John Stuart Mill

The poet and the analyst, the seer and the man of reflection, after Coleridge and Carlyle, these two types emerged in English thought with extremely marked features and in irreconcilable opposition. James Mill tried to transmit to his son, John Stuart Mill, born in 1806, this rigorous intellectual discipline of Benthamism, all logical and deductive.

The young Mill fanatically adopted the principles of the school and founded a utilitarian society. But then came the mental crisis that he recounted in the famous pages of Autobiography (1873): it was a painful feeling of inertia that left him indifferent to all the tasks that had excited him before; he blamed the exclusive habits of analysis that his paternal education had given him for this emotional atony; it was then that he saw the importance of immediate and unreflected feeling: “Ask yourself if you are happy, and then you will cease to be; the only chance is to take as the aim of life not happiness, but some end external to it.”

Then he read Wordsworth, “the poet of unpoetic natures”; in 1838, he remarked how excellent Bentham’s method was, but how limited his knowledge of life was: “His method is empirical; but it is Tempirism which has little experience of life”, and he opposed Coleridge in 1840, with his flashes of thought which point to truths not suspected by the utilitarians.

If Mill retained from his early education a wise, lucid and defiant way of expressing oratory and enthusiasm, we can nevertheless say that this crisis gave him a breadth of views, unusual in the school.

Source: Émile Bréhier(1951). Histoire de la philosophie, Presses Universitaires de France. Translation and adaptation by © 2024 Nicolae Sfetcu

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