shewn to my father in manuscript, it was put
into my hands by him, and I made a marginal analysis of it as I had done of the Elements of Political
Economy. Next to the Traité de Législation, it was one of the books which by the searching character of
its analysis produced the greatest effect upon me. On reading it lately after an interval of many years, I
find it to have some of the defects as well as the merits of the Benthamic modes of thought, and to
contain, as I now think, many weak arguments, but with a great overbalance of sound ones, and much
good material for a more completely philosophic and conclusive treatment of the subject.
I have now, I believe, mentioned all the books which had any considerable effect on my early mental
developement. From this point I began to carry on my intellectual cultivation by writing still more than
by reading. In the summer of 1822 I wrote my first argumentative essay. I remember very little about it,
except that it was an attack on what I regarded as the aristocratic prejudice, that the rich were, or
were likely to be, superior in moral qualities to the poor. My performance was entirely argumentative,
without any of the declamation which the subject would admit of, and might be expected to suggest to a
young writer. In that department however I was, and remained, very inapt. Dry argument was the only
thing I could manage, or willingly attempted; though passively I was very susceptible to the effect of all
composition, whether in the form of poetry or oratory, which appealed to the feelings on any basis of
reason. My father, who knew nothing of this essay until it was finished, was well satisfied, and as I
learnt from others, even pleased with it; but, perhaps from a desire to promote the exercise of other
mental faculties than the purely logical, he advised me to make my next exercise in composition one of
the oratorical kind: on which suggestion, availing myself of my familiarity with Greek history and ideas
and with the Athenian orators, I wrote two speeches, one an accusation, the other a defence of Pericles
on a supposed impeachment for not marching out to fight the Lacedæmonians on their invasion of
Attica.* After this I continued to write papers on subjects often very much beyond my capacity, but with
great benefit both from the exercise itself, and from the discussions which it led to with my father.
I had now also begun to converse, on general subjects, with the instructed men with whom I came in
contact: and the opportunities of such contact naturally became more numerous. The two friends of my
father from whom I derived most, and with whom I most associated, were Mr. Grote and Mr. John
Austin. The acquaintance of both with my father was recent, but had ripened rapidly into intimacy. Mr.
Grote was introduced to my father by Mr. Ricardo, I think in 1819 (being then about twenty-five years
old), and sought assiduously his society and conversation. Already a highly instructed man, he was yet,
by the side of my father, a tyro on the great subjects of human opinion; but he rapidly seized on my
father’s best ideas; and in the department of political opinion he made himself known as early as 1820,
by a pamphlet in defence of Radical Reform, in reply to a celebrated article by Sir James Mackintosh,
then lately published in the Edinburgh Review. Mr. Grote’s father, the banker, was, I believe, a thorough
Tory, and his mother intensely Evangelical; so that for his liberal opinions he was in no way indebted to
home influences. But, unlike most persons who have the prospect of being rich by inheritance, he had,
though actively engaged in the business of banking, devoted a great portion of time to philosophic
studies; and his intimacy with my father did much to decide the character of the next stage in his
mental progress. Him I often visited, and my conversations with him on political, moral, and
philosophical subjects gave me, in addition to much valuable instruction, all the pleasure and benefit of
sympathetic communion with a man of the high intellectual and moral eminence which his life and
writings have since manifested to the world.
Mr. Austin, who was four or five years older than Mr. Grote, was the eldest son of a retired miller in
Suffolk, who had made money by contracts during the war, and who must have been a man of
remarkable qualities, as I infer from the fact that all his sons were of more than common ability and all
eminently gentlemen. The one with whom we are now concerned, and whose writings on jurisprudence
have made him celebrated, was for some time in the army, and served in Sicily under Lord William
Bentinck. After the peace he sold his commission and studied for the bar, to which he had been called
for some time before my father knew him. He was not, like Mr. Grote, to any extent a pupil of my father,
but he had attained, by reading and thought, a considerable number of the same opinions, modified by
his own very decided individuality of character. He was a man of great intellectual powers which in
conversation appeared at their very best; from the vigour and richness of expression with which, under
the excitement of discussion, he was accustomed to maintain some view or other of most general
subjects; and from an appearance of not only strong, but deliberate and collected will; mixed with a
certain bitterness, partly derived from temperament, and partly from the general cast of his feelings
and reflexions. The dissatisfaction with life and the world, felt more or less in the present state of
society and intellect by every discerning and highly conscientious mind, gave in his case a rather
melancholy tinge to the character, very natural to those whose passive moral susceptibilities are more
than proportioned to their active energies. For it must be said, that the strength of will, of which his
manner seemed to give such strong assurance, expended itself principally in manner. With great zeal
for human improvement, a strong sense of duty, and capacities and acquirements the extent of which is
proved by the writings he has left, he hardly ever completed any intellectual task of magnitude. He had
so high a standard of what ought to be done, so exaggerated a sense of deficiencies in his own
performances, and was so unable to content himself with the amount of elaboration sufficient for the
occasion and the purpose, that he not only spoiled much of his work for ordinary use by overlabouring
it, but spent so much time and exertion in superfluous study and thought, that when his task ought to
have been completed, he had generally worked himself into an illness, without having half finished
what he undertook. From this mental infirmity (of which he is not the sole example among the
accomplished and able men whom I have known), combined with liability to frequent attacks of
disabling though not dangerous ill health, he accomplished, through life, little in comparison with what
he seemed capable of; but what he did produce is held in the very highest estimation by the most
competent judges; and, like Coleridge, he might plead as a set-off that he had been to many persons,
through his conversation, a source not only of much instruction but of great elevation of character. On
me his influence was most salutary. It was moral in the best sense. He took a sincere and kind interest
in me, far beyond what could have been expected towards a mere youth from a man of his age,
standing, and what seemed austerity of character. There was in his conversation and demeanour a tone
of highmindedness which did not shew itself so much, if the quality existed as much, in any of the other
persons with whom at that time I associated. My intercourse with him was the more beneficial, owing
to his being of a different mental type from all other intellectual men whom I frequented, and he from
the first set himself decidedly against the prejudices and narrownesses which are almost sure to be
found in a young man formed by a particular mode of thought or a particular social circle.
His younger brother, Charles Austin, of whom at this time and for the next year or two I saw much,
had also a great effect on me, though of a very different description. He was but a few years older than
myself, and had then just left the University, where he had shone with great éclat as a man of intellect
and a brilliant orator and converser. The effect he produced on his Cambridge cotemporaries deserves
to be accounted an historical event; for to it may in part be traced the tendency towards Liberalism in
general, and the Benthamic and politico-economic form of it in particular, which shewed itself in a
portion of the more active-minded young men of the higher classes from this time to 1830. The Union
Debating Society,* at that time at the height of its reputation, was an arena where what were then
thought extreme opinions, in politics and philosophy, were weekly asserted, face to face with their
opposites, before audiences consisting of the élite of the Cambridge youth: and though many persons
afterwards of more or less note (of whom Lord Macaulay is the most celebrated) gained their first
oratorical laurels in those debates, the really influential mind among these intellectual gladiators was
Charles Austin. He continued, after leaving the University, to be, by his conversation and personal
ascendancy, a leader among the same class of young men who had been his associates there; and he
attached me among others to his car. Through him I became acquainted with Macaulay, Hyde and
Charles Villiers, Strutt (now Lord Belper), Romilly (now Lord Romilly and Master of the Rolls), and
various others who subsequently figured in literature or politics, and among whom I heard discussions
on many topics, as yet to a certain degree new to me. The influence of Charles Austin over me differed
from that of the persons I have hitherto mentioned, in being not the influence of a man over a boy, but
that of an elder cotemporary. It was through him that I first felt myself, not a pupil under teachers, but
a man among men. He was the first person of intellect whom I met on a ground of equality, though as
yet much his inferior on that common ground. He was a man who never failed to impress greatly those
with whom he came in contact, even when their opinions were the very reverse of his. The impression
he gave was that of boundless strength, together with talents which, combined with such apparent
force of will and character, seemed capable of dominating the world. Those who knew him, whether
friendly to him or not, always anticipated that he would play a conspicuous part in public life. It is
seldom that men produce so great an immediate effect by speech, unless they, in some degree, lay
themselves out for it; and he did this in no ordinary degree. He loved to strike, and even to startle. He
knew that decision is the greatest element of effect, and he uttered his opinions with all the decision he
could throw into them, never so well pleased as when he astonished any one by their audacity. Very
unlike his brother, who made war against the narrower interpretations and applications of the
principles they both professed, he on the contrary presented the Benthamic doctrines in the most
startling form of which they were susceptible, exaggerating every thing in them which tended to
consequences offensive to any one’s preconceived feelings. All which, he defended with such verve and
vivacity, and carried off by a manner so agreeable as well as forcible, that he always either came off
victor, or divided the honours of the field. It is my belief that much of the notion popularly entertained
of the tenets and sentiments of what are called Benthamites or Utilitarians, had its origin in paradoxes
thrown out by Charles Austin. It must be said, however, that his example was followed, haud passibus
æquis,* by younger proselytes, and that to outrer* whatever was by anybody considered offensive in
the doctrines and maxims of Benthamism, became at one time the badge of a small coterie of youths.
All of these who had anything in them, myself among others, quickly outgrew this boyish vanity; and
those who had not, became tired of differing from other people, and gave up both the good and the bad
part of the heterodox opinions they had for some time professed.
It was in the winter of 1822/23 that I formed the plan of a little society, to be composed of young men
agreeing in fundamental principles—acknowledging Utility as their standard in ethics and politics, and
a certain number of the principal corollaries drawn from it in the philosophy I had accepted—and
meeting once a fortnight to read essays and discuss questions conformably to the premises thus agreed
on. The fact would hardly be worth mentioning, but for the circumstance, that the name I gave to the
society I had planned was the Utilitarian Society. It was the first time that any one had taken the title of
Utilitarian; and the term made its way into the language from this humble source. I did not invent the
word, but found it in one of Galt’s novels, the “Annals of the Parish,” in which the Scotch clergyman, of
whom the book is a supposed autobiography, is represented as warning his parishioners not to leave the
Gospel and become utilitarians. With a boy’s fondness for a name and a banner I seized on the word,
and for some years called myself and others by it as a sectarian appellation; and it came to be
occasionally used by some others holding the opinions which it was intended to designate. As those
opinions attracted more notice, the term was repeated by strangers and opponents, and got into rather
common use just about the time when those who had originally assumed it, laid down that along with
other sectarian characteristics. The Society so called consisted at first of no more than three members,
one of whom, being Mr. Bentham’s amanuensis,* obtained for us permission to hold our meetings in his
house. The number never, I think, reached ten, and the society was broken up in 1826. It had thus an
existence of about three years and a half. The chief effect of it as regards myself, over and above the
benefit of practice in oral discussion, was that of bringing me in contact with several young men at that
time less advanced than myself, among whom, as they professed the same opinions, I was for some time
a sort of leader, and had considerable influence on their mental progress. Any young man of education
who fell in my way, and whose opinions were not incompatible with those of the Society, I endeavoured
to press into its service; and some others I probably should never have known, had they not joined it.
Those of the members who became my intimate companions—no one of whom was in any sense of the
word a disciple, but all of them independent thinkers on their own basis—were William Eyton Tooke,
son of the eminent political economist, a young man of singular worth both moral and intellectual, lost
to the world by an early death; his friend William Ellis, an original thinker in the field of political
economy, now honorably known by his apostolic exertions for the improvement of education; George
Graham, afterwards an official assignee of the Bankruptcy Court, a thinker of originality and power on
almost all abstract subjects; and (from the time when he came first to England to study for the bar in
1824 or 1825) a man who has made considerably more noise in the world than any of these, John Arthur
Roebuck.
In May 1823, my professional occupation and status for the next thirty-five years of my life, were
decided by my father’s obtaining for me an appointment from the East India Company, in the office of
the Examiner of India Correspondence,* immediately under himself. I was appointed in the usual
manner, at the bottom of the list of clerks, to rise, at least in the first instance, by seniority; but with the
understanding, that I should be employed from the beginning in preparing drafts of despatches, and be
thus trained up as a successor to those who then filled the higher departments of the office. My drafts
of course required, for some time, much revision from my immediate superiors, but I soon became well
acquainted with the business, and by my father’s instructions and the general growth of my own
powers, I was in a few years qualified to be, and practically was, the chief conductor of the
correspondence with India in one of the leading departments, that of the Native States. This continued
to be my official duty until I was appointed Examiner, only two years before the time when the abolition
of the East India Company as a political body determined my retirement.* I do not know any one of the
occupations by which a subsistence can now be gained, more suitable than such as this to any one who,
not being in independent circumstances, desires to devote a part of the twenty-four hours to private
intellectual pursuits. Writing for the press, cannot be recommended as a permanent resource to any
one qualified to accomplish anything in the higher departments of literature or thought: not only on
account of the uncertainty of this means of livelihood, especially if the writer has a conscience, and will
not consent to serve any opinions except his own; but also because the writings by which one can live,
are not the writings which themselves live, and are never those in which the writer does his best. Books
destined to form future thinkers take too much time to write, and when written come in general too
slowly into notice and repute, to be relied on for subsistence. Those who have to support themselves by
their pen must depend on literary drudgery, or at best on writings addressed to the multitude; and can
employ in the pursuits of their own choice only such time as they can spare from those of necessity;
which is generally less than the leisure allowed by office occupations, while the effect on the mind is far
more enervating and fatiguing. For my own part, I have, through life, found office duties an actual rest
from the other mental occupations which I have carried on simultaneously with them. They were
sufficiently intellectual not to be a distasteful drudgery, without being such as to cause any strain upon
the mental powers of a person used to abstract thought, or to the labour of careful literary composition.
The drawbacks, for every mode of life has its drawbacks, were not, however, unfelt by me. I cared little
for the loss of the chances of riches and honours held out by some of the professions, particularly the
bar, which had been, as I have already said, the profession thought of for me. But I was not indifferent
to exclusion from Parliament, and public life:* and I felt very sensibly the more immediate
unpleasantness of confinement to London; the holiday allowed by India-house practice not exceeding a
month in the year, while my taste was strong for a country life, and my sojourn in France had left
behind it an ardent desire of travelling. But though these tastes could not be freely indulged, they were
at no time entirely sacrificed. I passed most Sundays, throughout the year, in the country, taking long
rural walks on that day even when residing in London. The month’s holiday was, for a few years, passed
at my father’s house in the country: afterwards a part or the whole was spent in tours, chiefly
pedestrian, with some one or more of the young men who were my chosen companions; and at a later
period, in longer journeys or excursions, alone or with other friends. France, Belgium, and Rhenish
Germany were within easy reach of the annual holiday: and two longer absences, one of three, the
other of six months, under medical advice, added Switzerland, the Tyrol, and Italy to my list.
Fortunately, also, both these journeys occurred rather early, so as to give the benefit and charm of the
remembrance to a large portion of life.
I am disposed to agree with what has been surmised by others, that the opportunity which my official
position gave me of learning by personal observation the necessary conditions of the practical conduct
of public affairs, has been of considerable value to me as a theoretical reformer of the opinions and
institutions of my time. Not, indeed, that public business transacted on paper, to take effect on the
other side of the globe, was of itself calculated to give much practical knowledge of life. But the
occupation accustomed me to see and hear the difficulties of every course, and the means of obviating
them, stated and discussed deliberately, with a view to execution; it gave me opportunities of perceiving
when public measures, and other political facts, did not produce the effects which had been expected of
them, and from what causes; above all it was valuable to me by making me, in this portion of my
activity, merely one wheel in a machine, the whole of which had to work together. As a speculative
writer, I should have had no one to consult but myself, and should have encountered in my speculations
none of the obstacles which would have started up whenever they came to be applied to practice. But
as a Secretary conducting political correspondence, I could not issue an order or express an opinion,
without satisfying various persons very unlike myself, that the thing was fit to be done. I was thus in a
good position for finding out by practice the mode of putting a thought which gives it easiest
admittance into minds not prepared for it by habit; while I became practically conversant with the
difficulties of moving bodies of men, the necessities of compromise, the art of sacrificing the non-
essential to preserve the essential. I learnt how to obtain the best I could, when I could not obtain
everything; instead of being indignant or dispirited because I could not have entirely my own way, to be
pleased and encouraged when I could have the smallest part of it; and when even that could not be, to
bear with complete equanimity the being overruled altogether. I have found, through life, these
acquisitions to be of the greatest possible importance for personal happiness, and they are also a very
necessary condition for enabling any one, either as theorist or as practical man, to effect the greatest
amount of good compatible with his opportunities.
 CHAPTER IV

YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISM. THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW

THE occupation of so much of my time by office work did not relax my attention to my own pursuits,
which were never carried on more vigorously. It was about this time that I began to write in
newspapers. The first writings of mine which got into print were two letters published towards the end
of 1822, in the Traveller evening newspaper. The Traveller (which afterwards grew into the “Globe and
Traveller” by the purchase and incorporation of the Globe) was then the property of the well known
political economist Colonel Torrens. Under the editorship of an able man, Mr. Walter Coulson (who after
being an amanuensis of Mr. Bentham, became a reporter, then an editor, next a barrister and
conveyancer, and died Counsel to the Home Office), it had become one of the most important
newspaper organs of liberal politics. Col. Torrens himself wrote much of the political economy of his
paper; and had at this time made an attack upon some opinion of Ricardo and my father, to which at my
father’s instigation I attempted an answer, and Coulson out of consideration for my father and good will
to me, inserted it. There was a reply by Torrens, to which I again rejoined. I soon after attempted
something considerably more ambitious. The prosecutions of Richard Саrlilе and his wife and sister for
publications hostile to Christianity,* were then exciting much attention, and nowhere more than among
the people I frequented. Freedom of discussion even in politics, much more in religion, was at that time
far from being, even in theory, the conceded point which it at least seems to be now; and the holders of
obnoxious opinions had to be always ready to argue and reargue for the liberty of expressing them. I
wrote a series of five letters, under the signature of Wickliffe,* going over the whole length and breadth
of the question of free publication of all opinions on religion, and offered them to the Morning
Chronicle.* Three of them were published in January and February 1823; the other two, containing
things too outspoken for that journal, never appeared at all. But a paper which I wrote soon after on the
same subject, à propos of a debate in the House of Commons, was inserted as a leading article; and
during the whole of this year, 1823, a considerable number of my contributions were printed in the
Chronicle and Traveller: sometimes notices of books, but oftener letters, commenting on some
nonsense talked in Parliament, or some defect of the law, or misdoings of the magistracy or the courts
of justice. In this last department the Chronicle was now rendering signal service. After the death of
Mr. Perry, the editorship and management of the paper had devolved on Mr. John Black, long a reporter
on its establishment; a man of most extensive reading and information, great honesty and simplicity of
mind; a particular friend of my father, imbued with many of his and Bentham’s ideas, which he
reproduced in his articles, among other valuable thoughts, with great facility and skill. From this time
the Chronicle ceased to be the merely Whig organ it was before, and during the next ten years became
to a considerable extent a vehicle of the opinions of the Utilitarian radicals.* This was mainly by what
Black himself wrote, with some assistance from Fonblanque, who first shewed his eminent qualities as a
writer by articles and jeux d’esprit* in the Chronicle. The defects of the law, and of the administration
of justice, were the subject on which that paper rendered most service to improvement. Up to that time
hardly a word had been said, except by Bentham and my father, against that most peccant* part of
English institutions and of their administration. It was the almost universal creed of Englishmen, that
the law of England, the judicature of England, the unpaid magistracy of England, were models of
excellence. I do not go beyond the mark in saying, that after Bentham, who supplied the principal
materials, the greatest share of the merit of breaking down this wretched superstition belongs to Black,
as editor of the Morning Chronicle. He kept up an incessant fire against it, exposing the absurdities and
vices of the law and the courts of justice, paid and unpaid, until he forced some sense of them into
people’s minds. On many other questions he became the organ of opinions much in advance of any
which had ever before found regular advocacy in the newspaper press. Black was a frequent visitor of
my father, and Mr. Grote used to say that he always knew by the Monday morning’s article, whether
Black had been with my father on the Sunday. Black was one of the most influential of the many
channels through which my father’s conversation and personal influence made his opinions tell on the
world; cooperating with the effect of his writings in making him a power in the country, such as it has
rarely been the lot of an individual in a private station to be, through the mere force of intellect and
character: and a power which was often acting the most efficiently where it was least seen and
suspected. I have already noticed how much of what was done by Ricardo, Hume, and Grote, was the
result, in part, of his prompting and persuasion. He was the good genius by the side of Brougham in
most of what he did for the public, either on education, law reform, or any other subject. And his
influence flowed in minor streams too numerous to be specified. This influence was now about to
receive a great extension, by the foundation of the Westminster Review.*
Contrary to what may have been supposed, my father was in no degree a party to setting up the
Westminster Review. The need of a Radical organ to make head against the Edinburgh and Quarterly*
(then in the period of their greatest reputation and influence) had been a topic of conversation between
him and Mr. Bentham many years earlier, and it had been a part of their château en Espagne* that my
father should be the editor, but the idea had never assumed any practical shape. In 1823, however, Mr.
Bentham determined to establish the review at his own cost, and offered the editorship to my father,
who declined it as incompatible with his India House appointment. It was then entrusted to Mr. (now
Sir John) Bowring, at that time a merchant in the City. Mr. Bowring had been for two or three years
previous an assiduous frequenter of Mr. Bentham, to whom he was recommended by many personal
good qualities, by an ardent admiration for Bentham, a zealous adoption of many though not all of his
opinions, and, not least, by an extensive acquaintanceship and correspondence with Liberals of all
countries, which seemed to qualify him for being a powerful agent in spreading Bentham’s fame and
doctrines through all quarters of the world. My father had seen little of Bowring, but knew enough of
him to have formed a strong opinion, that he was a man of an entirely different type from what my
father considered suitable for conducting a political and philosophical review: and he augured so ill of
the enterprise that he regretted it altogether, feeling persuaded not only that Mr. Bentham would lose
his money, but that discredit would probably be brought upon radical principles. He could not however
desert Mr. Bentham, and he consented to write an article for the first number. As it had been a favorite
portion of the scheme formerly talked of, that part of the work should be devoted to reviewing the other
Reviews, this article of my father’s was to be a general criticism of the Edinburgh Review from its
commencement. Before writing it he made me read through all the volumes of the Review, or as much
of each as seemed of any importance (which was not so arduous a task in 1823 as it would be now), and
make notes for him of the articles which I thought he would wish to examine, either on account of their
good or their bad qualities. This paper of my father’s was the chief cause of the sensation which the
Westminster Review produced at its first appearance, and is, both in conception and in execution, one
of the most striking of all his writings. He began by an analysis of the tendencies of periodical literature
in general; pointing out, that it cannot, like books, wait for success, but must succeed immediately, or
not at all, and is hence almost certain to profess and inculcate the opinions already held by the public to
which it addresses itself, instead of attempting to rectify or improve those opinions. He next, to
characterize the position of the Edinburgh Review as a political organ, entered into a complete
analysis, from the Radical point of view, of the British Constitution. He held up to notice its thoroughly
aristocratic character: the nomination of a majority of the House of Commons by a few hundred
families; the entire identification of the more independent portion, the county members, with the great
landholders; the different classes whom this narrow oligarchy was induced, for convenience, to admit to
a share of power; and finally, what he called its two props, the Church, and the legal profession. He
pointed out the natural tendency of an aristocratic body of this composition, to group itself into two
parties, one of them in possession of the executive, the other endeavouring to supplant the former and
become the predominant section by the aid of public opinion, without any essential sacrifice of the
aristocratical predominance. He described the course likely to be pursued, and the political ground
occupied, by an aristocratic party in opposition, coquetting with popular principles for the sake of
popular support. He shewed how this idea was realized in the conduct of the Whig party, and of the
Edinburgh Review as its chief literary organ. He described, as their main characteristic, what he
termed “seesaw”; writing alternately on both sides of every question which touched the power or
interest of the governing classes; sometimes in different articles, sometimes in different parts of the
same article: and illustrated his position by copious specimens. So formidable an attack on the Whig
party and policy had never before been made; nor had so great a blow been ever struck, in this country,
for radicalism: nor was there, I believe, any living person capable of writing that article, except my
father.
In the meantime the nascent review had formed a junction with another project, of a purely literary
periodical, to be edited by Mr. Henry Southern, afterwards a diplomatist, then a literary man by
profession. The two editors agreed to unite their corps, and divide the editorship, Bowring taking the
political, Southern the literary department. Southern’s review was to have been published by
Longman,* and that firm, though part proprietors of the Edinburgh, were willing to be the publishers of
the new journal. But when all the arrangements had been made, and the prospectuses sent out, the
Longmans saw my father’s attack on the Edinburgh, and drew back. My father was now appealed to for
his interest with his own publisher, Baldwin, which was exerted with a successful result. And so, in
April 1824, amidst anything but hope on my father’s part, and that of most of those who afterwards
aided in carrying on the review, the first number made its appearance.1
That number was an agreeable surprise to most of us. The average of the articles was of much better
quality than had been expected. The literary and artistic department had rested chiefly on Mr.
Bingham, a barrister (subsequently a Police Magistrate) who had been for some years a frequenter of
Bentham, was a friend of both the Austins, and had adopted with great ardour Mr. Bentham’s
philosophical opinions. Partly from accident, there were in the first number as many as five articles by
Bingham; and we were extremely pleased with them. I well remember the mixed feeling I myself had
about the Review; the joy at finding, what we did not at all expect, that it was sufficiently good to be
capable of being made a creditable organ of those who held the opinions it professed; and extreme
vexation, since it was so good on the whole, at what we thought the blemishes of it. When, however, in
addition to our generally favourable opinion of it, we learned that it had an extraordinarily large sale
for a first number, and found that the appearance of a Radical review, with pretensions equal to those of
the established organs of parties, had excited much attention, there could be no room for hesitation,
and we all became eager in doing everything we could to strengthen and improve it.[11]
My father continued to write occasional articles. The Quarterly Review received its exposure, as a
sequel to that of the Edinburgh. Of his other contributions, the most important were an attack on
Southey’s Book of the Church, in the fifth number, and a political article in the twelfth. Mr. Austin only
contributed one paper, but one of great merit, an argument against primogeniture, in reply to an article
then lately published in the Edinburgh Review by McCulloch. Grote also was a contributor only once;
all the time he could spare being already taken up with his History of Greece. The article he wrote was
on his own subject, and was a very complete exposure and castigation of Mitford. Bingham and Charles
Austin continued to write for some time; Fonblanque was a frequent contributor from the third number.
Of my particular associates, Ellis was a regular writer up to the ninth number; and about the time when
he left off, others of the set began; Eyton Tooke, Graham, and Roebuck. I was myself the most frequent
writer of all, having contributed, from the second number to the eighteenth, thirteen articles; reviews
of books on history and political economy, or discussions on special political topics, as corn laws, game
laws, law of libel.* Occasional articles of merit came in from other acquaintances of my father’s, and in
time, of mine; and some of Mr. Bowring’s writers turned out well. On the whole, however, the conduct
of the Review was never satisfactory to any of the persons strongly interested in its principles, with
whom I came in contact. Hardly ever did a number come out without containing several things
extremely offensive to us, either in point of opinion, of taste, or by mere want of ability. The unfavorable
judgments passed by my father, Grote, the two Austins, and others, were reechoed with exaggeration
by us younger people; and as our youthful zeal rendered us by no means backward in making
complaints, we led the two editors a sad life. From my knowledge of what I then was, I have no doubt
that we were at least as often wrong as right; and I am very certain that if the Review had been carried
on according to our notions (I mean those of the juniors) it would have been no better, perhaps not even
so good as it was. But it is worth noting as a fact in the history of Benthamism, that the periodical
organ, by which it was best known, was from the first extremely unsatisfactory to those, whose opinions
on all subjects it was supposed specially to represent.
Meanwhile, however, the Review made considerable noise in the world, and gave a recognized status,
in the arena of opinion and discussion, to the Benthamic type of radicalism, out of all proportion to the
number of its adherents, and to the personal merits and abilities, at that time, of most of those who
could be reckoned among them. It was a time, as is known, of rapidly rising Liberalism. When the fears
and animosities accompanying the war with France had been brought to an end, and people had once
more a place in their thoughts for home politics, the tide began to set towards reform.* The renewed
oppression of the Continent by the old reigning families, the countenance apparently given by the
English Government to the conspiracy against liberty called the Holy Alliance, and the enormous
weight of the national debt and taxation occasioned by so long and costly a war, rendered the
government and parliament very unpopular.* Radicalism, under the leadership of the Burdetts and
Cobbetts, had assumed a character and importance which seriously alarmed the Administration: and
their alarm had scarcely been temporarily assuaged by the celebrated Six Acts, when the trial of Queen
Caroline roused a still wider and deeper feeling of hatred.* Though the outward signs of this hatred
passed away with its exciting cause, there arose on all sides a spirit which had never shewn itself
before, of opposition to abuses in detail. Mr. Hume’s persevering scrutiny of the public expenditure,
forcing the House of Commons to a division on every objectionable item in the estimates, had begun to
tell with great force on public opinion, and had extorted many minor retrenchments from an unwilling
Administration. Political economy had asserted itself with great vigour in public affairs, by the Petition
of the Merchants of London for Free Trade,* drawn up in 1820 by Mr. Tooke and presented by Mr.
Alexander Baring; and by the noble exertions of Ricardo during the few years of his parliamentary life.
His writings, following up the impulse given by the Bullion controversy,* and followed up in their turn
by the expositions and comments of my father and McCulloch (whose writings in the Edinburgh Review
during those years were most valuable), had drawn general attention to the subject, making at least
partial converts in the Cabinet itself; and Huskisson, supported by Canning, had commenced that
gradual demolition of the protective system, which one of their colleagues virtually completed in 1846,
though the last vestiges were only swept away by Mr. Gladstone in 1860. Mr. Peel, then Home
Secretary, was entering cautiously into the untrodden and peculiarly Benthamic path of Law Reform. At
this period, when Liberalism seemed to be becoming the tone of the time,* when improvement of
institutions was preached from the highest places, and a complete change of the constitution of
Parliament was loudly demanded in the lowest, it is not strange that attention should have been roused
by the regular appearance in controversy of what seemed a new school of writers, claiming to be the
legislators and theorists of this new tendency. The air of strong conviction with which they wrote, when
scarcely any one else seemed to have an equally strong faith in as definite a creed; the boldness with
which they tilted against the very front of both the existing political parties; their uncompromising
profession of opposition to many of the generally received opinions, and the suspicion they lay under of
holding others still more heterodox than they professed; the talent and verve of at least my father’s
articles, and the appearance of a corps behind him sufficient to carry on a review; and finally, the fact
that the review was bought and read, made the so called Bentham school in philosophy and politics fill
a greater place in the public mind than it had held before, or has ever again held since other equally
earnest schools of thought have arisen in England. As I was in the head quarters of it, knew of what it
was composed, and as one of the most active of its very small number, might say without undue
assumption, quorum pars magna fui,* it belongs to me more than to most others to give some account
of it.
This supposed school, then, had no other existence than what was constituted by the fact, that my
father’s writings and conversation drew round him a certain number of young men who had already
imbibed, or who imbibed from him, a greater or smaller portion of his very decided political and
philosophical opinions. The notion that Bentham was surrounded by a band of disciples who received
their opinions from his lips, is a fable to which my father did justice in his “Fragment on Mackintosh,”
and which, to all who knew Mr. Bentham’s habits of life and manner of conversation, is simply
ridiculous.* The influence which Bentham exercised was by his writings. Through them he has
produced, and is producing, effects on the condition of mankind, wider and deeper, no doubt, than any
which can be attributed to my father. He is a much greater name in history. But my father exercised a
far greater personal ascendancy. He was sought for the vigour and instructiveness of his conversation,
and did use it largely as an instrument for the diffusion of his opinions. I have never known any man
who could do such ample justice to his best thoughts in colloquial discussion. His perfect command
over his great mental resources, the terseness and expressiveness of his language and the moral
earnestness as well as intellectual force of his delivery, made him one of the most striking of all
argumentative conversers: and he was full of anecdote, a hearty laugher, and when with people whom
he liked, a most lively and amusing companion. It was not solely, or even chiefly, in diffusing his merely
intellectual convictions, that his power shewed itself: it was still more through the influence of a quality,
of which I have only since learnt to appreciate the extreme rarity: that exalted public spirit and regard
above all things to the good of the whole, which warmed into life and activity every germ of similar
virtue that existed in the minds he came in contact with: the desire he made them feel for his
approbation, the shame at his disapproval; the moral support which his conversation and his very
existence gave to those who were aiming at the same objects, and the encouragement he afforded to
the faint-hearted or desponding among them, by the firm confidence which (though the reverse of
sanguine as to the results to be expected in any one particular case) he always felt in the power of
reason, the general progress of improvement, and the good which individuals could do by judicious
effort.
It was my father’s opinions which gave the distinguishing character to the Benthamic or utilitarian
propagandism of that time. They fell singly scattered from him in many directions, but they flowed from
him in a continued stream principally in three channels. One was through me, the only mind directly
formed by his instructions, and through whom considerable influence was exercised over various young
men who became, in their turn, propagandists. A second was through some of the Cambridge
cotemporaries of Charles Austin, who, either initiated by him or under the general mental impulse
which he gave, had adopted many opinions allied to those of my father, and some of the more
considerable of whom afterwards sought my father’s acquaintance and frequented his house. Among
these may be mentioned Strutt, afterwards Lord Belper, and the present Lord Romilly, with whose
eminent father, Sir Samuel, my father had of old been on terms of friendship. The third channel was
that of a younger generation of Cambridge undergraduates, cotemporary not with Austin but with
Eyton Tooke, who were drawn to that estimable person by affinity of opinions, and introduced by him to
my father: the most notable of these was Charles Buller. Various other persons individually received
and transmitted a considerable amount of my father’s influence: for example, Black (as before
mentioned) and Fonblanque: most of these however we accounted only partial allies; Fonblanque, for
instance, was always divergent from us on many important points. But indeed there was by no means
complete unanimity among any portion of us, nor had any of us adopted implicitly all my father’s
opinions. For example, although his Essay on Government* was regarded probably by all of us as a
masterpiece of political wisdom, our adhesion by no means extended to the paragraph of it, in which he
maintains that women may consistently with good government, be excluded from the suffrage, because
their interest is the same with that of men. From this doctrine, I, and all those who formed my chosen
associates, most positively dissented. It is due to my father to say that he denied having intended to
affirm that women should be excluded, any more than men under the age of forty, concerning whom he
maintained, in the very next paragraph, an exactly similar thesis. He was, as he truly said, not
discussing whether the suffrage had better be restricted, but only (assuming that it is to be restricted)
what is the utmost limit of restriction, which does not necessarily involve a sacrifice of the securities for
good government. But I thought then, as I have always thought since, that the opinion which he
acknowledged, no less than that which he disclaimed, is as great an error as any of those against which
the Essay was directed; that the interest of women is included in that of men exactly as much and no
more, as the interest of subjects is included in that of kings; and that every reason which exists for
giving the suffrage to anybody, demands that it should not be withheld from women. This was also the
general opinion of the younger proselytes; and it is pleasant to be able to say that Mr. Bentham, on this
important point, was wholly on our side.
But though none of us, probably, agreed in every respect with my father, his opinions, as I said before,
were the principal element which gave its colour and character to the little group of young men who
were the first propagators of what was afterwards called “philosophic radicalism.” Their mode of
thinking was not characterized by Benthamism in any sense which has relation to Bentham as a chief or
guide, but rather by a combination of Bentham’s point of view with that of the modern political
economy, and with the Hartleian metaphysics. Malthus’s population principle* was quite as much a
banner, and point of union among us, as any opinion specially belonging to Bentham. This great
doctrine, originally brought forward as an argument against the indefinite improvability of human
affairs, we took up with ardent zeal in the contrary sense, as indicating the sole means of realizing that
improvability by securing full employment at high wages to the whole labouring population through a
voluntary restriction of the increase of their numbers. The other leading characteristics of the creed,
which we held in common with my father, may be stated as follows:
 In politics, an almost unbounded confidence in the efficacy of two things: representative government,
and complete freedom of discussion. So complete was my father’s reliance on the influence of reason
over the minds of mankind, whenever it is allowed to reach them, that he felt as if all would be gained if
the whole population were taught to read, if all sorts of opinions were allowed to be addressed to them
by word and in writing, and if by means of the suffrage they could nominate a legislature to give effect
to the opinions they adopted. He thought that when the legislature no longer represented a class
interest, it would aim at the general interest, honestly and with adequate wisdom; since the people
would be sufficiently under the guidance of educated intelligence, to make in general a good choice of
persons to represent them, and having done so, to leave to those whom they had chosen a liberal
discretion. Accordingly aristocratic rule, the government of the Few in any of its shapes, being in his
eyes the only thing which stood between mankind and an administration of their affairs by the best
wisdom to be found among them, was the object of his sternest disapprobation, and a democratic
suffrage the principal article of his political creed, not on the ground of liberty, Rights of Man, or any of
the phrases, more or less significant, by which, up to that time, democracy had usually been defended,
but as the most essential of “securities for good government.” In this, too, he held fast only to what he
deemed essentials; he was comparatively indifferent to monarchical or republican forms—far more so
than Bentham, to whom a king, in the character of “corrupter-general,”* appeared necessarily very
noxious. Next to aristocracy, an established church, or corporation of priests, as being by position the
great depravers of religion, and interested in opposing the progress of the human mind, was the object
of his greatest detestation; though he disliked no clergyman personally who did not deserve it, and was
on terms of sincere friendship with several. In ethics, his moral feelings were energetic and rigid on all
points which he deemed important to human well being, while he was supremely indifferent in opinion
(though his indifference did not shew itself in personal conduct) to all those doctrines of the common
morality, which he thought had no foundation but in asceticism and priestcraft. He looked forward, for
example, to a considerable increase of freedom in the relations between the sexes, though without
pretending to define exactly what would be, or ought to be, the precise conditions of that freedom. This
opinion was connected in him with no sensuality either of a theoretical or of a practical kind. He
anticipated, on the contrary, as one of the beneficial effects of increased freedom, that the imagination
would no longer dwell upon the physical relation and its adjuncts, and swell this into one of the
principal objects of life; a perversion of the imagination and feelings, which he regarded as one of the
deepest seated and most pervading evils in the human mind. In psychology, his fundamental doctrine
was the formation of all human character by circumstances, through the universal Principle of
Association, and the consequent unlimited possibility of improving the moral and intellectual condition
of mankind by education. Of all his doctrines none was more important than this, or needs more to be
insisted on: unfortunately there is none which is more contradictory to the prevailing tendencies of
speculation, both in his time and since.
These various opinions were seized on with youthful fanaticism by the little knot of young men of
whom I was one: and we put into them a sectarian spirit, from which, in intention at least, my father
was wholly free. What we (or rather a phantom substituted in the place of us) were sometimes, by a
ridiculous exaggeration, called by others, namely a “school,” some of us for a time really hoped and
aspired to be. The French philosophes of the eighteenth century* were the example we sought to
imitate, and we hoped to accomplish no less results.[12] No one of the set went to so great excesses in
this boyish ambition as I did; which might be shewn by many particulars, were it not an useless waste
of space and time.
All this, however, is properly only the outside of our existence; or at least, the intellectual part alone,
and no more than one side of that. In attempting to penetrate inward, and give any indication of what
we were as human beings, I must be understood as speaking only of myself, of whom alone I can speak
from sufficient knowledge; and I do not believe that the picture would suit any of my companions
without many and great modifications.
I conceive that the description so often given of a Benthamite, as a mere reasoning machine, though
extremely inapplicable to most of those who have been designated by that title, was during two or three
years of my life not altogether untrue of me. It was perhaps as applicable to me as it can well be to any
one just entering into life, to whom the common objects of desire must in general have at least the
attraction of novelty. There is nothing very extraordinary in this fact: no youth of the age I then was,
can be expected to be more than one thing, and this was the thing I happened to be. Ambition and
desire of distinction, I had in abundance; and zeal for what I thought the good of mankind was my
strongest sentiment, mixing with and colouring all others. But my zeal was as yet little else, at that
period of my life, than zeal for speculative opinions. It had not its root in genuine benevolence, or
sympathy with mankind; though these qualities held their due place in my ethical standard. Nor was it
connected with any high enthusiasm for ideal nobleness. Yet of this feeling I was imaginatively very
susceptible; but there was at that time an intermission of its natural aliment, poetical culture, while
there was a superabundance of the discipline antagonistic to it, that of mere logic and analysis. Add to
this that, as already mentioned, my father’s teachings tended to the undervaluing of feeling. It was not
that he was himself cold-hearted or insensible; I believe it was rather from the contrary quality; he
thought that feeling could take care of itself; that there was sure to be enough of it if actions were
properly cared about. Offended by the frequency with which, in ethical and philosophical controversy,
feeling is made the ultimate reason and justification of conduct, instead of being itself called on for a
justification, while, in practice, actions, the effect of which on human happiness is mischievous, are
defended as being required by feeling, and the character of a person of feeling obtains a credit for
desert, which he thought only due to actions, he had a real impatience of attributing praise to feeling,
or of any but the most sparing reference to it either in the estimation of persons or in the discussion of
things. In addition to the influence which this characteristic in him, had on me and others, we found all
the opinions to which we attached most importance, constantly attacked on the ground of feeling.
Utility was denounced as cold calculation; political economy as hard-hearted; anti-population doctrines
as repulsive to the natural feelings of mankind. We retorted by the word “sentimentality,” which, along
with “declamation” and “vague generalities,” served us as common terms of opprobrium. Although we
were generally in the right, as against those who were opposed to us, the effect was that the cultivation
of feeling (except the feelings of public and private duty) was not in much esteem among us, and had
very little place in the thoughts of most of us, myself in particular.[13] What we principally thought of,
was to alter people’s opinions; to make them believe according to evidence, and know what was their
real interest, which when they once knew, they would, we thought, by the instrument of opinion,
enforce a regard to it upon one another. While fully recognizing the superior excellence of unselfish
benevolence and love of justice, we did not expect the regeneration of mankind from any direct action
on those sentiments, but from the effect of educated intellect, enlightening the selfish feelings.
Although this last is prodigiously important as a means of improvement in the hands of those who are
themselves impelled by nobler principles of action, I do not believe that any one of the survivors of the
Benthamites or Utilitarians of that day, now relies mainly upon it for the general amendment of human
conduct.
From this neglect both in theory and in practice of the cultivation of feeling, naturally resulted among
other things an undervaluing of poetry, and of Imagination generally as an element of human nature. It
is, or was, part of the popular notion of Benthamites, that they are enemies of poetry: this was partly
true of Bentham himself; he used to say that “all poetry is misrepresentation”:* but, in the sense in
which he said it, the same might have been said of all impressive speech; of all representation or
inculcation more oratorical in its character than a sum in arithmetic. An article of Bingham’s in the first
number of the Westminster Review, in which he offered as an explanation of something which he
disliked in Moore, that “Mr. Moore is a poet, and therefore is not a reasoner,” did a good deal to attach
the notion of hating poetry to the writers in the Review. But the truth was that many of us were great
readers of poetry; Bingham himself had been a writer of it, while as regards me (and the same thing
might be said of my father), the correct statement would be not that I disliked poetry, but that I was
theoretically indifferent to it. I disliked any sentiments in poetry which I should have disliked in prose;
and that included a great deal. And I was wholly blind to its place in human culture, as a means of
educating the feelings. But I was always personally very susceptible to some kinds of it. In the most
sectarian period of my Benthamism I happened to look into Pope’s Essay on Man, and though every
opinion in it was contrary to mine, I well remember how powerfully it acted on my imagination. Perhaps
at that time poetical composition of any higher type than eloquent discussion in verse, might not have
produced a similar effect on me: at all events I seldom gave it an opportunity. This, however, was a
mere passing state. Long before I had enlarged in any considerable degree, the basis of my intellectual
creed, I had obtained in the natural course of my mental progress, poetic culture of the most valuable
kind, by means of reverential admiration for the lives and characters of heroic persons; especially the
heroes of philosophy. The same inspiring effect which so many of the benefactors of mankind have left
on record that they had experienced from Plutarch’s Lives, was produced on me by Plato’s pictures of
Socrates, and by some modern biographies, above all by Condorcet’s Life of Turgot; a book well
calculated to rouse the best sort of enthusiasm, since it contains one of the wisest and noblest of lives,
delineated by one of the wisest and noblest of men. The heroic virtue of these glorious representatives
of the opinions with which I sympathized, deeply affected me, and I perpetually recurred to them as
others do to a favorite poet, when needing to be carried up into the more elevated regions of feeling
and thought. I may observe by the way that this book cured me of my sectarian follies. The two or three
pages beginning “Il regardait toute secte comme nuisible,”* and explaining why Turgot always kept
himself perfectly distinct from the Encyclopedists, sank deeply into my mind. I left off designating
myself and others as Utilitarians, and by the pronoun “we,” or any other collective designation, I ceased
to afficher* sectarianism.[14] My real inward sectarianism I did not get rid of till later, and much more
gradually.
About the end of 1824, or beginning of 1825, Mr. Bentham, having lately got back his papers on
Evidence from M. Dumont (whose Traité des Preuves Judiciaires, grounded on them, was then first
completed and published), resolved to have them printed in the original, and bethought himself of me
as capable of preparing them for the press; in the same manner as his Book of Fallacies had been
recently edited by Bingham. I gladly undertook this task, and it occupied nearly all my leisure for about
a year, exclusive of the time afterwards spent in seeing the five large volumes through the press. Mr.
Bentham had begun this treatise three times, at considerable intervals, each time in a different manner,
and each time without reference to the preceding: two of the three times he had gone over nearly the
whole subject. These three masses of manuscript it was my business to condense into a single treatise;
adopting the one last written as the groundwork, and incorporating with it as much of the two others as
it had not completely superseded. I had also to unroll such of Bentham’s involved and parenthetical
sentences, as seemed to overpass by their complexity the measure of what readers were likely to take
the pains to understand. It was further Mr. Bentham’s particular desire that I should, from myself,
endeavour to supply any lacunæ which he had left; and at his instance I read, for this purpose, the most
authoritative treatises on the English Law of Evidence, and commented on a few of the objectionable
points of the English rules, which had escaped Bentham’s notice. I also replied to the objections which
had been made to some of his doctrines, by reviewers of Dumont’s book, and added a few
supplementary remarks on some of the more abstract parts of the subject, such as the theory of
improbability and impossibility. The controversial part of these editorial additions was written in a more
assuming tone, than became one so young and inexperienced as I was: but indeed I had never
contemplated coming forward in my own person; and, as an anonymous editor of Bentham, I fell into
the tone of my author, not thinking it unsuitable to him or to the subject, however it might be so to me.
My name as editor was put to the book after it was printed, at Mr. Bentham’s positive desire, which I in
vain attempted to persuade him to forego.
The time occupied in this editorial work was extremely well employed in respect to my own
improvement. The “Rationale of Judicial Evidence” is one of the richest in matter of all Bentham’s
productions. The theory of evidence being in itself one of the most important of his subjects, and
ramifying into most of the others, the book contains, very fully developed, a great proportion of all his
best thoughts: while, among more special things, it comprises the most elaborate exposure of the vices
and defects of English law, as it then was, which is to be found in his works; not confined to the law of
evidence, but including, by way of illustrative episode, the entire procedure or practice of Westminster
Hall.* The direct knowledge, therefore, which I obtained from the book, and which was imprinted upon
me much more thoroughly than it could have been by mere reading, was itself no small acquisition. But
this occupation did for me what might seem less to be expected; it gave a great start to my powers of
composition. Everything which I wrote subsequently to this editorial employment, was markedly
superior to anything that I had written before it. Bentham’s later style, as the world knows, was heavy
and cumbersome, from the excess of a good quality, the love of precision, which made him introduce
clause within clause into the heart of every sentence, that the reader might receive into his mind all the
modifications and qualifications simultaneously with the main proposition: and the habit grew on him
until his sentences became, to those not accustomed to them, most laborious reading. But his earlier
style, that of the Fragment on Government, Plan of a Judicial Establishment, &c., is a model of liveliness
and ease combined with fulness of matter, scarcely ever surpassed: and of this earlier style there were
many striking specimens in the manuscripts on Evidence, all of which I endeavoured to preserve. So
long a course of this admirable writing had a considerable effect upon my own; and I added to it by the
assiduous reading of other writers, both French and English, who combined, in a remarkable degree,
ease with force, such as Goldsmith, Fielding, Pascal, Voltaire, and Courier. Through these influences my
writing lost the jejuneness of my early compositions; the bones and cartilages began to clothe
themselves with flesh, and the style became, at times, lively and almost light.
This improvement was first exhibited in a new field. Mr. Marshall, of Leeds, father of the present
generation of Marshalls, the same who was brought into Parliament for Yorkshire when the
representation forfeited by Grampound* was transferred to it—an earnest parliamentary reformer, and
a man of large fortune, of which he made a liberal use, had been much struck with Bentham’s Book of
Fallacies: and the thought had occurred to him that it would be useful to publish annually the
Parliamentary Debates, not in the chronological order of Hansard,* but classified according to subjects,
and accompanied by a commentary pointing out the fallacies of the speakers. With this intention, he
very naturally addressed himself to the editor of the Book of Fallacies; and Bingham, with the
assistance of Charles Austin, undertook the editorship. The work was called “Parliamentary History and
Review.” Its sale was not sufficient to keep it in existence, and it only lasted three years. It excited,
however, some attention among parliamentary and political people. The best strength of the party was
put forth in it; and its execution did them much more credit, than that of the Westminster Review had
ever done. Bingham and Charles Austin wrote much in it; as did Strutt, Romilly, and several other
liberal lawyers. My father wrote one article in his best style; the elder Austin another. Coulson wrote
one of great merit. It fell to my lot to lead off the first number by an article on the principal topic of the
session (that of 1825), the Catholic Association and the Catholic disabilities.* In the second number I
wrote an elaborate Essay on the commercial crisis of 1825 and the Currency Debates. In the third I had
two articles, one on a minor subject, the other on the Reciprocity principle in commerce, à propos of a
celebrated diplomatic correspondence between Canning and Gallatin.* These writings were no longer
mere reproductions and applications of the doctrines I had been taught; they were original thinking, as
far as that name can be applied to old ideas in new forms and connexions: and I do not exceed the truth
in saying that there was a maturity, and a well-digested character about them, which there had not
been in any of my previous performances. In execution, therefore, they were not at all juvenile; but
their subjects have either gone by, or have been so much better treated since, that they are entirely
superseded, and should remain buried in the same oblivion with my contributions to the first dynasty of
the Westminster Review.
While thus engaged in writing for the public, I did not neglect other modes of self-cultivation. It was
at this time that I learnt German; beginning it in the Hamiltonian method,* for which purpose I and
several of my companions formed a class. For several years from this period, our social studies assumed
a shape which contributed very much to my mental progress. The idea occurred to us of carrying on, by
reading and conversation, a joint study of several of the branches of science which we wished to be
masters of. We assembled to the number of a dozen or more. Mr. Grote lent a room of his house in
Threadneedle Street for the purpose, and his partner Prescott, one of the three original members of the
Utilitarian Society, made one among us. We met two mornings in every week, from half past eight till
ten, at which hour most of us were called off to our daily occupations. Our first subject was Political
Economy. We chose some systematic treatise as our textbook; my father’s “Elements” being our first
choice. One of us read aloud a chapter, or some smaller portion, of the book. The discussion was then
opened, and any one who had an objection or other remark to make, made it. Our rule was to discuss
thoroughly every point raised, whether great or small, prolonging the discussion until all who took part
were satisfied with the conclusion they had individually arrived at; and to follow up every topic of
collateral speculation which the chapter or the conversation suggested, never leaving it until we had
untied every knot which we found. We repeatedly kept up the discussion of some one point for several
weeks, thinking intently on it during the intervals of our meetings, and contriving solutions of the new
difficulties which had risen up in the last morning’s discussion. When we had finished in this way my
father’s Elements, we went in the same manner through Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy, and
Bailey’s Dissertation on Value. These close and vigorous discussions were not only improving in a high
degree to those who took part in them, but brought out new views of some topics of abstract Political
Economy. The theory of International Values which I afterwards published, emanated from these
conversations, as did also the modified form of Ricardo’s theory of Profits, laid down in my Essay on
Profits and Interest. Those among us with whom new speculations chiefly originated, were Ellis,
Graham, and I; though others gave valuable aid to the discussions, especially Prescott and Roebuck, the
one by his knowledge, the other by his dialectical acuteness. The theories of International Values and of
Profits were excogitated and worked out in about equal proportions by myself and Graham: and if our
original project had been executed, my “Essays on some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy”
would have been brought out along with some papers of his, under our joint names. But when my
exposition came to be written, I found that I had so much overestimated my agreement with him, and
he dissented so much from the most original of the two Essays, that on International Values, that I was
obliged to consider the theory as now exclusively mine, and it came out as such when published many
years later. I may mention that among the alterations which my father made in revising his Elements
for the third edition, several were grounded on criticisms elicited by these Conversations; and in
particular, he modified his opinions (though not to the extent of our new speculations) on both the
points to which I have adverted.
When we had enough of political economy, we took up the syllogistic logic in the same manner, Grote
now joining us. Our first text book was Aldrich, but being disgusted with its superficiality, we reprinted
one of the most finished among the many manuals of the school logic, which my father, a great collector
of such books, possessed, the Manuductio ad Logicam of the Jesuit Du Trieu. After finishing this, we
took up Whately’s Logic, then first republished from the Encyclopædia Metropolitana, and finally the
“Computatio sive Logica” of Hobbes. These books, dealt with in our manner, afforded a wide range for
original metaphysical speculation: and most of what has been done in the First Book of my System of
Logic, to rationalize and correct the principles and distinctions of the school logicians, and to improve
the theory of the Import of Propositions, had its origin in these discussions; Graham and I originating
most of the novelties, while Grote and others furnished an excellent tribunal or test. From this time I
formed the project of writing a book on Logic, though on a much humbler scale than the one I
ultimately executed.
Having done with Logic, we launched into analytic psychology, and having chosen Hartley for our text
book, we raised Priestley’s edition to an extravagant price by searching through London to furnish each
of us with a copy. When we had finished Hartley, we suspended our meetings; but, my father’s Analysis
of the Mind being published soon after, we reassembled for the purpose of reading it. With this our
exercises ended. I have always dated from these conversations my own real inauguration as an original
and independent thinker. It was also through them that I acquired, or very much strengthened, a
mental habit to which I attribute all that I have ever done, or ever shall do, in speculation; that of never
accepting half-solutions of difficulties as complete; never abandoning a puzzle, but again and again
returning to it until it was cleared up; never allowing obscure corners of a subject to remain
unexplored, because they did not appear important; never thinking that I perfectly understood any part
of a subject until I understood the whole.
Our doings from 1825 to 1830 in the way of public speaking filled a considerable place in my life
during those years, and as they had important effects on my development, something ought to be said
of them.
There was for some time in existence a society of Owenites, called the Cooperative Society, which met
for weekly public discussions in Chancery Lane.* In the early part of 1825, accident brought Roebuck in
contact with several of its members, and led to his attending one or two of the meetings and taking part
in the debate in opposition to Owenism. Some one of us started the notion of going there in a body and
having a general battle: and Charles Austin and some of his friends who did not usually take part in our
joint exercises, entered into the project. It was carried out by concert with the principal members of the
Society, themselves nothing loth, as they naturally preferred a controversy with opponents to a tame
discussion among their own body. The question of population was proposed as the subject of debate:*
Charles Austin led the case on our side with a brilliant speech, and the fight was kept up by
adjournment through five or six weekly meetings before crowded auditories, including along with the
members of the Society and their friends, many hearers and some speakers from the Inns of Court.
When this debate was ended, another was commenced on the general merits of Owen’s system: and the
contest altogether lasted about three months. It was a lutte corps-à-corps* between Owenites and
political economists, whom the Owenites regarded as their most inveterate opponents: but it was a
perfectly friendly dispute. We who represented political economy had the same objects in view as they
had, and took pains to shew it; and the principal champion on their side was a very estimable man, with
whom I was well acquainted, Mr. William Thompson, of Cork, author of a book on the Distribution of
Wealth, and of an “Appeal” in behalf of women against the passage relating to them in my father’s
Essay on Government. Ellis, Roebuck, and I, took an active part in the debate, and among those from
the Inns of Court who joined in it I remember Charles Villiers. The other side obtained also, on the
population question, very efficient support from without. The well known Gale Jones, then an elderly
man, made one of his florid speeches; but the speaker with whom I was most struck, though I dissented
from nearly every word he said, was Thirlwall, the historian, since Bishop of St. David’s, then a
Chancery barrister, unknown except by a high reputation for eloquence acquired at the Cambridge
Union before the era of Austin and Macaulay. His speech was in answer to one of mine. Before he had
uttered ten sentences, I set him down as the best speaker I had ever heard, and I have never since
heard any one whom I placed above him.
The great interest of these debates predisposed some of those who took part in them, to catch at a
suggestion thrown out by McCulloch, the political economist, that a society was wanted in London
similar to the Speculative Society at Edinburgh, in which Brougham, Horner and others first cultivated
public speaking. Our experience at the Cooperative Society seemed to give cause for being sanguine as
to the sort of men who might be brought together in London for such a purpose. McCulloch mentioned
the matter to several young men of influence to whom he was then giving private lessons in political
economy. Some of these entered warmly into the project, particularly George Villiers, afterwards Earl of
Clarendon. He and his brothers Hyde and Charles, Romilly, Charles Austin, and I, with some others,
met and agreed on a plan. We determined to meet once a fortnight, from November to June, at the
Freemason’s Tavern, and we had soon a splendid list of members, containing, along with several
members of parliament, nearly all the most noted speakers of the Cambridge Union and of the Oxford
United Debating Society. It is curiously illustrative of the tendencies of the time that our principal
difficulty in recruiting for the Society was to find a sufficient number of Tory speakers. Almost all whom
we could press into the service were Liberals, of different orders and degrees. Besides those already
named, we had Macaulay, Thirlwall, Praed, Lord Howick, Samuel Wilberforce (afterwards Bishop of
Oxford), Charles Poulett Thomson (afterwards Lord Sydenham), Edward and Henry Lytton Bulwer,
Fonblanque, and many others whom I cannot now recollect, but who made themselves afterwards more
or less conspicuous in public or literary life. Nothing could seem more promising. But when the time for
action drew near, and it was necessary to fix on a President, and find somebody to open the first
debate, none of our celebrities would consent to perform either office. Of the many who were pressed
on the subject, the only one who could be prevailed on was a man of whom I knew very little, but who
had taken high honours at Oxford and was said to have acquired a great oratorical reputation there;
who some time afterwards became a Tory member of parliament.* He accordingly was fixed on, both for
filling the President’s chair and for making the first speech. The important day arrived; the benches
were crowded; all our great speakers were present, to judge of, but not to help our efforts. The Oxford
orator’s speech was a complete failure. This threw a damp on the whole concern: the speakers who
followed were few, and none of them did their best: the affair was a complete fiasco; and the oratorical
celebrities we had counted on went away never to return, giving to me at least a lesson in knowledge of
the world. This unexpected breakdown altered my whole relation to the project. I had not anticipated
taking a prominent part, or speaking much or often, particularly at first; but I now saw that the success
of the scheme depended on the new men, and I put my shoulder to the wheel. I opened the second
question, and from that time spoke in nearly every debate. It was very uphill work for some time. The
three Villiers’ and Romilly stuck to us for some time longer, but the patience of all the founders of the
Society was at last exhausted, except me and Roebuck. In the season following, 1826/27, things began
to mend. We had acquired two excellent Tory speakers, Hayward, and Shee (afterwards Sergeant
Shee): the radical side was reinforced by Charles Buller, Cockburn, and others of the second generation
of Cambridge Benthamites; and with their and other occasional aid, and the two Tories as well as
Roebuck and me for regular speakers, almost every debate was a bataille rangée* between the
“philosophic radicals” and the Tory lawyers; until our conflicts were talked about, and several persons
of note and consideration came to hear us. This happened still more in the subsequent seasons, 1828
and 1829, when the Coleridgians, in the persons of Maurice and Sterling, made their appearance in the
Society as a second Liberal and even Radical party, on totally different grounds from Benthamism and
vehemently opposed to it; bringing into these discussions the general doctrines and modes of thought
of the European reaction against the philosophy of the eighteenth century; and adding a third and very
important belligerent party to our contests, which were now no bad exponent of the movement of
opinion among the most cultivated part of the new generation. Our debates were very different from
those of common debating societies, for they habitually consisted of the strongest arguments and most
philosophic principles which either side was able to produce, thrown often into close and serré *
confutations of one another. The practice was necessarily very useful to us, and eminently so to me. I
never, indeed, acquired real fluency, and had always a bad and ungraceful delivery; but I could make
myself listened to: and as I always wrote my speeches when, from the feelings involved, or the nature of
the ideas to be developed, expression seemed important, I greatly increased my power of effective
writing; acquiring not only an ear for smoothness and rhythm, but a practical sense for telling
sentences, and an immediate criterion of their telling property, by their effect on a mixed audience.
The Society, and the preparation for it, together with the preparation for the morning conversations
which were going on simultaneously, occupied the greater part of my leisure; and made me feel it a
relief when, in the spring of 1828, I ceased to write for the Westminster. The Review had fallen into
difficulties. Though the sale of the first number had been very encouraging, the permanent sale had
never, I believe, been sufficient to pay the expenses, on the scale on which the review was carried on.
Those expenses had been considerably, but not sufficiently, reduced. One of the editors, Southern, had
resigned; and several of the writers, including my father and me, who had been paid like other
contributors for our earlier articles, had latterly written without payment. Nevertheless, the original
funds were nearly or quite exhausted, and if the Review was to be continued some new arrangement of
its affairs had become indispensable. My father and I had several conferences with Bowring on the
subject. We were willing to do our utmost for maintaining the Review as an organ of our opinions, but
not under Bowring’s editorship: while the impossibility of its any longer supporting a paid editor,
afforded a ground on which, without affront to him, we could propose to dispense with his services. We,
and some of our friends, were prepared to carry on the Review as unpaid writers, either finding among
ourselves an unpaid editor, or sharing the editorship among us. But while this negociation was
proceeding, with Bowring’s apparent acquiescence, he was carrying on another in a different quarter
(with Colonel Perronet Thompson), of which we received the first intimation in a letter from Bowring as
editor, informing us merely that an arrangement had been made, and proposing to us to write for the
next number, with promise of payment. We did not dispute Bowring’s right to bring about, if he could,
an arrangement more favorable to himself than the one we had proposed; but we thought the
concealment which he had practised towards us, while seemingly entering into our own project, an
affront: and even had we not thought so, we were indisposed to expend any more of our time and
trouble in attempting to write up the Review under his management. Accordingly my father excused
himself from writing; though two or three years later, on great pressure, he did write one more political
article. As for me, I positively refused. And thus ended my connexion with the original Westminster. The
last article which I wrote in it had cost me more labour than any previous; but it was a labour of love,
being a defence of the early French Revolutionists against the Tory misrepresentations of Sir Walter
Scott, in the introduction to his Life of Napoleon. The number of books which I read for this purpose,
making notes and extracts—even the number I had to buy (for in those days there was no public or
subscription library from which books of reference could be taken home), far exceeded the worth of the
immediate object; but I had at that time a half formed intention of writing a History of the French
Revolution; and though I never executed it, my collections afterwards were very useful to Carlyle for a
similar purpose.*

1 The continuation of this article in the second number of the review was written by me under my father’s eye, and (except as
practice in composition, in which respect it was, to me, more useful than anything else I ever wrote) was of little or no value.
 CHAPTER V

A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY. ONE STAGE ONWARD

FOR some years after this time I wrote very little, and nothing regularly, for publication: and great were
the advantages which I derived from the intermission. It was of no common importance to me, at this
period, to be able to digest and mature my thoughts for my own mind only, without any immediate call
for giving them out in print. Had I gone on writing, it would have much disturbed the important
transformation in my opinions and character, which took place during those years. The origin of this
transformation, or at least the process by which I was prepared for it, can only be explained by turning
some distance back.
From the winter of 1821, when I first read Bentham, and especially from the commencement of the
Westminster Review, I had what might truly be called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world. My
conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object. The personal sympathies I
wished for were those of fellow labourers in this enterprise. I endeavoured to pick up as many flowers
as I could by the way; but as a serious and permanent personal satisfaction to rest upon, my whole
reliance was placed on this: and I was accustomed to felicitate myself on the certainty of a happy life
which I enjoyed, through placing my happiness in something durable and distant, in which some
progress might be always making, while it could never be exhausted by complete attainment. This did
very well for several years, during which the general improvement going on in the world and the idea of
myself as engaged with others in struggling to promote it, seemed enough to fill up an interesting and
animated existence. But the time came when I awakened from this as from a dream. It was in the
autumn of 1826. I was in a dull state of nerves[15], such as everybody is occasionally liable to;
unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasure at
other times, becomes insipid or indifferent; the state, I should think, in which converts to Methodism
usually are, when smitten by their first “conviction of sin.” In this frame of mind it occurred to me to
put the question directly to myself, “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the
changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at
this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-
consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on
which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual
pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the
means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.
At first I hoped that the cloud would pass away of itself; but it did not. A night’s sleep, the sovereign
remedy for the smaller vexations of life, had no effect on it. I awoke to a renewed consciousness of the
woful fact. I carried it with me into all companies, into all occupations. Hardly anything had power to
cause me even a few minutes oblivion of it. For some months the cloud seemed to grow thicker and
thicker. The lines in Coleridge’s “Dejection”* —I was not then acquainted with them—exactly describe
my case:

A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,

A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief
In word, or sigh, or tear.

In vain I sought relief from my favourite books; those memorials of past nobleness and greatness, from
which I had always hitherto drawn strength and animation. I read them now without feeling, or with the
accustomed feeling minus all its charm; and I became persuaded, that my love of mankind, and of
excellence for its own sake, had worn itself out. I sought no comfort by speaking to others of what I felt.
If I had loved any one sufficiently to make confiding my griefs a necessity, I should not have been in the
condition I was. I felt, too, that mine was not an interesting, or in any way respectable distress. There
was nothing in it to attract sympathy. Advice, if I had known where to seek it, would have been most
precious. The words of Macbeth to the physician often occurred to my thoughts.* But there was no one
on whom I could build the faintest hope of such assistance. My father, to whom it would have been
natural to me to have recourse in any practical difficulties, was the last person to whom, in such a case
as this, I looked for help. Everything convinced me that he had no knowledge of any such mental state
as I was suffering from, and that even if he could be made to understand it, he was not the physician
who could heal it. My education, which was wholly his work, had been conducted without any regard to
the possibility of its ending in this result; and I saw no use in giving him the pain of thinking that his
plans had failed, when the failure was probably irremediable, and at all events, beyond the power of his
remedies. Of other friends, I had at that time none to whom I had any hope of making my condition
intelligible. It was however abundantly intelligible to myself; and the more I dwelt upon it, the more
hopeless it appeared.
My course of study had led me to believe, that all mental and moral feelings and qualities, whether of
a good or of a bad kind, were the results of association; that we love one thing and hate another, take
pleasure in one sort of action or contemplation, and pain in another sort, through the clinging of
pleasurable or painful ideas to those things, from the effect of education or of experience. As a corollary
from this, I had always heard it maintained by my father, and was myself convinced, that the object of
education should be to form the strongest possible associations of the salutary class; associations of
pleasure with all things beneficial to the great whole, and of pain with all things hurtful to it. This
doctrine appeared inexpugnable; but it now seemed to me on retrospect, that my teachers had
occupied themselves but superficially with the means of forming and keeping up these salutary
associations. They seemed to have trusted altogether to the old familiar instruments, praise and blame,
reward and punishment. Now I did not doubt that by these means, begun early and applied
unremittingly, intense associations of pain and pleasure, especially of pain, might be created, and might
produce desires and aversions capable of lasting undiminished to the end of life. But there must always
be something artificial and casual in associations thus produced. The pains and pleasures thus forcibly
associated with things, are not connected with them by any natural tie; and it is therefore, I thought,
essential to the durability of these associations, that they should have become so intense and inveterate
as to be practically indissoluble, before the habitual exercise of the power of analysis had commenced.
For I now saw, or thought I saw, what I had always before received with incredulity—that the habit of
analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings: as indeed it has when no other mental habit is
cultivated, and the analysing spirit remains without its natural complements and correctives. The very
excellence of analysis (I argued) is that it tends to weaken and undermine whatever is the result of
prejudice; that it enables us mentally to separate ideas which have only casually clung together: and no
associations whatever could ultimately resist this dissolving force, were it not that we owe to analysis
our clearest knowledge of the permanent sequences in nature; the real connexions between Things, not
dependent on our will and feelings; natural laws, by virtue of which, in many cases, one thing is
inseparable from another in fact; which laws, in proportion as they are clearly perceived and
imaginatively realized, cause our ideas of things which are always joined together in Nature, to cohere
more and more closely in our thoughts. Analytic habits may thus even strengthen the associations
between causes and effects, means and ends, but tend altogether to weaken those which are, to speak
familiarly, a mere matter of feeling. They are therefore (I thought) favourable to prudence and
clearsightedness, but a perpetual worm at the root both of the passions and of the virtues; and above
all, fearfully undermine all desires, and all pleasures, which are the effects of association, that is,
according to the theory I held, all except the purely physical and organic; of the entire insufficiency of
which to make life desirable, no one had a stronger conviction than I had. These were the laws of
human nature by which, as it seemed to me, I had been brought to my present state. All those to whom
I looked up, were of opinion that the pleasure of sympathy with human beings, and the feelings which
made the good of others, and especially of mankind on a large scale, the object of existence, were the
greatest and surest sources of happiness. Of the truth of this I was convinced, but to know that a
feeling would make me happy if I had it, did not give me the feeling. My education, I thought, had failed
to create these feelings in sufficient strength to resist the dissolving influence of analysis, while the
whole course of my intellectual cultivation had made precocious and premature analysis the inveterate
habit of my mind. I was thus, as I said to myself, left stranded at the commencement of my voyage, with
a well equipped ship and a rudder, but no sail; without any real desire for the ends which I had been so
carefully fitted out to work for: no delight in virtue or the general good, but also just as little in
anything else. The fountains of vanity and ambition seemed to have dried up within me, as completely
as those of benevolence. I had had (as I reflected) some gratification of vanity at too early an age: I had
obtained some distinction, and felt myself of some importance, before the desire of distinction and of
importance had grown into a passion: and little as it was which I had attained, yet having been attained
too early, like all pleasures enjoyed too soon, it had made me blasé and indifferent to the pursuit. Thus
neither selfish nor unselfish pleasures were pleasures to me. And there seemed no power in nature
sufficient to begin the formation of my character anew, and create in a mind now irretrievably analytic,
fresh associations of pleasure with any of the objects of human desire.
These were the thoughts which mingled with the dry heavy dejection of the melancholy winter of
1826–7. During this time I was not incapable of my usual occupations. I went on with them
mechanically, by the mere force of habit. I had been so drilled in a certain sort of mental exercise, that I
could still carry it on when all the spirit had gone out of it. I even composed and spoke several speeches
at the debating society, how, or with what degree of success I know not. Of four years continual
speaking at that society, this is the only year of which I remember next to nothing. Two lines of
Coleridge, in whom alone of all writers I have found a true description of what I felt, were often in my
thoughts, not at this time (for I had never read them), but in a later period of the same mental malady:*
Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,And hope without an object cannot live.*
In all probability my case was by no means so peculiar as I fancied it, and I doubt not that many
others have passed through a similar state; but the idiosyncracies of my education had given to the
general phenomenon a special character, which made it seem the natural effect of causes that it was
hardly possible for time to remove. I frequently asked myself, if I could, or if I was bound to go on
living, when life must be passed in this manner. I generally answered to myself, that I did not think I
could possibly bear it beyond a year. When, however, not more than half that duration of time had
elapsed, a small ray of light broke in upon my gloom. I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel’s Memoirs,
and came to the passage which relates his father’s death, the distressed position of the family, and the
sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be everything
to them—would supply the place of all that they had lost. A vivid conception of the scene and its
feelings came over me, and I was moved to tears. From this moment my burthen grew lighter. The
oppression of the thought that all feeling was dead within me, was gone. I was no longer hopeless: I
was not a stock or a stone. I had still, it seemed, some of the material out of which all worth of
character, and all capacity for happiness, are made. Relieved from my ever present sense of
irremediable wretchedness, I gradually found that the ordinary incidents of life could again give me
some pleasure; that I could again find enjoyment, not intense, but sufficient for cheerfulness, in
sunshine and sky, in books, in conversation, in public affairs; and that there was, once more,
excitement, though of a moderate kind, in exerting myself for my opinions, and for the public good.
Thus the cloud gradually drew off, and I again enjoyed life: and though I had several relapses, some of
which lasted many months, I never again was as miserable as I had been.
The experiences of this period had two very marked effects on my opinions and character. In the first
place, they led me to adopt a theory of life, very unlike that on which I had before acted, and having
much in common with what at that time I certainly had never heard of, the anti-self-consciousness
theory of Carlyle.* I never, indeed, wavered in the conviction that happiness is the test of all rules of
conduct, and the end of life. But I now thought that this end was only to be attained by not making it
the direct end. Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than
their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or
pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find
happiness by the way. The enjoyments of life (such was now my theory) are sufficient to make it a
pleasant thing, when they are taken en passant, without being made a principal object. Once make
them so, and they are immediately felt to be insufficient. They will not bear a scrutinizing examination.
Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.* The only chance is to treat, not happiness,
but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-
interrogation, exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale
happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either
forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal questioning. This theory now became the
basis of my philosophy of life. And I still hold to it as the best theory for all those who have but a
moderate degree of sensibility and of capacity for enjoyment, that is, for the great majority of mankind.
The other important change which my opinions at this time underwent, was that I, for the first time,
gave its proper place, among the prime necessities of human well-being, to the internal culture of the
individual. I ceased to attach almost exclusive importance to the ordering of outward circumstances,
and the training of the human being for speculation and for action. I had now learnt by experience that
the passive susceptibilities needed to be cultivated as well as the active capacities, and required to be
nourished and enriched as well as guided. I did not, for an instant, lose sight of, or undervalue, that
part of the truth which I had seen before; I never turned recreant to intellectual culture, or ceased to
consider the power and practice of analysis as an essential condition both of individual and of social
improvement. But I thought that it had consequences which required to be corrected, by joining other
kinds of cultivation with it. The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties, now seemed to me
of primary importance. The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical
and philosophical creed. And my thoughts and inclinations turned in an increasing degree towards
whatever seemed capable of being instrumental to that object.
I now began to find meaning in the things which I had read or heard about the importance of poetry
and art as instruments of human culture. But it was some time longer before I began to know this by
personal experience. The only one of the imaginative arts in which I had from childhood taken great
pleasure, was music; the best effect of which (and in this it surpasses perhaps every other art) consists
in exciting enthusiasm; in winding up to a high pitch those feelings of an elevated kind which are
already in the character, but to which this excitement gives a glow and a fervour, which though
transitory at its utmost height, is precious for sustaining them at other times. This effect of music I had
often experienced; but, like all my pleasurable susceptibilities, it was suspended during the gloomy
period. I had sought relief again and again from this quarter, but found none. After the tide had turned,
and I was in process of recovery, I had been helped forward by music, but in a much less elevated
manner. I at this time first became acquainted with Weber’s Oberon,* and the extreme pleasure which I
drew from its delicious melodies did me good, by shewing me a source of pleasure to which I was as
susceptible as ever. The good however was much impaired by the thought, that the pleasure of music
(as is quite true of such pleasure as this was, that of mere tune) fades with familiarity, and requires
either to be revived by intermittence, or fed by continual novelty. And it is very characteristic both of
my then state, and of the general tone of my mind at this period of my life, that I was seriously
tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of musical combinations. The octave consists only of five
tones and two semitones, which can be put together in only a limited number of ways, of which but a
small proportion are beautiful: most of these, it seemed to me, must have been already discovered, and
there could not be room for a long succession of Mozarts and Webers, to strike out as these had done,
entirely new and surpassingly rich veins of musical beauty. This source of anxiety may perhaps be
thought to resemble that of the philosophers of Laputa, who feared lest the sun should be burnt out.* It
was, however, connected with the best feature in my character, and the only good point to be found in
my very unromantic and in no way honorable distress. For though my dejection, honestly looked at,
could not be called other than egotistical, produced by the ruin, as I thought, of my fabric of happiness,
yet the destiny of mankind in general was ever in my thoughts, and could not be separated from my
own. I felt that the flaw in my life, must be a flaw in life itself; that the question was, whether, if the
reformers of society and government could succeed in their objects, and every person in the community
were free and in a state of physical comfort, the pleasures of life, being no longer kept up by struggle
and privation, would cease to be pleasures. And I felt that unless I could see my way to some better
hope than this for human happiness in general, my dejection must continue; but that if I could see such
an outlet, I should then look on the world with pleasure; content as far as I was myself concerned, with
any fair share of the general lot.
This state of my thoughts and feelings made the fact of my reading Wordsworth for the first time (in
the autumn of 1828) an important event in my life. I took up the collection of his poems from curiosity,
with no expectation of mental relief from it, though I had before resorted to poetry with that hope. In
the worst period of my depression I had read through the whole of Byron (then new to me) to try
whether a poet, whose peculiar department was supposed to be that of the intenser feelings, could
rouse any feeling in me. As might be expected, I got no good from this reading, but the reverse. The
poet’s state of mind was too like my own. His was the lament of a man who had worn out all pleasures,
and who seemed to think that life, to all who possess the good things of it, must necessarily be the
vapid uninteresting thing which I found it. His Harold and Manfred had the same burthen on them
which I had; and I was not in a frame of mind to derive any comfort from the vehement sensual passion
of his Giaours, or the sullenness of his Laras.* But while Byron was exactly what did not suit my
condition, Wordsworth was exactly what did. I had looked into the Excursion two or three years before,
and found little in it; and should probably have found as little, had I read it at this time. But the
miscellaneous poems, in the two-volume edition of 1815 (to which little of value was added in the latter
part of the author’s life), proved to be the precise thing for my mental wants at that particular juncture.
In the first place, these poems addressed themselves powerfully to one of the strongest of my
pleasurable susceptibilities, the love of rural objects and natural scenery; to which I had been indebted
not only for much of the pleasure of my life, but quite recently for relief from one of my longest relapses
into depression.*[16] In this power of rural beauty over me, there was a foundation laid for taking
pleasure in Wordsworth’s poetry; the more so, as his scenery lies mostly among mountains, which,
owing to my early Pyrenean excursion, were my ideal of natural beauty. But Wordsworth would never
have had any great effect on me, if he had merely placed before me beautiful pictures of natural
scenery. Scott does this still better than Wordsworth, and a very second-rate landscape does it more
effectually than any poet. What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that
they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling,
under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest
of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure,
which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connexion with struggle or imperfection,
but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind. From
them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of
life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their
influence. There have certainly been, even in our own age, greater poets than Wordsworth; but poetry
of deeper and loftier feeling could not have done for me at that time what his did. I needed to be made
to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this,
not only without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in, the common feelings and
common destiny of human beings. And the delight which these poems gave me, proved that with
culture of this sort, there was nothing to dread from the most confirmed habit of analysis. At the
conclusion of the Poems came the famous Ode, falsely called Platonic, “Intimations of Immortality”: in
which, along with more than his usual sweetness of melody and rhythm, and along with the two
passages of grand imagery but bad philosophy so often quoted, I found that he too had had similar
experience to mine; that he also had felt that the first freshness of youthful enjoyment of life was not
lasting; but that he had sought for compensation, and found it, in the way in which he was now teaching
me to find it.* The result was that I gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual depression,
and was never again subject to it. I long continued to value Wordsworth less according to his intrinsic
merits, than by the measure of what he had done for me. Compared with the greatest poets, he may be
said to be the poet of unpoetical natures, possessed of quiet and contemplative tastes. But unpoetical
natures are precisely those which require poetic cultivation. This cultivation Wordsworth is much more
fitted to give, than poets who are intrinsically far more poets than he.
It so fell out that the merits of Wordsworth were the occasion of my first public declaration of my new
way of thinking, and separation from those of my habitual companions who had not undergone a similar
change. The person with whom at that time I was most in the habit of comparing notes on such subjects
was Roebuck, and I induced him to read Wordsworth, in whom he also at first seemed to find much to
admire: but I, like most Wordsworthians, threw myself into strong antagonism to Byron, both as a poet
and as to his influence on the character. Roebuck, all whose instincts were those of action and struggle,
had, on the contrary, a strong relish and great admiration of Byron, whose writings he regarded as the
poetry of human life, while Wordsworth’s, according to him, was that of flowers and butterflies. We
agreed to have the fight out at our Debating Society, where we accordingly discussed for two evenings
the comparative merits of Byron and Wordsworth, propounding and illustrating by long recitations our
respective theories of poetry:* Sterling also, in a brilliant speech, putting forward his particular theory.
This was the first debate on any weighty subject in which Roebuck and I had been on opposite sides.
The schism between us widened from this time more and more, though we continued for some years
longer to be companions. In the beginning, our chief divergence related to the cultivation of the
feelings. Roebuck was in many respects very different from the vulgar notion of a Benthamite or
Utilitarian.* He was a lover of poetry and of most of the fine arts. He took great pleasure in music, in
dramatic performances, especially in painting, and himself drew and designed landscapes with great
facility and beauty. But he never could be made to see that these things have any value as aids in the
formation of character. Personally, instead of being, as Benthamites are supposed to be, void of feeling,
he had very quick and strong sensibilities. But, like most Englishmen who have feelings, he found his
feelings stand very much in his way. He was much more susceptible to the painful sympathies than to
the pleasurable, and looking for his happiness elsewhere, he wished that his feelings should be
deadened rather than quickened. And in truth the English character, and English social circumstances,
make it so seldom possible to derive happiness from the exercise of the sympathies, that it is not
wonderful if they count for little in an Englishman’s scheme of life. In most other countries the
paramount importance of the sympathies as a constituent of individual happiness is an axiom, taken for
granted rather than needing any formal statement; but most English thinkers almost seem to regard
them as necessary evils, required for keeping men’s actions benevolent and compassionate. Roebuck
was, or appeared to be, this kind of Englishman. He saw little good in any cultivation of the feelings,
and none at all in cultivating them through the imagination, which he thought was only cultivating
illusions. It was in vain I urged on him that the imaginative emotion which an idea when vividly
conceived excites in us, is not an illusion but a fact, as real as any of the other qualities of objects; and
far from implying anything erroneous and delusive in our mental apprehension of the object, is quite
consistent with the most accurate knowledge and most perfect practical recognition of all its physical
and intellectual laws and relations. The intensest feeling of the beauty of a cloud lighted by the setting
sun, is no hindrance to my knowing that the cloud is vapour of water, subject to all the laws of vapours
in a state of suspension; and I am just as likely to allow for, and act on, these physical laws whenever
there is occasion to do so, as if I had been incapable of perceiving any distinction between beauty and
ugliness.
While my intimacy with Roebuck diminished, I fell more and more into friendly intercourse with our
Coleridgian adversaries in the Society, Frederick Maurice and John Sterling, both subsequently so well
known, the former by his writings, the latter through the biographies by Hare and Carlyle. Of these two
friends, Maurice was the thinker, Sterling the orator, and impassioned expositor of thoughts which, at
this period, were almost entirely formed for him by Maurice. With Maurice I had for some time been
acquainted through Eyton Tooke, who had known him at Cambridge, and though my discussions with
him were almost always disputes, I had carried away from them much that helped to build up my new
fabric of thought, in the same way as I was deriving much from Coleridge, and from the writings of
Goethe and other German authors which I read during those years. I have so deep a respect for
Maurice’s character and purposes, as well as for his great mental gifts, that it is with some
unwillingness I say anything which may seem to place him on a less high eminence than I would gladly
be able to accord to him. But I have always thought that there was more intellectual power wasted in
Maurice than in any other of my cotemporaries. Few of them certainly have had so much to waste.
Great powers of generalization, rare ingenuity and subtlety, and a wide perception of important and
unobvious truths, served him not for putting something better into the place of the worthless heap of
received opinions on the great subjects of thought, but for proving to his own mind that the Church of
England had known everything from the first, and that all the truths on the ground of which the Church
and orthodoxy have been attacked (many of which he saw as clearly as any one) are not only consistent
with the Thirty-nine articles, but are better understood and expressed in those articles than by any one
who rejects them. I have never been able to find any other explanation of this, than by attributing it to
that timidity of conscience, combined with original sensitiveness of temperament, which has so often
driven highly gifted men into Romanism from the need of a firmer support than they can find in the
independent conclusions of their own judgment. Any more vulgar kind of timidity no one who knew
Maurice would ever think of imputing to him, even if he had not given public proof of his freedom from
it, by his ultimate collision with some of the opinions commonly regarded as orthodox, and by his noble
origination of the Christian Socialist movement.* The nearest parallel to him, in a moral point of view, is
Coleridge, to whom, in merely intellectual power, apart from poetical genius, I think him decidedly
superior. At this time, however, he might be described as a disciple of Coleridge, and Sterling as a
disciple of Coleridge and of him. The modifications which were taking place in my old opinions gave me
some points of contact with them; and both Maurice and Sterling were of considerable use to my
development. With Sterling I soon became very intimate, and was more attached to him than I have
ever been to any other man. He was indeed one of the most loveable of men. His frank, cordial,
affectionate and expansive character; a love of truth alike conspicuous in the highest things and the
humblest; a generous and ardent nature which threw itself with impetuosity into the opinions it
adopted, but was as eager to do justice to the doctrines and the men it was opposed to, as to make war
on what it thought their errors; and an equal devotion to the two cardinal points of Liberty and Duty,
formed a combination of qualities as attractive to me, as to all others who knew him as well as I did.
With his open mind and heart, he found no difficulty in joining hands with me across the gulf which as
yet divided our opinions. He told me how he and others had looked upon me (from hearsay information)
as a “made” or manufactured man, having had a certain impress of opinion stamped on me which I
could only reproduce;* and what a change took place in his feelings when he found, in the discussion on
Wordsworth and Byron, that Wordsworth, and all which that name implies, “belonged” to me as much
as to him and his friends. The failure of his health soon scattered all his plans of life, and compelled him
to live at a distance from London, so that after the first year or two of our acquaintance we only saw
each other at distant intervals. But (as he said himself in one of his letters to Carlyle) when we did meet
it was like brothers. Though he was never, in the full sense of the word, a profound thinker, his
openness of mind, and the moral courage in which he greatly surpassed Maurice, made him outgrow
the dominion which Maurice and Coleridge had once exercised over his intellect; though he retained to
the last a great but discriminating admiration of both, and towards Maurice a warm affection. Except in
that short and transitory phasis of his life, during which he made the mistake of becoming a clergyman,
his mind was ever progressive; and the advance he always seemed to have made when I saw him after
an interval, made me apply to him what Goethe said of Schiller, “Er hatte eine fürchterliche
Fortschreitung.”* He and I started from intellectual points almost as wide apart as the poles, but the
distance between us was always diminishing: if I made steps towards some of his opinions, he, during
his short life, was constantly approximating more and more to several of mine: and if he had lived, and
had health and vigour to prosecute his ever assiduous self-culture, there is no knowing how much
further this spontaneous assimilation might have proceeded.
After 1829 I withdrew from attendance on the Debating Society. I had had enough of speech-making,
and was glad to carry on my private studies and meditations without any immediate call for outward
assertion of their results. I found the fabric of my old and taught opinions giving way in many fresh
places, and I never allowed it to fall to pieces, but was incessantly occupied in weaving it anew. I never,
in the course of my transition, was content to remain, for ever so short a time, confused and unsettled.
When I had taken in any new idea, I could not rest till I had adjusted its relation to my old opinions, and
ascertained exactly how far its effect ought to extend in modifying or superseding them.
The conflicts which I had so often had to sustain in defending the theory of government laid down in
Bentham’s and my father’s writings, and the acquaintance I had obtained with other schools of political
thinking, made me aware of many things which that doctrine, professing to be a theory of government
in general, ought to have made room for, and did not. But these things, as yet, remained with me rather
as corrections to be made in applying the theory to practice, than as defects in the theory. I felt that
politics could not be a science of specific experience; and that the accusations against the Benthamic
theory of being a theory, of proceeding à priori, by way of general reasoning, instead of Baconian
experiment, shewed complete ignorance of Bacon’s principles, and of the necessary conditions of
experimental investigation. At this juncture appeared, in the Edinburgh Review, Macaulay’s famous
attack on my father’s Essay on Government. This gave me much to think about. I saw that Macaulay’s
conception of the logic of politics was erroneous; that he stood up for the empirical mode of treating
political phenomena, against the philosophical; that even in physical science, his notion of
philosophizing might have recognized Kepler, but would have excluded Newton and Laplace. But I
could not help feeling, that though the tone was unbecoming (an error for which the writer, at a later
period, made the most ample and honorable amends), there was truth in several of his strictures on my
father’s treatment of the subject; that my father’s premises were really too narrow, and included but a
small number of the general truths, on which, in politics, the important consequences depend. Identity
of interest between the governing body and the community at large, is not, in any practical sense which
can be attached to it, the only thing on which good government depends; neither can this identity of
interest be secured by the mere conditions of election. I was not at all satisfied with the mode in which
my father met the criticisms of Macaulay. He did not, as I thought he ought to have done, justify himself
by saying, “I was not writing a scientific treatise on politics. I was writing an argument for
parliamentary reform.” He treated Macaulay’s argument as simply irrational; an attack upon the
reasoning faculty; an example of the saying of Hobbes, that when reason is against a man, a man will
be against reason.* This made me think that there was really something more fundamentally erroneous
in my father’s conception of philosophical Method, as applicable to politics, than I had hitherto
supposed there was. But I did not at first see clearly what the error might be. At last it flashed upon me
all at once in the course of other studies. In the early part of 1830 I had begun to put on paper the ideas
on Logic (chiefly on the distinctions among Terms, and the import of Propositions) which had been
suggested and in part worked out in the morning conversations already spoken of. Having secured
these thoughts from being lost, I pushed on into the other parts of the subject, to try whether I could do
anything further towards clearing up the theory of Logic generally. I grappled at once with the problem
of Induction, postponing that of Reasoning, on the ground that it is necessary to obtain premises before
we can reason from them. Now, Induction is mainly a process for finding the causes of effects: and in
attempting to fathom the mode of tracing causes and effects in physical science, I soon saw that in the
more perfect of the sciences, we ascend, by generalization from particulars, to the tendencies of causes
considered singly, and then reason downward from those separate tendencies, to the effect of the same
causes when combined. I then asked myself, what is the ultimate analysis of this deductive process; the
common theory of the syllogism evidently throwing no light upon it. My practice (learnt from Hobbes
and my father) being to study abstract principles by means of the best concrete instances I could find,
the Composition of Forces, in dynamics, occurred to me as the most complete example of the logical
process I was investigating. On examining, accordingly, what the mind does when it applies the
principle of the Composition of Forces, I found that it performs a simple act of addition. It adds the
separate effect of the one force to the separate effect of the other, and puts down the sum of these
separate effects as the joint effect. But is this a legitimate process? In dynamics, and in all the
mathematical branches of physics, it is; but in some other cases, as in chemistry, it is not; and I then
recollected that something not unlike this was pointed out as one of the distinctions between chemical
and mechanical phenomena, in the introduction to that favorite of my boyhood, Thomson’s System of
Chemistry. This distinction at once made my mind clear as to what was perplexing me in respect to the
philosophy of politics. I now saw, that a science is either deductive or experimental, according as, in the
province it deals with, the effects of causes when conjoined, are or are not the sums of the effects
which the same causes produce when separate. It followed that politics must be a deductive science. It
thus appeared, that both Macaulay and my father were wrong; the one in assimilating the method of
philosophizing in politics to the purely experimental method of chemistry; while the other, though right
in adopting a deductive method, had made a wrong selection of one, having taken as the type of
deduction, not the appropriate process, that of the deductive branches of natural philosophy, but the
inappropriate one of pure geometry, which not being a science of causation at all, does not require or
admit of any summing-up of effects. A foundation was thus laid in my thoughts for the principal
chapters of what I afterwards published on the Logic of the Moral Sciences;* and my new position in
respect to my old political creed, now became perfectly definite.
If I am asked what system of political philosophy I substituted for that which, as a philosophy, I had
abandoned, I answer, no system: only a conviction, that the true system was something much more
complex and many sided than I had previously had any idea of, and that its office was to supply, not a
set of model institutions, but principles from which the institutions suitable to any given circumstances
might be deduced. The influences of European, that is to say, Continental, thought, and especially those
of the reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, were now streaming in upon me.*
They came from various quarters: from the writings of Coleridge, which I had begun to read with
interest even before the change in my opinions; from the Coleridgians with whom I was in personal
intercourse; from what I had read of Goethe; from Carlyle’s early articles in the Edinburgh and Foreign
Reviews, though for a long time I saw nothing in these (as my father saw nothing in them to the last)
but insane rhapsody. From these sources, and from the acquaintance I kept up with the French
literature of the time, I derived, among other ideas which the general turning upside down of the
opinions of European thinkers had brought uppermost, these in particular: That the human mind has a
certain order of possible progress, in which some things must precede others, an order which
governments and public instructors can modify to some, but not to an unlimited extent: That all
questions of political institutions are relative, not absolute, and that different stages of human progress
not only will have, but ought to have, different institutions: That government is always either in the
hands, or passing into the hands, of whatever is the strongest power in society, and that what this
power is, does not depend on institutions, but institutions on it: That any general theory or philosophy
of politics supposes a previous theory of human progress, and that this is the same thing with a
philosophy of history. These opinions, true in the main, were held in an exaggerated and violent manner
by the thinkers with whom I was now most accustomed to compare notes, and who, as usual with a
reaction, ignored that half of the truth which the thinkers of the eighteenth century saw. But though, at
one period of my progress, I for some time undervalued that great century, I never joined in the
reaction against it, but kept as firm hold of one side of the truth as I took of the other. The fight
between the nineteenth century and the eighteenth always reminded me of the battle about the shield,
one side of which was white and the other black.* I marvelled at the blind rage with which the
combatants rushed against one another. I applied to them, and to Coleridge himself, many of
Coleridge’s sayings about half truths;* and Goethe’s device, “many-sidedness,”* was one which I would
most willingly, at this period, have taken for mine.
The writers by whom, more than by any others, a new mode of political thinking was brought home to
me, were those of the St. Simonian school in France.* In 1829 and 1830 I became acquainted with some
of their writings. They were then only in the earlier stages of their speculations. They had not yet
dressed out their philosophy as a religion, nor had they organized their scheme of Socialism.* They
were just beginning to question the principle of hereditary property. I was by no means prepared to go
with them even this length; but I was greatly struck with the connected view which they for the first
time presented to me, of the natural order of human progress; and especially with their division of all
history into organic periods and critical periods.* During the organic periods (they said) mankind
accept with firm conviction some positive creed, claiming jurisdiction over all their actions, and
containing more or less of truth and adaptation to the needs of humanity. Under its influence they make
all the progress compatible with the creed, and finally outgrow it; when a period follows of criticism
and negation, in which mankind lose their old convictions without acquiring any new ones, of a general
or authoritative character, except the conviction that the old are false. The period of Greek and Roman
polytheism, so long as really believed in by instructed Greeks and Romans, was an organic period,
succeeded by the critical or sceptical period of the Greek philosophers. Another organic period came in
with Christianity. The corresponding critical period began with the Reformation, has lasted ever since,
still lasts, and cannot altogether cease until a new organic period has been inaugurated by the triumph
of a yet more advanced creed. These ideas, I knew, were not peculiar to the St. Simonians; on the
contrary, they were the general property of Europe, or at least of Germany and France, but they had
never, to my knowledge, been so completely systematized as by these writers, nor the distinguishing
characteristics of a critical period so powerfully set forth; for I was not then acquainted with Fichte’s
Lectures on “the Characteristics of the Present Age.” In Carlyle, indeed, I found bitter denunciations of
an “age of unbelief,”* and of the present age as such, which I, like most people at that time, supposed
to be passionate protests in favour of the old modes of belief. But all that was true in these
denunciations I thought that I found more calmly and philosophically stated by the St. Simonians.
Among their publications, too, there was one which seemed to me far superior to the rest; in which the
general idea was matured into something much more definite and instructive. This was an early work of
Auguste Comte, who then called himself, and even announced himself in the title page as, a pupil of
Saint-Simon. In this tract M. Comte first put forth the doctrine which he afterwards so copiously
illustrated, of the natural succession of three stages in every department of human knowledge: first the
theological, next the metaphysical, and lastly, the positive stage; and contended, that social science
must be subject to the same law; that the feudal and Catholic system was the concluding phasis of the
theological state of the social science, Protestantism the commencement and the doctrines of the
French Revolution the consummation of the metaphysical, and that its positive state was yet to come.
This doctrine harmonized well with my existing notions, to which it seemed to give a scientific shape. I
already regarded the methods of physical science as the proper models for political. But the chief
benefit which I derived at this time from the trains of thought suggested by the St. Simonians and by
Comte, was, that I obtained a clearer conception than ever before of the peculiarities of an era of
transition in opinion, and ceased to mistake the moral and intellectual characteristics of such an era,
for the normal attributes of humanity. I looked forward, through the present age of loud disputes but
generally weak convictions, to a future which shall unite the best qualities of the critical with the best
qualities of the organic periods; unchecked liberty of thought, unbounded freedom of individual action
in all modes not hurtful to others; but also, convictions as to what is right and wrong, useful and
pernicious, deeply engraven on the feelings by early education and general unanimity of sentiment, and
so firmly grounded in reason and in the true exigencies of life, that they shall not, like all former and
present creeds, religious, ethical, and political, require to be periodically thrown off and replaced by
others.
M. Comte soon left the St. Simonians, and I lost sight of him and his writings for a number of years.
But the St. Simonians I continued to cultivate. I was kept au courant* of their progress by one of their
most enthusiastic disciples, M. Gustave d’Eichthal, who about that time passed a considerable interval
in England. I was introduced to their chiefs, Bazard and Enfantin, in 1830; and as long as their public
teachings and proselytism continued, I read nearly everything they wrote. Their criticisms on the
common doctrines of Liberalism seemed to me full of important truth; and it was partly by their
writings that my eyes were opened to the very limited and temporary value of the old political economy,
which assumes private property and inheritance as indefeasible facts, and freedom of production and
exchange as the dernier mot* of social improvement. The scheme gradually unfolded by the St.
Simonians, under which the labour and capital of society would be managed for the general account of
the community, every individual being required to take a share of labour, either as thinker, teacher,
artist, or producer, all being classed according to their capacity, and remunerated according to their
works, appeared to me a far superior description of Socialism to Owen’s. Their aim seemed to me
desirable and rational, however their means might be inefficacious; and though I neither believed in the
practicability, nor in the beneficial operation of their social machinery, I felt that the proclamation of
such an ideal of human society could not but tend to give a beneficial direction to the efforts of others
to bring society, as at present constituted, nearer to some ideal standard. I honoured them most of all
for what they have been most cried down for—the boldness and freedom from prejudice with which
they treated the subject of family, the most important of any, and needing more fundamental alterations
than remain to be made in any other great social institution, but on which scarcely any reformer has
the courage to touch. In proclaiming the perfect equality of men and women, and an entirely new order
of things in regard to their relations with one another, the St. Simonians in common with Owen and
Fourier have entitled themselves to the grateful remembrance of future generations.
In giving an account of this period of my life, I have only specified such of my new impressions as
appeared to me, both at the time and since, to be a kind of turning points, marking a definite progress
in my mode of thought. But these few selected points give a very insufficient idea of the quantity of
thinking which I carried on respecting a host of subjects during these years of transition. Much of this,
it is true, consisted in rediscovering things known to all the world, which I had previously disbelieved,
or disregarded. But the rediscovery was to me a discovery, giving me plenary possession of the truths
not as traditional platitudes but fresh from their source: and it seldom failed to place them in some new
light, by which they were reconciled with, and seemed to confirm while they modified, the truths less
generally known which lay in my early opinions, and in no essential part of which I at any time wavered.
All my new thinking only laid the foundation of these more deeply and strongly, while it often removed
misapprehension and confusion of ideas which had perverted their effect. For example, during the later
returns of my dejection, the doctrine of what is called Philosophical Necessity weighed on my existence
like an incubus. I felt as if I was scientifically proved to be the helpless slave of antecedent
circumstances; as if my character and that of all others had been formed for us by agencies beyond our
control, and was wholly out of our own power. I often said to myself, what a relief it would be if I could
disbelieve the doctrine of the formation of character by circumstances; and remembering the wish of
Fox respecting the doctrine of resistance to governments, that it might never be forgotten by kings, nor
remembered by subjects, I said that it would be a blessing if the doctrine of necessity could be believed
by all quoad* the characters of others, and disbelieved in regard to their own. I pondered painfully on
the subject, till gradually I saw light through it. I perceived, that the word Necessity, as a name for the
doctrine of Cause and Effect applied to human action, carried with it a misleading association; and that
this association was the operative force in the depressing and paralysing influence which I had
experienced. I saw that though our character is formed by circumstances, our own desires can do much
to shape those circumstances; and that what is really inspiriting and ennobling in the doctrine of
freewill, is the conviction that we have real power over the formation of our own character; that our
will, by influencing some of our circumstances, can modify our future habits or capabilities of willing.
All this was entirely consistent with the doctrine of circumstances, or rather, was that doctrine itself,
properly understood. From that time I drew, in my own mind, a clear distinction between the doctrine
of circumstances, and Fatalism; discarding altogether the misleading word Necessity. The theory, which
I now for the first time rightly apprehended, ceased altogether to be discouraging, and besides the
relief to my spirits, I no longer suffered under the burthen, so heavy to one who aims at being a
reformer in opinions, of thinking one doctrine true, and the contrary doctrine morally beneficial. The
train of thought which had extricated me from this dilemma, seemed to me, in after years, fitted to
render a similar service to others; and it now forms the chapter on Liberty and Necessity in the
concluding Book of my “System of Logic.”*
Again, in politics, though I no longer accepted the doctrine of the Essay on Government* as a
scientific theory; though I ceased to consider representative democracy as an absolute principle, and
regarded it as a question of time, place, and circumstance; though I now looked upon the choice of
political institutions as a moral and educational question more than one of material interests, thinking
that it ought to be decided mainly by the consideration, what great improvement in life and culture
stands next in order for the people concerned, as the condition of their further progress, and what
institutions are most likely to promote that; nevertheless this change in the premises of my political
philosophy did not alter my practical political creed as to the requirements of my own time and country.
I was as much as ever a radical and democrat, for Europe, and especially for England. I thought the
predominance of the aristocratic classes, the noble and the rich, in the English Constitution, an evil
worth any struggle to get rid of; not on account of taxes, or any such comparatively small
inconvenience, but as the great demoralizing agency in the country. Demoralizing, first, because it
made the conduct of the government an example of gross public immorality, through the predominance
of private over public interests in the State, and the abuse of the powers of legislation for the
advantage of classes. Secondly, and in a still greater degree, because the respect of the multitude
always attaching itself principally to that which, in the existing state of society, is the chief passport to
power; and under English institutions, riches, hereditary or acquired, being the almost exclusive source
of political importance; riches, and the signs of riches, were almost the only things really respected,
and the life of the people was mainly devoted to the pursuit of them. I thought, that while the higher
and richer classes held the power of government, the instruction and improvement of the mass of the
people were contrary to the self interest of those classes, because tending to render the people more
powerful for throwing off the yoke: but if the democracy obtained a large, and perhaps the principal,
share in the governing power, it would become the interest of the opulent classes to promote their
education, in order to ward off really mischievous errors, and especially those which would lead to
unjust violations of property. On these grounds I was not only as ardent as ever for democratic
institutions, but earnestly hoped that Owenite, St. Simonian, and all other anti-property doctrines might
spread widely among the poorer classes; not that I thought those doctrines true, or desired that they
should be acted on, but in order that the higher classes might be made to see that they had more to
fear from the poor when uneducated, than when educated.
In this frame of mind the French Revolution of July* found me. It roused my utmost enthusiasm, and
gave me, as it were, a new existence. I went at once to Paris, was introduced to Lafayette, and laid the
groundwork of the intercourse I afterwards kept up with several of the active chiefs of the extreme
popular party. After my return I entered warmly, as a writer, into the political discussions of the time;
which soon became still more exciting, by the coming in of Lord Grey’s ministry, and the proposing of
the Reform Bill.* For the next few years I wrote copiously in newspapers. It was about this time that
Fonblanque, who had for some time written the political articles in the Examiner, became the
proprietor and editor of the paper. 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 any one 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.[17] 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,” enquired on coming to London that autumn respecting their
authorship; an enquiry 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 recognized
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 shewing me the manuscript of Sartor Resartus, his best and
greatest work, which he had 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.
[18] 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 an
utilitarian, and with all his love of 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.[19]
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 shewn 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 Third Book. At the point which I have 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, shewed 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 having 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 course of my subsequent reflections.
 CHAPTER VI

COMMENCEMENT OF THE MOST VALUABLE FRIENDSHIP OF MY LIFE. MY

FATHER’S DEATH. WRITINGS AND OTHER PROCEEDINGS UP TO 1840

It was at 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.[20] 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.[21] Married at a very 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,[22] 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 coexisted 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.
[23] Alike in the highest regions of speculation and in the smallest 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.[24] 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 dishonorable 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 loveable 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 developement; 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 those 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 preeminently 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, which took place very gradually, dates its commencement from my reading, or
rather study, of M. de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” which fell into my hands immediately
after its first appearance. In that remarkable work, the excellencies of Democracy were pointed out in a
more conclusive, because a more specific manner than I had ever known them to be even by the most
enthusiastic democrats; while the specific dangers which beset Democracy, considered as the
government of the numerical majority, were brought into equally strong light, and subjected to a
masterly analysis, not as reasons for resisting what the author considered as an inevitable result of
human progress, but as indications of the weak points of popular government, the defences by which it
needs to be guarded, and the correctives which must be added to it in order that while full play is given
to its beneficial tendencies, those which are of a different nature may be neutralized or mitigated. I was
now well prepared for speculations of this character, and from this time onward my own thoughts
moved more and more in the same channel, though the consequent modifications in my practical
political creed were spread over many years, as would be shewn by comparing my first review of
“Democracy in America,” written and published in 1835, with the one in 1840 (reprinted in the
“Dissertations”), and this last, with the “Considerations on Representative Government.”
A collateral subject on which also I derived great benefit from the study of Tocqueville, was the
fundamental question of Centralization. The powerful philosophic analysis which he applied to
American and to French experience, led him to attach the utmost importance to the performance of as
much of the collective business of society, as can safely be so performed, by the people themselves,
without any intervention of the executive government, either to supersede their agency, or to dictate
the manner of its exercise. He viewed this practical political activity of the individual citizen, not only as
one of the most effectual means of training the social feelings and practical intelligence of the people,
so important in themselves and so indispensable to good government, but also as the specific
counteractive to some of the characteristic infirmities of Democracy, and a necessary protection against
its degenerating into the only despotism of which in the modern world there is real danger—the
absolute rule of the head of the executive over a congregation of isolated individuals, all equals but all
slaves. There was, indeed, no immediate peril from this source on the British side of the channel, where
nine tenths of the internal business which elsewhere devolves on the government, was transacted by
agencies independent of it; where Centralization was, and is, the subject not only of rational
disapprobation, but of unreasoning prejudice; where jealousy of Government interference was a blind
feeling preventing or resisting even the most beneficial exertion of legislative authority to correct the
abuses of what pretends to be local self-government, but is, too often, selfish mismanagement of local
interests, by a jobbing and borne* local oligarchy. But the more certain the public were to go wrong on
the side opposed to Centralization, the greater danger was there lest philosophic reformers should fall
into the contrary error, and overlook the mischiefs of which they had been spared the painful
experience. I was myself, at this very time, actively engaged in defending important measures, such as
the great Poor Law Reform of 1834,* against an irrational clamour grounded on the Anti-Centralization
prejudice: and had it not been for the lessons of Tocqueville, I do not know that I might not, like many
reformers before me, have been hurried into the excess opposite to that which, being the one prevalent
in my own country, it was generally my business to combat. As it is, I have steered carefully between
the two errors, and whether I have or have not drawn the line between them exactly in the right place, I
have at least insisted with equal emphasis upon the evils on both sides, and have made the means of
reconciling the advantages of both, a subject of serious study.
In the meanwhile had taken place the election of the first Reformed Parliament, which included
several of the most notable of my Radical friends and acquaintances; Grote, Roebuck, Buller, Sir
William Molesworth, John and Edward Romilly, and several more; besides Warburton, Strutt, and
others, who were in parliament already. Those who thought themselves, and were called by their
friends, the philosophic radicals, had now, it seemed, a fair opportunity, in a more advantageous
position than they had ever before occupied, for shewing what was in them; and I, as well as my father,
founded great hopes on them. These hopes were destined to be disappointed. The men were honest,
and faithful to their opinions, as far as votes were concerned; often in spite of much discouragement.
When measures were proposed, flagrantly at variance with their principles, such as the Irish Coercion
Bill, or the Canada coercion in 1837,* they came forward manfully, and braved any amount of hostility
and prejudice rather than desert the right. But on the whole they did very little to promote any
opinions; they had little enterprise, little activity: they left the lead of the radical portion of the House
to the old hands, to Hume and O’Connell. A partial exception must be made in favour of one or two of
the younger men; and in the case of Roebuck, it is his title to permanent remembrance, that in the very
first year during which he sat in Parliament he originated (or reoriginated after the unsuccessful
attempt of Mr. Brougham) the parliamentary movement for National Education; and that he was the
first to commence, and for years carried on almost alone, the contest for the self-government of the
Colonies.* Nothing, on the whole equal to these two things, was done by any other individual, even of
those from whom most was expected. And now, on a calm retrospect, I can perceive that the men were
less in fault than we supposed, and that we had expected too much from them.[25] They were in
unfavourable circumstances. Their lot was cast in the ten years of inevitable reaction, when the Reform
excitement being over, and the few legislative improvements which the public really called for having
been rapidly effected, power gravitated back in its natural direction, to those who were for keeping
things as they were; when the public mind desired rest, and was less disposed than at any other period
since the peace, to let itself be moved by attempts to work up the reform feeling into fresh activity in
favour of new things. It would have required a great political leader, which no one is to be blamed for
not being, to have effected really great things by parliamentary discussion when the nation was in this
mood. My father and I had hoped that some competent leader might arise; some man of philosophic
attainments and popular talents, who could have put heart into the many younger or less distinguished
men that would have been ready to join him—could have made them available, to the extent of their
talents, in bringing advanced ideas before the public—could have used the House of Commons as a
rostra or a teacher’s chair for instructing and impelling the public mind; and would either have forced
the Whigs to receive their measures from him, or have taken the lead of the Reform party out of their
hands. Such a leader there would have been, if my father had been in Parliament. For want of such a
man, the instructed Radicals sank into a mere côté gauche* of the Whig party. With a keen, and as I
now think, an exaggerated sense of the possibilities which were open to the Radicals if they made even
ordinary exertion for their opinions, I laboured from this time till 1839, both by personal influence with
some of them, and by writings, to put ideas into their heads and purpose into their hearts. I did some
good with Charles Buller, and some with Sir William Molesworth; both of whom did valuable service,
but were unhappily cut off almost in the beginning of their usefulness.* On the whole, however, my
attempt was vain. To have had a chance of succeeding in it, required a different position from mine. It
was a task only for one who, being himself in Parliament, could have mixed with the radical members in
daily consultation, could himself have taken the initiative, and instead of urging others to lead, could
have summoned them to follow.
What I could do by writing, I did. During the year 1833 I continued working in the Examiner with
Fonblanque, who at that time was zealous in keeping up the fight for radicalism against the Whig
ministry. During the session of 1834 I wrote comments on passing events, of the nature of newspaper
articles (under the title “Notes on the Newspapers”), in the Monthly Repository, a magazine conducted
by Mr. Fox, well known as a preacher and political orator, and subsequently as member of parliament
for Oldham; with whom I had lately become acquainted, and for whose sake chiefly I wrote in his
Magazine. I contributed several other articles to this periodical, the most considerable of which (on the
theory of poetry) is reprinted in the “Dissertations.”* Altogether, the writings (independently of those in
newspapers) which I published from 1832 to 1834, amount to a large volume. This, however, includes
abstracts of several of Plato’s Dialogues, with introductory remarks, which, though not published until
1834, had been written several years earlier; and which I afterwards, on various occasions, found to
have been read, and their authorship known, by more people than were aware of anything else which I
had written, up to that time. To complete the tale of my writings at this period, I may add that in 1833,
at the request of Bulwer, who was just then completing his “England and the English” (a work, at that
time, greatly in advance of the public mind), I wrote for him a critical account of Bentham’s philosophy,
a small pail of which he incorporated in his text, and printed the rest (with an honorable
acknowledgment) as an Appendix. In this, along with the favorable, a part also of the unfavourable side
of my estimation of Bentham’s doctrines, considered as a complete philosophy, was for the first time put
into print.*
But an opportunity soon offered by which, as it seemed, I might have it in my power to give more
effectual aid, and at the same time, stimulus, to the “philosophic radical” party, than I had done
hitherto. One of the projects occasionally talked of between my father and me, and some of the
parliamentary and other Radicals who frequented his house, was the foundation of a periodical organ of
philosophic radicalism, to take the place which the Westminster Review had been intended to fill: and
the scheme had gone so far as to bring under discussion the pecuniary contributions which could be
looked for, and the choice of an editor. Nothing however came of it for some time: but in the summer of
1834 Sir William Molesworth, himself a laborious student, and a precise and metaphysical thinker
capable of aiding the cause by his pen as well as by his purse, spontaneously proposed to establish a
Review, provided I would consent to be the real, if I could not be the ostensible, editor. Such a proposal
was not to be refused; and the review was founded, at first under the title of the London Review, and
afterwards under that of the London and Westminster, Molesworth having bought the Westminster from
its proprietor General Thompson, and merged the two into one. In the years between 1834 and 1840
the conduct of this review occupied the greater part of my spare time. In the beginning, it did not, as a
whole, by any means represent my opinions. I was under the necessity of conceding much to my
inevitable associates. The Review was established to be the representative of the “philosophic radicals,”
with most of whom I was now at issue on many essential points, and among whom I could not even
claim to be the most important individual. My father’s cooperation as a writer we all deemed
indispensable, and he wrote largely in it until prevented by his last illness. The subjects of his articles,
and the strength and decision with which his opinions were expressed in them, made the Review at first
derive its tone and colouring from him much more than from any of the other writers. I could not
exercise editorial control over his articles, and I was sometimes obliged to sacrifice to him portions of
my own. The old Westminster Review doctrines, but little modified, thus formed the staple of the
review; but I hoped, by the side of these, to introduce other ideas and another tone, and to obtain for
my own shade of opinion a fair representation, along with those of other members of the party. With
this end chiefly in view, I made it one of the peculiarities of the work that every article should bear an
initial, or some other signature, and be held to express the opinions solely of the individual writer; the
editor being only responsible for its being worth publishing, and not in conflict with the objects for
which the Review was set on foot. I had an opportunity of putting in practice my scheme of conciliation
between the old and the new “philosophic radicalism” by the choice of a subject for my own first
contribution. Professor Sedgwick,* a man of eminence in a particular walk of natural science, but who
should not have trespassed into philosophy, had lately published his Discourse on the Studies of
Cambridge, which had as its most prominent feature an intemperate assault on analytic psychology and
utilitarian ethics, in the form of an attack on Locke and Paley. This had excited great indignation in my
father and others, which I thought it fully deserved. And here, I imagined, was an opportunity of at the
same time repelling an unjust attack, and inserting into my defence of Hartleianism and Utilitarianism
a number of the opinions which constituted my view of those subjects, as distinguished from that of my
old associates. In this I partially succeeded, though my relation to my father would have made it painful
to me in any case, and impossible in a review for which he wrote, to speak out my whole mind on the
subject at this time.
I am, however, inclined to think that my father was not so much opposed as he seemed, to the modes
of thought in which I believed myself to differ from him; that he did injustice to his own opinions by the
unconscious exaggerations of an intellect emphatically polemical; and that when thinking without an
adversary in view, he was willing to make room for a great portion of the truths he seemed to deny. I
have frequently observed that he made large allowance in practice for considerations which seemed to
have no place in his theory. His “Fragment on Mackintosh,” which he wrote and published about this
time, although I greatly admired some parts of it, I read as a whole with more pain than pleasure; yet
on reading it again, long after, I found little in the opinions it contains, but what I think in the main just;
and I can even sympathize in his disgust at the verbiage of Mackintosh, though his asperity towards it
went not only beyond what was judicious, but beyond what was even fair. One thing which I thought, at
the time, of good augury, was the very favorable reception he gave to Tocqueville’s “Democracy in
America.” It is true, he said and thought much more about what Tocqueville said in favour of
Democracy, than about what he said of its disadvantages. Still, his high appreciation of a book which
was at any rate an example of a mode of treating the question of government almost the reverse of his
—wholly inductive and analytical, instead of purely ratiocinative—gave me great encouragement. He
also approved of an article which I published in the first number following the junction of the two
reviews, the Essay reprinted in the Dissertations under the title “Civilization”;* into which I threw many
of my new opinions, and criticized rather emphatically the mental and moral tendencies of the time, on
grounds and in a manner which I certainly had not learnt from him.
 All speculation, however, on the possible future developments of my father’s opinions, and on the
probabilities of permanent cooperation between him and me in the promulgation of our thoughts, was
doomed to be cut short. During the whole of 1835 his health had been declining: his symptoms became
unequivocally those of pulmonary consumption, and after lingering to the last stage of debility, he died
on the 23rd of June 1836. Until the last few days of his life there was no apparent abatement of
intellectual vigour; his interest in all things and persons that had interested him through life was
undiminished, nor did the approach of death cause the smallest wavering (as in so strong and firm a
mind it was impossible that it should) in his convictions on the subject of religion. His principal
satisfaction, after he knew that his end was near, seemed to be the thought of what he had done to
make the world better than he found it; and his chief regret in not living longer, that he had not had
time to do more.
His place is an eminent one in the literary, and even in the political history of his country; and it is far
from honourable to the generation which has benefitted by his worth, that he is so seldom mentioned,
and, compared with men far his inferiors, so little remembered. This is probably to be ascribed mainly
to two causes. In the first place, the thought of him merges too much in the deservedly superior fame of
Bentham. Yet he was anything but Bentham’s mere follower or disciple. Precisely because he was
himself one of the most original thinkers of his time, he was one of the earliest to appreciate and adopt
the most important mass of original thought which had been produced by the generation preceding
him. His mind and Bentham’s were essentially of different construction. He had not all Bentham’s high
qualities, but neither had Bentham all his. It would, indeed, be ridiculous to claim for him the praise of
having accomplished for mankind such splendid services as Bentham’s. He did not revolutionize—or
rather create—one of the great departments of human thought. But, leaving out of the reckoning all
that portion of his labours in which he benefitted by what Bentham had done, and counting only what
he achieved in a province in which Bentham had done nothing, that of analytic psychology, he will be
known to posterity as one of the greatest names in that most important branch of speculation, on which
all the moral and political sciences ultimately rest, and will mark one of the essential stages in its
progress. The other reason, which has made his fame less than he deserved, is that notwithstanding the
great number of his opinions which, partly through his own efforts, have now been generally adopted,
there was on the whole a marked opposition between his spirit and that of the present time. As Brutus
was called the last of the Romans,* so was he the last of the eighteenth century: he continued its tone
of thought and sentiment into the nineteenth (though not unmodified nor unimproved), partaking
neither in the good nor in the bad influences of the reaction against the eighteenth century, which was
the great characteristic of the first half of the nineteenth. The eighteenth century was a great age, an
age of strong and brave men, and he was a fit companion for its strongest and bravest. By his writings
and his personal influence he was a great centre of light to his generation. During his later years he
was quite as much the head and leader of the intellectual radicals in England, as Voltaire was of the
philosophes of France. It is only one of his minor merits, that he was the originator of all sound
statesmanship in regard to the subject of his largest work, India. He wrote on no subject which he did
not enrich with valuable thought, and excepting the “Elements of Political Economy,” a very useful book
when first written, but which has now for some time finished its work, it will be long before any of his
books will be wholly superseded, or will cease to be instructive reading to students of their subjects. In
the power of influencing by mere force of mind and character, the convictions and purposes of others,
and in the strenuous exertion of that power to promote freedom and progress, he left, as far as my
knowledge extends, no equal among men, and but one among women.*
Though acutely sensible of my own inferiority in the qualities by which he acquired his personal
ascendancy, I had now to try what it might be possible for me to accomplish without him; and the
Review was the instrument on which I built my chief hopes of establishing a useful influence over the
liberal and democratic section of the public mind. Deprived of my father’s aid, I was also exempted
from the restraints and retinences by which that aid had been purchased. I did not feel that there was
any other radical writer or politician to whom I was bound to defer, further than consisted with my own
opinions: and having the complete confidence of Molesworth, I resolved henceforth to give full scope to
my own opinions and modes of thought, and to open the Review widely to all writers who were in
sympathy with Progress as I understood it, even though I should lose by it the support of my former
associates. Carlyle, consequently, became from this time a frequent writer in the Review; Sterling, soon
after, an occasional one; and though each individual article continued to be the expression of the
private sentiments of its writer, the general tone conformed in some tolerable degree to my opinions.
For the conduct of the Review, under and in conjunction with me, I associated with myself a young
Scotchman of the name of Robertson, who had some ability and information, much industry, and an
active scheming head, full of devices for making the Review more saleable, and on whose capacities in
that direction I founded a good deal of hope: insomuch that when Molesworth, in the beginning of
1837, became tired of carrying on the Review at a loss, and desirous of getting rid of it (he had done his
part honourably, and at no small pecuniary cost), I, very imprudently for my own pecuniary interest,
and very much from reliance on Robertson’s devices, determined to continue it at my own risk, until his
plans should have had a fair trial. The devices were good, and I never had any reason to change my
opinion of them. But I do not believe that any devices would have made a radical and democratic review
defray its expenses, including a paid editor or sub editor, and a liberal payment to writers. I myself and
several frequent contributors gave our labour gratuitously, as we had done for Molesworth; but the paid
contributors continued to be remunerated on the usual scale of the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews;
and this could not be done from the proceeds of the sale.
In the same year, 1837, and in the midst of these occupations, I resumed the Logic. I had not touched
my pen on the subject for five years, having been stopped and brought to a halt on the threshold of
Induction. I had gradually discovered that what was mainly wanting, to overcome the difficulties of that
branch of the subject, was a comprehensive and at the same time accurate view of the whole circle of
physical science, which I feared it would take me a long course of study to acquire; since I knew not of
any book, or other guide, that would spread out before me the generalities and processes of the
sciences, and I apprehended that I should have no choice but to extract them for myself, as I best could,
from the details. Happily for me, Dr. Whewell, early in this year, published his History of the Inductive
Sciences. I read it with eagerness, and found in it a considerable approximation to what I wanted.
Much, if not most, of the philosophy of the work appeared open to objection; but the materials were
there, for my own thoughts to work upon: and the author had given to those materials that first degree
of elaboration, which so greatly facilitates and abridges the subsequent labour. I had now obtained
what I had been waiting for. Under the impulse given me by the thoughts excited by Dr. Whewell, I read
again Sir J. Herschel’s Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy; and I was able to measure the
progress my mind had made, by the great help I now found in this work, though I had read and even
reviewed it several years before with little profit. I now set myself vigorously to work out the subject in
thought and in writing. The time I bestowed on this had to be stolen from occupations more urgent. I
had just two months to spare, at this period, in the intervals of writing for the Review. In these two
months I completed the first draft of about a third, the most difficult third, of the book. What I had
before written I estimate at another third, so that only one third remained. What I wrote at this time
consisted of the remainder of the doctrine of Reasoning (the theory of Trains of Reasoning, and
Demonstrative Science), and the greater part of the Book on Induction. When this was done, I had, as it
seemed to me, untied all the really hard knots, and the completion of the book had become only a
question of time. Having got thus far, I had to leave off in order to write two articles for the next
number of the Review. When these were written, I returned to the subject, and now for the first time
fell in with Comte’s Cours de Philosophie Positive, or rather with the two volumes of it which were all
that had at that time been published.
My theory of Induction was substantially completed before I knew of Comte’s book; and it is perhaps
well that I came to it by a different road from his, since the consequence has been that my treatise
contains, what his certainly does not, a reduction of the inductive process to strict rules and to a
scientific test, such as the Syllogism is for ratiocination. Comte is always precise and profound on the
methods of investigation, but he does not even attempt any exact definition of the conditions of proof:
and his writings shew that he never attained a just conception of them. This, however, was specifically
the problem which, in treating of Induction, I had proposed to myself. Nevertheless, I gained much from
Comte, with which to enrich my chapters in the subsequent rewriting: and his book was of essential
service to me in some of the parts which still remained to be thought out. As his subsequent volumes
successively made their appearance, I read them with avidity, but, when he reached the subject of
Social Science, with varying feelings. The fourth volume disappointed me: it contained those of his
opinions on social subjects with which I most disagree. But the fifth, containing the connected view of
history, rekindled all my enthusiasm; which the sixth (or concluding) volume did not materially abate. In
a merely logical point of view, the only leading conception for which I am indebted to him is that of the
Inverse Deductive Method, as the one chiefly applicable to the complicated subjects of History and
Statistics: a process differing from the more common form of the Deductive Method in this, that instead
of arriving at its conclusions by general reasoning and verifying them by specific experience (as is the
natural order in the deductive branches of physical science), it obtains its generalizations by a collation
of specific experience, and verifies them by ascertaining whether they are such as would follow from
known general principles.* This was an idea entirely new to me when I found it in Comte: and but for
him I might not soon (if ever) have arrived at it.
I had been long an ardent admirer of Comte’s writings before I had any communication with himself;
nor did I ever, to the last, see him in the body. But for some years we were frequent correspondents,
until our correspondence became controversial, and our zeal cooled. I was the first to slacken
correspondence; he was the first to drop it. I found, and he probably found likewise, that I could do no
good to his mind, and that all the good he could do to mine, he did by his books. This would never have
led to discontinuance of intercourse, if the differences between us had been on matters of simple
doctrine. But they were chiefly on those points of opinion which blended in both of us with our
strongest feelings, and determined the entire direction of our aspirations. I had fully agreed with him
when he maintained that the mass of mankind, including even their rulers in all the practical
departments of life, must, from the necessity of the case, accept most of their opinions on political and
social matters, as they do on physical, from the authority of those who have bestowed more study on
those subjects than they generally have it in their power to do. This lesson had been strongly impressed
on me by the early work of Comte, to which I have adverted. And there was nothing in his great
Treatise which I admired more than his remarkable exposition of the benefits which the nations of
modern Europe have historically derived from the separation, during the middle ages, of temporal and
spiritual power, and the distinct organization of the latter. I agreed with him that the moral and
intellectual ascendancy, once exercised by priests, must in time pass into the hands of philosophers,
and will naturally do so when they become sufficiently unanimous, and in other respects worthy to
possess it. But when he exaggerated this line of thought into a practical system, in which philosophers
were to be organized into a kind of corporate hierarchy, invested with almost the same spiritual
supremacy (though without any secular power) once possessed by the Catholic church; when I found
him relying on this spiritual authority as the only security for good government, the sole bulwark
against practical oppression, and expecting that by it a system of despotism in the state and despotism
in the family would be rendered innocuous and beneficial; it is not surprising, that while as logicians we
were nearly at one, as sociologists we could travel together no further. M. Comte lived to carry out
these doctrines to their extremest consequences, by planning, in his last work, the “Système de
Politique Positive,” the completest system of spiritual and temporal despotism, which ever yet
emanated from a human brain, unless possibly that of Ignatius Loyola: a system by which the yoke of
general opinion, wielded by an organized body of spiritual teachers and rulers, would be made supreme
over every action, and as far as is in human possibility, every thought, of every member of the
community, as well in the things which regard only himself, as in those which concern the interests of
others. It is but just to say that this work is a considerable improvement, in many points of feeling, over
Comte’s previous writings on the same subjects: but as an accession to social philosophy, the only value
it seems to me to possess consists in putting an end to the notion that no effectual moral authority can
be maintained over society without the aid of religious belief; for Comte’s work recognizes no religion
except that of Humanity, yet it leaves an irresistible conviction that any moral beliefs, concurred in by
the community generally, may be brought to bear upon the whole conduct and lives of its individual
members with an energy and potency truly alarming to think of. The book stands a monumental
warning to thinkers on society and politics, of what happens when once men lose sight, in their
speculations, of the value of Liberty and of Individuality.
To return to myself: the Review engrossed, for some time longer, nearly all the time I could devote to
authorship, or to thinking with authorship in view. The articles from the London and Westminster
Review which are reprinted in the “Dissertations” are scarcely a fourth part of those I wrote. In the
conduct of the Review I had two principal objects. One was to free philosophic radicalism from the
reproach of sectarian Benthamism. I desired, while retaining the precision of expression, the
definiteness of meaning, the contempt of declamatory phrases and vague generalities, which were so
honorably characteristic both of Bentham and of my father, to give a wider basis and a more free and
genial character to Radical speculations; to shew that there was a Radical philosophy, better and more
complete than Bentham’s, while recognizing and incorporating all of Bentham’s which is permanently
valuable. In this first object I, to a certain extent, succeeded. The other thing I attempted, was to stir up
the educated Radicals, in and out of Parliament, to exertion, and induce them to make themselves, what
I thought by using the proper means, they might become—a powerful party capable of taking the
government of the country, or at least of dictating the terms on which they should share it with the
Whigs. This attempt was from the first chimerical: partly because the time was unpropitious, the
Reform fervour being in its period of ebb, and the Tory influences powerfully rallying; but, still more,
because, as Austin so truly said, “the country did not contain the men.” Among the Radicals in
Parliament there were several qualified to be useful members of an enlightened Radical party, but none
capable of forming and leading such a party. The exhortations I addressed to them found no response.
One occasion did present itself when there seemed to be room for a bold and successful stroke for
Radicalism. Lord Durham had left the ministry, by reason, as was thought, of their not being sufficiently
liberal; he afterwards accepted from them the task of ascertaining and removing the causes of the
Canadian rebellion: he had shewn a disposition to surround himself at the outset with Radical advisers;
one of his earliest measures, a good measure both in intention and in effect, having been disapproved
and reversed by the Government at home, he had resigned his post, and placed himself openly in a
position of quarrel with the ministers.* Here was a possible chief for a Radical party in the person of a
man of importance, who was hated by the Tories, and had just been injured by the Whigs. Any one who
had the most elementary notions of party tactics, must have attempted to make something of such an
opportunity. Lord Durham was bitterly attacked from all sides, inveighed against by enemies, given up
by timid friends; while those who would willingly have defended him did not know what to say. He
appeared to be returning a defeated and discredited man. I had followed the Canadian events from the
beginning; I had been one of the prompters of his prompters; his policy was almost exactly what mine
would have been, and I was in a position to defend it. I wrote and published a manifesto in the Review,
in which I took the very highest ground in his behalf, claiming for him not mere acquittal, but praise
and honour.* Instantly a number of other writers took up the tone. I believe there was a portion of truth
in what Lord Durham, soon after, with polite exaggeration, said to me—that to this article might be
ascribed the almost triumphal reception which he met with on his arrival in England. I believe it to have
been the word in season, which, at a critical moment, does much to decide the result; the touch which
determines whether a stone, set in motion at the top of an eminence, shall roll down on one side or on
the other. All hopes connected with Lord Durham as a politician soon vanished; but with regard to
Canadian, and generally to colonial policy, the cause was gained: Lord Durham’s report, written by
Charles Buller, partly under the inspiration of Wakefield, began a new era; its recommendations,
extending to complete internal self-government, were in full operation in Canada within two or three
years, and have been since extended to nearly all the other colonies, of European race, which have any
claim to the character of important communities. And I may say that in successfully upholding the
reputation of Lord Durham and his advisers at the most important moment, I contributed materially to
this result.
One other case occurred during my conduct of the Review, which similarly illustrated the effect of
taking a prompt initiative. I believe that the early success and reputation of Carlyle’s French
Revolution, were considerably accelerated by what I wrote about it in the Review. Immediately on its
publication, and before the commonplace critics, all whose rules and modes of judgment it set at
defiance, had time to preoccupy the public with their disapproval of it, I wrote and published a review
of the book, hailing it as one of those productions of genius which are above all rules, and are a law to
themselves. Neither in this case nor in that of Lord Durham do I ascribe the impression, which I think
was produced by what I wrote, to any particular merit of execution: indeed, in at least one of the cases
(the article on Carlyle) I do not think the execution was good. And in both instances, I am persuaded
that anybody, in a position to be read, who had expressed the same opinion at the same precise time,
and had made any tolerable statement of the just grounds for it, would have produced the same effect.
But, after the complete failure of my hopes of putting a new life into radical politics by means of the
Review, I am glad to look back on these two instances of success in an honest attempt to do immediate
service to things and persons that deserved it.
After the last hope of the formation of a Radical party had disappeared, it was time for me to stop the
heavy expenditure of time and money which the Review cost me. It had to some extent answered my
personal purpose, as a vehicle for my opinions. It had enabled me to express in print much of my
altered mode of thought, and to separate myself in a marked manner from the narrower Benthamism of
my early writings. This was done by the general tone of all I wrote, including various purely literary
articles, but especially by the two papers (reprinted in the Dissertations) which attempted a
philosophical estimate of Bentham and of Coleridge.* In the first of these, while doing full justice to the
merits of Bentham, I pointed out what I thought the errors and deficiencies of his philosophy. The
substance of this criticism I still think perfectly just; but I have sometimes doubted whether it was right
to publish it at that time. I have often felt that Bentham’s philosophy, as an instrument of progress, has
been to some extent discredited before it had done its work, and that to lend a hand towards lowering
its reputation was doing more harm than service to improvement. Now however when a counter-
reaction appears to be setting in towards what is good in Benthamism, I can look with more satisfaction
on this criticism of its defects, especially as I have myself balanced it by vindications of the fundamental
principles of Bentham’s philosophy, which are reprinted along with it in the same collection. In the
essay on Coleridge I attempted to characterize the European reaction against the negative philosophy
of the eighteenth century: and here, if the effect only of this one paper were to be considered, I might
be thought to have erred by giving undue prominence to the favourable side, as I had done in the case
of Bentham to the unfavourable. In both cases, the impetus with which I had detached myself from
what was untenable in the doctrines of Bentham and of the eighteenth century, may have carried me,
though in appearance rather than in reality, too far on the contrary side. But as far as relates to the
article on Coleridge, my defence is, that I was writing for Radicals and Liberals, and it was my business
to dwell most on that in writers of a different school, from the knowledge of which they might derive
most improvement.
The number of the Review which contained the paper on Coleridge, was the last which was published
during my proprietorship. In the spring of 1840 I made over the Review to Mr. Hickson, who had been a
frequent and very useful unpaid contributor under my management; only stipulating that the change
should be marked by a resumption of the old name, that of Westminster Review. Under that name Mr.
Hickson conducted it for ten years, on the plan of dividing among contributors only the net proceeds of
the Review, giving his own labour as writer and editor gratuitously. Under the difficulty in obtaining
writers, which arose from this low scale of payment, it is highly creditable to him that he was able to
maintain, in some tolerable degree, the character of the Review as an organ of radicalism and progress.
I did not cease altogether to write for the Review, but continued to send it occasional contributions, not,
however, exclusively; for the greater circulation of the Edinburgh Review induced me from this time to
offer articles to it also when I had anything to say for which it appeared to be a suitable vehicle. And
the concluding volumes of “Democracy in America” having just then come out, I inaugurated myself as
a contributor to the Edinburgh by the article on that work, which heads the second volume of the
“Dissertations.”*
 CHAPTER VII

GENERAL VIEW OF THE REMAINDER OF MY LIFE

FROM this time, what is worth relating of my life will come into a very small compass; for I have no
further mental changes to tell of, but only, as I hope, a continued mental progress; which does not
admit of a consecutive history, and the results of which, if real, will be best found in my writings. I shall
therefore greatly abridge the chronicle of my subsequent years.
The first use I made of the leisure which I gained by disconnecting myself from the Review, was to
finish the Logic. In July and August 1838 I had found an interval in which to execute what was still
undone of the original draft of the Third Book. In working out the logical theory of those laws of nature
which are not laws of Causation, nor corollaries from such laws, I was led to recognize Kinds as
realities in nature, and not mere distinctions for convenience; a light which I had not obtained when the
First Book was written, and which made it necessary for me to modify and enlarge several chapters of
that Book. The Book on Language and Classification, and the chapter on the Classification of Fallacies,*
were drafted in the autumn of the same year; the remainder of the work in the summer and autumn of
1840. From April following to the end of 1841, my spare time was devoted to a complete rewriting of
the book from its commencement. It is in this way that all my books have been composed. They were
always written at least twice over; a first draft of the entire work was completed to the very end of the
subject, then the whole begun again de novo; but incorporating, in the second writing, all sentences
and parts of sentences of the old draft, which appeared as suitable to my purpose as anything which I
could write in lieu of them. I have found great advantages in this system of double redaction. It
combines, better than any other mode of composition, the freshness and vigour of the first conception,
with the superior precision and completeness resulting from prolonged thought. In my own case,
moreover, I have found that the patience necessary for a careful elaboration of the details of exposition
and expression, costs much less effort after the entire subject has been once gone through, and the
substance of all that I find to say has in some manner, however imperfect, been got upon paper. The
only thing which I am careful, in the first draft, to make as perfect as I am able, is the arrangement. If
that is bad, the whole thread on which the ideas string themselves becomes twisted; thoughts placed in
a wrong connexion are not expounded in a manner that suits the right, and a first draft with this
original vice is next to useless as a foundation for the final treatment.
During the rewriting of the Logic, Dr. Whewell’s Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences made its
appearance; a circumstance fortunate for me, as it gave me what I greatly desired, a full treatment of
the subject by an antagonist, and enabled me to present my ideas with greater clearness and emphasis
as well as fuller and more varied development, in defending them against definite objections, and
confronting them distinctly with an opposite theory. The controversies with Dr. Whewell, as well as
much matter derived from Comte, were first introduced into the book in the course of the rewriting.
At the end of 1841, the book being ready for press, I offered it to Murray, who kept it until too late for
publication that season, and then refused it, for reasons which could just as well have been given at
first. But I have had no cause to regret a rejection which led to my offering it to Mr. Parker, by whom it
was published in the spring of 1843. My original expectations of success were extremely limited.
Archbishop Whately had indeed rehabilitated the name of Logic, and the study of the forms, rules, and
fallacies of Ratiocination; and Dr. Whewell’s writings had begun to excite an interest in the other part
of my subject, the theory of Induction. A treatise, however, on a matter so abstract, could not be
expected to be popular; it could only be a book for students, and students on such subjects were not
only (at least in England) few, but addicted chiefly to the opposite school of metaphysics, the
ontological and “innate principles” school.* I therefore did not expect that the book would have many
readers, or approvers; and looked for little practical effect from it, save that of keeping the tradition
unbroken of what I thought a better philosophy. What hopes I had of exciting any immediate attention,
were mainly grounded on the polemical propensities of Dr. Whewell; who, I thought, from observation
of his conduct in other cases, would probably do something to bring the book into notice, by replying,
and that promptly, to the attack on his opinions. He did reply, but not till 1850, just in time for me to
answer him in the third edition. How the book came to have, for a work of the kind, so much success,
and what sort of persons compose the bulk of those who have bought, I will not venture to say read, it, I
have never thoroughly understood. But taken in conjunction with the many proofs which have since
been given of a revival of speculation, speculation too of a free kind, in many quarters, and above all
(where at one time I should have least expected it) in the Universities, the fact becomes partially
intelligible. I have never indulged the illusion that the book had made any considerable impression on
philosophical opinion. The German, or à priori view of human knowledge, and of the knowing faculties,
is likely for some time longer (though it may be hoped in a diminishing degree) to predominate among
those who occupy themselves with such enquiries, both here and on the Continent. But the “System of
Logic” supplies what was much wanted, a text-book of the opposite doctrine—that which derives all
knowledge from experience, and all moral and intellectual qualities principally from the direction given
to the associations. I make as humble an estimate as anybody of what either an analysis of logical
processes, or any possible canons of evidence, can do by themselves, towards guiding or rectifying the
operations of the understanding. Combined with other requisites, I certainly do think them of great use;
but whatever may be the practical value of a true philosophy of these matters, it is hardly possible to
exaggerate the mischiefs of a false one. The notion that truths external to the mind may be known by
intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in these
times, the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions. By the aid of this theory,
every inveterate belief and every intense feeling, of which the origin is not remembered, is enabled to
dispense with the obligation of justifying itself by reason, and is erected into its own all-sufficient
voucher and justification. There never was such an instrument devised for consecrating all deep seated
prejudices. And the chief strength of this false philosophy in morals, politics, and religion, lies in the
appeal which it is accustomed to make to the evidence of mathematics and of the cognate branches of
physical science. To expel it from these, is to drive it from its stronghold: and because this had never
been effectually done, the intuitive school, even after what my father had written in his Analysis of the
Mind, had in appearance, and as far as published writings were concerned, on the whole the best of the
argument. In attempting to clear up the real nature of the evidence of mathematical and physical
truths, the “System of Logic” met the intuition philosophers on ground on which they had previously
been deemed unassailable; and gave its own explanation, from experience and association, of that
peculiar character of what are called necessary truths, which is adduced as proof that their evidence
must come from a deeper source than experience. Whether this has been done effectually, is still sub
judice;* and even then, to deprive a mode of thought so strongly rooted in human prejudices and
partialities, of its mere speculative support, goes but a very little way towards overcoming it; but
though only a step, it is a quite indispensable one; for since, after all, prejudice can only be successfully
combated by philosophy, no way can really be made against it permanently until it has been shewn not
to have philosophy on its side.[26]
Being now released from any active concern in temporary politics, and from any literary occupation
involving personal communication with contributors and others, I was enabled to indulge the
inclination, natural to thinking persons when the age of boyish vanity is once past, for limiting my own
society to a very few persons.* General society, as now carried on in England, is so insipid an affair,
even to the persons who make it what it is, that it is kept up for any reason rather than the pleasure it
affords. All serious discussion on matters on which opinions differ, being considered ill bred, and the
national deficiency in liveliness and sociability having prevented the cultivation of the art of talking
agreeably on trifles, in which the French of the last century so much excelled, the sole attraction of
what is called society to those who are not at the top of the tree, is the hope of being aided to climb a
little higher in it; while to those who are already at the top, it is chiefly a compliance with custom, and
with the supposed requirements of their station. To a person of any but a very common order in thought
or feeling, such society, unless he has personal objects to serve by it, must be supremely unattractive:
and most people, in the present day, of any really high class of intellect, make their contact with it so
slight, and at such long intervals, as to be almost considered as retiring from it altogether. Those
persons of any mental superiority who do otherwise, are, almost without exception, greatly deteriorated
by it. Not to mention loss of time, the tone of their feelings is lowered: they become less in earnest
about those of their opinions respecting which they must remain silent in the society they frequent:
they come to look upon their most elevated objects as unpractical, or, at least, too remote from
realization to be more than a vision, or a theory; and if, more fortunate than most, they retain their
higher principles unimpaired, yet with respect to the persons and affairs of their own day they
insensibly adopt the modes of feeling and judgment in which they can hope for sympathy from the
company they keep. A person of high intellect should never go into unintellectual society unless he can
enter it as an apostle; yet he is the only person with high objects, who can safely enter it at all. Persons
even of intellectual aspirations had much better, if they can, make their habitual associates of at least
their equals, and as far as possible, their superiors, in knowledge, intellect, and elevation of sentiment.
Moreover, if the character is formed, and the mind made up, on the few cardinal points of human
opinion, agreement of conviction and feeling on these, has been felt in all times to be an essential
requisite of anything worthy the name of friendship, in a really earnest mind. All these circumstances
united, made the number very small of those whose society, and still more whose intimacy, I now
voluntarily sought.
Among these, by far the principal was the incomparable friend of whom I have already spoken. At this
period she lived mostly, with one young daughter, in a quiet part of the country, and only occasionally in
town, with her first husband, Mr. Taylor. I visited her equally in both places; and was greatly indebted
to the strength of character which enabled her to disregard the false interpretations liable to be put on
the frequency of my visits to her while living generally apart from Mr. Taylor, and on our occasionally
travelling together, though in all other respects our conduct during those years gave not the slightest
ground for any other supposition than the true one, that our relation to each other at that time was one
of strong affection and confidential intimacy only. For though we did not consider the ordinances of
society binding on a subject so entirely personal, we did feel bound that our conduct should be such as
in no degree to bring discredit on her husband, nor therefore on herself.[27]
In this third period (as it may be termed) of my mental progress,* which now went hand in hand with
hers, my opinions gained equally in breadth and depth. I understood more things, and those which I
had understood before, I now understood more thoroughly. I had now completely turned back from
what there had been of excess in my reaction against Benthamism. I had, at the height of that reaction,
certainly become much more indulgent to the common opinions of society and the world, and more
willing to be content with seconding the superficial improvement which had begun to take place in
those common opinions, than became one whose convictions, on so many points, differed fundamentally
from them. I was much more inclined, than I can now approve, to put in abeyance the more decidedly
heretical part of my opinions, which I now look upon as almost the only ones, the assertion of which
tends in any way to regenerate society. But in addition to this, our opinions were now far more heretical
than mine had been in the days of my most extreme Benthamism. In those days I had seen little further
than the old school of political economists into the possibilities of fundamental improvement in social
arrangements. Private property as now understood, and inheritance, appeared to me as to them, the
dernier mot of legislation:* and I looked no further than to mitigating the inequalities consequent on
these institutions, by getting rid of primogeniture and entails. The notion that it was possible to go
further than this in removing the injustice—for injustice it is whether admitting of a complete remedy
or not—involved in the fact that some are born to riches and the vast majority to poverty, I then
reckoned chimerical; and only hoped that by universal education, leading to voluntary restraint on
population, the portion of the poor might be made more tolerable. In short, I was a democrat, but not
the least of a Socialist. We were now much less democrats than I had been, because so long as
education continues to be so wretchedly imperfect, we dreaded the ignorance and especially the
selfishness and brutality of the mass: but our ideal of ultimate improvement went far beyond
Democracy, and would class us decidedly under the general designation of Socialists. While we
repudiated with the greatest energy that tyranny of society over the individual which most Socialistic
systems are supposed to involve, we yet looked forward to a time when society will no longer be divided
into the idle and the industrious; when the rule that they who do not work shall not eat, will be applied
not to paupers only, but impartially to all; when the division of the produce of labour, instead of
depending, as in so great a degree it now does, on the accident of birth, will be made by concert, on an
acknowledged principle of justice; and when it will no longer either be, or be thought to be, impossible
for human beings to exert themselves strenuously in procuring benefits which are not to be exclusively
their own, but to be shared with the society they belong to. The social problem of the future we
considered to be, how to unite the greatest individual liberty of action, with a common ownership in the
raw material of the globe, and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour. We had
not the presumption to suppose that we could already foresee, by what precise form of institutions
these objects could most effectually be attained, or at how near or how distant a period they would
become practicable. We saw clearly that to render any such social transformation either possible or
desirable, an equivalent change of character must take place both in the uncultivated herd who now
compose the labouring masses, and in the immense majority of their employers. Both these classes
must learn by practice to labour and combine for generous, or at all events for public and social
purposes, and not, as hitherto, solely for narrowly interested ones. But the capacity to do this has
always existed in mankind, and is not, nor is ever likely to be, extinct. Education, habit, and the
cultivation of the sentiments will make a common man dig or weave for his country, as readily as fight
for his country. True enough, it is only by slow degrees, and a system of culture prolonged through
successive generations, that men in general can be brought up to this point. But the hindrance is not in
the essential constitution of human nature. Interest in the common good is at present so weak a motive
in the generality, not because it can never be otherwise, but because the mind is not accustomed to
dwell on it as it dwells from morning till night on things which tend only to personal advantage. When
called into activity as only self interest now is, by the daily course of life, and spurred from behind by
the love of distinction and the fear of shame, it is capable of producing, even in common men, the most
strenuous exertions as well as the most heroic sacrifices. The deep rooted selfishness which forms the
general character of the existing state of society, is so deeply rooted, only because the whole course of
existing institutions tends to foster it; modern institutions in some respects more than ancient, since
the occasions on which the individual is called on to do anything for the public without receiving its pay,
are far less frequent in modern life, than in the smaller commonwealths of antiquity. These
considerations did not make us overlook the folly of premature attempts to dispense with the
inducements of private interest in social affairs, while no substitute for them has been or can be
provided: but we regarded all existing institutions and social arrangements as being (in a phrase I once
heard from Austin) “merely provisional,” and we welcomed with the greatest pleasure and interest all
socialistic experiments by select individuals (such as the Cooperative Societies*), which, whether they
succeeded or failed, could not but operate as a most useful education of those who took part in them,
by cultivating their capacity of acting upon motives pointing directly to the general good, or making
them aware of the defects which render them and others incapable of doing so.
In the “Principles of Political Economy,” these opinions were promulgated, less clearly and fully in the
first edition, rather more so in the second, and quite unequivocally in the third.* The difference arose
partly from the change of times, the first edition having been written and sent to press before the
French Revolution of 1848,* after which the public mind became more open to the reception of
novelties in opinion, and doctrines appeared moderate which would have been thought very startling a
short time before. In the first edition the difficulties of Socialism were stated so strongly, that the tone
was on the whole that of opposition to it. In the year or two which followed, much time was given to the
study of the best Socialistic writers on the Continent, and to meditation and discussion on the whole
range of topics involved in the controversy: and the result was that most of what had been written on
the subject in the first edition was cancelled, and replaced by arguments and reflexions which
represent a more advanced opinion.
The Political Economy was far more rapidly executed than the Logic, or indeed than anything of
importance which I had previously written. It was commenced in the autumn of 1845, and was ready for
the press before the end of 1847. In this period of little more than two years there was an interval of six
months during which the work was laid aside, while I was writing articles in the Morning Chronicle
(which unexpectedly entered warmly into my purpose) urging the formation of peasant properties on
the waste lands of Ireland. This was during the period of the famine, the winter of 1846/47,* when the
stern necessities of the time seemed to afford a chance of gaining attention for what appeared to me
the only mode of combining relief to immediate destitution with permanent improvement of the social
and economical condition of the Irish people. But the idea was new and strange; there was no English
precedent for such a proceeding: and the profound ignorance of English politicians and the English
public concerning all social phenomena not generally met with in England (however common
elsewhere) made my endeavours an entire failure. Instead of a great operation on the waste lands, and
the conversion of cottiers* into proprietors, Parliament passed a Poor Law for maintaining them as
paupers: and if the nation has not since found 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 shewed 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.
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.[28] 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.
During the years which intervened between the commencement of my married life and the
catastrophe which closed it, the principal occurrences of my outward existence (unless I count as such
a first attack of the family disease, and a consequent journey of more than six months for the recovery
of health, in Italy, Sicily, and Greece) had reference to my position in the India House. In 1856 I was
promoted to the rank of chief of the office in which I had served for upwards of thirty-three years. The
appointment, that of Examiner of India Correspondence, was the highest, next to that of Secretary, in
the East India Company’s home service, involving the general superintendance of all the
correspondence with the Indian Governments, except the military, naval, and financial. I held this office
as long as it continued to exist, being a little more than two years; after which it pleased Parliament, in
other words Lord Palmerston, to put an end to the East India Company as a branch of the government
of India under the Crown, and convert the administration of that country into a thing to be scrambled
for by the second and third class of English parliamentary politicians.* I was the chief manager of the
resistance which the Company made to their own political extinction. To the letters and petitions I
wrote for them, and the concluding chapter of my treatise on Representative Government, I must refer
for my opinions on the folly and mischief of this ill-considered change. Personally I considered myself a
gainer by it, as I had given enough of my life to India, and was not unwilling to retire on the liberal
compensation granted. After the change was consummated, Lord Stanley, the first Secretary of State
for India, made me the honorable offer of a seat in the Council, and the proposal was subsequently
renewed by the Council itself, on the first occasion of its having to supply a vacancy in its own body. But
the conditions of Indian government under the new system made me anticipate nothing but useless
vexation and waste of effort from any participation in it: and nothing that has since happened has had
any tendency to make me regret my refusal.
During the two years which immediately preceded the cessation of my official life, my wife and I were
working together at the “Liberty.”* I had first planned and written it as a short essay, in 1854. It was in
mounting the steps of the Capitol,* in January 1855, that the thought first arose of converting it into a
volume. None of my writings have been either so carefully composed, or so sedulously corrected as
this. After it had been written as usual twice over, we kept it by us, bringing it out from time to time
and going through it de novo, reading, weighing and criticizing every sentence. Its final revision was to
have been a work of the winter of 1858/59, the first after my retirement, which we had arranged to
pass in the South of Europe. That hope and every other were frustrated by the most unexpected and
bitter calamity of her death—at Avignon, on our way to Montpellier, from a sudden attack of pulmonary
congestion.
Since then, I have sought for such alleviation as my state admitted of, by the mode of life which most
enabled me to feel her still near me. I bought a cottage as close as possible to the place where she is
buried, and there her daughter* (my fellow-sufferer and now my chief comfort) and I, live constantly
during a great portion of the year. My objects in life are solely those which were hers; my pursuits and
occupations those in which she shared, or sympathized, and which are indissolubly associated with her.
Her memory is to me a religion, and her approbation the standard by which, summing up as it does all
worthiness, I endeavour to regulate my life.
In resuming my pen some years after closing the preceding narrative,* I am influenced by a desire
not to leave incomplete the record, for the sake of which chiefly this biographical sketch was
undertaken, of the obligations I owe to those who have either contributed essentially to my own mental
developement or had a direct share in my writings and in whatever else of a public nature I have done.
In the preceding pages, this record, so far as it relates to my wife, is not so detailed and precise as it
ought to be; and since I lost her, I have had other help, not less deserving and requiring
acknowledgment.*
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 most 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 her 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 any one 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 out this 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
expressing 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.1[29]
The first of my books in which her share was conspicuous 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 benefitted by her accurate and clear-sighted criticism.2
The chapter of the Political Economy 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 real 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 common run of political economists confuse these
together, under the designation of economic laws, which they deem incapable of being defeated or
modified by human effort; ascribing the same necessity to things dependent on the unchangeable
conditions of our earthly existence, and to those which, being but the necessary consequences of
particular social arrangements, are merely coextensive with these. Given certain institutions and
customs, wages, profits, and rent will be determined by certain causes; but this class of political
economists drop the indispensable presupposition, and argue that these causes must by an inherent
necessity, against which no human means can avail, determine the shares which fall, in the division of
the produce, to labourers, capitalists, and landlords. The “Principles of Political Economy” yielded to
none of its predecessors in aiming at the scientific appreciation of the action of these causes, under the
conditions which they presuppose; but it set the example of not treating those conditions as final. The
economic generalisations which depend, not on necessities of nature but on those combined with the
existing arrangements of society, it deals with only as provisional, and as liable to be much altered by
the progress of social improvement. I had indeed partially learnt this view of things from the thoughts
awakened in me by the speculations of the Saint-Simonians; but it was made a living principle
pervading and animating the book by my wife’s promptings. This example illustrates well the general
character of what she contributed to my writings. What was abstract and purely scientific was
generally mine; the properly human element came from her: in all that concerned the application of
philosophy to the exigencies of human society and progress, I was her pupil, alike in boldness of
speculation and cautiousness of practical judgment. For, on the one hand, she was much more
courageous and farsighted than without her I should have been, in anticipations of an order of things to
come, in which many of the limited generalizations now so often confounded with universal principles
will cease to be applicable. Those parts of my writings and especially of the Political Economy which
contemplate possibilities in the future such as, when affirmed by Socialists, have in general been
fiercely denied by political economists, would, but for her, either have been absent, or the suggestions
would have been made much more timidly and in a more qualified form. But while she thus rendered
me bolder in speculation on human affairs, her practical turn of mind, and her almost unerring estimate
of practical obstacles, repressed in me all tendencies that were really visionary. Her mind invested all
ideas in a concrete shape, and formed to itself a conception of how they would actually work: and her
knowledge of the existing feelings and conduct of mankind was so seldom at fault, that the weak point
in any unworkable suggestion seldom escaped her.3*
The “Liberty” was more directly and literally our joint production than anything else which bears my
name, for there was not a sentence of it that was not several times gone through by us together, turned
over in many ways, and carefully weeded of any faults, either in thought or expression, that we
detected in it. It is in consequence of this that, although it never underwent her final revision, it far
surpasses, as a mere specimen of composition, anything which has proceeded from me either before or
since. With regard to the thoughts, it is difficult to identify any particular part or element as being more
hers than all the rest. The whole mode of thinking of which the book was the expression, was
emphatically hers. But I also was so thoroughly imbued with it that the same thoughts naturally
occurred to us both. That I was thus penetrated with it, however, I owe in a great degree to her. There
was a moment in my mental progress when I might easily have fallen into a tendency towards over-
government, both social and political; as there was also a moment when, by reaction from a contrary
excess, I might have become a less thorough radical and democrat than I am. In both these points as in
many others, she benefitted me as much by keeping me right where I was right, as by leading me to
new truths and ridding me of errors. My great readiness and eagerness to learn from everybody, and to
make room in my opinions for every new acquisition by adjusting the old and the new to one another,
might, but for her steadying influence, have seduced me into modifying my early opinions too much.
She was in nothing more valuable to my mental development than by her just measure of the relative
importance of different considerations, which often protected me from allowing to truths I had only
recently learnt to see, a more important place in my thoughts than was properly their due.[30]
The “Liberty” is likely to survive longer than anything else that I have written (with the possible
exception of the “Logic”), because the conjunction of her mind with mine has rendered it a kind of
philosophic text-book of a single truth, which the changes progressively taking place in modern society
tend to bring out into ever stronger relief: the importance, to man and society, of a large variety in
types of character, and of giving full freedom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable and
conflicting directions. Nothing can better shew how deep are the foundations of this truth, than the
great impression made by the exposition of it at a time which, to superficial observation, did not seem
to stand much in need of such a lesson. The fears we expressed lest the inevitable growth of social
equality and of the government of public opinion should impose on mankind an oppressive yoke of
uniformity in opinion and practice, might easily have appeared chimerical to those who looked more at
present facts than at tendencies; for the gradual revolution that is taking place in society and
institutions has thus far been decidedly favourable to the development of new opinions, and has
procured for them a much more unprejudiced hearing than they previously met with. But this is a
feature belonging to periods of transition,* when old notions and feelings have been unsettled and no
new doctrines have yet succeeded to their ascendancy. At such times people of any mental activity,
having given up many of their old beliefs, and not feeling quite sure that those they still retain can
stand unmodified, listen eagerly to new opinions. But this state of things is necessarily transitory: some
particular body of doctrine in time rallies the majority round it, organizes social institutions and modes
of action conformably to itself, education impresses this new creed upon the new generations without
the mental processes that have led to it, and by degrees it acquires the very same power of
compression, so long exercised by the creeds of which it had taken the place. Whether this noxious
power will be exercised depends on whether mankind have by that time become aware that it cannot be
exercised without stunting and dwarfing human nature. It is then that the teachings of the “Liberty”
will have their greatest value. And it is to be feared that they will retain that value a long time.
As regards originality, it has of course no other than that which every thoughtful mind gives to its own
mode of conceiving and expressing truths which are common property. The leading thought of the book
is one which, though in many ages confined to insulated thinkers, mankind have probably at no time
since the beginning of civilisation been entirely without. To speak only of the last few generations, it is
distinctly contained in the vein of important thought respecting education and culture spread through
the European mind by the labours and genius of Pestalozzi. The unqualified championship of it by
Wilhelm von Humboldt is referred to in the book; but he by no means stood alone in his own country.
During the early part of the present century, the doctrine of the rights of individuality, and the claim of
the moral nature to develope itself in its own way, was pushed by a whole school of German authors
even to exaggeration; and the writings of Goethe, the most celebrated of all German authors, though
not belonging to that or to any other school, are penetrated throughout by views of morals and of
conduct in life, often in my opinion not defensible, but which are incessantly seeking whatever defence
they admit of in the theory of the right and duty of self-development. In our own country, before the
book “on Liberty” was written, the doctrine of Individuality had been enthusiastically asserted, in a stile
of vigorous declamation sometimes reminding one of Fichte, by Mr. William Maccall, in a series of
writings of which the most elaborate is entitled “Elements of Individualism.” And a remarkable
American, Mr. Warren, had framed a System of Society, on the foundation of “the Sovereignty of the
Individual,” had obtained a number of followers, and had actually commenced the formation of a Village
Community (whether it now exists I know not)* which, though bearing a superficial resemblance to
some of the projects of Socialists, is diametrically opposite to them in principle, since it recognises no
authority whatever in Society over the individual, except to enforce equal freedom of development for
all individualities. As the book which bears my name claimed no originality for any of its doctrines, and
was not intended to write their history, the only author who had preceded me in their assertion of
whom I thought it appropriate to say anything, was Humboldt, who furnished the motto to the work;
although in one passage I borrowed from the Warrenites their phrase, the sovereignty of the individual.
It is hardly necessary here to remark that there are abundant differences in detail, between the
conception of the doctrine by any of the predecessors I have mentioned, and that set forth in the book.
After my irreparable loss one of my earliest cares was to print and publish the treatise, so much of
which was the work of her whom I had lost, and consecrate it to her memory. I have made no alteration
or addition to it, nor shall I ever. Though it wants the last touch of her hand, no substitute for that touch
shall ever be attempted by mine.
The political circumstances of the time induced me shortly after to complete and publish a pamphlet
(“Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform”), part of which had been written some years previously on the
occasion of one of the abortive Reform Bills and had at the time been approved and revised by her. Its
principal features were, hostility to the Ballot (a change of opinion in both of us, in which she rather
preceded me) and a claim of representation for minorities; not however at that time going beyond the
cumulative vote proposed by Mr. Garth Marshall. In finishing the pamphlet for publication with a view
to the discussions on the Reform Bill of Lord Derby’s and Mr. Disraeli’s Government in 1859,* I added a
third feature, a plurality of votes, to be given, not to property, but to proved superiority of education.
This recommended itself to me, as a means of reconciling the irresistible claim of every man or woman
to be consulted, and to be allowed a voice, in the regulation of affairs which vitally concern them, with
the superiority of weight justly due to opinions grounded on superiority of knowledge. The suggestion
however was one which I had never discussed with my almost infallible counsellor, and I have no
evidence that she would have concurred in it. As far as I have been able to observe, it has found favour
with nobody; all who desire any sort of inequality in the electoral vote, desiring it in favour of property
and not of intelligence or knowledge. If it ever overcomes the strong feeling which exists against it, this
will only be after the establishment of a systematic National Education by which the various grades of
politically valuable acquirement may be accurately defined and authenticated. Without this it will
always remain liable to strong, possibly conclusive, objections; and with this, it would perhaps not be
needed.
It was soon after the publication of “Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform” that I became acquainted
with Mr. Hare’s admirable system of Personal Representation,* which, in its present shape, was then
for the first time published. I saw in this great practical and philosophical idea, the greatest
improvement of which the system of representative government is susceptible; an improvement which,
in the most felicitous manner, exactly meets and cures the grand, and what before seemed the inherent,
defect of the representative system; that of giving to a numerical majority all power, instead of only a
power proportional to its numbers, and enabling the strongest party to exclude all weaker parties from
making their opinions heard in the assembly of the nation, except through such opportunity as may be
given to them by the accidentally unequal distribution of opinions in different localities. To these great
evils nothing more than very imperfect palliatives had seemed possible; but Mr. Hare’s system affords a
radical cure. This great discovery, for it is no less, in the political art, inspired me, as I believe it has
inspired all thoughtful persons who have adopted it, with new and more sanguine hopes respecting the
prospects of human society; by freeing the form of political institutions towards which the whole
civilised world is manifestly and irresistibly tending, from the chief part of what seemed to qualify or
render doubtful its ultimate benefits. Minorities, so long as they remain minorities, are, and ought to
be, outvoted; but under arrangements which enable any assemblage of voters, amounting to a certain
number, to place in the legislature a representative of its own choice, minorities cannot be suppressed.
Independent opinions will force their way into the council of the nation and make themselves heard
there, a thing which often cannot happen in the existing forms of representative democracy; and the
legislature instead of being weeded of individual peculiarities and entirely made up of men who simply
represent the creed of great political or religious parties, will comprise a large proportion of the most
eminent individual minds in the country placed there without reference to party by voters who
appreciate their individual eminence. I can understand that persons, otherwise intelligent, should, for
want of sufficient examination, be repelled from Mr. Hare’s plan by what they think the complex nature
of its machinery. But any one who does not feel the want which the scheme is intended to supply; any
one who throws it over as a mere theoretical subtlety or crotchet, tending to no valuable purpose, and
unworthy of the attention of practical men, may be pronounced an incompetent statesman, unequal to
the politics of the future. I mean, unless he is a minister, or aspires to become one: for we are quite
accustomed to a minister’s continuing to profess unqualified hostility to an improvement almost to the
very day when his conscience or his interest induces him to take it up as a public measure and carry it.
Had I met with Mr. Hare’s system before the publication of my pamphlet, I should have given an
account of it there. Not having done so, I wrote an article in Fraser’s Magazine (reprinted in my
miscellaneous writings) principally for that purpose, though I included in it, along with Mr. Hare’s book,
a review of two other productions on the question of the day; one of them a pamphlet by my early friend
Mr. John Austin, who had in his old age become an enemy of all further parliamentary reform; the other
an able and ingenious though partially erroneous work by Mr. Lorimer.*
In the course of the same summer I fulfilled a duty particularly incumbent upon me, that of helping
(by an article in the Edinburgh Review) to make known Mr. Bain’s profound treatise on the Mind, just
then completed by the publication of its second volume. And I carried through the press a selection of
my minor writings, forming the first two volumes of “Dissertations and Discussions.” The selection had
been made during my wife’s lifetime, but the revision, in concert with her, with a view to republication,
had been barely commenced; and when I had no longer the guidance of her judgment I despaired of
pursuing it further, and republished the papers as they were, with the exception of striking out such
passages as were no longer in accordance with my opinions. My literary work of the year terminated
with an essay in Fraser’s magazine (afterwards republished in the third volume of “Dissertations and
Discussions”) entitled “a Few Words on Non-Intervention.”* I was prompted to write this paper by a
desire, while vindicating England from the imputations commonly brought against her on the Continent
of a peculiar selfishness in matters of foreign policy, to warn Englishmen of the colour given to this
imputation by the low tone in which English statesmen are accustomed to speak of English policy as
concerned only with English interests, and by the conduct of Lord Palmerston at that particular time in
opposing the Suez Canal.* And I took the opportunity of expressing ideas which had long been in my
mind (some of them generated by my Indian experience and others by the international questions which
then greatly occupied the European public) respecting the true principles of international morality and
the legitimate modifications made in it by difference of times and circumstances; a subject I had
already to some extent discussed in the vindication of the French Provisional Government of 1848
against the attacks of Lord Brougham and others which I published at the time in the Westminster
Review and which is reprinted in the “Dissertations.”*
I had now settled, as I believed for the remainder of my existence, into a purely literary life; if that
can be called literary which continued to be occupied in a preeminent degree with politics, and not
merely with theoretical, but practical politics, although a great part of the year was spent at a distance
of many hundred miles* from the chief seat of the politics of my own country, to which, and primarily
for which, I wrote. But in truth, the modern facilities of communication have not only removed all the
disadvantages, to a political writer in tolerably easy circumstances, of distance from the scene of
political action, but have converted them into advantages. The immediate and regular receipt of
newspapers and periodicals keeps him au courant of even the most temporary politics, and gives him a
much more correct view of the state and progress of opinion than he could acquire by personal contact
with individuals: for every one’s social intercourse is more or less limited to particular sets or classes,
whose impressions and no others reach him through that channel; and experience has taught me that
those who give their time to the absorbing claims of what is called society, not having leisure to keep up
a large acquaintance with the organs of opinion, remain much more ignorant of the general state either
of the public mind, or of the active and instructed part of it, than a recluse who reads the newspapers
need be. There are, no doubt, disadvantages in too long a separation from one’s country—in not
occasionally renewing one’s impressions of the light in which men and things appear when seen from a
position in the midst of them; but the deliberate judgment formed at a distance, and undisturbed by
inequalities of perspective, is the most to be depended on, even for application to practice. Alternating
between the two positions I combined the advantages of both. And, though the inspirer of my best
thoughts was no longer with me, I was not alone: she had left a daughter—my stepdaughter, Miss Helen
Taylor, the inheritor of much of her wisdom, and of all her nobleness of character, whose ever growing
and ripening talents from that day to this have been devoted to the same great purposes, and have
already made her name better and more widely known than was that of her mother, though far less so
than I predict that if she lives, it is destined to become. Of the value of her direct cooperation with me,
something will be said hereafter: of what I owe in the way of instruction to her great powers of original
thought and soundness of practical judgment, it would be a vain attempt to give an adequate idea.
Surely no one ever before was so fortunate, as, after such a loss as mine, to draw another such prize in
the lottery of life—another companion, stimulator, adviser, and instructor of the rarest quality. Whoever,
either now or hereafter, may think of me and of the work I have done, must never forget that it is the
product not of one intellect and conscience but of three, the least considerable of whom, and above all
the least original, is the one whose name is attached to it.
The work of the years 1860 and 1861 consisted chiefly of two treatises, only one of which was
intended for immediate publication. This was the “Considerations on Representative Government,”* a
connected exposition of what, by the thoughts of many years, I had come to regard as the best form of a
popular constitution. Along with as much of the general theory of government as is necessary to
support this particular portion of its practice, the volume contains my matured views of the principal
questions which occupy the present age, within the province of purely organic institutions, and raises
by anticipation some other questions to which growing necessities will sooner or later compel the
attention both of theoretical and of practical politicians. The chief of these last is the distinction
between the function of making laws, for which a numerous popular assembly is radically unfit, and
that of getting good laws made, which is its proper duty, and cannot be satisfactorily fulfilled by any
other authority: and the consequent need of a Legislative Commission, as a permanent part of the
constitution of a free country; consisting of a small number of highly trained political minds on whom,
when Parliament has determined that a law shall be made, the task of making it should be devolved;
Parliament retaining the power of passing or rejecting the bill when drawn up, but not of altering it
otherwise than by sending proposed amendments to be dealt with by the Commission. The question
here raised respecting the most important of all public functions, that of legislation, is a particular case
of the great problem of modern political organization, stated I believe for the first time in its full extent
by Bentham, though in my opinion not always satisfactorily resolved by him; the combination of
complete popular control over public affairs with the greatest attainable perfection of skilled agency.
The other treatise written at this time is the one which was published some years later under the title
of “The Subjection of Women.”* It was written at my daughter’s suggestion that there might, in any
event, be in existence a written exposition of my opinions on that great question, as full and conclusive
as I could make it. The intention was to keep this among other unpublished papers, improving it from
time to time if I was able, and to publish it at the time when it should seem likely to be most useful. As
ultimately published it was enriched with some important ideas of my daughter’s, and passages of her
writing. But in what was of my own composition, all that is most striking and profound belongs to my
wife; coming from the fund of thought which had been made common to us both, by our innumerable
conversations and discussions on a topic which filled so large a place in our minds.
Soon after this time I took from their repository a portion of the unpublished papers which I had
written during the last years of our married life, and shaped them, with some additional matter, into the
little work entitled “Utilitarianism”;* which was first published in three parts, in successive numbers of
Fraser’s Magazine, and afterwards reprinted in a volume.
Before this however the state of public affairs had become extremely critical, by the commencement
of the American civil war.* My strongest feelings were engaged in this struggle, which, I felt from the
beginning, was destined to be a turning point, for good or evil, of the course of human affairs for an
indefinite duration. Having been a deeply interested observer of the Slavery quarrel in America, during
the many years that preceded the open breach, I knew that it was in all its stages an aggressive
enterprise of the slave owners to extend the territory of slavery; under the combined influences of
pecuniary interest, domineering temper, and the fanaticism of a class for its class privileges, influences
so fully and powerfully depicted in the admirable work of my friend Professor Cairnes, “The Slave
Power.” Their success, if they succeeded, would be a victory of the powers of evil which would give
courage to the enemies of progress and damp the spirits of its friends all over the civilised world, while
it would create a formidable military power grounded on the worst and most anti-social form of the
tyranny of men over men, and by destroying for a long time the prestige of the great democratic
republic would give to all the privileged classes of Europe a false confidence, probably only to be
extinguished in blood. On the other hand, if the spirit of the North was sufficiently roused to carry the
war to a successful termination, and if that termination did not come too soon and too easily, I foresaw,
from the laws of human nature and the experience of revolutions, that when it did come it would in all
probability be thorough: that the bulk of the Northern population, whose conscience had as yet been
awakened only to the point of resisting the further extension of slavery, but whose fidelity to the
Constitution of the United States made them disapprove of any attempt by the Federal Government to
interfere with slavery in the States where it already existed, would acquire feelings of another kind
when the Constitution had been shaken off by armed rebellion, would determine to have done for ever
with the accursed thing, and would join their banner with that of the noble body of Abolitionists, of
whom Garrison was the courageous and single minded apostle, Wendell Phillips the eloquent orator,
and John Brown the voluntary martyr.*4 Then, too, the whole mind of the United States would be let
loose from its bonds, no longer corrupted by the supposed necessity of apologising to foreigners for the
most flagrant of all possible violations of the free principles of their Constitution, while the tendency of
a fixed state of society to stereotype a set of national opinions would be at least temporarily checked
and the national mind would become more open to the recognition of whatever was bad in either the
institutions or the customs of the people. These hopes, so far as related to Slavery, have been
completely, and in other respects are in course of being progressively realized. Foreseeing from the
first this double set of consequences from the success or failure of the rebellion, it may be imagined
with what feelings I contemplated the rush of nearly the whole upper and middle classes of my own
country, even those who passed for Liberals, into a furious pro-Southern partisanship: the working
classes, and some of the literary and scientific men, being almost the sole exceptions to the general
frenzy.* I never before felt so keenly how little permanent improvement had reached the minds of our
influential classes and of what small value were the liberal opinions they had got into the habit of
professing. None of the Continental Liberals committed the same frightful mistake. But the generation
which had extorted negro emancipation from our West India planters had passed away;* another had
succeeded which had not learnt by many years of discussion and exposure to feel strongly the
enormities of slavery; and the inattention habitual with Englishmen to whatever is going on in the world
outside their own island, made them profoundly ignorant of all the antecedents of the struggle,
insomuch that it was not generally believed in England, for the first year or two of the war, that the
quarrel was one of slavery. There were men of high principle and unquestionable liberality of opinion
who thought it a dispute about tariffs, or assimilated it to the cases in which they were accustomed to
sympathise, of a people struggling for independence.
It was my obvious duty to be one of the small minority who protested against this perverted state of
public opinion. I was not the first to protest. It ought to be remembered to the honour of Mr. Hughes
and of Mr. Ludlow, that they, by writings published at the very beginning of the struggle, began the
protestation. Mr. Bright followed in one of the most powerful of his speeches, followed by others not
less striking. I was on the point of adding my words to theirs when there occurred, towards the end of
1861, the seizure of the Southern envoys on board a British vessel, by an officer of the United States.*
Even English forgetfulness has not yet had time to lose all remembrance of the explosion of feeling in
England which then burst forth, the expectation, prevailing for some weeks, of war with the United
States, and the warlike preparations actually commenced on this side. While this state of things lasted
there was no chance of a hearing for anything favourable to the American cause; and moreover I
agreed with those who thought the act unjustifiable and such as to require that England should demand
its disavowal. When the disavowal came, and the alarm of war was over, I wrote, in January 1862, the
paper, in Fraser’s Magazine, entitled “The Contest in America.”* And I shall always feel grateful to my
daughter that her urgency prevailed on me to write it when I did: for we were then on the point of
setting out for a journey of some months in Greece and Turkey, and but for her, I should have deferred
writing till our return. Written and published when it was, the paper helped to encourage those Liberals
who had felt overborne by the tide of illiberal opinion, and to form in favour of the good cause a nucleus
of opinion which increased gradually, and after the success of the North began to seem probable,
rapidly. When we returned from our journey I wrote a second article, a review of Professor Cairnes’
book published in the Westminster Review.* England is paying the penalty, in many uncomfortable
ways, of the durable resentment which her ruling classes stirred up in the United States by their
ostentatious wishes for the ruin of America as a nation; they have reason to be thankful that a few, if
only a few known writers and speakers, standing firmly by the Americans in the time of their greatest
difficulty, effected a partial diversion of these bitter feelings, and made Great Britain not altogether
odious to the Americans.
This duty having been performed, my principal occupation for the next two years was on subjects not
political. The publication of Mr. Austin’s Lectures on Jurisprudence after his decease, gave me an
opportunity of paying a deserved tribute to his memory and at the same time expressing some thoughts
on a subject on which, in my old days of Benthamism, I had bestowed much study. But the chief product
of those years was the Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy.* His Lectures, published in
1860 and 1861, I had read towards the end of the latter year, with a half formed intention of giving an
account of them in a Review, but I soon found that this would be idle, and that justice could not be done
to the subject in less than a volume. I had then to consider whether it would be advisable that I myself
should attempt such a performance. On consideration, there seemed to be strong reasons for doing so. I
was greatly disappointed with the Lectures. I read them, certainly, with no prejudice against Sir W.
Hamilton. I had up to that time deferred the study of his Notes to Reid on account of their unfinished
state, but I had not neglected his “Discussions in Philosophy”; and though I knew that his general mode
of treating the facts of mental philosophy differed from that of which I most approved, yet his vigorous
polemic against the later Transcendentalists, and his strenuous assertion of some important principles,
especially the Relativity of human knowledge, gave me many points of sympathy with his opinions, and
made me think that genuine psychology had considerably more to gain than to lose by his authority and
reputation. His Lectures and the Dissertations on Reid dispelled this illusion: and even the Discussions,
read by the light which these threw on them, lost much of their value. I found that the points of
apparent agreement between his opinions and mine were more verbal than real; that the important
philosophical principles which I had thought he recognised, were so explained away by him as to mean
little or nothing, or were continually lost sight of, and doctrines entirely inconsistent with them were
taught in nearly every part of his philosophical writings. My estimation of him was therefore so far
altered, that instead of regarding him as occupying a kind of intermediate position between the two
rival philosophies, holding some of the principles of both, and supplying to both powerful weapons of
attack and defence, I now looked upon him as one of the pillars, and in this country from his high
philosophical reputation the chief pillar, of that one of the two which seemed to me to be erroneous.
Now, the difference between these two schools of philosophy, that of Intuition, and that of Experience
and Association, is not a mere matter of abstract speculation; it is full of practical consequences, and
lies at the foundation of all the greatest differences of practical opinion in an age of progress. The
practical reformer has continually to demand that changes be made in things which are supported by
powerful and widely spread feelings, or to question the apparent necessity and indefeasibleness of
established facts; and it is often an indispensable part of his argument to shew, how those powerful
feelings had their origin, and how those facts came to seem necessary and indefeasible. There is
therefore a natural hostility between him and a philosophy which discourages the explanation of
feelings and moral facts by circumstances and association, and prefers to treat them as ultimate
elements of human nature; a philosophy which is addicted to holding up favourite doctrines as intuitive
truths, and deems intuition to be the voice of Nature and of God, speaking with an authority higher
than that of our reason. In particular, I have long felt that the prevailing tendency to regard all the
marked distinctions of human character as innate, and in the main indelible, and to ignore the
irresistible proofs that by far the greater part of those differences, whether between individuals, races,
or sexes, are such as not only might but naturally would be produced by differences in circumstances,
is one of the chief hindrances to the rational treatment of great social questions, and one of the
greatest stumbling blocks to human improvement. This tendency has its source in the intuitional
metaphysics which characterized the reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, and it
is a tendency so agreeable to human indolence, as well as to conservative interests generally, that
unless attacked at the very root, it is sure to be carried to even a greater length than is really justified
by the more moderate forms of the intuitional philosophy. That philosophy, not always in its moderate
forms, had ruled the thought of Europe for the greater part of a century. My father’s Analysis of the
Mind, my own Logic, and Professor Bain’s great treatise, had attempted to reintroduce a better mode of
philosophizing, latterly with quite as much success as could be expected; but I had for some time felt
that the mere contrast of the two philosophies was not enough, that there ought to be a hand-to-hand
fight between them, that controversial as well as expository writings were needed, and that the time
was come when such controversy would be useful. Considering then the writings and fame of Sir W.
Hamilton as the great fortress of the intuitional philosophy in this country, a fortress the more
formidable from the imposing character, and the in many respects great personal merits and mental
endowments, of the man, I thought it might be a real service to philosophy to attempt a thorough
examination of all his most important doctrines, and an estimate of his general claims to eminence as a
philosopher. And I was confirmed in this resolution by observing that in the writings of at least one, and
him one of the ablest, of Sir W. Hamilton’s followers, his peculiar doctrines were made the justification
of a view of religion which I hold to be profoundly immoral—that it is our duty to bow down in worship
before a Being whose moral attributes are affirmed to be unknowable by us, and to be perhaps
extremely different from those which, when we are speaking of our fellow-creatures, we call by the
same names.
As I advanced in my task, the damage to Sir W. Hamilton’s reputation became greater than I at first
expected, through the almost incredible multitude of inconsistencies which shewed themselves on
comparing different passages with one another. It was my business however to shew things exactly as
they were, and I did not flinch from it. I endeavoured always to treat the philosopher whom I criticized
with the most scrupulous fairness; and I knew that he had abundance of disciples and admirers to
correct me if I ever unintentionally did him injustice. Many of them accordingly have answered me,
more or less elaborately; and they have pointed out oversights and misunderstandings, though few in
number, and mostly very unimportant in substance. Such of those as had (to my knowledge) been
pointed out before the publication of the latest edition (at present the third) have been corrected there,
and the remainder of the criticisms have been, as far as seemed necessary, replied to. On the whole, the
book has done its work: it has shewn the weak side of Sir W. Hamilton, and has reduced his too great
philosophical reputation within more moderate bounds; and by some of its discussions, as well as by
two expository chapters, on the notions of Matter and of Mind, it has perhaps thrown additional light on
some of the disputed questions in the domain of psychology and metaphysics.
After the completion of the book on Hamilton, I applied myself to a task which a variety of reasons
seemed to render specially incumbent upon me; that of giving an account, and forming an estimate, of
the doctrines of Auguste Comte.* I had contributed more than any one else to make his speculations
known in England. In consequence chiefly of what I had said of him in my Logic, he had readers and
admirers among thoughtful men on this side of the Channel at a time when his name had not yet, in
France, emerged from obscurity. So unknown and unappreciated was he at the time when my Logic was
written and published, that to criticise his weak points might well appear superfluous, while it was a
duty to give as much publicity as one could to the important contributions he had made to philosophic
thought. At the time however at which I have now arrived, this state of affairs had entirely changed. His
name at least was known almost universally, and the general character of his doctrines very widely. He
had taken his place in the estimation both of friends and opponents, as one of the conspicuous figures
in the thought of the age. The better parts of his speculations had made great progress in working their
way into those minds, which by their previous culture and tendencies, were fitted to receive them: and
under cover of those better parts those of a worse character, greatly developed and added to in his later
writings, had also made some way, having obtained active and enthusiastic adherents, some of them of
no inconsiderable personal merit, in England, France, and other countries. These causes not only made
it desirable that some one should undertake the task of sifting what is good from what is bad in M.
Comte’s speculations, but seemed to impose on myself in particular a special obligation to make the
attempt. This I accordingly did in two Essays, published in successive numbers of the Westminster
Review, and reprinted in a small volume under the title “Auguste Comte and Positivism.”
The writings which I have now mentioned, together with a small number of papers in periodicals
which I have not deemed worth preserving, were the whole of the products of my activity as a writer
during the years from 1859 to 1865. In the early part of the last mentioned year, in compliance with a
wish frequently expressed to me by working men, I published cheap People’s Editions of those of my
writings which seemed the most likely to find readers among the working classes; viz. Principles of
Political Economy, Liberty, and Representative Government. This was a considerable sacrifice of my
pecuniary interest, especially as I resigned all idea of deriving profit from the cheap editions, and after
ascertaining from my publishers the lowest price which they thought would remunerate them on the
usual terms of an equal division of profits, I gave up my half share to enable the price to be fixed still
lower. To the credit of Messrs. Longman they fixed, unasked, a certain number of years after which the
copyright and stereotype plates were to revert to me, and a certain number of copies after the sale of
which I should receive half of any further profit. This number of copies (which in the case of the
Political Economy was 10,000) has for some time been exceeded, and the People’s Editions have begun
to yield me a small but unexpected pecuniary return, though very far from an equivalent for the
diminution of profit from the Library Editions.
In this summary of my outward life I have now arrived at the period at which my tranquil and retired
existence as a writer of books was to be exchanged for the less congenial occupation of a member of
the House of Commons. The proposal made to me, early in 1865, by some electors of Westminster, did
not present the idea to me for the first time. It was not even the first offer I had received, for, more than
ten years previous, in consequence of my opinions on the Irish Land question, Mr. Lucas and Mr. Duffy,
in the name of the popular party in Ireland, offered to bring me into Parliament for an Irish County,
which they could easily have done: but the incompatibility of a seat in Parliament with the office I then
held in the India House, precluded even consideration of the proposal. After I had quitted the India
House, several of my friends would gladly have seen me a member of Parliament; but there seemed no
probability that the idea would ever take any practical shape. I was convinced that no numerous or
influential portion of any electoral body, really wished to be represented by a person of my opinions;
and that one who possessed no local connexion or popularity, and who did not choose to stand as the
mere organ of a party, had small chance of being elected anywhere unless through the expenditure of
money. Now it was, and is, my fixed conviction, that a candidate ought not to incur one farthing of
expense for undertaking a public duty. Such of the lawful expenses of an election as have no special
reference to any particular candidate ought to be borne as a public charge, either by the State or by the
locality. What has to be done by the supporters of each candidate in order to bring his claims properly
before the constituency, should be done by unpaid agency, or by voluntary subscription. If members of
the electoral body, or others, are willing to subscribe money of their own for the purpose of bringing by
lawful means into Parliament some one who they think would be useful there, no one is entitled to
object: but that the expense, or any part of it, should fall on the candidate, is fundamentally wrong;
because it amounts, in reality, to buying his seat. Even on the most favourable supposition as to the
mode in which the money is expended, there is a legitimate suspicion that any one who gives money for
leave to undertake a public trust, has other than public ends to promote by it; and (a consideration of
the greatest importance) the cost of elections, when borne by the candidates, deprives the nation of the
services, as members of Parliament, of all who cannot or will not afford to incur a heavy expense. I do
not say that, so long as there is scarcely a chance for an independent candidate to come into Parliament
without complying with this vicious practice, it must always be morally wrong in him to spend money,
provided that no part of it is either directly or indirectly employed in corruption. But, to justify it, he
ought to be very certain that he can be of more use to his country as a member of Parliament than in
any other mode which is open to him; and this assurance, in my own case, I did not feel. It was by no
means clear to me that I could do more to advance the public objects which had a claim on my
exertions from the benches of the House of Commons, than from the simple position of a writer. I felt,
therefore, that I ought not to seek election to Parliament, much less to expend any money in procuring
it.
But the conditions of the question were considerably altered when a body of electors sought me out,
and spontaneously offered to bring me forward as their candidate. If it should appear, on explanation,
that they persisted in this wish, knowing my opinions, and accepting the only conditions on which I
could conscientiously serve, it was questionable whether this was not one of those calls upon a member
of the community by his fellow citizens, which he was scarcely justified in rejecting. I therefore put
their disposition to the proof by one of the frankest explanations ever tendered, I should think, to an
electoral body by a candidate. I wrote in reply to the offer a letter for publication,* saying that I had no
personal wish to be a member of parliament, that I thought a candidate ought neither to canvass nor to
incur any expense, and that I could not consent to do either. I said further that if elected I could not
undertake to give any of my time and labour to their local interests. With respect to general politics, I
told them without reserve what I thought on a number of important subjects on which they had asked
my opinion; and one of these being the suffrage, I made known to them, among other things, my
conviction (as I was bound to do, since I intended, if elected, to act on it) that women were entitled to
representation in Parliament on the same terms with men. It was the first time, doubtless, that such a
doctrine had ever been mentioned to electors; and the fact that I was elected after proposing it, gave
the start to the movement which has since become so vigorous in favour of women’s suffrage. Nothing,
at the time, appeared more unlikely than that a candidate (if candidate I could be called) whose
professions and conduct set so completely at defiance all ordinary notions of electioneering, should
nevertheless be elected. A well known literary man, who was also a man of society, was heard to say,
that the Almighty himself would have no chance of being elected on such a programme. I strictly
adhered to it, neither spending money nor canvassing, nor did I take any personal part in the election
until about a week preceding the day of nomination, when I attended a few public meetings to state my
principles and give to any questions which the electors might exercise their just right of putting to me
for their own guidance, answers as plain and unreserved as my Address. On one subject only, my
religious opinions, I announced from the beginning that I would answer no questions; a determination
which appeared to be completely approved by those who attended the meetings. My frankness on all
other subjects on which I was interrogated, evidently did me far more good than my answers, whatever
they might be, did harm. Among the proofs I received of this, one is too remarkable not to be recorded.
In the pamphlet “Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform” I had said, rather bluntly, that the working
classes, though differing from those of some other countries in being ashamed of lying, are yet
generally liars.* This passage some opponent got printed in a placard, which was handed to me at a
meeting, chiefly composed of the working classes, and I was asked whether I had written and published
it. I at once answered “I did.” Scarcely were these two words out of my mouth, when vehement
applause resounded through the whole meeting. It was evident that the working people were so
accustomed to expect equivocation and evasion from those who sought their suffrages, that when they
found, instead of that, a direct avowal of what was likely to be disagreeable to them, instead of being
offended they concluded at once that this was a person whom they could trust. A more striking instance
never came under my notice of what, I believe, is the experience of those who best know the working
classes—that the most essential of all recommendations to their favour is that of complete
straightforwardness; its presence outweighs in their minds very strong objections, while no amount of
other qualities will make amends for its apparent absence. The first working man who spoke after the
incident I have mentioned (it was Mr. Odger) said, that the working classes had no desire not to be told
of their faults; they wanted friends, not flatterers, and felt under obligation to any one who told them of
anything in themselves which he sincerely believed to require amendment. And to this the meeting
heartily responded.
Had I been defeated in the election, I should still have had no reason to regret the contact it had
brought me into with large bodies of my countrymen; which not only gave me much new experience,
but enabled me to scatter my political opinions rather widely, and by making me known in many
quarters where I had never before been heard of, increased the number of my readers and the
presumable influence of my writings. These latter effects were of course produced in a still greater
degree, when, as much to my own surprise as to that of any one, I was returned to Parliament by a
majority of some hundreds over my Conservative competitor.
I was a member of the House during the three sessions of the Parliament which passed the Reform
Bill; during which time Parliament was necessarily my main occupation, except during the recess. I was
a tolerably frequent speaker, sometimes of prepared speeches, sometimes extemporaneously. But my
choice of occasions was not such as I should have made if my leading object had been parliamentary
influence. When I had gained the ear of the House, which I did by a successful speech on Mr.
Gladstone’s Reform Bill,* the idea I proceeded on was that when anything was likely to be as well done,
or sufficiently well done, by other people, there was no necessity for me to meddle with it. As I
therefore, in general, reserved myself for work which no others were likely to do, a great proportion of
my appearances were on points on which the bulk of the Liberal party, even the advanced portion of it,
either were of a different opinion from mine, or were comparatively indifferent. Several of my speeches,
especially one against the motion for the abolition of capital punishment,* and another in favour of
resuming the right of seizing enemies’ goods in neutral vessels,* were opposed to what then was, and
probably still is, regarded as the advanced liberal opinion. My advocacy of women’s suffrage, and of
Personal Representation, were at the time looked upon by many as whims of my own, but the great
progress since made by those opinions, and especially the zealous response made from almost all parts
of the kingdom to the demand for women’s suffrage, fully justified the timeliness of those movements,
and have made what was undertaken as a moral and social duty, a personal success. Another duty
which was particularly incumbent on me as one of the Metropolitan Members, was the attempt to
obtain a Municipal Government for the Metropolis: but on that subject the indifference of the House of
Commons was such that I found hardly any help or support within its walls. On this subject, however, I
was the organ of an active and intelligent body of persons outside, with whom and not with me the
scheme originated, who carried on all the agitation on the subject and drew up the Bills. My part was to
bring in Bills already prepared, and to sustain the discussion of them during the short time they were
allowed to remain before the House; after having taken an active part in the work of a Committee
presided over by Mr. Ayrton, which sat through the greater part of the Session of 1866 to take evidence
on the subject. The very different position in which the question now stands (1870) may justly be
attributed to the preparation which went on during those years, and which produced but little visible
effect at the time; but all questions on which there are strong private interests on one side, and only the
public good on the other, have a similar period of incubation to go through.
The same idea, that the use of my being in Parliament was to do work which others were not able or
not willing to do, made me think it my duty to come to the front in defence of advanced Liberalism on
occasions when the obloquy to be encountered was such as most of the advanced Liberals in the House,
preferred not to incur. My first vote in the House was in support of an amendment in favour of Ireland,
moved by an Irish member and for which only five English and Scotch votes were given, including my
own: the other four were Mr. Bright, Mr. McLaren, Mr. T. B. Potter and Mr. Hadfield. And the second
speech I delivered5 was on the bill to prolong the suspension of the Habeas Corpus in Ireland.* In
denouncing, on this occasion, the English mode of governing Ireland, I did no more than the general
opinion of England now admits to have been just; but the anger against Fenianism was then in all its
freshness; any attack on what Fenians* attacked was looked upon as an apology for them; and I was so
unfavourably received by the House, that more than one of my friends advised me (and my own
judgment agreed with the advice) to wait, before speaking again, for the favourable opportunity that
would be given by the first great debate on the Reform Bill. During this silence, many flattered
themselves that I had turned out a failure, and that they should not be troubled with me any more.
Perhaps their uncomplimentary comments may, by the force of reaction, have helped to make my
speech on the Reform Bill the success it was. My position in the House was further improved by a
speech in which I insisted on the duty of paying off the National Debt before our coal supplies are
exhausted,* and by an ironical reply to some of the Tory leaders who had quoted against me certain
passages of my writings and called me to account for others, especially for one in my “Considerations
on Representative Government” which said that the Conservative party was by the law of its
composition the stupidest party.* They gained nothing by drawing attention to this passage, which up to
that time had not excited any notice, but the sobriquet of “the stupid party” stuck to them for a
considerable time afterwards. Having now no longer any apprehension of not being listened to, I
confined myself, as I have since thought, too much, to occasions on which my services seemed specially
needed, and abstained more than enough from speaking on the great party questions. With the
exception of Irish questions, and those which concerned the working classes, a single speech on Mr.
Disraeli’s Reform Bill* was nearly all that I contributed to the great decisive debates of the last two of
my three sessions.
I have, however, much satisfaction in looking back to the part I took on the two classes of subjects
just mentioned. With regard to the working classes, the chief topic of my speech on Mr. Gladstone’s
Reform Bill was the assertion of their claims to the suffrage.* A little later, after the resignation of Lord
Russell’s ministry and the succession of a Tory Government, came the attempt of the working classes to
hold a meeting in Hyde Park, their exclusion by the police, and the breaking down of the park railing by
the crowd. Though Mr. Beales and the leaders of the working men had retired under protest before this
took place, a scuffle ensued in which many innocent persons were maltreated by the police, and the
exasperation of the working men was extreme. They shewed a determination to make another attempt
at a meeting in the Park, to which many of them would probably have come armed; the Government
made military preparations to resist the attempt, and something very serious seemed impending. At this
crisis I really believe that I was the means of preventing much mischief. I had in my place in Parliament
taken the side of the working men, and strongly censured the conduct of the Government. I was invited,
with several other Radical members, to a conference with the leading members of the Council of the
Reform League;* and the task fell chiefly upon myself of persuading them to give up the Hyde Park
project, and hold their meeting elsewhere. It was not Mr. Beales and Colonel Dickson who needed
persuading; on the contrary, it was evident that those gentlemen had already exerted their influence in
the same direction, thus far without success. It was the working men who held out: and so bent were
they on their original scheme that I was obliged to have recourse to les grands moyens.* I told them
that a proceeding which would certainly produce a collision with the military, could only be justifiable
on two conditions: if the position of affairs had become such that a revolution was desirable, and if they
thought themselves able to accomplish one. To this argument after considerable discussion they at last
yielded: and I was able to inform Mr. Walpole that their intention was given up. I shall never forget the
depth of his relief or the warmth of his expressions of gratitude. After the working men had conceded
so much to me, I felt bound to comply with their request that I would attend and speak at their meeting
at the Agricultural Hall: the only meeting called by the Reform League which I ever attended. I had
always declined being a member of the League, on the avowed ground that I did not agree in its
programme of manhood suffrage and the ballot: from the ballot I dissented entirely; and I could not
consent to hoist the flag of manhood suffrage, even on the assurance that the exclusion of women was
not intended to be implied; since if one goes beyond what can be immediately carried and professes to
take one’s stand on a principle, one should go the whole length of the principle. I have entered thus
particularly into this matter because my conduct on this occasion gave great displeasure to the Tory
and Tory-Liberal press, who have charged me ever since with having shewn myself, in the trials of
public life, intemperate and passionate. I do not know what they expected from me; but they had reason
to be thankful to me if they knew from what I had in all probability preserved them. And I do not
believe it could have been done, at that particular juncture, by any one else. No other person, I believe,
had at that moment the necessary influence for restraining the working classes, except Mr. Gladstone
and Mr. Bright, neither of whom was available: Mr. Gladstone, for obvious reasons; Mr. Bright, because
he was out of town.
When, some time later, the Tory Government brought in a bill to prevent public meetings in the
Parks,* I not only spoke strongly in opposition to it, but formed one of a number of advanced Liberals,
who, aided by the very late period of the Session, succeeded in defeating the Bill by what is called
talking it out. It has not since been renewed.
On Irish affairs also I felt bound to take a decided part. I was one of the foremost in the deputation of
Members of Parliament who prevailed on Lord Derby to spare the life of the condemned Fenian
insurgent, General Burke.* The Church question was so vigorously handled by the leaders of the party,
in the session of 1868, as to require no more from me than an emphatic adhesion; but the land question
was by no means in so advanced a position: the superstitions of landlordism had up to that time been
little challenged, especially in Parliament, and the backward state of the question, so far as concerned
the Parliamentary mind, was evidenced by the extremely mild measure brought in by Lord Russell’s
Government in 1866, which nevertheless could not be carried. On that bill I delivered one of my most
careful speeches, in which I attempted to lay down some of the principles of the subject, in a manner
calculated less to stimulate friends, than to conciliate and convince opponents.* The engrossing subject
of Parliamentary Reform prevented either this bill, or one of a similar character brought in by Lord
Derby’s Government, from being carried through. They never got beyond the second reading.
Meanwhile the signs of Irish disaffection had become much more decided; the demand for complete
separation between the two countries had assumed a menacing aspect, and there were few who did not
feel that if there was still any chance of reconciling Ireland to British connexion, it could only be by the
adoption of much more thorough reforms in the territorial and social relations of the country, than had
yet been contemplated. The time seemed to me to have come when it would be useful to speak out my
whole mind; and the result was my pamphlet “England and Ireland,”* which was written in the winter
of 1867, and published shortly before the commencement of the session of 1868. The leading features
of the pamphlet were on the one hand an argument to shew the undesirableness, for Ireland as well as
England, of separation between the countries, and on the other, a proposal for settling the land
question by giving to the existing tenants a permanent tenure at a fixed rent, to be assessed after due
enquiry by the State.
The pamphlet was not popular, except in Ireland, as I did not expect it to be. But, if no measure short
of that which I proposed would do full justice to Ireland, or afford a prospect of conciliating the mass of
the Irish people, the duty of proposing it was imperative; while if on the other hand, there was any
intermediate course which had a claim to a trial, I well knew that to propose something which would be
called extreme was the true way not to impede but to facilitate a more moderate experiment. It is most
improbable that a measure conceding so much to the tenantry as Mr. Gladstone’s Irish Land Bill, would
have been proposed by a Government, or could have been carried through Parliament, unless the
British public had been led to perceive that a case might be made, and perhaps a party formed, for a
measure considerably stronger. It is the character of the British people, or at least of the higher and
middle classes who pass muster for the British people, that to induce them to approve of any change it
is necessary that they should look upon it as a middle course: they think every proposal extreme and
violent unless they hear of some other proposal going still farther, upon which their antipathy to
extreme views may discharge itself. So it proved in the present instance; my proposal was condemned,
but any scheme of Irish Land reform, short of mine, came to be thought moderate by comparison. I may
observe that the attacks made on my plan usually gave a very incorrect idea of its nature. It was usually
discussed as a proposal that the State should buy up the land and become the universal landlord;
though in fact it only offered to each individual landlord this as an alternative, if he liked better to sell
his estate than to retain it on the new conditions; and I fully anticipated that most landlords would
continue to prefer the position of landowners to that of Government annuitants, and would retain their
existing relation to their tenants, often on more indulgent terms than the full rents on which the
compensation to be given them by Government would have been based. This and many other
explanations I gave in a speech on Ireland, in the debate on Mr. Maguire’s Resolution, early in the
session of 1868.* A corrected report of this speech, together with my speech on Mr. Fortescue’s Bill,
has been published (not by me, but with my permission) in Ireland.
Another public duty, of a most serious kind, it was my lot to have to perform, both in and out of
Parliament, during these years. A disturbance in Jamaica,* provoked in the first instance by injustice,
and exaggerated by rage and panic into a premeditated rebellion, had been the motive or excuse for
taking hundreds of innocent lives by military violence or by sentence of what were called courts
martial, continuing for weeks after the brief disturbance had been put down; with many added
atrocities of destruction of property, flogging women as well as men, and a great display of the brutal
recklessness which generally prevails when fire and sword are let loose. The perpetrators of these
deeds were defended and applauded in England by the same kind of people who had so long upheld
negro slavery: and it seemed at first as if the British nation was about to incur the disgrace of letting
pass without even a protest, excesses of authority as revolting as any of those for which, when
perpetrated by the instruments of other governments, Englishmen can hardly find terms sufficient to
express their abhorrence. After a short time, however, an indignant feeling was roused; a voluntary
Association formed itself under the name of the Jamaica Committee, to take such deliberation and
action as the case might admit of, and adhesions poured in from all parts of the country. I was abroad at
the time but I sent in my name to the Committee as soon as I heard of it, and took an active part in its
proceedings from the time of my return. There was much more at stake than only justice to the
Negroes, imperative as was that consideration. The question was, whether the British dependencies,
and eventually perhaps Great Britain itself, were to be under the government of law, or of military
license; whether the lives and persons of British subjects are at the mercy of any two or three officers
however raw and inexperienced or reckless and brutal, whom a panic-stricken Governor or other
functionary may assume the right to constitute into a so-called Court Martial. This question could only
be decided by an appeal to the tribunals; and such an appeal the Committee determined to make. Their
determination led to a change in the Chairmanship of the Committee, as the Chairman, Mr. Charles
Buxton, thought it not unjust indeed, but inexpedient, to prosecute Governor Eyre and his principal
subordinates in a criminal court: but a numerously attended General meeting of the Association having
decided this point against him, Mr. Buxton withdrew from the Committee, though continuing to work in
the cause, and I was, quite unexpectedly on my own part, proposed and elected Chairman. It became,
in consequence, my duty to represent the Committee in the House, sometimes by putting questions to
the Government, sometimes as the recipient of questions more or less provocative, addressed by
individual members to myself; but especially as speaker in the important debate originated in the
session of 1866 by Mr. Buxton: and the speech I then delivered is that which I should probably select as
the best of my speeches in Parliament.*6 For more than two years we carried on the combat, trying
every avenue legally open to us, to the courts of criminal justice. A bench of magistrates in one of the
most Tory counties in England dismissed our case: we were more successful before the magistrates at
Bow Street; which gave an opportunity to the Lord Chief Justice of the Queen’s Bench, Sir Alexander
Cockburn, for delivering his celebrated charge, which settled the law of the question in favour of
liberty, as far as it is in the power of a judge’s charge to settle it.* There, however, our success ended,
for the Old Bailey Grand Jury by throwing out our bill prevented the case from coming to trial. It was
clear that to bring English functionaries to the bar of a criminal court for abuses of power committed
against negroes and mulattoes, was not a popular proceeding with the English middle classes. We had
however redeemed, so far as lay in us, the character of our country, by shewing that there was at any
rate a body of persons determined to use all the means which the law afforded to obtain justice for the
injured. We had elicited from the highest criminal judge in the nation an authoritative declaration that
the law was what we maintained it to be; and we had given an emphatic warning to those who might be
tempted to similar guilt hereafter, that though they might escape the actual sentence of a criminal
tribunal, they were not safe against being put to some trouble and expense in order to avoid it. Colonial
Governors and other persons in authority will have a considerable motive to stop short of such
extremities in future.
As a matter of curiosity I kept some specimens of the abusive letters, almost all of them anonymous,
which I received while these proceedings were going on. They are evidence of the sympathy felt with
the brutalities in Jamaica by the brutal part of the population at home. They graduated from coarse
jokes, verbal and pictorial, up to threats of assassination.[31]
Among other matters of importance in which I took an active part, but which excited little interest in
the public, two deserve particular mention. I joined with several other independent Liberals in
defeating an Extradition Bill,* introduced at the very end of the session of 1866 and by which, though
surrender avowedly for political offences was not authorised, political refugees, if charged by a foreign
government with acts which are necessarily incident to all attempts at insurrection, would have been
surrendered to be dealt with by the criminal courts of the government against which they had rebelled:
thus making the British Government an accomplice in the vengeance of foreign despotisms. The defeat
of this proposal led to the appointment of a Select Committee (in which I was included) to examine and
report on the whole subject of Extradition Treaties; and the result was that in the Extradition Act,
which passed through Parliament after I had ceased to be a member, opportunity is given to any one
whose extradition is demanded, of being heard before an English Court of justice to prove that the
offence with which he is charged is really political. The cause of European freedom has thus been saved
from a serious misfortune, and our own country from a great iniquity. The other subject to be
mentioned is the fight kept up by a body of advanced Liberals in the session of 1868, on the Bribery Bill
of Mr. Disraeli’s Government,* in which I took a very active part. I had taken council with several of
those who had applied their minds most carefully to the details of the subject—Mr. W. D. Christie,
Serjeant Pulling, Mr. Chadwick—as well as bestowed much thought of my own, for the purpose of
framing such amendments and additional clauses as might make the Bill really effective against the
numerous modes of corruption, direct and indirect, which might otherwise, as there was much reason
to fear, be increased instead of diminished by the Reform Act. We also aimed at engrafting on the Bill,
measures for diminishing the mischievous burthen of what are called the legitimate expenses of
elections. Among our many amendments was that of Mr. Fawcett for making the returning officer’s
expenses a charge on the rates instead of on the candidates; another was the prohibition of paid
canvassers, and the limitation of paid agents to one for each candidate; a third was the extension of the
precautions and penalties against bribery, to municipal elections, which are well known to be not only a
preparatory school for bribery at parliamentary elections, but an habitual cover for it. The Conservative
Government, however, when once they had carried the leading provision of their Bill (for which I voted
and spoke), the transfer of the jurisdiction in elections from the House of Commons to the Judges, made
a determined resistance to all other improvements: and after one of our most important proposals, that
of Mr. Fawcett, had actually obtained a majority, they summoned the strength of their party and threw
out the clause in a subsequent stage. The Liberal party in the House was greatly dishonoured by the
conduct of many of its members in giving no help whatever to this attempt to secure the necessary
conditions of an honest representation of the people. With their large majority in the House they could
have carried all the amendments, or better ones if they had better to propose. But it was late in the
Session; members were eager to set about their preparations for the impending General Election: and
while some (such as Sir Robert Anstruther) honourably remained at their post, though rival candidates
were already canvassing their constituency, a much greater number placed their electioneering
interests before their public duty. Many Liberals also looked with indifference on legislation against
bribery, thinking that it merely diverted public interest from the Ballot, which they considered, very
mistakenly as I expect it will turn out, to be a sufficient, and the only, remedy. From these causes our
fight, though kept up with great vigour for several nights, was wholly unsuccessful, and the practices
which we sought to render more difficult, prevailed more widely than ever in the first General Election
held under the new electoral law.
In the general debates on Mr. Disraeli’s Reform Bill, my participation was limited to the one speech
already mentioned; but I made the Bill an occasion for bringing the two greatest improvements which
remain to be made in representative government formally before the House and the nation. One of
them was Personal, or as it is called with equal propriety, Proportional Representation. I brought this
under the consideration of the House, by an expository and argumentative speech on Mr. Hare’s plan;*
and subsequently I was active in support of the very imperfect substitute for that plan, which, in a small
number of constituencies, Parliament was induced to adopt. This poor makeshift had scarcely any
recommendation, except that it was a partial recognition of the evil which it did so little to remedy: as
such however it was attacked by the same fallacies, and required to be defended on the same
principles, as a really good measure; and its adoption in a few parliamentary elections, as well as the
subsequent introduction of what is called the Cumulative Vote in the elections for the London School
Board,* have had the good effect of converting the equal claim of all electors to a proportional share in
the representation, from a subject of merely speculative discussion, into a question of practical politics,
much sooner than would otherwise have been the case.
This assertion of my opinions on Personal Representation cannot be credited with any considerable or
visible amount of practical result. It was otherwise with the other motion which I made in the form of
an amendment to the Reform Bill, and which was by far the most important, perhaps the only really
important public service I performed in the capacity of a Member of Parliament: a motion to strike out
the words which were understood to limit the electoral franchise to males,* thereby admitting to the
suffrage all women who as householders or otherwise possess the qualification required of male
electors. For women not to make their claim to the suffrage at the time when the elective franchise was
being largely extended, would have been to abjure the claim altogether; and a movement on the subject
was begun in 1866, when I presented a petition for the suffrage signed by a considerable number of
distinguished women. But it was as yet uncertain whether the proposal would obtain more than a few
stray votes in the House: and when, after a debate in which the speakers on the contrary side were
conspicuous by their feebleness, the votes recorded in favour of the motion amounted to 73—made up
by pairs and tellers to above 80—the surprise was general and the encouragement great: the greater
too because one of those who voted for the motion was Mr. Bright, a fact which could only be attributed
to the impression made on him by the debate, as he had previously made no secret of his non-
concurrence in the proposal. The time appeared to my daughter, Miss Helen Taylor, to have come for
forming a Society for the extension of the suffrage to women. The existence of the Society is due to my
daughter’s initiative; its constitution was planned entirely by her, and she was the soul of the movement
during its first years, though delicate health and superabundant occupation made her decline to be a
member of the Executive Committee. Many distinguished members of parliament, professors, and
others, and some of the most eminent women of whom the country can boast, became members of the
Society, a large proportion either directly or indirectly through my daughter’s influence, she having
written the greater number, and all the best, of the letters by which adhesion was obtained, even when
those letters bore my signature. In two remarkable instances, those of Miss Nightingale and Miss Mary
Carpenter, the reluctance those ladies had at first felt to come forward (for it was not on their part
difference of opinion) was overcome by appeals written by my daughter though signed by me.
Associations for the same object were formed in various local centres, Manchester, Edinburgh,
Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, and others which have done much valuable work for the cause. All the
Societies take the title of branches of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage; but each has its own
governing body, and acts in complete independence of the others.
I believe I have mentioned all that is worth remembering of my proceedings in the House. But their
enumeration, even if complete, would give but an inadequate idea of my occupations during that
period, and especially of the time taken up by correspondence. For many years before my election to
Parliament I had been continually receiving letters from strangers, mostly addressed to me as a writer
on philosophy, and either propounding difficulties or communicating thoughts on subjects connected
with logic or political economy. In common, I suppose, with all who are known as political economists, I
was a recipient of all the shallow theories and absurd proposals by which people are perpetually
endeavouring to shew the way to universal wealth and happiness by some artful reorganisation of the
currency. When there were signs of sufficient intelligence in the writers to make it worth while
attempting to put them right, I took the trouble to point out their errors, until the growth of my
correspondence made it necessary to dismiss such persons with very brief answers. Many, however, of
the communications I received were more worthy of attention than these, and in some, oversights of
detail were pointed out in my writings, which I was thus enabled to correct. Correspondence of this sort
naturally multiplied with the multiplication of the subjects on which I wrote, especially those of a
metaphysical character. But when I became a member of parliament I began to receive letters on
private grievances and on every imaginable subject that related to any kind of public affairs, however
remote from my knowledge or pursuits. It was not my constituents in Westminster who laid this burthen
on me: they kept with remarkable fidelity the understanding on which I had consented to serve. I
received indeed now and then an application from some ingenuous youth to procure for him a small
government appointment: but these were few, and how simple and ignorant the writers were, was
shewn by the fact that the applications came in about equally whichever party was in power. My
invariable answer was, that it was contrary to the principles on which I was elected to ask favours of
any Government. But on the whole hardly any part of the country gave me less trouble than my own
constituents. The general mass of correspondence, however, swelled into an oppressive burthen. At this
time, and thenceforth, a great proportion of all my letters (including many which found their way into
the newspapers7) were not written by me but by my daughter; at first merely from her willingness to
help in disposing of a mass of letters greater than I could get through without assistance, but
afterwards because I thought the letters she wrote superior to mine, and more so in proportion to the
difficulty and importance of the occasion. Even those which I wrote myself were generally much
improved by her, as is also the case with all the more recent of my prepared speeches, of which, and of
some of my published writings, not a few passages, and those the most successful, were hers.[32]
While I remained in Parliament my work as an author was unavoidably limited to the recess. During
that time I wrote (besides the pamphlet on Ireland already mentioned) the Essay on Plato* published in
the Edinburgh Review and reprinted in the third volume of “Dissertations and Discussions”; and the
Address which conformably to custom I delivered to the University of St. Andrews, whose students had
done me the honour of electing me to the office of Rector.* In this Discourse I gave expression to many
thoughts and opinions which had been accumulating in me through life respecting the various studies
which belong to a liberal education, their uses and influences, and the mode in which they should be
pursued to render those influences most beneficial. The position I took up, vindicating the high
educational value alike of the old classic and the new scientific studies, on even stronger grounds than
are urged by most of their advocates, and insisting that it is only the stupid inefficiency of the usual
teaching which makes those studies be regarded as competitors instead of allies, was, I think,
calculated, not only to aid and stimulate the improvement which has happily commenced in the national
institutions for higher education, but to diffuse juster ideas than we often find even in highly educated
men on the conditions of the highest mental cultivation.
During this period also I commenced (and completed soon after I had left Parliament) the
performance of a duty to philosophy and to the memory of my father, by preparing and publishing an
edition of the “Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind” with notes bringing up the doctrines of
that admirable book to the latest improvements in science and in speculation.* This was a joint
undertaking: the psychological notes being furnished in about equal proportions by Mr. Bain and
myself, while Mr. Grote supplied some valuable contributions on points in the history of philosophy
incidentally raised, and Dr. Andrew Findlater supplied the deficiencies in the book which had been
occasioned by the imperfect philological knowledge of the time when it was written. Having been
originally published at a time when the current of metaphysical speculation ran in a quite opposite
direction to the psychology of Experience and Association, the “Analysis” had not obtained the amount
of immediate success which it deserved, though it had made a deep impression on many individual
minds, and had largely contributed, through those minds, to create that more favourable atmosphere
for the Association Psychology of which we now have the benefit. Admirably adapted for a class-book of
the Experience Metaphysics, it only required to be enriched, and in some cases corrected, by the
results of more recent labours in the same school of thought, to stand, as it now does, in company with
Mr. Bain’s treatises, at the head of the systematic works on Analytic psychology.
In the autumn of 1868 the Parliament which passed the Reform Act was dissolved, and at the new
election for Westminster I was thrown out; not to my surprise, nor, I believe, to that of my principal
supporters, though in the few days preceding the election they had become more sanguine than before.
That I should not have been elected at all would not have required any explanation; what excites
curiosity is that I should have been elected the first time, or, having been elected then, should have
been defeated afterwards. But the efforts made to defeat me were far greater on the second occasion
than on the first. For one thing, the Tory Government was now struggling for existence, and success in
any contest was of more importance to them. Then, too, all persons of Tory feelings were far more
embittered against me individually than on the previous occasion; many who had at first been either
favourable or indifferent, were vehemently opposed to my reelection. As I had shewn in my political
writings that I was aware of the weak points in democratic opinions, some Conservatives, it seems, had
not been without hopes of finding me an opponent of democracy: as I was able to see the Conservative
side of the question, they presumed that, like them, I could not see any other side. Yet if they had really
read my writings they would have known that after giving full weight to all that appeared to me well
grounded in the arguments against democracy, I unhesitatingly decided in its favour, while
recommending that it should be accompanied by such institutions as were consistent with its principle
and calculated to ward off its inconveniences: one of the chief of these remedies being Proportional
Representation, on which scarcely any of the Conservatives gave me any support. Some Tory
expectations appear to have been founded on the approbation I had expressed of plural voting, under
certain conditions: and it has been surmised that the suggestion of this sort made in one of the
Resolutions which Mr. Disraeli introduced into the House preparatory to his Reform Bill (a suggestion
which meeting with no favour he did not press) may have been occasioned by what I had written on the
point: but if so, it was forgotten that I had made it an express condition that the privilege of a plurality
of votes should be annexed to education, not to property, and even so, had approved of it only on the
supposition of universal suffrage. How utterly inadmissible such plural voting would be under the
suffrage given by the present Reform Act, is proved, to any who could otherwise doubt it, by the very
small weight which the working classes are found to possess in elections even under the law which
gives no more votes to any one elector than to any other.
While I thus was far more obnoxious to the Tory interest, and to many Conservative Liberals than I
had formerly been, the course I pursued in Parliament had by no means been such as to make Liberals
generally at all enthusiastic in my support. It has already been mentioned, how large a proportion of my
prominent appearances had been on questions on which I differed from most of the Liberal party or
about which they cared little, and how few occasions there had been on which the line I took was such
as could lead them to attach any great value to me as an organ of their opinions. I had moreover done
things which had excited, in many minds, a personal prejudice against me. Many were offended by
what they called the persecution of Mr. Eyre: and still greater offence was taken at my sending a
subscription to the election expenses of Mr. Bradlaugh. Having refused to be at any expense for my own
election, and having had all its expenses defrayed by others, I felt under a peculiar obligation to
subscribe in my turn where funds were deficient for candidates whose election was desirable. I
accordingly sent subscriptions to nearly all the working class candidates, and among others to Mr.
Bradlaugh. He had the support of the working classes; having heard him speak I knew him to be a man
of ability, and he had proved that he was the reverse of a demagogue by placing himself in strong
opposition to the prevailing opinion of the democratic party on two such important subjects as
Malthusianism and Personal Representation. Men of this sort, who while sharing the democratic
feelings of the working classes, judged political questions for themselves and had courage to assert
their individual convictions against popular opposition, were needed, as it seemed to me, in Parliament,
and I did not think that Mr. Bradlaugh’s anti-religious opinions (even though he had been intemperate
in the expression of them) ought to exclude him. In subscribing, however, to his election, I did what
would have been highly imprudent if I had been at liberty to consider only the interests of my own
reelection; and, as might be expected, the utmost possible use, both fair and unfair, was made of this
act of mine, to stir up the electors of Westminster against me. To these various causes, combined with
an unscrupulous use of the usual pecuniary and other influences on the side of my Tory competitor
while none were used on my side, it is to be ascribed that I failed at my second election after having
succeeded at the first. No sooner was the result of the election known than I received three or four
invitations to become a candidate for other constituencies, chiefly counties; but even if success could
have been expected, and this without expense, I was not disposed to deny myself the relief of returning
to private life. I had no cause to feel humiliated at my rejection by the electors; and if I had, the feeling
would have been far outweighed by the numerous expressions of regret which I received from all sorts
of persons and places, and in a most marked degree from those members of the liberal party in
Parliament with whom I had been accustomed to act.
Since that time little has occurred which there is need to commemorate in this place. I returned to my
old pursuits and to the enjoyment of a country life in the South of Europe; alternating twice a year with
a residence of some weeks or months in the neighbourhood of London. I have written various articles in
periodicals (chiefly in my friend Mr. Morley’s Fortnightly Review), have made a small number of
speeches on public occasions, especially at the meetings of the Women’s Suffrage Society, have
published the “Subjection of Women,” written some years before, with some additions by my daughter
and myself, and have commenced the preparation of matter for future books, of which it will be time to
speak more particularly if I live to finish them. Here, therefore, for the present, this Memoir may close.

1 The steps in my mental growth for which I was indebted to her were far from being those which a person wholly uninformed
on the subject would probably suspect. It might be supposed, for instance, that my strong convictions on the complete equality
in all legal, political, social and domestic relations, which ought to exist between men and women, may have been adopted or
learnt from her. This was so far from being the fact, that those convictions were among the earliest results of the application of
my mind to political subjects, and the strength with which I held them was, as I believe, more than anything else, the
originating cause of the interest she felt in me. What is true is, that until I knew her, the opinion was, in my mind, little more
than an abstract principle. I saw no more reason why women should be held in legal subjection to other people, than why men
should. I was certain that their interests required fully as much protection as those of men, and were quite as little likely to
obtain it without an equal voice in making the laws by which they are to be bound. But that perception of the vast practical
bearings of women’s disabilities which found expression in the book on the Subjection of Women, was acquired mainly through
her teaching. But for her rare knowledge of human nature and comprehension of moral and social influences, though I should
doubtless have held my present opinions I should have had a very insufficient perception of the mode in which the
consequences of the inferior position of women intertwine themselves with all the evils of existing society and with all the
difficulties of human improvement. I am indeed painfully conscious how much of her best thoughts on the subject I have failed
to reproduce, and how greatly that little treatise falls short of what would have been if she had put on paper her entire mind on
this question, or had lived to revise and improve, as she certainly would have done, my imperfect statement of the case.
2 The only person from whom I received any direct assistance in the preparation of the “System of Logic” was Mr. Bain, since
so justly celebrated for his philosophical writings. He went carefully through the manuscript before it was sent to press, and
enriched it with a great number of additional examples and illustrations from science; many of which, as well as some detached
remarks of his own in confirmation of my logical views, I inserted nearly in his own words.
My obligations to Comte were only to his writings—to the part which had then been published of his “Cours de Philosophie
Positive”: and as has been seen from what I have said in the Narrative, the amount of these obligations is far less than has
sometimes been asserted. The first volume, which contains all the fundamental doctrines of the book, was substantially
complete before I had seen Comte’s treatise. I derived from him many valuable thoughts, conspicuously in the chapter on
Hypotheses and in the view taken of the logic of algebra: but it is only in the concluding Book, on the Logic of the Moral
Sciences, that I owe to him any radical improvement in my conception of the application of logical methods. This improvement I
have stated and characterized in a former part of the present Memoir.
3 A few dedicatory lines, acknowledging what the book owed to her, were prefixed to some of the presentation copies of the
Political Economy on its first publication. Her dislike of publicity alone prevented their insertion in the other copies of the work.
4 The saying of this true hero, after his capture, that he was worth more for hanging than for any other purpose, reminds one,
by its combination of wit, wisdom, and self devotion, of Sir Thomas More.
5 The first was in answer to Mr. Lowe’s reply to Mr. Bright on the Cattle Plague Bill, and was thought at the time to have
helped to get rid of a provision in the Government measure which would have given to landholders a second indemnity, after
they had already been once indemnified for the loss of some of their cattle by the increased selling price of the remainder.
6 Among the most active members of the Committee were Mr. P. A. Taylor, M.P., always faithful and energetic in every
assertion of the principles of liberty; Mr. Goldwin Smith, Mr. Frederic Harrison, Mr. Slack, Mr. Chamerovzow, Mr. Shaen, and
Mr. Chesson, the Honorary Secretary of the Association.
7 One which deserves particular mention is a letter respecting the Habitual Criminals Act and the functions of a police
generally, written in answer to a private application for my opinion, but which got into the newspapers and excited some notice.
This letter which was full of original and valuable thoughts was entirely my daughter’s. The fertility and aptness which
distinguishes her practical conceptions of the adaptation of means to ends is such as I can never hope to rival.
 APPENDIX
ADDITIONAL TEXTUAL MATERIAL

Abbreviations
JS Jack Stillinger, The Early Draft of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography (Urbana, Ill.:
University of Illinois Press, 1961)
CWi Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. i, ed. John Robson and Jack Stillinger (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1981)
HMC Mill Autobiography, ed. Jack Stillinger (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969; Oxford
University Press, 1971)
R [+ number] rejected leaves of the Early Draft MS that are cited in JS and CW i
[1] p. 6 conduct than which nothing . . . he strenuously upheld: the Early Draft continues with an
indirect reference to Mill’s mother: ‘and to which he had not, and never could have supposed
that he had, the inducements of kindred intellect, tastes, or pursuits’ ( JS, 36; CW i. 6; HMC, 4).
[2] p. 6 holding, as he did, opinions: the Early Draft adds ‘of extreme democracy, and what is called
infidelity’ ( JS, 36; CW i. 6).
[3] p. 16 I have felt ever since . . . philosophic conjectures: the Early Draft omits this sentence,
including instead: ‘and I have ever felt myself, beyond any modern that I know of except my
father and perhaps beyond even him, a pupil of Plato, and cast in the mould of his dialectics’ (
JS, 48; CW i. 24; HMC, 15).
[4] p. 22 I suppose I acquired this bad habit . . . respect for them: in a variant of the Early Draft Mill
adds that he probably acquired ‘this detestable habit’ of contradicting things said on topics
about which he knew nothing whatsoever from ‘being on the one hand, accustomed to lay down
the law to my younger sisters, and having no other companions to withstand me, and on the
other from having been encouraged’ ( JS, 56; CW i. 36).
[5] p. 22 My father . . . his presence: in an earlier draft, deleted following Harriet Taylor Mill’s
markings, Mill commented: ‘My mother did tax me with it, but for her remonstrances I never
had the slightest regard’ ( JS, 56; CW i. 36; HMC, 21).
[6] p. 24 He had not . . . effects without causes: in deleted passages on rejected leaves (R23–5) of the
Early Draft Mill speaks more specifically of ‘the very considerable drawbacks’ that attended his
education, drawbacks ‘which have pursued me through life’. ‘I grew up with great inaptness in
the common affairs of every day life. I was far longer than children generally are before I could
put on my clothes. I know not how many years passed before I could tie a knot. My articulation
was long imperfect; one letter, r, I could not pronounce until I was nearly sixteen. I never could,
nor can I now, do anything requiring the smallest manual dexterity, but I never put even a
common share of the exercise of understanding into practical things. I was continually
acquiring odd or disagreeable tricks which I very slowly and imperfectly got rid of. I was,
besides, utterly inobservant: I was, as my father continually told me, like a person who had not
the organs of sense: my eyes and ears seemed of no use to me, so little did I see or hear what
was before me, and so little, even of what I did see or hear, did I observe and remember. My
father was the extreme opposite in all these particulars: his senses and his mental faculties
were always on the alert; he carried decision and energy of character in his whole manner and
into every action of like: and this, as much as his talents, contributed to the great impression
which he always made upon those with whom he came into personal contact. The education he
gave me was, however, considered in itself, much more fitted for training me to know rather
than to do. Not that he was unaware of my defects; both as a boy and as a youth I was
incessantly smarting under his severe admonitions on the subject. He could not endure
stupidity, nor feeble and lax habits, in whatever manner displayed, and I was perpetually
exciting his anger by manifestations of them. From the earliest time I can remember he used to
reproach me, and most truly, with a general habit of inattention; owing to which, he said, I was
constantly acquiring bad habits, and never breaking myself of them; was constantly forgetting
what I ought to remember, and judging and acting like a person devoid of common sense; and
which would make me, he said, grow up a mere oddity, looked down upon by everybody, and
unfit for all the common purposes of life. It was not, therefore, from any insensibility or
tolerance on his part towards such faults, that my education, considered in this particular, must
be regarded as a failure. Neither do I see any necessary tendency in his plan of education to
produce those effects. No doubt, they may have had some connexion with the fact, otherwise
most salutary, of my being educated at home, and not at school, among other boys, and having
no encouragement to practice bodily exercises, from which boys in general derive their earliest
lessons of practical skill and contrivance. It must not however be supposed that play, or time for
it was refused me. Though no holidays were allowed, lest the habit of work should be broken,
and taste for idleness acquired, I had abundant leisure in every day to amuse myself: but my
amusement being solitary or with children younger than myself, gave little stimulus to either
 bodily or mental activity There were wanting, in addition to the book-lessons which were the
staple of my instruction, well devised practical lessons, exercising the hands, and the head
directing the hands, and necessitating careful observation, and adaptation of means to ends. I
had also the great misfortune of having, in domestic matters, everything done for me.
Circumstanced as I was, nothing but being thrown as much as possible, in daily matters, upon
my own powers of contriving and of executing could have given me the proper use of my
faculties for the occasions of life. This discipline, I presume my father did not see the necessity
of; and it would never have occurred to my mother, who without misgivings of any sort worked
from morning till night for her children.’ These comments went through three versions before
being excised on Harriet Taylor Mill’s strong advice. They were reintroduced in this final
paragraph of the chapter in the Columbia MS. His repeated attempts to include some mention
of it, and the bitterness of some of his language (references to ungainliness, awkwardness, and
‘a thoroughly ineffective and bungling manner’ occur in one deleted sentence), bear witness to
strong feeling in the matter ( JS, 178–82; CW i. 608–10; HMC, 23–4).
[7] p. 32 If we consider further that . . . by his severity: in place of this section, the Early Draft reads:
‘In an atmosphere of tenderness and affection he would have been tender and affectionate; but
his ill assorted marriage and his asperities of temper disabled him from making such an
atmosphere. It was one of the most unfavourable of the moral agencies which acted on me in
my boyhood, that mine was not an education of love but of fear’ ( JS, 66; CW i. 52).
In addition, there are the following two paragraphs in leaves rejected for the Early Draft (R31–7) that
enlarge on this and some other drawbacks: ‘I once heard him say, that there was always the
greatest sympathy between him and his children until the time of lessons began but that the
lessons always destroyed it. Certainly his children till six or seven years old always liked him
and were happy in his presence, and he liked them and had pleasure in talking to them and in
interesting and amusing them; and it is equally true that after the lessons began, fear of his
severity sooner or later swallowed up all other feelings towards him. This is true only of the
elder children: with the younger he followed an entirely different system, to the great comfort
of the later years of his life. But in respect to what I am here concerned with, the moral
agencies which acted on myself, it must be mentioned as a most baneful one, that my father’s
children neither loved him, nor, with any warmth of affection, any one else. I do not mean that
things were worse in this respect than they are in most English families; in which genuine
affection is altogether exceptional; what is usually found being more or less of an attachment of
mere habit, like that to inanimate objects, and a few conventional proprieties of phrase and
demonstration. I believe there is less personal affection in England than in any other country of
which I know anything, and I give my father’s family not as peculiar in this respect but only as a
too faithful exemplification of the ordinary fact. That rarity in England, a really warm hearted
mother, would in the first place have made my father a totally different being, and in the second
would have made the children grow up loving and being loved. But my mother with the very
best intentions, only knew how to pass her life in drudging for them. Whatever she could do for
them she did, and they liked her, because she was kind to them, but to make herself loved,
looked up to, or even obeyed, required qualities which she unfortunately did not possess.
‘I thus grew up in the absence of love and in the presence of fear: and many and indelible are
the effects of this bringing-up, in the stunting of my moral growth. One of these, which it would
have required a quick sensibility and impulsiveness of natural temperament to counteract, was
habitual reserve. Without knowing or believing that I was reserved, I grew up with an instinct
of closeness. I had no one to whom I desired to express everything which I felt; and the only
person I was in communication with, to whom I looked up, I had too much fear of, to make the
communication to him of any act or feeling ever a matter of frank impulse or spontaneous
inclination. Instead of a character whose instinct and habit are openness, but who can
command reserve when duty or prudence require it, my circumstances tended to form a
character, close and reserved from habit and want of impulse, not from will, and therefore,
while destitute of the frank communicativeness which wins and deserves sympathy, yet
continually failing in reticence where it is suitable and desirable’ ( JS, 183–4; CW i. 611–13;
HMC, 33–4).
[8] p. 34 in a period of Bentham’s life . . . subsequently: rejected leaves for the Early Draft (R34–5) add
the following: ‘When we lived in Newington Green my father used to dine with Mr. Bentham (at
the very considerable distance of Queen’s Square Place) every Tuesday. During each of seven or
eight years Mr Bentham passed some part of the year in the country, and my father with the
whole or part of his family (I always being one) used to accompany him’ ( JS, 67; CW i. 54–5).
[9] p. 34 my father rented from him, in Queen Square, Westminster: in the rejected leaf for the Early
Draft (R35), Mill is concerned to clarify his father’s financial relationship with Bentham, having
moved adjacent to Bentham to a house rented by him, and that looked into Mr Bentham’s
garden: ‘he allowed my father to occupy at the rent he himself paid for it. In this house we lived
until 1831. My father paid the rent direct to the head landlord, so Mr Bentham’s participation
was simply equivalent to being security for the rent. I am particular in mentioning these
circumstances because statements have been made exaggerating greatly my father’s personal
obligation to Mr Bentham. The only obligation, in money or money’s worth, which he ever, to
the best of my knowledge and belief, received from Mr Bentham, consisted of the visits to the
 country which I have mentioned, and these visits were of no remarkable length until the four
years subsequent to 1813’ ( JS, 68; CW i. 56).
[10] p. 34 falling waters: rejected leaves for the Early Draft (R36) contain a note here which was
deleted following Harriet Taylor Mill’s marking: ‘The mode of life at Ford Abbey* was the
following. Mr. Bentham and my father studied and wrote in the same large room (a different
room however in summer and in winter). My father commenced at about seven, summer and
winter: and as Mr. Bentham did not make his appearance till some time after nine, I and the
other children worked at our lessons in the same room during those two hours. The general
hour of breakfast was nine, but Mr. Bentham always breakfasted at one o’clock among his
books and papers, his breakfast being laid early in the morning on his study table. The party at
the general breakfast consisted of my father and mother, Mr. Bentham’s amanuensis for the
time being, and the visitors, if, as not unfrequently happened, any were staying in the house.
Before his one o’clock breakfast Mr. Bentham regularly went out for the same invariable walk, a
circuit of about half an hour, in which my father almost always joined him. The interval between
breakfast and this walk my father employed in hearing lessons, which when weather permitted,
was always done in walking about the grounds. The hours from one to six my father passed in
study and this was the time regularly allotted to us children for learning lessons. Six was the
dinner hour, and the remainder of the evening Mr. Bentham passed in social enjoyment, of
which he had a keen relish. I was never present on these evenings except a few times when Mr.
Bentham good-naturedly sent for me to teach me to play at chess’ ( JS, 68–9; CW i. 56–7; HMC,
36).
[11] p. 56 strengthen and improve it: in a discarded section of the Early Draft, Mill wrote: ‘My first
contribution to the review was in the second number.* In my father’s article the detailed shew-
up of the Edinburgh Review had been left unfinished, and he wished me to attempt to finish it. I
had one qualification for doing so, the strong indignation at many articles which I had read in
the course of my reading and notetaking for my father’s use. But I can now see that there was
something ridiculous in this pretension of a youth, not yet eighteen, to sit in judgment on some
of the principal writers of the time. The thing however was written and published, and what
seems strange, many if not most of its readers did not suspect that the continuation was by a
different hand from the first article. So incapable are most people, when the fond of the
thoughts is the same, and the manner imitated, to distinguish the borrowed from the original.
The article was not, could not be, anything more than a theme written on the ideas which had
been instilled into me by my teachers. The stile was bony and wiry, very unlike the writing of a
young person, but with a certain degree of vigour and of polish. No one but myself wrote any
part of it, or even corrected it; but it went through an incredible amount of elaboration from
myself under my father’s eye, he giving it back to me repeatedly part by part to be amended, or
cancelled and begun again, either to throw in more and better thoughts or to bring themout
more pointedly in the expression. I suppose that there were a few sentences that were not
rewritten with great pains and effort nearly a dozen times. The article was worth little enough
in any other respect but to me it was very valuable as practice in composition’ ( JS, 93; CW i.
96–8).
[12] p. 63 accomplish no less results: in the Early Draft Mill has: ‘I even proposed to myself to chronicle
our doings, from that early period, on the Model of Grimm’s Correspondence,* and actually for
some time kept a journal with that intention. Charles Austin had a project of a Philosophical
Dictionary, suggested by Voltaire’s, in which everything was to be spoken out freely; I entered
eagerly into it and sent three or four articles (the only ones, I believe, ever written) towards a
commencement of it. My particular companions and Charles Austin’s however did not much
associate with one another: an attempt being made to bring them together periodically at his
lodgings was soon given up, and he and I did not long travel in the same direction. The head
quarters of me and my associates was not my father’s house but Grote’s, which I very much
frequented. Every new proselyte and every one whom I hoped to make a proselyte, I took there
to be indoctrinated. Grote’s opinions were at that time very much the same both in their strong
and their weak points as those of us younger people, but he was of course very much more fully
formed, and incomparably the superior of all of us in knowledge and present abilities’ ( JS, 101;
CW i. 110).
[13] p. 65 myself in particular: a deleted line from the Early Draft continues, ‘And therefore we had at
this time no idea of real culture. In our scheme for improving human affairs we overlooked
human beings’ ( JS, 103; CW i. 112–13; HMC, 67).
[14] p. 66 sectarianism: in a deleted draft at this point he commented on how Turgot, plus passing
remarks of his father’s, ‘made me feel how injurious it is to the progress of new opinions for the
holders of them to band themselves together as a sect, call themselves by a name, and
encourage the world to hold them jointly and severally responsible for one another’ ( JS, 104;
CW i. 116).
[15] p. 77 I was in a dull state of nerves: the Early Draft reads: ‘I was, probably from physical causes
(connected perhaps merely with the time of year) in a dull state of nerves’ ( JS, 117; CW i. 137;
HMC, 80).
[16] p. 85 relapses into depression: in the Early Draft Mill wrote: ‘About Midsummer of that same year
 1828 I set out on a short walking tour: for months before I had been in my old state of gloomy
dejection though as I have already mentioned not so intense as at first; this continued the
greater part of the first day, but the walk by the side of the Thames from Reading to
Pangbourne, in one of the loveliest of summer evenings with the western sky in its most
splendid colouring before me, and the calm river, rich meadows and wooded hills encompassing
me, insensibly changed my state, and except a short interval two days later I had no return of
depression during that excursion nor for several months afterwards’ ( JS, 125; CW i. 150; HMC,
89).
[17] p. 99 missed fire altogether: in the Early Draft Mill included here, first as part of the main text, and
then as a note: ‘This was an error I frequently committed: for example, in the summer of 1832,
when the country was preparing for the first elections after the passing of the Reform Bill,* I
wrote several articles in the Examiner* in strong opposition to the exaction of pledges from
representatives. The doctrine was right in itself, and very suitable to democratic institutions
when firmly established and rooted in the habits of the people: then no doubt it would be wise
in the electors to look out the most honest and most instructed men whom they could induce to
undertake the office of legislators, and refrain from binding them beforehand to any definite
measures; but I did not sufficiently consider that the transition from bad to good institutions
was only commencing. Like many other persons at the time, I thought that we had had our
revolution; that the way was now smooth for the advance of democracy, that precautions were
henceforth chiefly required against the evils which might come from the popular side; and I
little anticipated that the coming years would require a long continuance of struggle to give
democracy even its due influence.’ In its earliest draft, Mill went on to say: ‘If my advice had
been taken the democracy would have laid down its weapons after a mere partial success. The
Examiner, I believe, lost near two hundred of its subscribers by those articles, and I much doubt
whether it gained as many by everything else that I wrote for it. The paper that I wrote for
“Spirit of the Age” did no similar damage, nor had any effect at all that I know of; except that
Carlyle . . .’ ( JS, 144; CW i. 180–1).
[18] p. 100 keenest delight: Mill’s Early Draft includes here: ‘In all this part of my life I was in such a
state of reaction against sectarianism of thought or feeling, that those in whom I recognized any
kind of superiority I did not judge or criticize at all; I estimated them by that side of their
qualities or achievements by which they were admirable and valuable to me, while whatever I
saw that seemed criticizable was not a per contra to be deducted, but was simply uncounted
and disregarded’ ( JS, 145; CW i. 182; HMC, 105).
[19] p. 102 he held at this time: Mill’s Early Draft contains the following paragraph on Mrs Austin: ‘His
wife, who was then first beginning to be known by her translations, took the principal conduct
of the active and practical part of their life: for he, though he always felt like a gentleman and
judged like a man of the world, in the good sense of both those terms, retired as far as he could
from all business or contact with worldly affairs. She laid herself out from drawing round her as
many persons of consideration or promise of consideration, as she could get, and succeeded in
getting many foreigners, some literary men and a good many young men of various
descriptions, and many who came for her remained for him. Having known me from a boy, she
made great profession of a maternal interest in me. But I never for a moment supposed that she
really cared for me: nor perhaps for anybody beyond the surface; I mean as to real feeling, not
that she was not quite ready to be friendly or serviceable. She professed Benthamite opinions
when Mr Austin professed the same, and German opinions when he turned in that direction; but
in truth, though she had considerable reading and acquirements, she never appeared to me to
have anything deserving the name opinions. If at that time she had anything capable of being so
called, and coming from her own mind, it consisted of prudential maxims for the conduct of life.
Under the influence of these she slid into the opinions agreeable to the well-to-do classes, as
soon as she saw a possibility of making any way for herself among a few people of consequence.
She cultivated blandness of manner and the ways which put people at their ease; and while she
was quite ready to listen, she always had plenty to say, though chiefly in the form of narrative
and that mainly of what had been said to her by other people. She made herself agreeable to
young men by encouraging them with professions of sympathy to talk about themselves; but I
do not think that the impression thus made lasted long with them, though she often succeeded
in retaining that degree of good will which is obtained by the appearance of good nature. The
good nature, in the sense in which that quality can be ascribed to a person of so little feeling,
was I dare say, to a certain extent genuine; but it was not inconsistent with her having, at times,
a very mischievous tongue, which sowed médisance [malicious gossip] far and wide by
expressions so guarded as almost to elude responsibility for any distinct statement’ ( JS, 147–8;
CW i. 186).
[20] p. 105 in 1830 . . . in her twenty-third year: an earlier draft, much edited and later omitted, ends
the sentence at ‘in 1830’ and continues: ‘Its origin or rather occasion was the accident of a
common acquaintance; but I have always been convinced that sooner or later, & rather sooner
than later, we should have found each other out: for both of us were at this time ardent seekers
for persons of similar opinions & of any intellectual gifts. Had our acquaintance commenced
later; had her judgment of me been first formed in mature years it would probably have been
far less favourable; but I, at whatever period of life I had known her, must always have felt her
 to be the most admirable person I had ever known, & must have made her approbation the
guiding light & her sympathy the chief object of my life, though to appreciate the greatness &
variety of her pre-eminence could only have been possible after long and intimate knowledge, to
any one not on the same exalted level as herself. To me, so inferior in nature & so widely
different in all previous discipline, a complete or adequate appreciation of her is impossible, &
such approach to it as I have made has only been the effect of a long course of education
derived from the knowledge and contemplation of her’ ( JS, 191-2; CW i. 617).
[21] p. 105 and poetic nature: Mill’s draft continued: ‘Morally she was already so perfect that even she
could not add anything to her type of perfection in after life. Every noble & beautiful quality
seemed in turn to be her leading characteristic so long as only that side of her character was
looked at. The passion of justice might have been thought to be her strongest feeling, but for
her boundless generosity & a lovingness ever ready to pour itself forth upon any or all human
beings however unlike herself, if they did but shew a capacity of making the smallest return of
feeling or even a wish to have feeling bestowed on them. Her unselfishness was not that of a
taught system of duties, but of a heart which thoroughly identified itself with the feelings of
others, & even, imaginatively investing others with an intensity of feeling equal to its own, often
took great suffering upon itself to save others from pain which would have been comparatively
small. She was by nature one of those who would have had most excuse for thinking first of
themselves, for her impulses were tenfold stronger, her pleasures and pains tenfold more
intense than those of common persons: yet to receive all pleasure & all good from the love of
others would to her have been the only congenial state, & when she took concern for herself or
asserted any claims of her own, every one felt that the impersonal love of justice was speaking
in her neither more nor less than it would have spoken in behalf of a stranger or an enemy. All
the rest of her moral characteristics were those which naturally accompany those qualities of
mind & heart. The most genuine modesty combined with the loftiest pride; a simplicity &
sincerity which was absolute, towards all who were fit to receive it; the utmost scorn of
everything mean or cowardly, & indignation at everything brutal or tyrannical, faithless or
dishonourable in conduct or character; while making the broadest distinction between acts
giving evidence of intrinsic badness of feeling & character, & those which whether in
themselves right or wrong, may be done by persons otherwise loveable or admirable. Such a
woman could not, except by the rarest destiny, be otherwise than alone in the world, especially
in a world like England’ ( JS, 192–3; CW i. 618–19).
[22] p. 106 good fortune to be admitted: Mill’s earlier draft, later omitted, continued: ‘though it was
many years before I could be said to be at all intimate with her. But from the time when I could
really call her my friend I wished for no other.
‘I have never known any intellect in man or woman which, taken from all in all, could be
compared to hers. All other persons when looked at besides hers seem to be but special talents,
—a peculiar knack acquired by study & practice of dealing with some particular thing. On all
the subjects on which she thinks, that is on all the great subjects of speculation & and on all
near subjects of important practice, she goes to the very heart and marrow of the matter,
cleaving through at one stroke all entanglements of verbal sophistry & haze of confused
conceptions. Alike in the highest regions of philosophy & in the smallest practical concerns of
daily life her mind is always the same perfect instrument; always seizing the essential idea or
principle, the cause on which the effect depends, the precise end, & the precise obstacle to its
attainment’ ( JS, 193–4; CW i. 619).
[23] p. 106 she ultimately became : Mill’s earlier draft, later omitted, continued: ‘But if I were to say in
what above all she is preeminent, it is in her profound knowledge of human nature. To know all
its depths and elevations she has only to study herself; her knowledge of its varieties she owes
to an observation which overlooks nothing, & an activity of mind which converts everything into
knowledge. Hence, while she sees further than, as it appears to me, any one else has done into
the possibilities and capabilities of the future, the thoroughness of her insight into &
comprehension of human beings as they are preserves her from all miscalculations or illusions’
( JS, 194–5; CW i. 619–20).
[24] p. 106 rulers of mankind : Mill’s earlier draft, later omitted, continued: ‘Everything in my later
writings to which any serious value can be attached, everything either far reaching in
speculation or genial in tone & feeling & sympathetic with humanity, everything to which
Political Economy in particular owes its reputation & which is thought to distinguish it to its
advantage from other treatises under the same name, is in all essentials not my writing but
hers: & still more will be the case with what remains to be written in order to bring our
opinions fully before the world.
‘It is less obvious what even in the immaturity of her powers & her experience, could attract
her to me, than me to her; or what, peculiarly valuable to her, she could find in such a type of
character as mine: but a thorough agreement in opinion is to any one, especially to a young
person opposed to the reigning opinions, always a support, especially when the concurring
minds have been very differently formed & trained & have arrived at their conclusions by very
different paths. To her who had 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 & reasoning. It was also a strong link between
us that we felt alike on that most vital question, the social position of women: whose
subordination, by law and custom, to men, we regarded as the last remaining form of primeval
tyranny & serfage, & whose equal admissibility to all occupations & equal participation in all
rights, we deemed to not only to be the clear dictate of justice, but to be an essential condition
of any great improvement in mankind either individually or socially. It would give a totally false
idea of her character if I were not to say, that her strong feeling on this point was the effect of
principle, & not of any desire on her own part to mingle in the turmoil & strife of the
occupations which the dominant sex has hitherto reserved to itself. Though her education had
been masculine, her personal habits & tastes were all peculiarly feminine; her personal habits
& inclinations all pointed to a life not of self-help or self-assertion but of loving reliance on the
love & care of others. The importance she attached to the social independence & equal rights of
women, arose from two of the principal features of her character, her love of justice and her
sense of dignity. How indeed can either of these feelings, when a genuine outgrowth of the
individual nature, & not a matter of arbitrary convention as much as any of the rules of
deportment, tolerate that a human being should be marked out from birth to be the mere
appendage of some other? The most capable of the abnegation of any separate self, & merging
of the entire being with that of another, which is the characteristic of strong passion or rather,
which strong passion in its most passionate moment strives to realize, are precisely those who
would disdain to be the objects of this self-annihilating feeling unless the renunciation of any
separate existence is equally complete on both sides & unless it comes from spontaneous
impulses of individual feeling & not from social ordinances prescribing that one half of all
human character shall develop itself in this way or have no development at all. But men have
first decreed that women shall have no passions except personal passions, & have then erected
one of the natural promptings of strong personal passion into the ideal standard of womanly
perfection, from which they endeavour to reap a double advantage: first, the pleasure, the
convenience & the vanity of being all in all to their nearest companion without her being all in
all to them; & next that in the pursuit of their objects they have not only not to contend with
women as competitors but can exploit their enthusiasm & their quick practical sagacity for the
interests of their own success. And then because the feelings of women being denied any other
outlet, flow into the channel dug for them with a force proportioned to the capacity of strong
feeling with which they are naturally endowed, the inference is drawn that this is the channel
demanded by their own nature & that a woman who claims admission to any other, does so
because she has not the feelings which, by this kind of practical petitio principia* have been
decided to be womanly. If the commonest laws of human nature did not prove it, my wife is a
sufficient proof by example that whoever has the greatest & fullest measure of the feelings that
produce self devotion to another or others, is also the best qualified for any other field of action,
great or small, & must ever protest inwardly (unless her nature itself is bowed to the yoke of
her circumstances) against the stupid & selfish social arrangements which compel her, if she
acts at all, however the planning & originating mind & the commanding faculties may be on her
side, to act solely through another.
‘The influence of this most precious friendship upon my own development was of a two-fold
nature. The first, & that of which I earliest reaped the full benefit, was her effect on my ideal
standard of character. My conception of the highest worth of a human being was immeasurably
enlarged & exalted, while at the same time this larger ideal was filled and satisfied by her in a
manner in which no one had ever before satisfied even the far inferior ideal which I had
conceived previously. This first kind of influence was not so properly her influence, as the effect
on my own thoughts & feelings of new experience & new subjects of contemplation. The second
was the direct operation of her intellect & character upon mine, & this came to its full height
only gradually with the increasing maturity of her own thoughts and powers. But at a very early
period of my knowledge of her she became to me a living type of the most admirable kind of
human being. I had always wished for a friend whom I could admire wholly, without reservation
& restriction, & I had now found one. To render this possible, it was necessary that the object of
my admiration should be of a type very different from my own; should be a character
preeminently of feeling, combined however as I had not in any other instance known it to be,
with a vigorous & bold speculative intellect. Hers was not only all this but the perfection of a
poetic & artistic nature. With how eminent a practical capacity these endowments were
combined, I only understood by degrees; but the rest was enough without this to make me feel
that in any true classification of human beings such as I are only fit to be the subjects &
ministers of such as her; & that the best thing I, in particular, could do for the world, would be
to serve as a sort of prose interpreter of her poetry, giving a logical exposition to those who
have more understanding than feeling, of the reasonableness of that which she either knew by
the experience or divined by the intuition of one of the richest & strongest of natures guided by
the most unselfish & highminded of characters.
‘Accordingly the first years of my friendship with her were, in respect of my own
development, mainly years of poetic culture. It is hardly necessary to say that I am not now
speaking of written poetry, either metrical or otherwise; though I did cultivate this taste as well
as a taste for paintings & sculptures, & did read with enthusiasm her favorite poets, especially
 the one she placed far above all others, Shelley. But this was merely accessary. The real poetic
culture was, that my faculties, such as they were, became more & more attuned to the beautiful
& elevated, in all kinds, & especially in human feeling & character & more capable of vibrating
in unison with it. In the same proportion, & by natural consequence, I became less excitable by
anything else. All society & personal intercourse became burthensome to me except with those
in whom I recognized, along with more or less sympathy of opinion, at least a strong taste for
elevated & poetic feeling, if not the feeling itself. I gradually withdrew myself from much of the
society which I had frequented; though I still retained unabated interest in radical politics &
kept up my connexion with such of the rising or promising politicians on the radical side, as I
had ever been intimate with. I even became more involved in political & literary relations than I
had ever been before, through the foundation, as I have already mentioned, by Sir William
Molesworth of a new radical review, to be entirely under my direction’ ( JS, 198–200; CW i. 620–
4).
[25] p. 111 we had expected too much from them : Mill’s first draft is much more critical. He argues
that: ‘Nobody disappointed my father and me more than Grote because no one else had so
much in his power. We had long known him fainthearted, ever despairing of success, thinking
all obstacles gigantic; but the Reform Bill excitement seemed for a time to make a new man of
him: he had grown hopeful, and seemed as if he could almost become energetic. When brought
face to face however with an audience opposed to his opinions, when called on to beat up
against the stream, he was found wanting. . . . If his courage and energy had been equal to the
circumstances, or to his knowledge and abilities, the history of those ten years of relapse into
Toryism might have been very different’ ( JS, 155; CW i. 202; HMC, 117).
[26] p. 128 philosophy on its side : an early version here identifies this as the termination of what Mill
refers to as the second period of his writing, distinguishing it from the first, associated with the
Westminster Review. He goes on to note that the Principles of Political Economy (1848) and ‘all
subsequent writing’ are said to belong to a third stage ‘characterised by the predominating
influence of my wife’s intellect and character. Up to this time I have spoken of my writings and
opinions in the first person singular because the writings, though (after we became intimate)
mostly revised by her, and freed by her judgment from much that was faulty, as well as enriched
by her suggestions, were not, like subsequent ones, largely and in their most important features
the direct product of her own mind: and the opinions, though in a state of continued growth,
were not generically different from those which I had gradually wrought out on emerging from
the narrowness of my original Benthamism. But in the great advance which I have since made
in opinion I was wholly her pupil. Her bolder and more powerful mind arrived before mine at
every conclusion which was derived from a more thorough comprehension of the present and
insight into the future; and but for her intellect and her high moral feelings leading me on, it is
doubtful if I should ever have advanced much further than the point I had now reached’ ( JS,
169; CW i. 234–5).
[27] p. 129 nor therefore on herself : the Early Draft continues: ‘and we disdained, as every person not
a slave of his animal appetites must do, the abject notion that the strongest and tenderest
friendship cannot exist between a man and a woman without a sensual relation, or that any
impulses of that lower character cannot be put aside when regard for the feelings of others, or
even when only prudence and personal dignity require it’ ( JS, 171; CW i. 236; HMC, 137). This
was followed in a still earlier version by: ‘Certain it is that our life, during those years, would
have borne the strictest scrutiny, and though for the sake of others we not only made this
sacrifice but the much greater one of not living together, we did not feel under an obligation of
sacrificing intimate friendship and frequent companionship which was the chief good of life and
the principal object in it, to me, and, conscious as I am how little I was worthy of such regard, I
may say also to her’ ( JS, 171; CW i. 237).
[28] p. 135 a partnership of our entire existence : the first draft continues, ‘Before as well as since, I
have owed the best part of what I was and did to her inspiration and often to her direct
assistance; and so long as any of my writings subsequent to the Logic are read or remembered,
I hope it will be borne in mind that to her intellect and character they are mainly indebted for
whatever in them deserves remembrance’ ( JS, 177; CW i. 246). The Early Draft concludes with
those words.
[29] p. 138 general system of thought : Mill’s extended footnote rewrites and slightly extends one
section of the earlier manuscript, adding a reference to Mill’s Subjection of Women but
excluding the following statement: ‘Without her I should probably always have held my present
opinions on the question, but it would never have become to me as, with the deepest conviction,
it now is, the great question of the coming time: the most urgent interest of human progress,
involving the removal of a barrier that stops the way, and renders all the improvement which
can be effected while it remains, slight and superficial. I learnt from her nearly all I know of the
details of the subject; the opinion itself I held as strongly, though less according to knowledge,
before I had ever seen her’ (CW i. 251; Yale Fragment).
[30] p. 142 When two persons . . . than was properly their due : an earlier draft of this section of the
text exists in what is known as the Yale Fragment (being held at the University Library at Yale,
NJ). The later text largely covers the same material, although at greater length.
[31] p. 167A note in the hand of Mill’s stepdaughter Helen Taylor adds at this point: ‘At one time I
reckoned that threats of Assassination where [sic] received at least once a week: and I
remarked that threatening letters were always especially numerous by Tuesday morning’s post.
I inferred that they were meditated during the Sunday’s leisure and posted on the Mondays. It
might be worth while to collect evidence as to the proportions of Crime Committed on the
different days of the week. It may be observed however that in England Sunday is generally
used for all kinds of letter-writing, innocent as well as guilty’ (note in Columbia MS).
[32] p. 172 not a few passages . . . were hers : in the Columbia MS Mill inserted and then deleted the
following at this point: ‘I must add that whatever has been done by us for the diffusion of our
opinions and of our principles of action by private intercourse and the direct influence of mind
over mind, has been almost wholly her work, my own capacities of the kind being almost
confined to my writings: and no one but myself knows at how great a sacrifice both of her
personal tastes and inclinations and of her health that function was performed by her’ (CW i.
287; HMC, 181–2).
 EXPLANATORY NOTES
Mill’s references to individuals and books are so frequent that they are listed separately in the Index
and Glossary of Persons.

ABBREVIATIONS
CW Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson, 33 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963–91).
JS The Early Draft of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, ed. Jack Stillinger (Urbana, Ill.: University
of Illinois Press, 1961).

AUTOBIOGRAPHY
5 and the one . . . no opportunity of knowing: Mill is referring to his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill.
But a motive . . . were not written: these last few lines are a later addition. And the first part of the
paragraph is also not integral to the first draft but appears on a separate sheet.
6 appointment in the India House: James Mill worked as an official in the offices of the East India
Company, initially with the formal title of ‘assistant to the examiner of India correspondences’ in
1819, and rising to the post of chief examiner in 1830; a similar trajectory was followed by John
Stuart Mill. The chief examiner was responsible for supervising all despatches to and
communication with the company’s executives in India.
conduct than which . . . he strenuously upheld: an implicit reference to James Mill’s strongly
Malthusian views, with which John Stuart Mill was also sympathetic.
7 The Anabasis: Xenophon’s account of Cyrus’ expedition against his elder brother Artaxerxes II,
which enlisted Greek troops under Xenophon, and is commonly known today by the title The
Persian Expedition.
the first six dialogues . . . of Plato . . . I should understand it: these are commonly taken to include
Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito—and Mill also mentions Theaetetus—but chronology is a vexed
question in Plato scholarship, with greater consensus about the late dialogues than the order of
early and middle dialogues. And while he mentions the ‘common arrangement’, in fact there is wide
variation in what was or was not included. See also Mill’s essays on the dialogues in CW xi. 37–239.
8 Newington Green: an area of north-east London that straddles Hackney and Islington.
Hornsey: a village some 3 miles NNW of Newington Green.
8 Annual Register . . . 1788: ‘Annual Register: A View of the History, Politicks and Literature of the
Year’, an annual periodical with extensive coverage of domestic and international affairs first
published in 1758 by Dodsley and edited by Edmund Burke.
the American War . . . the English side: the American War of Independence (or American
Revolution) between 1776 and 1783, to secure the independence of Britain’s American colonies
from British rule.
9 Beaver’s African Memoranda: Philip Beaver (1766–1813), naval captain, author of African
Memoranda: Relative to an Attempt to Establish a British Settlement on the Island of Bulama, on
the Western Coast of Africa, in the year 1792 (London, 1805). Now generally referred to as Bolama,
the island lies off the coast of Guinea-Bissau.
Arabian Nights: a collection of Arab tales published in England first in 1706; a 5-volume edition was
published in London in 1802.
10 Anacreon: Anacreon (c.570–c.490 BCE) was a lyric poet. Mill may have been familiar with
Anacreon’s works from an early eighteenth-century edition published in Cambridge, but he may
also be referring to Anacreontea, a collection of poems that refer to and are derivative of Anacreon
and were attributed to him by Stephanus in 1554.
Anthology: a collection of sixteen books of epigrams from the ancient Greek derived from two
Byzantine compilations published in 4 vols. with 9 vols. of index and commentary in Leipzig
between 1794 and 1814.
11 Ancient Universal History: identified in CWi as Anon., An Universal History from the Earliest Time
to the present, 7 vols. (London 1736–44).
Agrarian Laws . . . Roman democratic party: Agrarian Laws were Roman laws directed to limit
individual landholding and to ensure its distribution to citizens who served in war. The policy is
closely associated with plebeian struggles against aristocratic domination, which is a long-running
feature of Roman history from at least the fourth century BCE and reached a peak in the social and
civil wars associated with Gaius and Tiberius Gracchi (c.133–120 BCE) and with Cornelius Sulla (90–
88 BCE).
14 Organon . . . Posterior Analytics: the ‘Prior Analytics’ and ‘Posterior Analytics’ are parts of
Aristotle’s Organon.
Mr. Wallace . . . Sandhurst: William Wallace (1768–1843), a fellow Scot from a humble background
who became a military mathematician, first at Great Marlow and then at Sandhurst when the
 Military Academy moved there.
16 intellectus sibi permissus: the mind left to itself—a phrase from Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum
(1620), I. ii. 20, 21.
elenchus: the practice of close dialectical reasoning practised by Socrates in the earlier dialogues
of Plato, epitomized in Crito and Gorgias, the latter of which (along with the opening book of the
Republic) points to its limitations as a source of knowledge.
vague generalities: Robson (CW i. 25) points to this as a phrase, used elsewhere by Mill, derived
from Bentham’s The Book of Fallacies, in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. Bowring, 11 vols.
(Edinburgh, 1843), ii. 440–8 (pt. 4, ch. 2).
17 Hindoo part . . . English part: see James Mill, History of India, 6 vols. (2nd edn., London, 1820),
vols. i and ii, bk. ii, chs. 1–10 ‘Of the Hindus’; vols. iii–vi, bk. iv, chs. 1–10 ‘From the establishment,
on legislative authority, of one exclusive company in the year 1708 . . .’.
19 no relaxation . . . my education: the terms of his father’s employment required his attendance at the
office from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Ricardo . . . political economy: David Ricardo (1772–1823), author of On the Principles of Political
Economy and Taxation (1817) and a close associate of James Mill and Jeremy Bentham.
compte rendu: report.
20 I left England . . . year: Mill went to stay with Jeremy Bentham’s brother Sir Samuel Bentham
(1757–1831) at his home in the south of France near Toulouse, from June 1820 until July 1821. It is
clear that here a less disciplined, more adventurous, and more physically demanding range of
educational possibilities were opened up to the young Mill.
26 Sabæan, or Manichæan theory . . . Principle: Sabaean from a baptizing Jewish sect of the first
century, subsequently influenced by Islam and enduring in a form of Gnosticism; Manichaeanism
deriving from the Iranian religion founded by Mani in third-century Iran.
ne plus ultra of wickedness: nothing more wicked.
29 “Choice of Hercules”: the choice between vice and virtue.
30 “Socratici viri”: followers of Socrates.
justice, temperance . . . exertion: an extended set of qualities for Plato’s Socrates who concentrates
on justice, wisdom, courage, and moderation.
the Stoic, the Epicurean, and the Cynic . . . sense of the word: Stoicism advocates a life of virtue in
accordance with nature; Epicureanism, a view of the good life as involving self-mastery and the
achievement of the higher pleasures; and Cynics (such as Diogenes), a life according to nature, with
the doctrine later evolving into Stoic philosophy. Mill’s comment about the ancient, not the modern,
understanding was added to a later draft, and is indicative of the very schematic and often
misleading representation of classical philosophy by his contemporaries.
34 Ford Abbey: a former Cistercian Abbey, now in Dorset, but with a postal address in Chard,
Somerset.
riant and . . . umbrageous: cheerful and shady.
shortly after the peace: this is ambiguous between October 1814 and July 1815. Both periods of
peace following defeat of Napoleon were celebrated, but the most widely celebrated peace was that
of 1814.
35 Edgeworth kind: a reference to the qualities celebrated in Maria Edgeworth’s Moral Tales for Young
People (1801).
37 old friend of my father’s: Joseph Lowe. See Index and Glossary of People.
38 Condillac’s . . . Cours d’Etudes: Étienne Bonot Condillac (1714–80), philosopher. Mill refers to his
Traité des sensations (Paris, 1754) and Cours d’études (although it seems likely that Mill is
confusing this with De l’art de penser from his Œuvres complètes, or more generally with the first
four books of the Œuvres.
French Revolution: the constitutionalizing of the French monarchy by the Estates General in 1789,
followed by the gradual breakdown of the political order and the establishment of a revolutionary
republic in the autumn of 1792, the execution of King Louis XVI (and his wife Marie Antoinette) in
1793, and the establishment of the Terror under Robespierre, who was in turn guillotined in 1794.
Girondist in an English Convention: the dominant faction in the French Revolution until May 1793
when they were excluded from the National Convention and then arrested in June and executed in
October and November. Although now seen as liberal intellectuals, the Girondins were also major
proponents of war with the European powers. Tarnished by their role in government from 1791,
they were also associated with a less centralized and more federal political system.
39 barbarism called English Law: James Mill and Jeremy Bentham shared the view that the mix of
common law and statute law in England was chaotic and sought a codification of law.
“the greatest happiness”: one of the core interpretations of utilitarianism is that the greatest
happiness of the greatest number ought to guide decision-making. It was originally formulated by
Bentham, but variants appear earlier in a range of writings. Bentham’s contribution was its
systematic application across a wide range of areas of law and policy.
Platonic model: Mill refers to Plato’s use of the dialogue form.
 What thus impressed me was the chapter: see chapter 3 of Louis Dumont (ed.), Traités de
législation (Paris, 1802), vol. i. This appears in its English version in An Introduction to the
Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. 2, and especially in the long footnote to sec. XIV (in The
Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh: W. Tait, 1838–43), i. 8–9) and in The
Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham: An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation,
ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart (London: Athlone Press, 1970), 24–9.
Classification of Offences . . . in Dumont’s rédaction: Dumont’s Traités . . . (1802), Principes du
code penal, Première partie, Des Delits ii. 240–307.
40 study of botany . . . in France: George Bentham, the son of Sir Samuel Bentham who was with Mill
during his stay in France and was his senior by several years, was a keen botanist.
42 Philip Beauchamp: a pseudonym for George Grote. See Index and Glossary of People.
43 Lacedæmonians . . . Attica: in Athens’ war with Sparta from 431, Pericles dictated a policy of
keeping within the walls of Athens, draining the enemy’s resources in a siege, and using sea power
rather than fighting a land battle with the enemy.
46 Union Debating Society: the Cambridge Union Society at the University of Cambridge was founded
in 1815.
47 haud passibus æquis: ‘with steps that by no means matched his’ (from Virgil’s Aeneid, 2. 724).
outrer: to exaggerate.
48 Mr. Bentham’s amanuensis: his secretary, Walter Coulson. See Index and Glossary of People.
Examiner of India Correspondence: see note to p. 6.
49 abolition of the East India Company . . . retirement: following the Indian Mutiny in 1857, the
company was closed down by Act of Parliament in 1858. Mill defended the company’s record
vigorously, expressing concern about the imposition of direct British rule supported by extensive
military force.
exclusion from Parliament, and public life: as an employee of the company, Mill was barred from
running for public office.
52 Richard Carlile . . . Christianity: Richard Carlile (1790–1843), publisher and freethinker, who
worked alongside his wife Jane and his sister Mary who were prosecuted and imprisoned with him
for blasphemy in 1819.
under the signature of Wickliffe: a reference to the fourteenth-century reformer and philosopher
John Wycliffe (d. 1384).
Morning Chronicle: a reformist daily paper published from 1769 until 1862. It was bought in 1789
by James Perry who brought the paper firmly in support of the Whig party and reform and gave
room to many radical and reformist journalists. He was succeeded in 1817 by John Black.
53 Whig organ . . . Utilitarian radicals: Mill is referring to loose groupings of parliamentary and extra-
parliamentary partisanship. Whigs generally associated with progressive views and a degree of
social optimism, but without the theoretical interest of the utilitarians and what came to be known
as ‘the philosophical radicals’. See E. Halévy, The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism (London:
Faber and Faber, 1972) and W. Thomas, The Philosophic Radicals: Nine Studies in Theory and
Practice, 1817–1841 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).
jeux d’esprit: witty and clever pieces.
peccant: offending.
54 Westminster Review: a quarterly journal first published in 1824 and remaining in print until 1914,
and acting as the mouthpiece for the philosophical radicals and their ideas. The Review was
founded by Jeremy Bentham, and on Mill’s report, his father was offered the editorship but turned
it down as incompatible with his holding of office in the East India Company.
54 Edinburgh and Quarterly: the Edinburgh Review or Critical Journal was founded in 1802 under the
initial editorship of Sidney Smith. It was a quarterly journal, but in a new style, with extensive
articles either in review of recent publications or as stand-alone essays, allowing the development
of a new style of critical argument. It was generally liberal in tone, and reformist. While it could
provide philosophical work of depth, it also became known for the savagery of its criticism, and for
its development of a new literary persona, the professional critic. The Quarterly Review was a
conservative review founded in 1809 to counter the Edinburgh Review and defending the Tory party
and the government—reflecting the growing divisions within that group. The Westminster Review
was established to challenge the Whiggish Edinburgh in the name of a more radical political stance.
château en Espagne: lit. ‘castle in Spain’, or castle in the air.
56 Longman: the publishing family of Longman, which have been active since 1724, took over the
Edinburgh Review after the failure of its first publisher Archibald Constable in 1826.
57 I was myself . . . law of libel: Mill’s contributions between July 1824 and April 1828 are in CW iv. 1–
70, 125–59; xi. 1–35.
58 It was a time . . . set towards reform: across Europe, following the final defeat of Napoleon at
Waterloo and his exile to St Helena, opposition movements began to regain their political voice,
only to find themselves facing regimes that had been refounded on autocratic principles by great-
power agreements forged at the Congress of Vienna designed to expunge the principles that had
animated the French Revolution.
 The renewed oppression . . . very unpopular: Mill refers to the suppression by France of the Trienio
Liberal in Spain (1820–3), which was followed by the suppression of liberal movements in Naples,
Piedmont, and Sicily which the Spanish Trienio had inspired in 1820, thereby returning to the
status quo imposed by the Congress of Vienna in 1815.
Six Acts . . . hatred: the Six Acts were a series of repressive measures taken against the rising
extra-parliamentary opposition following the draconian suppression of a public meeting near
Manchester calling for reform that became known as the Peterloo Massacre (1819). Anti-
government feeling continued to rise, with widespread popular support developing for Caroline
Amelia Elizabeth, Queen of George IV (1768–1821) whom he sought to divorce for adultery using a
Bill in Parliament (despite himself leading a notoriously dissolute life). The movement against the
King and the government forced the abandonment of the Bill, and Caroline was merely barred from
the coronation. She died in 1821, solving George’s problem.
Petition of the Merchants of London for Free Trade: a petition to the House of Commons calling for
the ending of the system of protectionism. It led to the creation of a parliamentary committee which
reported in favour of the elimination of many trade barriers. The debates were indicative of the
rising power of theories of political economy and of the philosophical radicals who were committed
political economists but were also supported by writers for the Edinburgh Review. Mill describes
the system as largely eliminated in 1846, when the Corn Laws were repealed, and wholly
eliminated by 1860.
the Bullion controversy: a debate in 1809 about the relative advantages of paper over gold, in which
David Ricardo played a principal part.
Liberalism . . . tone of the time: Mill’s claim is slightly anachronistic since Liberalism as a party
term developed only slowly from the mid-1810s—at the time (in the 1820s) he himself tended to
distinguish between the party of order and the popular or progressive party.
59 quorum pars magna fui: ‘in which I was an important element’, from Virgil’s Aeneid, 2. 6.
“Fragment on Mackintosh” . . . ridiculous: James Mill, A Fragment on Mackintosh (London, 1835).
61 Essay on Government: James Mill, Essay on Government, in the supplement to Encyclopædia
Britannica (London, 1820).
Malthus’s population principle: Robert Malthus in his Essay on Population, first published in 1798
but with a substantially extended and altered second edition in 1803 and four subsequent editions
in Malthus’s lifetime. Malthus claimed to demonstrate that population would always tend to outstrip
the supply of food, meaning that poverty was inevitable and attempts at amelioration often fruitless.
62 “corrupter-general”: a phrase coined by Bentham (one of many) that appears in his Plan of
Parliamentary Reform (London, 1817).
63 the French philosophes of the eighteenth century: a reference to the group of philosophers and
Enlightenment thinkers, particularly concentrated around the project of the Encyclopédie which
sought to set out and celebrate advances in sciences and the arts in the second half of the
eighteenth century.
65 “all poetry is misrepresentation”: from Bentham’s The Rationale of Reward (1825), bk. iii, ch. 1
(The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. Bowring, ii. 253–4).
66 “Il regardait toute secte comme nuisible”: ‘He looked on all sects as harmful’, from Marie-Jean-
Nicholas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, Vie de M. Turgot (London, 1786), 31.
afficher: declare publicly. Mill’s self-critical comments about retaining his inward sectarianism refer
to his sense that he held to principles not because of their inherent value but because they were the
principles of his particular group or sect. That distinction is reflected in his discussion of freedom of
thought and expression in On Liberty.
67 the entire . . . of Westminster Hall: that is, of the British Parliament.
68 Grampound: the only rotten borough to be reformed prior to the 1832 Reform Act. It was abolished
in 1821, following proof of widespread bribery in the 1818 election. The seat was transferred to
Yorkshire. Further reforms of the Cornish boroughs took place in 1832.
Hansard: the daily record of parliamentary debates which has been published since 1802.
69 Catholic Association and the Catholic disabilities: the Catholic Association was set up by Daniel
O’Connell in Ireland in 1823 to campaign against the restrictions for Catholics on eligibility for
public office that originated in the Test Act of 1672 and were repealed in the Catholic Relief Act of
1829.
Canning and Gallatin: George Canning (1770–1827), statesman; Abraham Alphonse Albert Gallatin
(1761–1849), Swiss national, emigrated to America, politician, secretary to the Treasury 1801–14,
minister to France 1816–23, then minister to England 1826. The reference here is to Canning’s
diplomatic correspondence with Albert Gallatin which Mill reflects on in ‘Intercourse between the
United States and the British Colonies in the West Indies’, Parliamentary Review, Session of 1826–
1827, 298–335 (CW vi. 123–47).
Hamiltonian method: a method of word-to-word translation, ignoring grammar. For the rather firm,
anti-grammatical principles, see Henry S. Salt, ‘The “Hamiltonian System” of Education’,
Gentleman’s Magazine (1888), 568–77.
71 Owenites, . . . Chancery Lane: followers of Robert Owen, author of A New View of Society (1813–
 14) and a number of other works advocating a cooperative mode of industry and collective life,
which developed a distinctive form of British socialism.
72 The question of population . . . subject of debate: Malthus had attacked Owen’s work in the later
editions of his Essay on Population (1798); see bk. iii, ch. 3 (1817 edn.).
lutte corps-à-corps: hand-to-hand fighting.
73 a man of whom I knew very little . . . Tory member of parliament: Donald MacLean; see Index and
Glossary of Persons.
74 bataille rangée: pitched battle.
serré: tight.
76 Carlyle . . . purpose: Carlyle’s The French Revolution (1837).
78 Coleridge’s “Dejection”: ‘Dejection: An Ode’, written 4 April 1802, ll. 21–4 (verse 2).
The words of Macbeth . . . my thoughts: a reference to Macbeth, V. iii. 42–7 (The Oxford
Shakespeare (2nd edn.), ed. Wells and Taylor):
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the fraught bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

81 the same mental malady: it is important to note that Mill reports these states of mind as occurring
on several occasions in his life. Mill’s ‘mental crisis’, to which many commentators refer, was in fact
not a single but a recurrent phenomenon—as he comments at the end of the subsequent paragraph.
Work without hope . . . cannot live: S. T. Coleridge, ‘Work without Hope’, 21 February 1825.
82 anti-self-consciousness theory of Carlyle: ‘The end of Man is an Action, and not a Thought, though it
were the noblest.’ Sartor Resartus (London, 1833), bk. ii, ch. 6.
Ask yourself . . . and you cease to be so: note the parallel with Mill’s account of pleasure not being
the direct end of action in the System of Logic (CW viii. 947, 949).
83 Weber’s Oberon: opera by Carl Maria Weber, adapted from Christoph Martin Wieland’s Oberon
(1780). First performed in London on 12 April 1826.
84 philosophers of Laputa . . . burnt out: Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, pt. iii, ch. 2. People who
live ‘never enjoying a minute’s peace of mind; and their disturbances proceed from causes which
very little affect the rest of mortals’.
85 Harold . . . Laras: characters in Byron’s poems Childe Harold (1819), Manfred (1817), The Giaour
(1813), and Lara (1814).
relapses into depression: this suggests a major period of depression much later in life.
86 the famous Ode . . . teaching me to find it: Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality from
Recollections of Early Childhood: ‘There was a time when Meadow, grove, and stream . . .’. The
reference is to ll. 180–91.
Byron and Wordsworth . . . respective theories of poetry: see CW xxvi, no. 27, pp. 434–42.
87 Roebuck . . . a Benthamite or Utilitarian: Mill’s Early Draft gives a much more extensive account of
Roebuck’s character ( JS, 127–33; CW i. 154–9). Mill’s falling out with Roebuck has been attributed
by some to Mill’s perception that Roebuck was critical of Mill’s relationship with Harriet Taylor.
89 Christian Socialist movement: a group of Christians who attacked inequality and some of the
institutions that were seen as breeding it. Maurice was an important early contributor with his The
Kingdom of Christ (1838), and John Ruskin subsequently identified with the movement, although
the phrase is more characteristic of the period in which Mill was writing his life than of the period
about which he is now speaking.
He told me . . . I could only reproduce: a further instance of this recurrent issue about his
‘formation’ which appears in Mill’s Autobiography, and which he sought to correct through his
Autobiography and in his life.
90 “Er hatte . . . Fortschreitung”: ‘he had an awesome rate of development’: Goethe’s comment on
Schiller.
91 Hobbes . . . man will be against reason: Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 11, describes men as ‘setting
themselves against reason, as oft as reason is against them’; the exact phrase comes from Hobbes’s
dedication ‘To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Newcastle’ of Human Nature or the
Fundamental elements of Policy (1640) (The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, ed.
Molesworth,11 vols. (1839–45), vol. iv. p. ix).
92 Logic of the Moral Sciences: Mill’s System of Logic (CW vii and viii).
93 influences of European . . . thought . . . streaming in upon me: by ‘reaction of the nineteenth
century to the eighteenth century’, Mill is referring to the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment.
battle about the shield . . . black: a tale, repeated in Joseph Spence, Moralities; or essays, letters,
fables; and translations. By Sir Harry Beaumont (London, 1753), 100–2. The knights are clothed in
 black or white; the shield’s two faces are silver and gold.
Coleridge’s sayings about half truths: ‘no falsehoods are more dangerous than truths
misunderstood’, Literary Remains, ‘Notes on Donne’ (1838), iii. 145.
Goethe’s device, “many sidedness”: Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (pt. i, ch. 4): ‘Many-
sidedness prepares, properly speaking, only the element in which the one-sided can act . . . The
best thing is to restrict oneself.’
St. Simonian school in France: see Henri Saint-Simon, Augustin Thierry, and Auguste Comte in
Index and Glossary of Persons.
94 not yet dressed out their philosophy . . . Socialism: although Saint-Simon’s Nouveau Christianisme
was published in Paris in 1825. See G. Claeys, ‘Non-Marxian Socialism 1815–1914’, in G. Stedman
Jones and G. Claeys (eds.), The Cambridge History of Nineteenth Century Political Thought
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 537–42.
organic periods and critical periods: Mill adapts terminology in some of his early essays. His ‘Spirit
of the Age’ (1831), written after witnessing the July Revolution of 1830 in France, distinguishes
periods of transition, in which everything is questioned, from periods of stability and order in which
the best minds lead society (CW xxii. 227–34, 238–45, 252–8, 278–82, 289–95, 304–7, 312–16).
“age of unbelief”: ‘Doubt has darkened into unbelief . . . , shade over shade goes grimly over your
soul, till you have the fixed, starless, Tartarean black.’ Sartor Resartus, ‘The Everlasting No’, 175.
95 au courant: abreast, up to date.
dernier mot: last word.
97 quoad: with respect to.
concluding Book . . . “System of Logic”: ch. 3 (CW viii. 836–43).
Essay on Government: by his father, James Mill.
98 the French Revolution of July: popular uprising against Charles X, following a defeat for his
government in the elections to the Chamber of Deputies, to which Charles responded with a series
of restrictions on civil liberties, executive ordinances against the liberty of the press, further
restricting the suffrage, dissolving the Chamber and calling for new elections under the new rules.
The ordinances were published on 26 July 1830. Within a week, following fighting and barricades
on the streets of the capital, Charles X fled into exile and was replaced, first as lieutenant general
and then as king, by Louis-Philippe, the son of the Duc d’Orléans known as ‘Philippe Egalité’. While
initially more liberal than Charles, and supported by a number of liberal statesmen, Louis-Philippe
was himself overthrown in the Revolution of 1848.
99 the Reform Bill: following the elections of 1830 and 1831, a liberal Whig government was formed
under Lord Grey and parliamentary reform became a realistic possibility. After narrowly avoiding a
constitutional crisis, the 1832 Reform Bill was passed by both Houses of Parliament and approved
by King William IV in June.
“The Spirit of the Age”: CW xxii; the articles appeared as a series in The Examiner between 9
January and 15 May 1831. See note to p. 94.
100 I wrote to him . . . of a mystic: CW xii. 204–9; and Letters of Thomas Carlyle to John Stuart Mill,
John Sterling and Robert Browning, ed. Alexander Carlyle (London, 1923), 94–5. Carlyle writes:
‘you are yet consciously nothing of a Mystic; your very Mysticism (for there is enough of it in you)
you have to translate into Logic before you give it place’.
101 I knew that . . . I saw over him: see Sartor Resartus, bk. ii, ch. 1, ‘what you see, yet cannot see over,
is as good as infinite’.
by one greatly the superior of us both: that is, Harriet Taylor, Mill’s future wife.
the elder Austin: John Austin (1790–1859). See Index and Glossary of Persons.
the French Economistes: a reference to physiocratic writers of the eighteenth century, such as
Quesney, Turgot (see Index and Glossary of Persons), Mirabeau, and Du Pont de Nemours. The
physiocrats were committed to principles of natural law and the removal of internal restrictions on
trade.
“un peuple éclairé”: an enlightened people.
103 “Essays on some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy”: CW iv. 229–340.
Theory of Kinds: bk. ii, ch. 7 (CW vii. 122–6).
104 The paper in question . . . also appears: Mill refers to ‘Corporation and Church Property’ (CW iv.
193–222); ‘The Currency Jungle’ (CW iv. 181–92); and the collection of his essays published as
Dissertations and Discussions, 2 vols. (London, 1859), 3 vols. expanded edn. (London, 1867).
106 long since deceased: a reference to Eliza Flower (1803–46), composer, friend of Harriet Taylor,
living in an unorthodox relationship with William J. Fox (see Index and Glossary of People), at a key
turning point in Mill’s relationship with Harriet.
106 carrière: course or career.
107 mala in se . . . mala prohibita: things wrong in themselves, as against wrong wholly by convention.
110 borné: intellectually limited or narrow.
the great Poor Law Reform of 1834: the reform of poor relief, widely seen as introducing a punitive
utilitarianism to ensure that those receiving poor relief would not be elevated above the level of
 subsistence enjoyed by the poorest labourers and would only receive relief in the workhouse. Mill’s
support for the measure is linked to his acceptance in broad terms of the principles of Malthus’s
Essay on Population (1st edn. 1798; last edn. in Malthus’s lifetime, 1826).
Irish Coercion Bill . . . Canadian coercion in 1837: levels of violence in Ireland resulted in a range of
Acts enforcing British political control, including the introduction of a centralized police system in
Ireland in 1836; in 1837 Canada rebelled against British rule but was repressed by British troops.
111 National Education . . . self-government of the Colonies: see Parl. Deb. (series 3), vol. 20, cols. 145–
6, 151 (30 July 1833), and William Thomas, The Philosophical Radicals: Nine Studies in Theory and
Practice (Oxford, 1979), ch. 5 ‘John Arthur Roebuck and the People’.
côté gauche: left wing.
112 Charles Buller . . . beginning of their usefulness: Buller was chief secretary to Lord Durham who
was tasked with solving the Canadian situation in 1838, and who was forced to resign in September
1838. Molesworth was in favour of measures to secure colonial liberties and proved a resilient critic
of government policy in Canada although that cause was essentially lost following attacks on
Durham’s leniency to the rebels in September 1838.
(on the theory of poetry) . . . “Dissertations”: ‘Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties’ (CW i. 343–65).
my estimation of Bentham’s . . . into print: ‘Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy’ (1833) (CW x. 3–18).
114 Professor Sedgwick: Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873), geologist, author of Discourse on the Studies of
the University (1832) which attacked utilitarianism and the philosophy of Locke and Paley. Mill
reviewed the work in the Westminster Review (CW x. 31–74).
115 “Civilization”: CW xviii. 117–48.
116 last of the Romans: Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, V. iii. 99; here Brutus uses the phrase to refer to
Titinius and Cassius who have killed themselves when facing defeat; but the representation of
Brutus as an honourable republican in a world collapsing into autocratic rule would warrant his
claim to the title.
but one among women: that is, Harriet Taylor.
119 Inverse Deductive Method . . . known general principles: set out in the System of Logic, bk. vi, ch.
10 (CW viii. 911–30).
121 Lord Durham . . . quarrel with the ministers: Mill refers to these events above, see note to p. 112.
122 I wrote and published . . . praise and honour: ‘Lord Durham and his Assailants’ (August 1838) (CW
vi. 436–44); see also the preceding and following essays.
123 of Bentham and of Coleridge: ‘Bentham’ (August 1838) and ‘Coleridge’ (March 1840) (CW x. 75–
115, 117–63).
124 concluding volumes . . . the “Dissertations”: see CW xviii. 153–204.
125 the Book on Language . . . Fallacies: bk. iv, ‘Of Operations Subsidiary to Induction’; bk. v, ‘Of
Fallacies’ (CW viii. 641–734, 735–809).
126 the ontological and “innate principles” school: Mill identifies this largely with German followers of
Kant (whom he does not associate with these principles), mainly Schelling and Hegel, but also
including their main French exponent Victor Cousin and the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid. See
CW vii. 59–61.
128 sub judice: under judicial review but not yet authoritatively determined (and therefore technically
(although it is not clear that Mill meant to imply this) not open to public debate.
limiting my own society to a very few persons: Mill’s hostility to society clearly owed much to his
perception of its judgement on the choices he and John and Harriet Taylor had made, but it is
represented as a matter of principle. In the wake of Harriet’s death in 1858 Mill became rather less
reclusive.
129 third period . . . progress: see Appendix p. 192, addition [26] p. 128 which identifies the first period
with the Westminster Review, and the second between 1840 and the Principles of Political Economy
(1848).
130 dernier mot of legislation: the last word—that is, that Mill had held that the most basic aim of
legislation was the protection of private property.
132 Cooperative Societies: deriving from late eighteenth-century experiments and defended by the
works of Robert Owen, the Cooperative Movement took shape principally after the establishment of
the Rochdale Pioneers in 1844, and the spread of their principles and practical example across the
country and in relation to a range of activities, including education, farming, manufacture, and
wholesale. The Cooperative Societies played a founding role in the British Labour Party.
unequivocally in the third: in an earlier version Mill emphasizes that this was not a result of
keeping back opinions, more that their views made considerable advances between the editions
(CW i. 241).
French Revolution of 1848: the overthrow of Louis-Philippe (himself the result of the 1830
Revolution) and the creation of a republican democracy, which introduced universal suffrage and a
range of social reforms. The radicalism of its Parisian leaders was not shared by the mass of the
population who once enfranchised elected Louis Napoleon to the presidency and supported him
when he overturned the constitution three years later and declared himself emperor.
 the famine, the winter of 1846/47: the Irish Potato Famine, 1845–51, when blight caused the staple
132
crop to fail and left tenants unable to meet their rents, resulting in their eviction and the
destruction of their cottages. Starvation, exacerbated by typhus, produced deaths of 350,000 in the
winter of 1846–7; around 1 million people died over the whole period, and a similar number
emigrated.
133 cottiers: those renting land on an annual, insecure basis.
134 the severity of the Horatian precept: exactly which precept from Horace is open to question—he
offers many. Mill’s sense is that in writing but not publishing he has fallen short of a demand of
Horace’s, probably that he might have contributed his thought in a more timely fashion: ‘seize the
day, put no trust in the future’ (Odes 3. 11. 7).
an unprincipled usurper in December 1851: Louis Napoleon, who was elected president of France
under the second republic in 1848, overturned the Constitution by a plebiscite and took the title
Emperor of the French in December 1851, ruling until 1870 when he was deposed following the
catastrophe of the Franco-Prussian War, which led to the Paris Commune and the establishment of
the Third Republic.
transitional period: Mill first adopted the Saint-Simonian idea that societies alternate between
periods of organic unity and transition in his unfinished ‘Spirit of the Age’ (1831) (CW xxii. 227–
316).
135 for seven and a half only!: Harriet Taylor Mill died in Avignon, France, on 3 November 1858.
136 after which it pleased Parliament . . . English parliamentary politicians: following the Indian Mutiny
and related uprisings in 1857, the British government, under Lord Palmerston, passed legislation to
remove control of Indian affairs from the East India Company and place it in the hands of the
British Parliament. Mill wrote extensively in opposition to the measures: see CW xxx. Writings on
India.
at the “Liberty”: On Liberty was published in 1859 after Harriet Taylor Mill’s death, with a fulsome
dedication to his wife. He also published it as it stood, making no revisions to the copy they had
worked on together (see Mill’s discussion of the text and its debt, pp. 136 and 141–3).
the Capitol: the Capitoline Hill in Rome that once housed the Temple of Jupiter, approached by a
staircase designed by Michelangelo.
137 her daughter: Helen Taylor (1831–1907), who remained with Mill until his death in 1873.
In resuming . . . preceding narrative: these later additions were written in 1869–70.
other help . . . requiring acknowledgment: that of Helen Taylor.
139 “the Probable Future of the Labouring Classes”: Principles of Political Economy, bk. iv, ch. 7 (CW iii.
759–96).
141 seldom escaped her: Mill’s footnote refers to a dedication of the Principles . . . pasted into some
‘gift copies’. The dedication read: ‘To Mrs. John Taylor as the most eminently qualified of all persons
known to the author either to originate or to appreciate speculations on social improvement, this
attempt to explain and diffuse ideas many of which were first learned from herself, is with the
highest respect and regard dedicated’ (Friedrich Hayek, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1951), 122).
142 periods of transition: see note to p. 134.
143 the formation of a Village Community (whether . . . I know not): Warren’s Long Island, New York
Community lasted from the early 1850s for about ten years.
144 the Reform Bill . . . Government in 1859: a proposal to grant an extension of parliamentary suffrage
led by Disraeli in the Commons, under Derby’s premiership, was defeated in the Commons by 39
votes on 31 March, leading to a general election.
145 system of Personal Representation: a proposal by Hare for proportional representation which Mill
discusses at length in his Considerations on Representative Government (1861), esp. chs. 7 and 8
(CW xix. 371–578).
146 article in Fraser’s Magazine . . . Mr. Lorimer: Fraser’s Magazine, 60 (December 1859), 766–76. See
CW xix. 341–70.
“a Few Words on Non-Intervention”: CW xxi. 109–24.
147 Lord Palmerston . . . opposing the Suez Canal: Palmerston’s opposition was based on his fear that
the British would lose their dominance over the trade with the East—a motive Mill regarded as
parochial and narrow.
the attacks of Lord Brougham . . . in the “Dissertations”: ‘Vindication of the French Revolution of
1848’ (CW xx. 317–65).
many hundred miles: Mill spent a considerable part of each year in Avignon, where Harriet Taylor
Mill was buried.
148 “Considerations on Representative Government”: published in 1861 (CW xix. 371–519).
149 “The Subjection of Women”: the essay was published with Helen Taylor’s encouragement in 1869
(CW xxi. 259–340).
“Utilitarianism”: published in Fraser’s Magazine, 64 (1861), 391–406, 525–34, 658–73; and as a
separate volume in 1863 (CW x. 203–59).
 American civil war: the war between the Northern Unionist and the Southern Confederate states,
1861–5, which ended with a Northern victory and the abolition of slavery.
150 voluntary martyr: Mill’s footnote on the similarity between John Brown’s insouciance in relation to
his hanging and Thomas More’s reported indifference to his own execution draws on William
Roper’s report of More saying, on mounting the shaky scaffold, ‘see me safe up, & for my coming
downe, let me shift for myselfe’ (The Mirrour of Vertue in Worldly greatness, or the Life of Syr
Thomas More (Paris, 1626), 166).
151 the rush of nearly the wholly upper and middle classes . . . the general frenzy: international
diplomatic opinion was that Britain was sympathetic to the South, and that it sought to gain from
the war. But Britain did not recognize the Confederacy as a state, and kept its neutrality.
the generation . . . had passed away: a reference to those who had brought an end to the British
slave trade (1807), most notably William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, and slavery in British
overseas territories (1833).
the end of 1861 . . . by an officer of the United States: in what became known as the Trent Affair, on
8 November 1861 a British steamer, RMS Trent, sailing between the Bahamas and Cuba, was
boarded by Union naval officers from the USS San Jacinto, captained by Charles Wilkes (1798–
1877). Two Confederate envoys on board, James Mason (1798–1871) and John Slidell (1793–1871),
travelling to England and France to lobby for recognition of the Confederacy, were arrested. The
two men were transported to Boston and imprisoned at Fort Warren and the Trent was allowed to
continue its journey. The incident provoked diplomatic outrage and a threat of war between Britain
and the Northern states, until the President, Abraham Lincoln, ordered the men be released in
December, thereby averting war. They continued with their mission, but without success.
152 “The Contest in America”: CW xxi. 125–42.
a review of Professor Cairnes’ book . . . Westminster Review: ‘The Slave Power’ (1862) (CW xxi.
143–64).
Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy: CW ix.
155 doctrines of Auguste Comte: ‘Auguste Comte and Positivism’ (1865) (CW x. 261–368).
158 a letter for publication: Mill conflates two letters to James Beal, one published in the Daily News on
23 March 1865, the other in the same paper on 21 April (CW xvi. 1005–7, 1031–5).
159 the working classes . . . are yet generally liars: CW xix. 338.
160 Mr. Gladstone’s Reform Bill: an attempt to reform the franchise in 1866 led by Gladstone and
supported by Mill, but finally incorporated in the Reform Bill of 1867 that doubled the electorate
and extended the vote to most adult males in urban areas of the country.
speeches . . . capital punishment: ‘Procedure in the House: Amendments’ and ‘Capital Punishment’,
21 Apr. 1868 (CW xxviii. 267).
seizing enemies’ goods in neutral vessels: ‘England’s Danger through the Suppression of Her
Maritime Power’, 5 Aug. 1867 (CW xxviii. 220).
161 on the bill . . . Habeas Corpus in Ireland: ‘Suspension of Habeas Corpus In Ireland’, 17 Feb. 1866
(CW xxviii. 52–4).
Fenianism . . . Fenians: those Irish Nationalists seeking home rule and willing to use force to
achieve their ends, although in the 1860s the term was also used in Britain to signify Irish working-
class support for independence.
paying off the National Debt . . . are exhausted: ‘The Malt Duty’, 17 Apr. 1866 (CW xxviii. 69–73).
the stupidest party: Considerations on Representative Government (CW xix. 452 n.).
162 Mr. Disraeli’s Reform Bill: ‘The Reform Bill’, [3] 9 May 1867 (CW xxviii. 146).
chief topic . . . claims to the suffrage: ‘Representation of the People’, [2] 13 Apr. 1866 (CW xxviii.
69–73).
the Council of the Reform League: the Reform League was founded in 1865 to advocate universal
manhood suffrage and the secret ballot. Mill was largely in favour of the former, but not the latter
(Considerations on Representative Government, ch. 10), as he notes later in this paragraph.
les grands moyens: extreme means or measures.
163 to prevent public meetings in the Parks: ‘Meetings in Royal Parks’, [1] 22 July 1867; [2] 13 Aug.
1867 (CW xxviii. 236–8).
General Burke: Burke, General Ricard O’Sullivan (1838–1922), leader of Irish Fenians, sentenced to
fifteen years’ penal servitude in 1868 for directing activities in England, although he was released
three years later on grounds of ill health.
164 I delivered one of my most careful speeches . . . and convince opponents: ‘Chichester Fortescue’s
Land Bill’, 17 May 1866 (CW xxviii. 75–83).
“England and Ireland”: John Stuart Mill, England and Ireland (London: Longmans, 1868) (CW vi.
504–33).
165 speech on Ireland . . . early in the session of 1868: ‘The State of Ireland’, 12 March 1868 (CW xxviii.
247).
A disturbance in Jamaica: the ‘Morant Bay Rebellion’ in October 1865, arising from a range of
dissatisfactions, degenerated into a repressive colonial response under the Governor, John Eyre,
 with over 400 fatalities, 600 floggings, and widespread violence directed at the black population.
Mill’s papers on the case from the Committee are included in Jamaica Committee: Public
Documents (1866, 1868) (CW xxi. 422–35).
166 the best of my speeches in Parliament: ‘The Disturbances in Jamaica’, [2] 31 July 1866 (CW xxviii.
93–5).
167 his celebrated charge . . . to settle it: Alexander James Edmund Cockburn, Charge of the Lord Chief
Justice of England to the Grand Jury at the central Criminal Courts, in the case of the Queen against
Nelson and Brand (London, 1867). Nelson and Brand were two officers involved in the repression
whose conduct was thought to go beyond justifiable limits even under martial law.
167 Extradition Bill: ‘The Extradition Treaties Act’, [1] 3 Aug. 1866, and [3] 6 Aug. 1866 (CW xxviii.
120–3).
168 Bribery Bill of Mr. Disraeli’s Government: Mill spoke on a number of occasions, if briefly in
Parliament, but more extensively in Committee throughout the session on these proposals: see e.g.
CW xxviii. 262–5, 279–80, 299–300, 301–3, 306–10, 311–14, 316–19, 325–8.
169 Mr Hare’s Plan: Mill’s major speech on this was ‘Personal Representation’, 30 May 1867 (CW xxviii.
176–87).
Cumulative Vote . . . London School Board: the Elementary Education Act of 1870 (33 & 34 Victoria,
c. 75) included provision for Board members to be elected by the ratepayers under a system of
cumulative voting. Each voter had an equal number of votes and could cast them for an equal
number of candidates, or confer votes on a single candidate. Those with the highest number of
votes were chosen for the existing number of seats available. Being able to cast all votes for a
single candidate, ‘plumping’ allowed minorities to ensure some representation on the Board.
Women who were householders were also permitted to vote and to stand as candidates.
a motion . . . to limit the electoral franchise to males: see Mill’s ‘The Admission of Women to the
Electoral Franchise’, 20 May 1867 (CW xxviii. 151–62).
172 Essay on Plato: ‘Grote’s Plato’ (CW xi. 375–440).
electing me to the office of Rector: Mill was elected to the three-year office for the period 1865–8.
Inaugural address delivered to the University of St Andrews (1867) (CW xxi. 215–58).
a duty to philosophy . . . and in speculation: James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human
Mind, 2 vols. (2nd edn., London, 1869).

APPENDIX: ADDITIONAL TEXTUAL MATERIAL

181 Ford Abbey: see note to p. 34.
182 My first contribution . . . second number: ‘Periodical Literature: Edinburgh Review’, Westminster
Review 1 (Apr. 1824) (CW i. 291–325).
183 Grimm’s Correspondence: Friedrich Melchior Baron von Grimm, Correspondence littéraire,
philosophique et critique, ed. J. Michaud et al., 17 vols. (Paris, 1812–14).
184 Reform Bill: see note to p. 99.
Examiner: a weekly periodical founded by the brothers John and Leigh Hunt in 1808, which
remained a flagship publication for radical thinkers for the following fifty years, finally closing in
the 1880s.
189 petitio principia: a circular argument.
 INDEX AND GLOSSARY OF PERSONS
NOTE: The longer entries to individuals are in three sections: biographical details; references to events ordered
chronologically; and references to texts ordered alphabetically. Works referred to by Mill without giving an author are listed by
their title.

abolitionists, American 150

Æschines (c.397–c.322 BCE), Athenian orator, and a major opponent of Demosthenes 10
Æsop’s Fables, published in Greek in Britain from the mid-sixteenth century, with a translation into English being available
from the mid-eighteenth century 7
American Civil War 149–52
Aldrich, Henry, Artis logicae compendium (a work of syllogistic logic) (Oxford, 1691) 70
Anacreon (c.570–c.490 BCE), lyric poet 10
analysis, habit or discipline of 71, 79–80, 83. See Mill, James, Analysis of Mind
Anglada, Joseph (1775–1833), French chemist and professor of medicine at Montpellier 35
Annual Register 1788 8
Anson, George, Baron Anson, A Voyage around the World, in the Years 1740–1744 (London, 1748) 9
Anstruther, Sir Robert (1834–86), Scottish Liberal Party politician and member for Fife from 1864 to 1880 168
Anthology 10, 196
Arabian Nights 9
Aristocracy 48, 62, 98
Aristophanes (c.460–c.386 BCE), ancient Greek poet and playwright of comedies 10
Aristotle (382–322 BCE), ancient Greek philosopher. Aristotle’s Rhetoric 10
association, law of (association psychology) 41, 63, 79–81, 127, 128, 153, 173. See also Hartley; psychology
atheism 25, 29
Austin, Charles (1799–1874), lawyer, QC 1841–8;
Parliamentary History and Review 1825–8 45–7, 56, 57, 60, 68–9, 72–3, 183
Austin, John (1790–1859), soldier with William Bentinck (q.v.) in Sicily 1812–14 and subsequently lawyer;
Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London, 1826 38, 39, 43–5, 56, 57, 101, 121, 131, 146, 152
Austin, Sarah, née Taylor (1793–1867), translator, wife of John Austin;
Mill’s ‘Liebes Mütterlein’ xxiii–xxiv, 185–6
Ayrton, Acton Smee (1816–86), lawyer and politician, Liberal MP for Tower Hamlets from 1857 to 1874;
parliamentary committee on municipal self-government 160

Bacon, Francis (1551–1626), Lord Chancellor from 1618, author of Novum Organum (1620) 16, 90
Bailey, Samuel (1791–1870), philosophical writer, and leading member of Sheffield’s political community;
A Critical Dissertation on the Nature, Measures, and Causes of Value: Chiefly in Reference to the Writings of Mr Ricardo and his Followers (London, 1825) 70
Baillie, Joanna (1762–1851), poet and playwright;
Constantine Paleologus (London, 1805) 12
Bain, Alexander (1810–77), inventor and writer;
The Senses and the Intellect (London, 1855), The Emotions and the Will (London, 1859) xxvii, 139, 146, 154, 172–3
Baldwin, Robert (n.d.), publisher of James Mill 56
Baring, Alexander (1774–1848), merchant and banker, subsequently raised to the peerage in 1835, opposed measures against
American commerce 58
Bazard, Saint-Amand (1791–1832), French follower of Saint-Simon (q.v.) 95
Beales, Edmond (1803–81), radical anti–Reform Bill (1866) agitator 162
Beattie, James (1735–1803), Scottish poet, Professor of Philosophy at Marischal College, Aberdeen 13
Beaver, Philip (1766–1813), African Memoranda: Relative to an Attempt to Establish a British Settlement on the Island of
Bulama, on the Western Coast of Africa, in the Year 1792 (London, 1805) 9
Bentham, Jeremy (1748–1832), philosopher and writer on jurisprudence;
Traité de legislation civile et pénale, ed. Louis Dumont, 3 vols. (Paris, 1802);
Traité de preuves judiciaires, ed. Louis Dumont, 2 vols. (Paris, 1823);
Rationale of Judicial Evidence, ed. J. S. Mill, 5 vols. (London, 1827); A Fragment on Government (London, 1776);
Draught of a New Plan for the Organisation of the Judicial Establishment in France (London, 1790);
The Book of Fallacies (London, 1824). See also The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring, 11 vols. (Edinburgh, 1838; 2nd edn. 1843). Analysis of the
Influence of Natural Religion, on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind (London, 1822) (under the pseudonym Philip Beauchamp, in fact George Grote) ix, x,
xviii
.
Lends books to James Mill 8; early friendship with the Mills 33–4; routine at Ford Abbey 34, 181–2; amanuenses 181–2, 48, 52; practice of ‘marginal contents’
39; influence on contemporaries 39, 53, 56, 59; JSM’s first reading of 39–41, 77; ideas on law and legislation 39–41, 53, 157; founds Westminster Review
54–5; on women’s suffrage 61; attitude toward kings 62; opinion of poetry 65; MSS edited by JSM 66–8; style 68, 125; theory of government 90–2; JSM’s
critiques of 112, 123–4; compared with James Mill 115, 121.
The Book of Fallacies (ed. Bingham, 1824) 66, 69; Draught of a New Plan for the Organisation of the Judicial Establishment in France (1790) 68; A Fragment on
Government (1776) 68; Plan of Parliamentary Reform (1817) 62 n.; Rationale of Judicial Evidence (ed. JSM, 1827) 67–9; The Rationale of Reward (1825) 65
n.; Traité des preuves judiciaires (ed. Dumont, 1823) 66, 68; Traités de législation civile et pénale (ed. Dumont, 1802) 39 –42
Bentham, Samuel (1757–1831), naval architect and engineer;
married to Lady Maria Sophia, née Fordyce (1765?–1858) 34
Bentinck, Lord William (1774–1839), military commander and colonial governor 44
Berkeley, George (1685–1753), bishop and philosopher 42
Bingham, Peregrine (1788–1864), barrister, magistrate, and writer;
Westminster Review 56, 57, 65; editor of Bentham’s Book of Fallacies (1824) 66; Parliamentary History and Review 68–9
Black, John (1783–1855), journalist and from 1817 editor of Morning Chronicle 53, 61
Blackstone, William (1723–80), judge and author of Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1765–9) 39
Bonaparte, Napoleon (1769–1821), Emperor of the French (1804–14/15) 37, 38
botany 40
Bougainville, Louis Antoine, comte de (1729–1811), French explorer and author of Voyage autour du monde (1771) 9
Bowring, Sir John (1792–1872), linguist, writer, and traveller, editor of the Westminster Review from 1824, and of The Works of
Jeremy Bentham, 11 vols. (Edinburgh, 1838) 54, 56, 57, 75
Bradlaugh, Charles (1833–91), politician and freethinker 174–5
Bribery Bill (1868) 168–9
Bright, John (1811–89), orator and statesman, MP for Birmingham 1857–85 151, 161, 163, 170
Brooke, Henry (1703–83), writer, author of The Fool of Quality or, the History of Henry Earl of Moreland (London, 1766–70) 9
Brougham, Lord Henry Peter (1778–1868), lawyer, Lord Chancellor, co-founder of Edinburgh Review 54, 72, 111, 147
Brown, John (1800–59), American abolitionist and insurrectionary 150
Brown, Thomas (1778–1820), philosopher, author of Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect (Edinburgh, 1805), and
Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, 1820) 42
Buller, Charles (1806–48), liberal politician, contributor to the Durham Report, or ‘Report on the Affairs of British North
America’, Parliamentary Papers, 1839 xvii, 60, 74, 110, 111, 122
Bulwer Lytton, Edward (1803–73), novelist and author of England and the English, 2 vols. (London, 1833) 73
Bulwer Lytton, William Henry (1801–72), diplomat and writer 73, 112
Burdett, Francis (1770–1844), politician 58
Burke, General Ricard O’Sullivan (1838–1922), leader of Irish Fenians, c.1868 163
Burnet, Gilbert (1643–1715), Bishop of Salisbury, Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Time, 2 vols. (London, 1724–34) 8
Burns, Robert (1759–96), Scottish poet 13
Butler, Joseph (1692–1752), Bishop of Durham, author of The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution
and Course of Nature (London, 1736) 25
Buxton, Charles (1823–71), liberal politician and parliamentarian 166
Byron, Lord George Gordon (1788–1824), poet 84, 85, 86, 89

Cæsar Julius (100–44 BCE), Roman leader, author of Commentaries on the Gallic War (51 BCE) 9
Cairnes, John Elliot (1823–75), economist and author of anti-slavery tracts including The Slave Power (London, 1863) 150, 152
Cambridge University 45, 60, 74, 88;
Union Debating Society 45, 72, 73
Canada Coercion Bill (1838) 110
Canadian policy 122
Campbell, Thomas (1777–1844), poet. Mill refers to his ‘Lochiel’s Warning’ (1803), ‘Hohenlinden’ (1803), ‘The Exile of Erin’
(1801), and ‘Gertrude of Wyoming’ (1809), collected in Gertrude of Wyoming and other Poems (London, 1809) 13
Canning, George (1770–1827), statesman 58;
diplomatic correspondence with Gallatin (q.v.) 69
Carlile, Richard (1790–1843), publisher and freethinker 52
Carlyle, Thomas (1795–1881), essayist and historian;
Sartor Resartus (1833–4);
articles from the Edinburgh Review, Fraser’s Magazine, and the Foreign Review and Continental Miscellany;
The French Revolution, 3 vols. (London, 1837) xii n., xix, xxii, xxix, 76, 82, 88, 89, 93, 94, 99, 100, 117, 122, 123, 138, 184
The French Revolution (1837) 76, 122, 123;
‘Characteristics’ (Edinburgh Review, 1831) 82 n.; Sartor Resartus (in Fraser’s , 1833–4; 1st English edn., 1838) 82 n., 101 n.; The Life of John Sterling (1851)
88, 89; early writings 93, 94, 100; influence on JSM 100, 138; contributions to London and Westminster Review, 117
Caroline Amelia Elizabeth, Queen of George IV (1768–1821), trial in the House of Lord’s on a charge of adultery 58
Carpenter, Mrs Mary (1808–77), philanthropist, dedicated to female education and prison reform 170
Cattle Plague Bill (1866) 161 n.
Cazotte, Jacques (1719–92), translator of Arabian Tales, 3 vols. (London, 1794) 9
centralization 109–10
Cervantes, Miguel de (1547–1616), author of Don Quixote (London, 1612) 9
Chadwick, Sir Edwin (1800–90), Poor Law and public health reformer 168
Chamerovzow, Louis Alexis (1816–75), anti-slavery campaigner 166 n.
chemistry ix, 13, 35, 92
Chesson, Frederick William (1833–88), anti-slavery campaigner 166 n.
Christianity 26, 42, 52, 94
Christie, William Dougal (1816–74), physician and diplomat 168
Church of England 55, 88
Cicero, Marcus Tullius (106–43 BCE), Roman orator and statesman 10
Clarkson, Thomas (1760–1846), philanthropist and advocate for the abolition of slavery 151 n.
Cobbett, William (1762–1835), essayist and political agitator 58
Cockburn, Sir Alexander, Lord Chief Justice (1802–80), judge and writer on legal and political subjects 74, 166
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772–1834), poet and essayist. ‘Dejection: An Ode’ (1802) 78;
‘Work without Hope’ (1828) 81; influence on JSM 88, 89, 93; Literary Remains (1838) 93 n.; JSM’s critique of xxiv, 45, 123–24
Coleridgians 74, 89, 93, 138
Collins, David (1756–1810), colonial governor, published An Account of the English Colony of New South Wales, 2 vols.
(London, 1798–1802) 9
colonial government 122, 165–6
Comte, Auguste (1798–1857), philosopher and sociologist, advocate of positivisme xxiv, xxix, 94, 126, 155–6;
Système de politique positive (Paris, 1824) 94–5, 139 n.; Système de politique positive in 4 vols. (Paris, 1851–4) 120; Cours de philosophie positive, 6 vols. (Paris
1830–42) 118–19
Condillac, Étienne Bonot (1714–80), philosopher;
Traité des sensations (Paris, 1754), Cours d’études 38, 41
Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas, Marquis de (1749–94), philosopher, mathematician, and reformer, author of Vie de monsieur
Turgot (London, 1786) 66
Cook, James (1728–79), explorer and cartographer 9
Cooperative Society, Owenite 71–3
Cornelius Nepos (c.100–c.25 BCE), biographer and author of De viris illustribus, on the lives of famous men 9
Coulson, Walter (c.1794–1860), journalist and lawyer;
friend of Jeremy Bentham (q.v.) 52, 69
Courier Paul Louis (1772–1825), soldier and writer 68
Cousin, Victor (1792–1867), French philosopher and educational reformer 126 n
Cowper, William (1731–1800), poet 13

Defoe, Daniel (c.1661–1731), political pamphleteer and writer, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
(London, 1719) 9
D’Eichthal, Gustave (1804–86), French writer and sociologist 95
deism 25, 29, 42
democracy 40, 62, 97, 98, 100, 108–9, 114, 130, 143, 173
Demosthenes (384–322 BCE), Athenian orator;
Demosthenis et Aeschinis quae exstant omnia, 10 vols. (London, 1827) 15, 16
Derby, Edward Henry Stanley, 15th Earl of (1826–93), politician and supporter of electoral reform 144, 163, 164
Dickson, Col. Lothian Sheffield (fl.1860s), prominent member of Reform League 162
Diogenes Laertius (c.200–50), author of Lives of the Philosophers 7
Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c.30 BCE–?), author of The Roman Antiquities 10, 11
Disraeli, Benjamin (1804–81), statesman, prime minister and writer 144, 162, 168, 169, 174
Drake, Sir Francis (c.1540–96), admiral and navigator 9
Dryden, John (1631–1700), poet. Mill refers to his Alexander’s Feast; or, the Power of Musique (London, 1697) 13
Duffy, Charles Gavan (1816–1903), journalist and politician 156
Dumont, Pierre Étienne Louis (1759–1829), the editor of collections of Jeremy Bentham’s writings x, 39, 41, 66, 67
Durham, John George Lambton, 1st Earl of, (1792–1840), politician and statesman who played a major role in Canadian–British
affairs 121–2
Du Trieu, Phillipus (1580–1645), author of Manuductio ad Logicam (1618) 71

East India Company x, xxii, xxvi, xxvii, 4, 6, 8, 48–9, 54, 135–6, 156
Edgeworth, Maria (1767–1849), novelist. Popular Tales (1804) 8;
Moral Tales for Young People (1801) 35 n.
Edinburgh Review (1802 ff.) 54, 55, 117, 124;
articles by Mackintosh 43; McCulloch 57, 58; Macaulay 90; Carlyle 93; and JSM 124, 146, 172; James Mill’s review of 55–6, 57, 58
education, modern 5 14–15, 19–21, 33, 130–2, 143, 144, 145, 172, 174, 182 See Mill, J. S., early education
Ellis, William (1800–81), economist and contributor to the Westminster Review 48, 57, 70, 72
elocution 16–17
Encyclopædia Metropolitana; or, Universal Dictionary of Knowledge (1817–45) 71
Enfantin, Barthélémy Prosper (1796–1864), French philosopher and Saint-Simonian 95
English life and character 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 53, 87, 101, 132, 134, 151, 165, 167, 180
ethology xiv, xxxi
Euclid (c.300 BCE), Greek mathematician and geometer, based at Alexandria 10
Euripides (c.485–406 BCE), Athenian tragedian 10
Examiner, The (1808 ff.) 99, 112, 184
Extradition Act (1870) 167
Eyre, Governor Edward John (1815–91), controversial governor of Jamaica during the Morant Bay Rebellion (October 1865)
174

Fawcett, Henry (1833–84), MP, statesman, and political economist 168

feeling(s) xix, xxvii, xxxi, 26, 27, 31–2, 36, 43, 62–3, 64–5, 74, 79–80, 83, 84, 85, 87, 95;
James Mill and 30–1, 64; analysis and 79–80; social feelings 109
Ferguson, Adam (1723–1816), philosopher, and author of The History and Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic, 3
vols. (Edinburgh, 1783) 11
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762–1814), Mill refers to his lectures The Characteristics of the Present Age (Eng. trans., London,
1847) 94, 143
Fielding, Henry (1707–54), English novelist and magistrate 68
Findlater, Dr Andrew (1810–85), compiler and writer on education 172
Flower, Eliza (1803–46), composer xxiii, 106 n.
Fonblanque, Albany William (1793–1872), journalist and radical, contributor to The Examiner and Westminster Review 53, 57,
61, 73, 99, 112
Ford Abbey 34, 181
Fordyce, George (1736–1802), physician and medical writer, father of Maria Fordyce, who married Samuel Bentham (q.v.) 35
Fortnightly Review (1865 ff.) 175
Fox, Charles James (1749–1806), statesman 97
Fox, William Johnson (1786–1864), Unitarian minister, linked to Eliza Flower (q.v.) x, xxiii, 112
Fourier, Francis Marie Charles (1772–1837), French philosopher and utopian thinker 96
Fraser’s Magazine (1830 ff.) 100, 146, 149, 152
Frederic(k) I of Prussia (1688–1740), King of Prussia 8
free will, doctrine of 97
freedom of action and discussion. See liberty
French language and literature 35, 68, 93;
character 36–7, 132; politics 98–9
French Revolutions: of 1789 37, 38, 75, 95; of 1830 98; of 1848 132, 134, 147
Gallatin, Abraham Alphonse Albert (1761–1849), Swiss national, émigré to America, politician, secretary to the Treasury 1801–
14, minister to France 1816–23, minister to England 1826 69
Galt, John (1779–1839), novelist, author of Annals of the Parish (London, 1821) 47
Garrison, William Lloyd (1805–79), Massachusetts abolitionist 150
Gergonne, Joseph Diaz (1771–1859), French logician and mathematician 35
German language and literature 69, 88, 94, 101, 127, 138, 143, 185;
metaphysics and religion 100, 102, 127
Gibbon, Edward (1737–94), historian of Rome 8
Gladstone, William Ewart (1809–98), liberal statesman, prime minister 58, 160, 162, 163, 164
Globe and Traveller, The (1823 ff.) 52
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749–1832), German poet, novelist, and dramatist 88, 90, 93, 143
Goldsmith, Oliver (1728–74), novelist and playwright 13, 68
Graham, George John ( fl. 1820–35), official assignee of the Bankrupcy court, political economist, contributor to the
Westminster Review 48, 57, 70, 71
Gray, Thomas (1716–71), poet, author of ‘The Bard’ (1757) and An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard (1751) 13
Greek Anthology 10
Greek language and literature 7, 10, 11, 12, 15, 20, 30, 43, 94
Grey, Lord Charles (1764–1845), statesman, Whig politician, 1832 Reform Act 99
Grimm, Friedrich Melchior Baron von (1723–1807), diplomat, contributor to the Encyclopédie and journalist, Correspondence
littérare, philosophique et critique, ed., J. Michaud et al.,17 vols.(Paris, 1812–14) 183
Grote, George (1762–1830), banker 43
Grote, George (1794–1871), historian, author of Statement of the Question of Parliamentary Reform (1821);
A History of Greece, 12 vols. (London, 1846–56) 43, 44, 53, 54, 57, 69, 70–1, 110, 172, 183, 191.
Married to Mary Selina, née Peckwell. Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind (under pseudonym of Philip
Beauchamp, 1822) 42; Statement of the Question of Parliamentary Reform (1821) 43; exposure of Mitford (Westminster Review, 1826) 54, 57; A History of
Greece (1846–56) 57; in Parliament 110, 183, 191

Habitual Criminals Act (1870) 171 n.

Hadfield, George (1787–1889), politician, radical MP for Sheffield 161
Hamilton, Sir William (1788–1856), philosopher, Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, 1859–60),
Dissertations on Reid (London, 1846), Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, Education and University Reform (London,
1852). J. S. Mill’s Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (London, 1865), CW ix, 69, 152, 154, 155
Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates (1803 ff.) 68
Hare, Julius Charles (1795–1855), churchman, composed a ‘Memoir of John Sterling’ (q.v.) 88
Hare, Thomas (1806–91), lawyer and political reformer, A Treatise on the Election of Representatives, Parliamentary and
Municipal (London, 1859), proportional representation
Harrison, Frederic (1831–1923), lawyer and author, associated with Comte (q.v.), and with reform issues in the 1860s and
1870s 145–6, 169
Hartley, David (1705–57), philosopher and author of Observation on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations (London,
1749) 41, 71
Hawkesworth, John (c.1715–73), author of An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for
Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, and Successively Performed by Commodore Byron, Captain Wallis,
Captain Carteret, and Captain Cook, 3 vols. (London, 1773) 9
Hayward, Abraham (1801–84), essayist and conservative writer 74
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1830), German idealist philosopher 126
Heineccius, Johann Gottlieb (1681–1741), German jurist and philosopher, who wrote on Roman law and on law as a rational
science including Antiquitatum Romanarum jurisprudentiam illustratium syntagma (1718); Institutes (i.e., Heineccius’
Recitationes in elementa juris civilis secundum ordinem institutionum (1789));
Pandects (Elementa juris naturae et gentium 1737 (London, 1763) ) 39
Helvetius, Claude Adrien (1715–71), French Enlightenment philosopher, author of De L’Esprit (Paris, 1758) 41
Herodotus (484–424 BCE), Greek historian 7, 28
Herschel, Sir John Frederick William (1792–1871), astronomer and author of A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural
Philosophy (London, 1831) 118
Hickson, William Edward (1803–70), educational writer, and proprietor of Westminster Review (1840–52) 124
Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1674), philosopher;
Computatio sive Logica (1668);
Tripos (1684) 95; Leviathan (1651) 14, 71, 91
Holy Alliance (1815) 58
Homer (c.eighth century BCE), attributed Iliad and Odyssey 12
Hooke, Nathaniel (d. 1763), author of The Roman History, from the Building of Rome to the Ruin of the Commonwealth, 4 vols.
(London, 1738–71) 8, 11
Horace (65–8 BCE), Roman poet 19, 12, 134
Howick, Henry George Grey, Lord (1802–94), liberal statesman of independent views 73
Hughes, Thomas (1822–96), novelist Tom Brown’s School Days (1857);
one of the first anti-slavery voices in Britain at the onset of the American Civil War 151
Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1767–1835), Prussian reformer and philosopher 143
Hume, David (1711–76), philosopher and historian, History of England (1754–62) and Essays and Treatises on Several
Subjects, 2 vols. (1753) 8, 33, 42
Hume, Joseph (1777–1855), radical politician 54, 58, 110
Huskisson, William (1770–1830), statesman, and the world’s first railway fatality 58
Hyde Park riots (1866) 162

imagination 66, 82, 87, 106 See also feeling(s); poetry

India, government of 17, 137
India House. See East India Company
intuition, innate-principle metaphysics 107, 133, 134–5, 162–3;
Carlyle, a man of intuition 106; Harriet Mill’s intuitive intelligence 112, 113
Ireland 140, 165, 170, 173–4
Irish Coercion Act (1833) 117
Irish Land Act (1870) 174
Isocrates (436–338 BCE), Athenian orator and writer: ad Demonicum and ad Nicoclem, works on the moral education of young
men 7

Jamaica rebellion (1865) 174–6

Jones, John Gale (1769–1838), radical orator and activist 72
Joyce, Jeremiah (1763–1815), Unitarian, tutor in the home of Lord Stanhope, charged with treason in 1794. Scientific
Dialogues, Intended for the Instruction and Entertainment of Young People, 6 vols. (London, 1800)
The Jurist; or Quarterly Journal of Jurisprudence and Legislation (1827–33) 109, 110
Juvenal (fl.c.120–40), Roman satirist 15

Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804), Prussian idealist philosopher 126

Kepler, Johannes (1571–1630), astronomer 90

Lafayette, Marie-Joseph Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de (1757–1834), soldier and participant in the American (1776) and French
Revolutions (of 1789 and 1830) 99
Langhorne, John (1735–79) and William (1721–72), translators of Plutarch’s Lives (London, 1770) 8
Laplace, Pierre Simon, Marquis de (1749–1827), French astronomer and mathematician 90
Latin language and literature 7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 20
Lavoisier, Antoine Laurent (1743–94), French chemist and physicist 38
law: English 17, 39, 53, 58, 67;
Roman 38–9
Lenthéric, Pierre (fl. 1810–30s), French mathematician who taught Mill in Montpellier 35
liberalism xxx, 37, 45, 58, 95, 161
liberty of action and discussion 27, 28, 52, 62, 95, 130, 141–3
Livy (59 BCE–17 CE), Roman historian 10, 11
Locke, John (1632–1704), philosopher and author of Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) 41, 114
logic 14, 17, 20, 26, 35, 39–40, 64, 70–1, 91–2, 103, 117, 119, 125, 126–7, 139 n., 154–5;
induction 91, 119; school (scholastic, syllogistic) logic 14, 17, 64, 70–1; syllogism 103
London and Westminster Review, The (1835–40) x, xxii, 113, 116–18, 121–4
London Debating Society 73–4, 81, 86, 90
London Review, The (1835–6). See London and Westminster Review
Longmans, publishers 56, 156
Lorimer, James (1818–90), jurist and philosopher, author of Political Progress not Necessarily Democratic (London, 1857) 146
Louis XIV (1638–1715), King of France 38
Louis XV (1710–74), King of France 38
Lowe, Joseph (d. 1831), Scottish journalist and political economist, and a friend of James Mill. He lived in Caen in France from
1814 until the 1820s and John Stuart Mill stayed with him when returning from Sir Samuel Bentham’s house in France 37
Lowe Robert, Viscount Sherbrooke (1811-92), MP, an admirer of Bentham and a member of the Political Economy club, who
spoke on the Cattle Diseases Bill, to which Mill refers 14 February 1866 161
Loyola, Ignatius (1491–1556), founder of the Jesuit religious order 120
Lucas, Frederick (1812–55), Roman Catholic journalist and politician, who sought to persuade Mill to stand for Parliament in
about 1854 156
Lucretius, Titus Lucretius Cārus (98–c.55 BCE), Roman poet and philosopher 10, 26
Ludlow, John Malcolm Forbes (1821–1911), lawyer and activist in support of the working classes. Early anti–slavery writer at
the start of the American Civil War 151
Lysias (c.458–c.380), Attic orator, 10
Lucian (115–post-180), Greek writer, established satirical dialogue form, 7

Macaulay, Thomas Babington (1800–59), historian and essayist, attacked James Mill’s Essay on Government in the Edinburgh
Review, 49 (1829) xxiv, 46, 72, 73, 90–2
Maccal, William (1812–88), writer, author of Elements of Individualism (London, 1847) 143
McCrie, Thomas (1772–1835), ecclesiastical historian, author of Life of John Knox (Edinburgh, 1812) 9
McCulloch, John Ramsay (1789–1864), political economist 57–8, 72–3
Mackintosh, James (1765–1832), philosopher and administrator, ‘Parliamentary Reform’, Edinburgh Review, 34 (1820),
prompted George Grote’s Statement on the Question of Parliamentary Reform (q.v.) 43, 59, 114
McLaren, Duncan (1800–86), politician and writer 161
MacLean, Donald (n.d.), first president of the London Debating Society 73 n.
Malthus, Thomas Robert (1766–1834), clergyman, political economist, author of Essay on Population (London, 1798) 61, 174
Marie Antoinette (1755–93), Queen of France, wife of Louis XVI, executed during the French Revolution 38
Marmontel, Jean François (1723–99), French philosophe; Mill cites the impact made by his Mémoires d’un père, 4 vols. (Paris,
1804) xviii, 81
Marshall, James Garth (1802–73), liberal politician, author of Minorities and Majorities: Their Relative Rights (London, 1853)
68, 144
Marshall, John (1765–1845), industrialist and politician, MP for Grampound
mathematics 9, 13, 37, 134; arithmetic 6; geometry 8, 9, 97, 109; algebra 8, 9; calculus 9
Maurice, Frederick Denison (1805–72), clergyman and reformer; ‘a Coleridgian’ 74, 88–9
Mill, Harriet, née Burrow (d. 1854), Mill’s mother ix, xvi–xvii, xviii, xxiii, xxvi, 177, 179–80, 182
Mill, Harriet (1807–58), née Hardy, subsequently Harriet Taylor, and, after her husband John’s death, married to John Stuart Mill x, xi, xvi, xviii–xxv; influence
 on JSM xi, xii, xv, xvii, xxx, 5, 101, 105–7, 129–32, 137–8, 139–41, 142, 179, 190–1; markings and alterations in original MS of Autobiography 177, 179, 181;
early relationship with JSM 101, 105, 129–31, 186–8, 192; interprets Carlyle 101; moral and intellectual character xxiv, 105–7, 142, 186–90; compared with
James Mill 116; social and political opinions 129–32; marriage with JSM 135; and On Liberty 136, 141–4; illness and death xxvi–xxvii, 135–6; and Principles
of Political Economy 139–41, 192; and Dissertations and Discussions 155; Letters with Mill xii, xix, xx n., xxiii, xxiv, xxvi; Subjection of Women 193
Mill, James (1773–1836), political economist, John Stuart’s father and author of History of British India, 3 vols. (London, 1817);
Elements of Political Economy (London, 1821), ‘Jurisprudence’ (in the supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica, 1820);
Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (London, 1829), and A Fragment on Mackintosh (London, 1835). Early life 5;
religious opinions 5, 25–7, 62, 115; character 5, 22, 29–32, 102; education of JSM ix, 5–24, 27–8, 30–3, 78–80, 91–3; opinion
of poetry 13, 65; indebtedness to Plato 16; principles of elocution 16; bad temper 16–17, 21, 26–7, 32; East India Company
employment 18, 48–9; encouragement of Ricardo (q.v.) 19; moral convictions 29–30, 62; disbelief in pleasure 30–1;
contempt for feelings 31–2, 65; relationship with children 32; JSM’s fear of 33; influence on contemporaries 33–4, 44, 53–4,
60–4, 115–16; abhorrence of English law 38–9; unpublished dialogue on government 39; JSM’s first published writings
defended 52; and Westminster Review, 54–7, 74–5; and utilitarian radicals 60–4; political ideas 61–3, 90–1, 91–2, 114;
psychological doctrine 63; contribution to Parliamentary History and Review 68–9; collector of logic books 71; and JSM’s
mental crisis 79; attitude towards Carlyle 93; JSM’s differences of opinion 102, 114; and the first Reformed Parliament 111;
writings in London and Westminster Review 113; death 115; reputation 115–17; Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human
Mind (1829; ed. JSM, 1869) 39–40, 71, 128, 154, 172–3; article on the Edinburgh Review (Westminster Review, 1824) 54,
57; article on the Quarterly Review (Westminster Review, 1824) 57; Elements of Political Economy (1821; 3rd edn., 1826)
19, 38, 42, 69–70, 116; A Fragment on Mackintosh (1835) 59, 114; ‘Government’ (in supplement to Encyclopædia
Britannica 1820) 61, 90–1, 97; The History of British India (1817) 5, 6, 7, 17, 116; ‘Jurisprudence’ (in supplement to
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1820) 40; review of Southey (Westminster Review, 1825) 57
Mill, John Stuart (1806–73);
reasons for writing autobiography 5, 137; birth 5; early education 5–24; reading in Greek and Latin literature 7, 8–9, 15–16,
history 8–9, 11,
and English poetry 10, 12–13; teaches Latin to sisters and brothers 9; writes histories, poetry, and tragedies 12; interest in
science 13; studies logic 14–15; influence of Plato 16–17; lessons in elocution 16–17; deficiencies in education 17, 23–4, 28,
179–81;
studies political economy 19–20, 69–70; natural abilities 20–1, 23–4; not educated by cram xii, xiii, 21; protection against self-
conceit 22–3; disputatiousness 22; lack of companionship 23–4; health 23, 49, 77, 135, 183; moral influences 25–34;
religious opinions 25–9, 42; education of fear 180; early acquaintance with Bentham 34, 181–2; travels 34, 50, 135, 152;
year’s residence in France 34–7; interest in French Revolution 38, 75–6; studies law 38–9; first reads Bentham 39–41, 77;
object in life 40–1, 77–8, 80–1, 82–3, 85–6; studies psychology 41–2, 72; first argumentative essay 43; influence of Grote and
the Austins 43–5; forms Utilitarian Society 47–8; sectarianism 47, 63, 65, 66; East India Company employment 48–51,
135–6, 156–7; first publications 52–3; and the Westminster Review 56–8, 75–6, 77; radical activities 57–63; as Benthamite or
reasoning machine 60–3, 90; neglect of feeling 64–5, 79–81; attitude toward poetry 65–6, 83, 84–6; edits Bentham’s
Rationale of Judicial Evidence 66–8; style 68, 74, 99; writings in Parliamentary History and Review 69; learns German 69;
forms discussion group 69–71; public speaking 71–5, 81, 86, 90; helps found London Debating Society 73–5; mental crisis
77–86; important transformation in opinions 77, 82–7, 108; anti-self-consciousness theory 81–2; cultivation of feelings 83,
85–6; first reads Wordsworth 84–6; debate on Wordsworth and Byron 86; schism with Roebuck 87–8; friendship with
Maurice and Sterling 88–90; political and social ideas 90–3, 97–8, 108–9, 129–32, 140–1, 143–5, 145–6, 148, 168–9, 173–4;
ideas on logic 91–3, 97, 103–4, 117–19, 125–8; many-sidedness 93–4, 142; influence of Comte and the Saint-Simonians 93–6,
118–20; in Paris during the Revolution of 1830 98–9; writings in Examiner 99, 112; acquaintance with Carlyle 99–101;
writings in Tait’s and Jurist 104; early relationship with his wife 105–7, 129–31; intellectual indebtedness to her 106–8, 130,
137–42, 147, 148, 149; and the first Reformed Parliament 111–12, 121–2; writings in Monthly Repository 112; critiques of
Bentham 112, 123–4; edits London and Westminster Review 112–14, 116–17, 122, 123, 124; double redaction method
125–6, 136; seclusion from society 128–9, 147; marriage 135; settles at Avignon 136–7; indebtedness to Helen Taylor 137,
148, 171–2; and American Civil War 149–51; critique of Hamilton 152–5; critique of Comte 155–6; publication in cheap
editions 156; election to Parliament 156–9; speeches and political activities 159–70; settles Hyde Park riots 162–3; and Irish
land question 163–5; chairman of Jamaica Committee 165–6; threats of assassination 167; and women’s suffrage 169–70;
correspondence 170–1; rector of St. Andrew’s 172; edits James Mill’s Analysis 172–3; defeated in second election 173–5;
Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865; reprinted from Westminster Review, 1865) 155–6; ‘Austin on Jurisprudence’
(Edinburgh Review, 1863) 152; ‘Bain’s Psychology’ (Edinburgh Review, 1859) 146; ‘Bentham’ (London and Westminster
Review, 1838) 123–4; ‘Civilization’ (London and Westminster Review, 1836) 114–15; ‘Coleridge’ (London and Westminster
Review, 1840) 123–4; Considerations on Representative Government (1861) 109, 134, 148, 156, 161–2; ‘The Contest in
America’ (Fraser’s, 1862) 151–2; ‘Corporation and Church Property’ ( Jurist, 1833) 104; ‘The Currency Juggle’ (Tait’s, 1833)
104; ‘De Tocqueville on Democracy in America’ (London and Westminster Review, 1835) 108–9; ‘M. de Tocqueville on
Democracy in America’ (Edinburgh Review, 1840) 109, 124; Dissertations and Discussions (vols. i and ii, 1859; vol. iii,
1867) 104, 109, 112, 115, 121, 123, 124, 146, 147, 172; England and Ireland (1868) 164, 172; Essays on Some Unsettled
Questions of Political Economy (1844) 70, 103; An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865) 152–5; ‘A Few
Words on Non–Intervention’ (Fraser’s, 1859) 146; ‘The French Revolution’ (review of Carlyle, London and Westminster
Review, 1837) 122–3; Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrew’s (1867) 172; ‘Lord Durham’s Return’
(LWR, 1838) 121, 122; On Liberty (1859) 137, 141–4, 156; ‘Notes on Some of the More Popular Dialogues of Plato’ (Monthly
Repository, 1834–5) 112; ‘Notes on the Newspapers’ (Monthly Repository, 1834) 112; ‘Periodical Literature’ (continuation
of James Mill’s article on the Edinburgh, Westminster Review, 1824) 56 n.; ‘Plato’ (Edinburgh Review, 1866) 172; Principles
of Political Economy (1848; 2nd edn., 1849; 3rd edn., 1852) 132–3, 139–42, 156, 192; ‘Professor Sedgwick’s Discourse’
(London and Westminster Review, 1835) 114; ‘Recent Writers on Reform’ (review of Hare, Austin, and Lorimer, Fraser’s,
1859) 146; ‘Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy’ (in Bulwer’s England and the English, 1833) 112; review of Herschel’s
Discourse (Examiner, 1831) 118; review of Scott’s Life of Napoleon (Westminster Review, 1828) 75; ‘The Slave Power’
(review of Cairnes, Westminster Review, 1862) 152; ‘The Spirit of the Age’ (Examiner, 1831) 99; The Subjection of Women
(1869) 139 n., 149, 175; A System of Logic (1843; 3rd edn., 1851) 71, 91–2, 97, 103, 117–19, 125, 126–7, 132, 139, 142,
154, 155, 193; Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (1859) 144–5, 146, 159; ‘Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties’ (Monthly
Repository, 1833) 112; Utilitarianism (1863; repr. from Fraser’s, 1861) 149; ‘Vindication of the French Revolution of
February 1848’ (Westminster Review, 1849) 147
Millar, John (1735–1801), philosopher and historian, author of An Historical View of the English Government, from the
Settlement of the Saxons in Britain to the Accession of the House of Stewart (London, 1787) 9
Milton, John (1608–74), poet and essayist 13
Mitford, William (1744–1827), author of The History of Greece, 10 vols. (London, 1784–1818) 11, 57, 110, 111, 113, 116, 117,
191
Molesworth, William (1810–55) (q.v.), politician and editor of Hobbes’s Works 110–11, 113, 116–17, 191
Mongault, Nicholas Hubert (1674–1746), editor and commentator on Cicero’s letters to Atticus (1714) 10
Monthly Repository, The (1806–38) 112
Moore, Thomas (1779–1852), poet 65
More, Thomas (1478–1535), statesman, author of Utopia (1516) 150 n.
Morning Chronicle, The (1770 ff.) 52, 53, 132
Mosheim, Johann Loren von (1693–1755), historian of the German Lutheran Church;
author of An Ecclesiastical History, Ancient and Modern (London, 1765) 9
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756–91), composer and musician 84
Murray, John (1778–1843), publisher 126
music 13, 83–4, 87
Napoleon I (1769–1821), Emperor of the French (1804–1814/15). See Bonaparte, Napoleon 58 n., 75
Napoleon III (1808–73), Emperor of the French (1852–70) 134 n.
natural scenery, JSM’s taste for 78, 83, 85–6
necessity, doctrine of 97
Newton, Sir Isaac (1642–1727), astronomer, mathematician, and physicist 90
Niebuhr, Barthold Georg (1776–1831), historian and ambassador, author of The History of Rome, 3 vols. (London, 1828–42) 11
Nightingale, Florence (1820–1910), medical reformer 170
O’Connell, Daniel (1775–1847), Irish politician and nationalist leader 69 n., 110
Odger, George (1813–77), British trade unionist and radical politician 159
oratory 10, 43
Ovid, Publius Ovidius Nāso (43 BCE–AD 17), Roman poet, author of Metamorphoses 10
Owen, Robert (1771–1858), industrialist, writer and socialist 72, 96
Owenites xxx, 71–2, 98
Paley, William (1743–1805), theologian and moral philosopher 114
Palmerston, Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount (1784–1865), statesman and prime minister 136, 147
Paoli, Pasquale (1725–1807), Corsican patriot and leader 8
Parker, John William (1792–1870), publisher 126
Parliament 33, 49, 53, 58, 59, 68, 148;
parliamentary radicals 110–12, 121–22; JSM in 156–72, 173–5
Parliamentary History and Review (1826–8) 68–9
parliamentary radicals. See radicalism
Pascal, Blaise (1623–62), French philosopher and mathematician 68
Peel, Robert (1788–1850), statesman and prime minister 58
Pericles (c.495–429 BCE), Athenian statesman, writer, and general 43
Perry, James (1756–1821), journalist and editor of Morning Chronicle 52–3
Pestalozzi, Johann Heidrich (1746–1827), Swiss educationalist and admirer of Rousseau 143
Petition of the Merchants of London for Free Trade (1820) 58
Phaedrus, Gaius Julius (c.15 BCE–AD 50), former Thracian slave, freed by Augustus, author of fables, Fabularum Aesopiarum
libri (Utrecht, 1718) 10
Phillips, Wendell (1811–84), American abolitionist 150
Plato (427–347 BCE), philosopher. Euthyphron, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Cratylus, Theætetus, Gorgias, Protagoras, Republic 7,
16, 29, 39, 66, 112, 172
Plutarch (46–c.120), Greek biographer, historian, and moral philosopher;
author of Parallel Lives 8, 66
poetry, poetic culture x, 12, 13, 34, 43, 64, 65, 66, 83, 84–7, 100, 101, 112, 186, 190–1
political economy 19–20, 48, 61, 64, 69–70, 72, 95, 132–3, 139–41
political philosophy: James Mill’s 62–3, 90–2;
JSM’s 92–5, 97–8, 109–10, 145–6, 148
Polybius, (c.200–post-118 BCE), Greek historian of Rome 10
Pompignan, Jean-Jacques Lefranc, Marquis de (1709–84), poet and antagonist of Voltaire (q.v.) 35
Pope, Alexander (1688–1744), poet. Translation of Homer’s Iliad (1720), and his Essay on Man (1733) 10, 12, 66
Potter, Thomas Bayley (1817–98), politician and MP for Rochdale 1865–95 161
Praed, Winthrop Mackworth (1802–39), poet and politician 73
Prescott, William George (n.d.), George Grote’s (q.v.), partner in the banking house of Grote, Prescott and Company 69, 70
Priestley, Joseph (1733–1804), theologian and scientist; edited Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind (London 1775) 71
property, private 94, 95, 98, 130, 144
Provençal, Jean Michel (1781–1845), professor of zoology in Montpellier 35
psychology xiv, 41, 63, 71, 108, 114–15, 153, 173. See also association
Pulling, Alexander (1813–95), sergeant-at-law and legal writer 168
Quarterly Review, The (1809 ff.) 54, 57, 117
Quintilian, Marcus Fabius (c.35–c.95), Roman teacher of rhetoric 15
radicalism 18, 58–61, 112–13, 121, 124;
in Parliament 110–12, 121–2
Reform Bills: of 1832 99, 101, 117 n.;
of 1859 (defeated ) 144; of 1866 (not put to a final vote) 159; of 1867 161–2, 168, 173, 174
Reform League 162, 163
Reid, Thomas (1710–96), Scottish philosopher and exponent of the ‘common sense’ school, 42, 152, 153
religion xxviii, 25–9, 40, 42, 52
representative government 62, 145, 148, 161, 169
Ricardo, David (1772–1823), economist and author of On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (London, 1817) 19,
33, 43, 52, 54, 58, 70
Robertson, John (n.d.), a partner with Mill in the Westminster Review 117
Robertson, William (1721–93), historian of Scotland, America, and Emperor Charles V 8
Robinson Crusoe (1719), a novel by Daniel Defoe 9
Roebuck, John Arthur (1801–79), lawyer, politician and writer 48, 57, 70, 74, 87;
Owenite debates 71–2; debate on Wordsworth and Byron 86; schism with JSM xxiii–xxiv, 88; in Parliament 110, 111
Rollin, Charles (1661–1741), French historian and author of The Ancient History 8
Romilly, Edward (n.d.), son of Samuel and brother of John 110
Romilly, John (1791–1864), lawyer, MP, Master of the Rolls 46, 60, 69, 73, 74, 110
Romilly, Sir Samuel (1757–1818), law reformer, MP, father of John Romilly 60
Russell, John, Earl (1792–1878), politician and prime minister 162, 164
Rutty, John (1698–1775), physician and author of a history of the Quakers in Ireland 9
St. Andrews, University of 172
Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, comte de (1760–1825), early socialist and philosopher xxix, 37, 94
Saint-Simonians 93–6, 98, 140
Sallust, Gaius Sallustius Crispus (86–35 BCE), Roman historian 10
Say, Jean Baptiste (1767–1832), French economist, author of Traité d’économie politique (1803) 37
Schiller, Johann Christoph Friederich von (1759–1805), German philosopher, historian, and playwright 90
science, physical 13;
as model for political 91, 94–5; and logic 17–18
Scott, Walter (1771–1832), novelist and poet. Romances and songs, Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French, with a
preliminary view of the French Revolution, 9 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1829) 75–6
Sedgwick, Adam (1785–1873), geologist, Discourse on the Studies of the University (1832) 114
sexes, relations between 63, 96, 192, 138 n.
Sewel, Willem (1650–1720), author of a history of the Quakers 9
Shaen, William (1821–87), radical and lawyer 166 n.
Shakespeare, William (1564–1616), playwright and poet 12 n., 13, 78
Shee, William (1804–68), lawyer, sergeant-at-law, MP 74
Shelley, Percy Byshe (1792–1822), poet xx, 106, 191
Six Acts (1819) 58
Slack, Henry James (1818–96), author and journalist 116 n.
Smith, Adam (1723–90), economist and philosopher, author of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,
2 vols. (London, 1776) 19
Smith, Goldwin (1823–1910), journalist and historian 166 n.
socialism xxx, 94, 96, 102, 108, 130, 131–2, 141, 143
Socrates (469–399 BCE), Greek philosopher, immortalized in the early dialogues of Plato 7, 29, 66
‘Socratici viri,’ 30
Sophocles (496–406/5 BCE), ancient Greek playwright, Mill refers in particular to Ajax, Electra, and Philoctetes 10
Southern, Henry (1799–1853), journalist and diplomat, manager of the literary pages of the Westminster Review 56, 75
Southey, Robert (1774–1843), Poet Laureate and author. James Mill attacked his The Book of the Church, 2 vols. (London,
1824) 57
Spenser, Edmund (1552?–1599), poet, author of The Fairie Queene (1590–6) 13
Stanley, Edward Henry, Earl of Derby (1826–93), politician 136
Sterling, John (1806–44), author and contributor to London and Westminster Review. Mill refers to him as a Coleridgian xxi,
74, 86, 88, 89, 117
Stewart, Dugauld (1753–1828), Scottish philosopher. Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 3 vols. (London, 1792–
1827) 42, 103
Strutt, Edward, Lord Belper (1801–80), politician with interests in free trade, law reform, and education 46, 60, 69, 110
Stuart, Sir John (c.1752–1821), of Fettercairn, and Lady Jane Stuart (?–1829), patrons of James Mill 5
Tacitus, Publius Cornelius (57–post-117), Roman historian 15
Taylor, Harriet (1807–58), née Hardy, subsequently Harriet Mill ix, x, xii, xvi, xviii, xix, xxi, xxii, xxv, 105, 135, 136, 137, 140,
146, 149, 179, 181
Taylor, Helen (1831–1907), feminist and campaigner, daughter of Harriet and John Taylor, adopted daughter of John Stuart Mill
and Harriet 148, 170, 190, 192, 193
Taylor, John (d. 1849), husband of Harriet Taylor x, xi, xxv, xxvi, 129, 135
Taylor, Peter Alfred (1819–91), politician and radical, Liberal MP for Leicester 166 n.
Terence, Publius Terentius Āfer (193/183–159 BCE), Roman playwright of comedies 10 Theocritus (c.300–250 BCE), Hellenistic
poet 10
Thirlwall, Connop (1795–1875), historian and bishop of St David’s, 72, 73
Thompson, Colonel Thomas Perronet (1783–1869), army officer and politician, contributor to Westminster Review 75, 113
Thompson, William (1775–1833), socialist and economist, author of An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth
Most Conducive to Human (London, 1824) and Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of
the Other Half, Men, to Retain them in Political and Thence Civil and Domestic Slavery (London, 1825) 72
Thomson, Charles Poulett, Baron Sydenham (1799–1841), politician and governor of British North America 73
Thomson, James (1700–1748), poet. Mill cites his ‘Winter’ from The Seasons (London, 1744) 12
Thomson, Dr Thomas (1773–1852), chemist and author of A System of Chemistry, 4 vols. (London, 1802) 13, 92
Thucydides (c.460–399 BCE), Greek historian 10
Tocqueville, Alexis de (1805–59), French philosopher, historian, and politician, author of Democracy in America, 2 vols. (1835,
1840) xxix, xxx, 108–10, 114
Tooke, William Eyton (d. 1829), son of the political economist Thomas Tooke (1774–1858) 48, 57, 58, 60, 88
Torrens, Col. Robert (1780–1864), political economist and owner of two London papers, Globe and Traveller, which he merged
in 1822 52
Traveller, The 52, 53
Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques (1727–81), French economist and philosopher, subject of a short but influential biography by
Condorcet (q.v) 66
Tweeddale, George Hay, 7th Marquis of (1753–1804), who may have employed James Mill as a tutor 6
United States of America 150–2
Universal History, from the Earliest Account of Time, An (1747–68) 11
Utilitarian Society x, 47, 69
utilitarianism, Benthamism x, xi, xvii, xxxi, 39, 47, 57, 61–5, 66, 74, 87, 100, 114, 121, 123, 129–130, 185
Villiers, Charles Pelham (1802–98), political economist and politician, MP for Wolverhampton 46, 72, 74
Villiers, George William Frederick, Earl of Clarendon (1800–70), statesman 73, 74
Villiers, Thomas Hyde (1801–32), politician, elder brother of Charles Villiers 74
Virgil, Publius Vergilius Maro (70–19 BCE), Roman poet;
Bucolics (the lesser known title for Eclogues) and Aeneid 10, 47, 59
Voltaire, pseudonym of François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), French writer and philosophe, author of many works including his
Dictionnaire philosophique (1764) 35, 68, 116, 183
Wakefield, Edward Gibbon (1796–1862), philanthropist and advocate of colonization, involved in debates on Canada 122
Wallace, William (1768–1843), mathematician 14
Walpole, Spencer Horatio (1806–98), reformer and politician 163
Warburton, Henry (1784–1858), radical politician 110
Warren, Josiah (1798–1874), initially a follower of Robert Owen (q.v.), became an anarchist, author of Equitable Commerce
(New York, 1852) and True Civilisation (1865) 143, 144
Watson, Robert (1730?–81), historian, author of The History of the Reign of Philip II, King of Spain (London, 1777) (which
includes the ‘History of Holland’ and (with William Thomson) The History of the Reign of Phillip III, King of Spain (London
1783)) 8, 11
Weber, Carl Maria von (1786–1826), German composer, including the opera Oberon (1826) 83, 84
Westminster Review, The (1824–36, 1840 ff.) xxii, 52–6, 57, 65, 69, 75–7, 113, 121, 147, 152, 156. See also London and
Westminster Review
Whately, Richard (1787–1863), archbishop and philosopher;
Mill mentions his Elements of Logic. Comprising the Substance of the Article in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana (London, 1826) 71, 103, 126
Whewell, William (1794–1866), historian and philosopher of science, author of History of Inductive Sciences, 3 vols. (London,
1857) and Of Induction, with Especial Reference to Mr. J. Stuart Mill’s System of Logic (London, 1849). History of the
Inductive Sciences (1837) 117–18;
The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840) 126; reply to JSM in Of Induction, with Especial Reference to . . . Mill’s System of Logic (1849) 126
Wilberforce, Samuel (1805–73), Bishop of Oxford and of Winchester 73
Wilberforce, William (1759–1833), politician and anti-slavery campaigner 151 n.
women’s suffrage xxviii 61–2, 147 n., 158, 159–60, 163, 169–70, 175;
National Society, 170, 175
Wordsworth, William (1770–1850), poet;
Mill refers to The Excursion, Being a Portion of the Recluse, a Poem (London, 1814), and Poems by William Wordsworth, Including Lyrical Ballads, and the
Miscellaneous Pieces by the Author 2 vols. (London, 1815) 84–6, 89
working classes 162–3, 174, 175
Wycliffe, John (d. 1384), religious reformer and philosopher 52
Xenophon (c.428–c.354 BCE), Athenian statesman and writer. Mill refers to his Anabasis and Cyropædia (concerning his
Persian Expedition);
the Memorabilia (his memoir of Socrates);
and his Hellenica (a history of Greece) 7, 10, 29
zoology 35