The Book of John Stuart Mill 1 · Written by himself, from On Liberty and his Autobiography
John Stuart Mill, born in London in 1806, died at Avignon in France in 1873. His father educated him himself: Greek at three, Latin at eight, and no company of children his own age. At twenty his mind gave way, and he came back to himself reading Wordsworth. On Liberty appeared in 1859, The Subjection of Women in 1869, and the Autobiography after his death. He entered the Commons in 1865, and in 1867 moved to give women the vote, the first such motion in the British parliament. This volume rests on what he wrote himself, not on another man’s record of him. He is the only one in this scripture who never had a religion — not that he threw it off, but that he never had it. Chapters 3 and 4 supply what the scripture was missing: the reason The Rule 7 lets the Stoa contradict the canon.
1.1I must tell you something about myself first, or you will not believe what follows.
1.2My father raised me on a system. Greek at three, Latin at eight, no playmates, no holidays, and no religion.
1.3About that last, let me be exact: I did not throw off a belief. I never had one.
1.4In this country there are very few such men. I am one of them.
1.5By my teens I knew what I would do with my life: improve the institutions and the opinions of the world.
1.6For that I read, wrote, and organised. I had no other object.
1.7In the autumn of my twentieth year a heaviness came over me, like a long spell of rain.
1.8And in that state I put a question to myself.
1.9I asked: suppose everything you look forward to were realised; suppose the institutions you mean to change and the opinions you mean to alter were all changed this instant —
1.10would that be a great joy to you?
1.11And an irrepressible self-consciousness in me answered, distinctly: no.
1.12At that my whole self went down. The foundation I had built my life on broke apart under that one answer.
1.13I told nobody. I went to the office, I wrote my articles. Inside there was nothing.
1.14Later I understood where the illness lay: my education had been all analysis.
1.15Analysis takes a thing apart to look at it. Take enough apart and a man can no longer put anything back together.
1.16I could break any pleasure into its parts. When I had finished, the pleasure was not there.
1.17What cured me was a book that had nothing to do with any of it.
1.18It was a Frenchman’s memoir. His father dies, the household collapses, and he is still a boy.
1.19And the boy suddenly feels that he can be everything to them.
1.20I read that and wept.
1.21From that moment I was not hopeless. I knew I was not a stock and not a stone.
1.22Afterward I read Wordsworth. Those poems argue nothing. They speak of hills, of water, and of the moment a mind grows quiet.
1.23That was what I needed: not a new argument, but the culture of the feelings.
1.24And out of that illness I got the rule I have used more than any other:
1.25Happiness cannot be aimed at directly.
1.26Those who have their minds set on something else — on another person, on a craft, on some matter they want to get clear — are happy along the way.
1.27Stop and ask yourself whether you are happy at this moment, and you have already stopped being so.
1.28Happiness is scenery you pass on a walk. Stand still and stare at it, and the walk has ended.