The latter, owing to
his obscure style and to the scholastic details of which many parts
of his treatise are made up, is little read, and seldom sufficiently
appreciated.
his obscure style and to the scholastic details of which many parts
of his treatise are made up, is little read, and seldom sufficiently
appreciated.
Autobiography by John Stuart Mill
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Title: Autobiography
Author: John Stuart Mill
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Language: English
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AUTOBIOGRAPHY
by
JOHN STUART MILL
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I 1806-1819
CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION
CHAPTER II 1813-1821
MORAL INFLUENCES IN EARLY YOUTH--MY FATHER'S CHARACTER AND OPINIONS
CHAPTER III 1821-1823
LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, AND FIRST OF SELF-EDUCATION
CHAPTER IV 1823-1828
YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISM--THE "WESTMINSTER REVIEW"
CHAPTER V 1826-1832
A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY--ONE STAGE ONWARD
CHAPTER VI 1830-1840
COMMENCEMENT OF THE MOST VALUABLE FRIENDSHIP OF MY LIFE--MY FATHER'S
DEATH--WRITINGS AND OTHER PROCEEDINGS UP TO 1840
CHAPTER VII 1840-1870
GENERAL VIEW OF THE REMAINDER OF MY LIFE. --COMPLETION OF THE "SYSTEM
OF LOGIC"--PUBLICATION OF THE "PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY"
--MARRIAGE--RETIREMENT FROM THE INDIA HOUSE--PUBLICATION OF "LIBERTY"
--"CONSIDERATIONS ON REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT"--CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA
--EXAMINATION OF SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON'S PHILOSOPHY--PARLIAMENTARY LIFE
--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
recognised 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. 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, 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 burdens 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 inflections of the nouns and verbs, but, after
a course of vocables, proceeded at once to translation; and I faintly
remember going through Aesop'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 _Cyropaedia_ 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 Theoctetus 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
favourite 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 other's 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 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 Voyages, 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 pre-eminent, 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; 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 favourable 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 Caesar's Commentaries, but
afterwards added to the superintendence 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
Aeneid; all Horace, except the Epodes; the Fables of Phaedrus; 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
decade); 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 Mingault'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,
Aeschines, 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 favourite,
Hooke, and in Ferguson, continued to delight me. A book which, in
spite of what is called the dryness of its style, 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; and an Abridgment of the _Ancient Universal History_; a
History of Holland, from my favourite 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
and 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 these
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. Shakspeare 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
Shakspeare, 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 most 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 style 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 encyclopaedia 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 class-name 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.
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 inflections 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, _showed_ 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 proof sheets 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
criticism 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 would never 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
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 on 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
shows 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 contemporaries.
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 showed 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 shown 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.
The latter, owing to
his obscure style 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 encyclopaedia 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 class-name 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.
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 inflections 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, _showed_ 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 proof sheets 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
criticism 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 would never 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
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 on 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
shows 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 contemporaries.
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 showed 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 shown 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. 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. 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.
CHAPTER II
MORAL INFLUENCES IN EARLY YOUTH. MY FATHER'S CHARACTER AND OPINIONS
In my education, as in that of everyone, 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 reflections 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 show 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 Sabaean, or Manichaean 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 fictitious excellences--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 can 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 anyone
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 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, 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 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 ease and sloth. These and other moralities he conveyed
in brief sentences, uttered as occasion arose, of grave exhortation,
or stern reprobation and contempt.
But though direct moral teaching does much, indirect does more; and
the effect my father produced on my character, did not depend solely
on what he said or did with that direct object, but also, and still
more, on what manner of man he was.
In his views of life he partook of the character of the Stoic, the
Epicurean, and the Cynic, not in the modern but the ancient sense of
the word. In his personal qualities the Stoic predominated. His
standard of morals was Epicurean, inasmuch as it was utilitarian,
taking as the exclusive test of right and wrong, the tendency of
actions to produce pleasure or pain. But he had (and this was the
Cynic element) scarcely any belief in pleasure; at least in his later
years, of which alone, on this point, I can speak confidently. He was
not insensible to pleasures; but he deemed very few of them worth the
price which, at least in the present state of society, must be paid
for them. The greater number of miscarriages in life he considered to
be attributable to the overvaluing of pleasures. Accordingly,
temperance, in the large sense intended by the Greek philosophers
--stopping short at the point of moderation in all indulgences--was
with him, as with them, almost the central point of educational
precept. His inculcations of this virtue fill a large place in my
childish remembrances. He thought human life a poor thing at best,
after the freshness of youth and of unsatisfied curiosity had gone by.
This was a topic on which he did not often speak, especially, it may
be supposed, in the presence of young persons: but when he did, it
was with an air of settled and profound conviction. He would sometimes
say that if life were made what it might be, by good government and
good education, it would be worth having: but he never spoke with
anything like enthusiasm even of that possibility. He never varied in
rating intellectual enjoyments above all others, even in value as
pleasures, independently of their ulterior benefits. The pleasures of
the benevolent affections he placed high in the scale; and used to
say, that he had never known a happy old man, except those who were
able to live over again in the pleasures of the young. For passionate
emotions of all sorts, and for everything which bas been said or
written in exaltation of them, he professed the greatest contempt.
He regarded them as a form of madness. "The intense" was with him a
bye-word of scornful disapprobation. He regarded as an aberration of
the moral standard of modern times, compared with that of the ancients,
the great stress laid upon feeling. Feelings, as such, he considered
to be no proper subjects of praise or blame. Right and wrong, good and
bad, he regarded as qualities solely of conduct--of acts and omissions;
there being no feeling which may not lead, and does not frequently lead,
either to good or to bad actions: conscience itself, the very desire to
act right, often leading people to act wrong. Consistently carrying
out the doctrine that the object of praise and blame should be the
discouragement of wrong conduct and the encouragement of right, he
refused to let his praise or blame be influenced by the motive of the
agent. He blamed as severely what he thought a bad action, when the
motive was a feeling of duty, as if the agents had been consciously
evil doers. He would not have accepted as a plea in mitigation for
inquisitors, that they sincerely believed burning heretics to be an
obligation of conscience. But though he did not allow honesty of purpose
to soften his disapprobation of actions, it had its full effect on his
estimation of characters. No one prized conscientiousness and rectitude
of intention more highly, or was more incapable of valuing any person
in whom he did not feel assurance of it. But he disliked people quite
as much for any other deficiency, provided he thought it equally likely
to make them act ill. He disliked, for instance, a fanatic in any bad
cause, as much as or more than one who adopted the same cause from
self-interest, because he thought him even more likely to be practically
mischievous. And thus, his aversion to many intellectual errors, or what
he regarded as such, partook, in a certain sense, of the character of a
moral feeling. All this is merely saying that he, in a degree once common,
but now very unusual, threw his feelings into his opinions; which truly
it is difficult to understand how anyone who possesses much of both, can
fail to do. None but those who do not care about opinions will confound
this with intolerance. Those who, having opinions which they hold to be
immensely important, and their contraries to be prodigiously hurtful,
have any deep regard for the general good, will necessarily dislike, as
a class and in the abstract, those who think wrong what they think right,
and right what they think wrong: though they need not therefore be, nor
was my father, insensible to good qualities in an opponent, nor governed
in their estimation of individuals by one general presumption, instead
of by the whole of their character. I grant that an earnest person,
being no more infallible than other men, is liable to dislike people
on account of opinions which do not merit dislike; but if he neither
himself does them any ill office, nor connives at its being donc by
others, he is not intolerant: and the forbearance which flows from a
conscientious sense of the importance to mankind of the equal freedom
of all opinions, is the only tolerance which is commendable, or, to the
highest moral order of minds, possible.
It will be admitted, that a man of the opinions, and the character,
above described, was likely to leave a strong moral impression on any
mind principally formed by him, and that his moral teaching was not
likely to err on the side of laxity or indulgence. The element which
was chiefly deficient in his moral relation to his children was that
of tenderness. I do not believe that this deficiency lay in his own
nature. I believe him to have had much more feeling than he habitually
showed, and much greater capacities of feeling than were ever
developed. He resembled most Englishmen in being ashamed of the signs
of feeling, and, by the absence of demonstration, starving the
feelings themselves. If we consider further that he was in the trying
position of sole teacher, and add to this that his temper was
constitutionally irritable, it is impossible not to feel true pity for
a father who did, and strove to do, so much for his children, who
would have so valued their affection, yet who must have been
constantly feeling that fear of him was drying it up at its source.
This was no longer the case later in life, and with his younger
children. They loved him tenderly: and if I cannot say so much of
myself, I was always loyally devoted to him. As regards my own
education, I hesitate to pronounce whether I was more a loser or
gainer by his severity. It was not such as to prevent me from having a
happy childhood. And I do not believe that boys can be induced to
apply themselves with vigour, and--what is so much more
difficult--perseverance, to dry and irksome studies, by the sole force
of persuasion and soft words. Much must be done, and much must be
learnt, by children, for which rigid discipline, and known liability
to punishment, are indispensable as means. It is, no doubt, a very
laudable effort, in modern teaching, to render as much as possible of
what the young are required to learn, easy and interesting to them.
But when this principle is pushed to the length of not requiring them
to learn anything _but_ what has been made easy and interesting, one
of the chief objects of education is sacrificed. I rejoice in the
decline of the old brutal and tyrannical system of teaching, which,
however, did succeed in enforcing habits of application; but the new,
as it seems to me, is training up a race of men who will be incapable
of doing anything which is disagreeable to them. I do not, then,
believe that fear, as an element in education, can be dispensed with;
but I am sure that it ought not to be the main element; and when it
predominates so much as to preclude love and confidence on the part of
the child to those who should be the unreservedly trusted advisers of
after years, and perhaps to seal up the fountains of frank and
spontaneous communicativeness in the child's nature, it is an evil for
which a large abatement must be made from the benefits, moral and
intellectual, which may flow from any other part of the education.
During this first period of my life, the habitual frequenters of my
father's house were limited to a very few persons, most of them little
known to the world, but whom personal worth, and more or less of
congeniality with at least his political opinions (not so frequently
to be met with then as since), inclined him to cultivate; and his
conversations with them I listened to with interest and instruction.
My being an habitual inmate of my father's study made me acquainted
with the dearest of his friends, David Ricardo, who by his benevolent
countenance, and kindliness of manner, was very attractive to young
persons, and who, after I became a student of political economy,
invited me to his house and to walk with him in order to converse on
the subject. I was a more frequent visitor (from about 1817 or 1818)
to Mr. Hume, who, born in the same part of Scotland as my father, and
having been, I rather think, a younger schoolfellow or college
companion of his, had on returning from India renewed their youthful
acquaintance, and who--coming, like many others, greatly under the
influence of my father's intellect and energy of character--was
induced partly by that influence to go into Parliament, and there
adopt the line of conduct which has given him an honourable place in
the history of his country. Of Mr. Bentham I saw much more, owing to
the close intimacy which existed between him and my father. I do not
know how soon after my father's first arrival in England they became
acquainted. But my father was the earliest Englishman of any great
mark, who thoroughly understood, and in the main adopted, Bentham's
general views of ethics, government and law: and this was a natural
foundation for sympathy between them, and made them familiar
companions in a period of Bentham's life during which he admitted much
fewer visitors than was the case subsequently. At this time Mr.
Bentham passed some part of every year at Barrow Green House, in a
beautiful part of the Surrey Hills, a few miles from Godstone, and
there I each summer accompanied my father in a long visit. In 1813 Mr.
Bentham, my father, and I made an excursion, which included Oxford,
Bath and Bristol, Exeter, Plymouth, and Portsmouth. In this journey I
saw many things which were instructive to me, and acquired my first
taste for natural scenery, in the elementary form of fondness for a
"view. " In the succeeding winter we moved into a house very near Mr.
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Title: Autobiography
Author: John Stuart Mill
Release Date: December 4, 2003 [EBook #10378]
Language: English
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AUTOBIOGRAPHY
by
JOHN STUART MILL
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I 1806-1819
CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION
CHAPTER II 1813-1821
MORAL INFLUENCES IN EARLY YOUTH--MY FATHER'S CHARACTER AND OPINIONS
CHAPTER III 1821-1823
LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, AND FIRST OF SELF-EDUCATION
CHAPTER IV 1823-1828
YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISM--THE "WESTMINSTER REVIEW"
CHAPTER V 1826-1832
A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY--ONE STAGE ONWARD
CHAPTER VI 1830-1840
COMMENCEMENT OF THE MOST VALUABLE FRIENDSHIP OF MY LIFE--MY FATHER'S
DEATH--WRITINGS AND OTHER PROCEEDINGS UP TO 1840
CHAPTER VII 1840-1870
GENERAL VIEW OF THE REMAINDER OF MY LIFE. --COMPLETION OF THE "SYSTEM
OF LOGIC"--PUBLICATION OF THE "PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY"
--MARRIAGE--RETIREMENT FROM THE INDIA HOUSE--PUBLICATION OF "LIBERTY"
--"CONSIDERATIONS ON REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT"--CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA
--EXAMINATION OF SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON'S PHILOSOPHY--PARLIAMENTARY LIFE
--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
recognised 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. 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, 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 burdens 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 inflections of the nouns and verbs, but, after
a course of vocables, proceeded at once to translation; and I faintly
remember going through Aesop'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 _Cyropaedia_ 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 Theoctetus 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
favourite 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 other's 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 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 Voyages, 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 pre-eminent, 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; 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 favourable 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 Caesar's Commentaries, but
afterwards added to the superintendence 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
Aeneid; all Horace, except the Epodes; the Fables of Phaedrus; 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
decade); 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 Mingault'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,
Aeschines, 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 favourite,
Hooke, and in Ferguson, continued to delight me. A book which, in
spite of what is called the dryness of its style, 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; and an Abridgment of the _Ancient Universal History_; a
History of Holland, from my favourite 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
and 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 these
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. Shakspeare 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
Shakspeare, 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 most 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 style 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 encyclopaedia 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 class-name 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.
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 inflections 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, _showed_ 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 proof sheets 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
criticism 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 would never 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
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 on 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
shows 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 contemporaries.
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 showed 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 shown 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.
The latter, owing to
his obscure style 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 encyclopaedia 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 class-name 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.
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 inflections 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, _showed_ 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 proof sheets 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
criticism 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 would never 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
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 on 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
shows 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 contemporaries.
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 showed 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 shown 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. 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. 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.
CHAPTER II
MORAL INFLUENCES IN EARLY YOUTH. MY FATHER'S CHARACTER AND OPINIONS
In my education, as in that of everyone, 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 reflections 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 show 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 Sabaean, or Manichaean 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 fictitious excellences--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 can 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 anyone
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 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, 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 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 ease and sloth. These and other moralities he conveyed
in brief sentences, uttered as occasion arose, of grave exhortation,
or stern reprobation and contempt.
But though direct moral teaching does much, indirect does more; and
the effect my father produced on my character, did not depend solely
on what he said or did with that direct object, but also, and still
more, on what manner of man he was.
In his views of life he partook of the character of the Stoic, the
Epicurean, and the Cynic, not in the modern but the ancient sense of
the word. In his personal qualities the Stoic predominated. His
standard of morals was Epicurean, inasmuch as it was utilitarian,
taking as the exclusive test of right and wrong, the tendency of
actions to produce pleasure or pain. But he had (and this was the
Cynic element) scarcely any belief in pleasure; at least in his later
years, of which alone, on this point, I can speak confidently. He was
not insensible to pleasures; but he deemed very few of them worth the
price which, at least in the present state of society, must be paid
for them. The greater number of miscarriages in life he considered to
be attributable to the overvaluing of pleasures. Accordingly,
temperance, in the large sense intended by the Greek philosophers
--stopping short at the point of moderation in all indulgences--was
with him, as with them, almost the central point of educational
precept. His inculcations of this virtue fill a large place in my
childish remembrances. He thought human life a poor thing at best,
after the freshness of youth and of unsatisfied curiosity had gone by.
This was a topic on which he did not often speak, especially, it may
be supposed, in the presence of young persons: but when he did, it
was with an air of settled and profound conviction. He would sometimes
say that if life were made what it might be, by good government and
good education, it would be worth having: but he never spoke with
anything like enthusiasm even of that possibility. He never varied in
rating intellectual enjoyments above all others, even in value as
pleasures, independently of their ulterior benefits. The pleasures of
the benevolent affections he placed high in the scale; and used to
say, that he had never known a happy old man, except those who were
able to live over again in the pleasures of the young. For passionate
emotions of all sorts, and for everything which bas been said or
written in exaltation of them, he professed the greatest contempt.
He regarded them as a form of madness. "The intense" was with him a
bye-word of scornful disapprobation. He regarded as an aberration of
the moral standard of modern times, compared with that of the ancients,
the great stress laid upon feeling. Feelings, as such, he considered
to be no proper subjects of praise or blame. Right and wrong, good and
bad, he regarded as qualities solely of conduct--of acts and omissions;
there being no feeling which may not lead, and does not frequently lead,
either to good or to bad actions: conscience itself, the very desire to
act right, often leading people to act wrong. Consistently carrying
out the doctrine that the object of praise and blame should be the
discouragement of wrong conduct and the encouragement of right, he
refused to let his praise or blame be influenced by the motive of the
agent. He blamed as severely what he thought a bad action, when the
motive was a feeling of duty, as if the agents had been consciously
evil doers. He would not have accepted as a plea in mitigation for
inquisitors, that they sincerely believed burning heretics to be an
obligation of conscience. But though he did not allow honesty of purpose
to soften his disapprobation of actions, it had its full effect on his
estimation of characters. No one prized conscientiousness and rectitude
of intention more highly, or was more incapable of valuing any person
in whom he did not feel assurance of it. But he disliked people quite
as much for any other deficiency, provided he thought it equally likely
to make them act ill. He disliked, for instance, a fanatic in any bad
cause, as much as or more than one who adopted the same cause from
self-interest, because he thought him even more likely to be practically
mischievous. And thus, his aversion to many intellectual errors, or what
he regarded as such, partook, in a certain sense, of the character of a
moral feeling. All this is merely saying that he, in a degree once common,
but now very unusual, threw his feelings into his opinions; which truly
it is difficult to understand how anyone who possesses much of both, can
fail to do. None but those who do not care about opinions will confound
this with intolerance. Those who, having opinions which they hold to be
immensely important, and their contraries to be prodigiously hurtful,
have any deep regard for the general good, will necessarily dislike, as
a class and in the abstract, those who think wrong what they think right,
and right what they think wrong: though they need not therefore be, nor
was my father, insensible to good qualities in an opponent, nor governed
in their estimation of individuals by one general presumption, instead
of by the whole of their character. I grant that an earnest person,
being no more infallible than other men, is liable to dislike people
on account of opinions which do not merit dislike; but if he neither
himself does them any ill office, nor connives at its being donc by
others, he is not intolerant: and the forbearance which flows from a
conscientious sense of the importance to mankind of the equal freedom
of all opinions, is the only tolerance which is commendable, or, to the
highest moral order of minds, possible.
It will be admitted, that a man of the opinions, and the character,
above described, was likely to leave a strong moral impression on any
mind principally formed by him, and that his moral teaching was not
likely to err on the side of laxity or indulgence. The element which
was chiefly deficient in his moral relation to his children was that
of tenderness. I do not believe that this deficiency lay in his own
nature. I believe him to have had much more feeling than he habitually
showed, and much greater capacities of feeling than were ever
developed. He resembled most Englishmen in being ashamed of the signs
of feeling, and, by the absence of demonstration, starving the
feelings themselves. If we consider further that he was in the trying
position of sole teacher, and add to this that his temper was
constitutionally irritable, it is impossible not to feel true pity for
a father who did, and strove to do, so much for his children, who
would have so valued their affection, yet who must have been
constantly feeling that fear of him was drying it up at its source.
This was no longer the case later in life, and with his younger
children. They loved him tenderly: and if I cannot say so much of
myself, I was always loyally devoted to him. As regards my own
education, I hesitate to pronounce whether I was more a loser or
gainer by his severity. It was not such as to prevent me from having a
happy childhood. And I do not believe that boys can be induced to
apply themselves with vigour, and--what is so much more
difficult--perseverance, to dry and irksome studies, by the sole force
of persuasion and soft words. Much must be done, and much must be
learnt, by children, for which rigid discipline, and known liability
to punishment, are indispensable as means. It is, no doubt, a very
laudable effort, in modern teaching, to render as much as possible of
what the young are required to learn, easy and interesting to them.
But when this principle is pushed to the length of not requiring them
to learn anything _but_ what has been made easy and interesting, one
of the chief objects of education is sacrificed. I rejoice in the
decline of the old brutal and tyrannical system of teaching, which,
however, did succeed in enforcing habits of application; but the new,
as it seems to me, is training up a race of men who will be incapable
of doing anything which is disagreeable to them. I do not, then,
believe that fear, as an element in education, can be dispensed with;
but I am sure that it ought not to be the main element; and when it
predominates so much as to preclude love and confidence on the part of
the child to those who should be the unreservedly trusted advisers of
after years, and perhaps to seal up the fountains of frank and
spontaneous communicativeness in the child's nature, it is an evil for
which a large abatement must be made from the benefits, moral and
intellectual, which may flow from any other part of the education.
During this first period of my life, the habitual frequenters of my
father's house were limited to a very few persons, most of them little
known to the world, but whom personal worth, and more or less of
congeniality with at least his political opinions (not so frequently
to be met with then as since), inclined him to cultivate; and his
conversations with them I listened to with interest and instruction.
My being an habitual inmate of my father's study made me acquainted
with the dearest of his friends, David Ricardo, who by his benevolent
countenance, and kindliness of manner, was very attractive to young
persons, and who, after I became a student of political economy,
invited me to his house and to walk with him in order to converse on
the subject. I was a more frequent visitor (from about 1817 or 1818)
to Mr. Hume, who, born in the same part of Scotland as my father, and
having been, I rather think, a younger schoolfellow or college
companion of his, had on returning from India renewed their youthful
acquaintance, and who--coming, like many others, greatly under the
influence of my father's intellect and energy of character--was
induced partly by that influence to go into Parliament, and there
adopt the line of conduct which has given him an honourable place in
the history of his country. Of Mr. Bentham I saw much more, owing to
the close intimacy which existed between him and my father. I do not
know how soon after my father's first arrival in England they became
acquainted. But my father was the earliest Englishman of any great
mark, who thoroughly understood, and in the main adopted, Bentham's
general views of ethics, government and law: and this was a natural
foundation for sympathy between them, and made them familiar
companions in a period of Bentham's life during which he admitted much
fewer visitors than was the case subsequently. At this time Mr.
Bentham passed some part of every year at Barrow Green House, in a
beautiful part of the Surrey Hills, a few miles from Godstone, and
there I each summer accompanied my father in a long visit. In 1813 Mr.
Bentham, my father, and I made an excursion, which included Oxford,
Bath and Bristol, Exeter, Plymouth, and Portsmouth. In this journey I
saw many things which were instructive to me, and acquired my first
taste for natural scenery, in the elementary form of fondness for a
"view. " In the succeeding winter we moved into a house very near Mr.
