The Book of John Stuart Mill 1 · Written by himself, from On Liberty and his Autobiography
This man wrote his own books. 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 2 and 3 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.