simply by compelling me to read the book thoroughly, for myself. As soon
as I was able to read with fluency, she began a course of Bible work
with me, which never ceased till I went to Oxford. She read alternate
verses with me, watching, at first, every intonation of my voice, and
correcting the false ones, till she made me understand the verse, if
within my reach, rightly, and energetically. It might be beyond me
altogether; that she did not care about; but she made sure that as soon
as I got hold of it at all, I should get hold of it by the right end.
In this way she began with the first verse of Genesis, and went straight
through, to the last verse of the Apocalypse; hard names, numbers,
Levitical law, and all; and began again at Genesis the next day. If a
name was hard, the better the exercise in pronunciation,--if the chapter
was tiresome, the better lesson in patience,--if loathsome, the better
lesson in faith that there was some use in its being so outspoken. After
our chapters, (from two to three a day, according to their length, the
first thing after breakfast, and no interruption from servants
allowed,--none from visitors, who either joined in the reading or had to
stay upstairs,--and none from any visitings or excursions, except real
travelling), I had to learn a few verses by heart, or repeat, to make
sure I had not lost, something of what was already known; and, with the
chapters thus gradually possessed from the first word to the last, I had
to learn the whole body of the fine old Scottish paraphrases, which are
good, melodious, and forceful verse; and to which, together with the
Bible itself, I owe the first cultivation of my ear in sound.
It is strange that of all the pieces of the Bible which my mother thus
taught me, that which cost me most to learn, and which was, to my
child's mind, chiefly repulsive--the 119th Psalm--has now become of all
the most precious to me, in its overflowing and glorious passion of love
for the Law of God, in opposition to the abuse of it by modern preachers
of what they imagine to be His gospel.
But it is only by deliberate effort that I recall the long morning hours
of toil, as regular as sunrise,--toil on both sides equal,--by which,
year after year, my mother forced me to learn these paraphrases, and
chapters, (the eighth of 1st Kings being one--try it, good reader, in a
leisure hour!) allowing not so much as a syllable to be missed or
misplaced; while every sentence was required to be said over and over
again till she was satisfied with the accent of it. I recollect a
struggle between us of about three weeks, concerning the accent of the
"of" in the lines
"Shall any following spring revive
The ashes of the urn?"--
I insisting, partly in childish obstinacy, and partly in true instinct
for rhythm, (being wholly careless on the subject both of urns and their
contents), on reciting it with an accented _of_. It was not, I say, till
after three weeks' labor, that my mother got the accent lightened on the
"of" and laid on the "ashes," to her mind. But had it taken three years
she would have done it, having once undertaken to do it. And, assuredly,
had she not done it,--well, there's no knowing what would have happened;
but I'm very thankful she _did_.
I have just opened my oldest (in use) Bible,--a small, closely, and very
neatly printed volume it is, printed in Edinburgh by Sir D. Hunter Blair
and J. Bruce, Printers, to the King's Most Excellent Majesty, in 1816.
Yellow, now, with age, and flexible, but not unclean, with much use,
except that the lower corners of the pages at 8th of 1st Kings, and 32d
Deuteronomy, are worn somewhat thin and dark, the learning of these two
chapters having cost me much pains. My mother's list of the chapters
with which, thus learned, she established my soul in life, has just
fallen out of it. I will take what indulgence the incurious reader can
give me, for printing the list thus accidentally occurrent:
Exodus, chapters 15th and 20th.
2 Samuel, " 1st, from 17th verse to end.
1 Kings, " 8th.
Psalms, " 23d, 32d, 90th, 91st, 103d, 112th, 119th, 139th.
Proverbs, " 2d, 3d, 8th, 12th.
Isaiah, " 58th.
Matthew, " 5th, 6th, 7th.
Acts, " 26th.
1 Corinthians, " 13th, 15th.
James, " 4th.
Revelation, " 5th, 6th.
And, truly, though I have picked up the elements of a little further
knowledge--in mathematics, meteorology, and the like, in after
life,--and owe not a little to the teaching of many people, this
maternal installation of my mind in that property of chapters, I count
very confidently the most precious, and, on the whole, the one
_essential_ part of all my education.
And it is perhaps already time to mark what advantage and mischief, by
the chances of life up to seven years old, had been irrevocably
determined for me.
I will first count my blessings (as a not unwise friend once recommended
me to do, continually; whereas I have a bad trick of always numbering
the thorns in my fingers and not the bones in them).
And for best and truest beginning of all blessings, I had been taught
the perfect meaning of Peace, in thought, act, and word.
I never had heard my father's or mother's voice once raised in any
question with each other; nor seen an angry, or even slightly hurt or
offended, glance in the eyes of either. I had never heard a servant
scolded; nor even suddenly, passionately, or in any severe manner,
blamed. I had never seen a moment's trouble or disorder in any household
matter; nor anything whatever either done in a hurry, or undone in due
time. I had no conception of such a feeling as anxiety; my father's
occasional vexation in the afternoons, when he had only got an order for
twelve butts after expecting one for fifteen, as I have just stated, was
never manifested to _me_; and itself related only to the question
whether his name would be a step higher or lower in the year's list of
sherry exporters; for he never spent more than half his income, and
therefore found himself little incommoded by occasional variations in
the total of it. I had never done any wrong that I knew of--beyond
occasionally delaying the commitment to heart of some improving
sentence, that I might watch a wasp on the window pane, or a bird in the
cherry tree; and I had never seen any grief.
Next to this quite priceless gift of Peace, I had received the perfect
understanding of the natures of Obedience and Faith. I obeyed word, or
lifted finger, of father or mother, simply as a ship her helm; not only
without idea of resistance, but receiving the direction as a part of my
own life and force, a helpful law, as necessary to me in every moral
action as the law of gravity in leaping. And my practice in Faith was
soon complete: nothing ever threatened me that was not inflicted, and
nothing ever told me that was not true.
Peace, obedience, faith; these three for chief good; next to these, the
habit of fixed attention with both eyes and mind--on which I will not
further enlarge at this moment, this being the main practical faculty of
my life, causing Mazzini to say of me, in conversation authentically
reported, a year or two before his death, that I had "the most analytic
mind in Europe." An opinion in which, so far as I am acquainted with
Europe, I am myself entirely disposed to concur.
Lastly, an extreme perfection in palate and all other bodily senses,
given by the utter prohibition of cake, wine, comfits, or, except in
carefulest restriction, fruit; and by fine preparation of what food was
given me. Such I esteem the main blessings of my childhood;--next, let
me count the equally dominant calamities.
First, that I had nothing to love.
My parents were--in a sort--visible powers of nature to me, no more
loved than the sun and the moon: only I should have been annoyed and
puzzled if either of them had gone out; (how much, now, when both are
darkened!)--still less did I love God; not that I had any quarrel with
Him, or fear of Him; but simply found what people told me was His
service, disagreeable; and what people told me was His book, not
entertaining. I had no companions to quarrel with, neither; nobody to
assist, and nobody to thank. Not a servant was ever allowed to do
anything for me, but what it was their duty to do; and why should I have
been grateful to the cook for cooking, or the gardener for
gardening,--when the one dared not give me a baked potato without asking
leave, and the other would not let my ants' nests alone, because they
made the walks untidy? The evil consequence of all this was not,
however, what might perhaps have been expected, that I grew up selfish
or unaffectionate; but that, when affection did come, it came with
violence utterly rampant and unmanageable, at least by me, who never
before had anything to manage.
For (second of chief calamities) I had nothing to endure. Danger or pain
of any kind I knew not: my strength was never exercised, my patience
never tried, and my courage never fortified. Not that I was ever afraid
of anything,--either ghosts, thunder, or beasts; and one of the nearest
approaches to insubordination which I was ever tempted into as a child,
was in passionate effort to get leave to play with the lion's cubs in
Wombwell's menagerie.
Thirdly, I was taught no precision nor etiquette of manners; it was
enough if, in the little society we saw, I remained unobtrusive, and
replied to a question without shyness: but the shyness came later, and
increased as I grew conscious of the rudeness arising from the want of
social discipline, and found it impossible to acquire, in advanced life,
dexterity in any bodily exercise, skill in any pleasing accomplishment,
or ease and tact in ordinary behaviour.
Lastly, and chief of evils. My judgment of right and wrong, and powers
of independent action, were left entirely undeveloped; because the
bridle and blinkers were never taken off me. Children should have their
times of being off duty, like soldiers; and when once the obedience, if
required, is certain, the little creature should be very early put for
periods of practice in complete command of itself; set on the barebacked
horse of its own will, and left to break it by its own strength. But the
ceaseless authority exercised over my youth left me, when cast out at
last into the world, unable for some time to do more than drift with its
vortices.
My present verdict, therefore, on the general tenor of my education at
that time, must be, that it was at once too formal and too luxurious;
leaving my character, at the most important moment for its construction,
cramped indeed, but not disciplined; and only by protection innocent,
instead of by practice virtuous.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: From "Praeterita," _1885, Vol. I, Chapter II_.]
A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY[3]
JOHN STUART MILL
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, 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 realised; 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 connections
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 realised, 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
clear-sightedness, 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 idiosyncrasies 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
"Memoires," 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 burden 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.