“No matter what side of the argument you are on,” said the great violinist, Jascha Heifetz, “you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other.”
And sometimes it works the other way around as well. Sometimes, you find people on the other side of your arguments that you would prefer as friends to people on your own. I found myself liking John Stewart Mill.
He begins his autobiography by saying that he has no illusions about why someone might care to read it. For the most part, he regards it as beneficial to one argument in particular and that is that children are capable of learning far more than grown-ups give them credit for – insisting that placed in a learning environment where learning and the development of the intellect is simply expected, children can accomplish far more than they do when placed in circumstances that expect them not to care. “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.” He says, later adding that “a pupil from whom nothing is ever demanded which he cannot do, never does all he can.”
John’s father James made it his principle objective, not to stuff his son’s head with knowledge (though there was a lot of stuffing going on) but rather to teach him to do useful things with knowledge and to perfect his powers of critical thought. “It was his invariable practice, whatever studies he exacted from me,” Mill writes,” to make me as far as possible understand and feel the utility of them”
“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”
Of this skill of assembling and analyzing logical arguments, Mill argues that most people never learn to do more than make assertions as though that were as good as the ability to make arguments. “It is also a study peculiarly adapted to an early stage in the education of philosophical students,” he says of the study of logic,
“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 opponent, only endeavour, by such argument 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.”
“I thought for myself almost from the first, and occasionally thought differently from him,” says the author of his father. A high compliment indeed and one that I hope my sons can say of me. James Mill was determined that his son should have the skills he needed to create his own intellectual self (reminds me of Tiger Woods’ father’s drive to make his son a golf prodigy). “Most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them,” writes Mill,
“have their mental capacities not strengthened, but over-laid 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.”
Later, John Mill suggests that the tyranny of an older method of education has been replaced with an equally or even more injurious lazes faire approach. “As regards my own education, I hesitate to pronounce whether I was more a loser or gainer by [my father’s] severity it was not such as to prevent me from having a happy childhood, says Mill.
“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.”
Mill would later argue for schools that provided more education than students or their parents actually demanded (Good luck doing that today). “On the contrary,” he would argue,
“I urged strenuously the importance of having a provision for education, not dependent on the mere demand of the market, that is, on the knowledge and discernment of average parents, but calculated to establish and keep up a higher standard of instruction than is likely to be spontaneously demanded by the buyers of the article.”
James Mill was what might regarded an agnostic and he raised his son to follow his line of reasoning on matters of religion (despite the contradiction with what has been said above). For the most part, his son seems to have largely adopted his father’s perspective on Christianity. For Mill, most Christians remain “Christian” by being inconsistent rather than syncopated with the doctrines they espouse. “The same slovenliness of thought,” he writes of Christians,
“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 . . .”
Mill saw the dominant religious beliefs of his own culture as though they were as foreign to his thinking as the polytheistic ideas of the ancients. “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.” he writes,
“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.”
And yet it seems from his autobiography that if we do not have religion in our lives, we must have something very much like it. If not beer, imperialism, or sports, then philosophy. For John Stewart Mill his self-confessed “conversion moment” came when he read the philosophy of his father’s friend, Jeremy Betham. “When I laid down the last volume of the Traité,” he says of Betham’s publication by that title, “I had become a different being” (dare we say, “born again”?)
“The "principle of utility" understood as Bentham understood it, and applied in the manner in which he applied it through these three volumes, fell exactly into its place as the keystone which held together the detached and fragmentary component parts of my knowledge and beliefs. It gave unity to my conceptions of things. I now had opinions; a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy; in one among the best senses of the word, a religion; the inculcation and diffusion of which could be made the principal outward purpose of a life. And I had a grand conception laid before me of changes to be effected in the condition of mankind through that doctrine.”
John Stewart Mill was convinced that there was no direct correlation between one’s religiosity and one’s morality. “Of unbelievers (so called) as well as of believers,” he says, “there are many species, including almost every variety of moral type.” His memories of his father are of a man who’s ethics were based on utility and not upon any “artificial” moral code that might compete with that objective. “In ethics, his moral feelings were energetic and rigid on all points which he deemed important to human well-being,” says Mill,
“while he was supremely indifferent in opinion (though his indifference did not show itself in personal conduct) to all those doctrines of the common morality, which he thought had no foundation but in asceticism and priest-craft. He looked forward, for example, to a considerable increase of freedom in the relations between the sexes, though without pretending to define exactly what would be, or ought to be, the precise conditions of that freedom. This opinion was connected in him with no sensuality either of a theoretical or of a practical kind.”
Utilitarianism is often accused of trying to make a calculating machine out of a complex human system of decision making. Mill confesses that for a few years of his life, this was not a criticism far from the truth. I had to laugh when Mill (my “brothuh from anothuh mothah”) confesses that he had to be reformed from his commitment to objectivity. “My father's teachings tended to the under-valuing of feeling,” he says, though “it was not that he was himself cold-hearted or insensible.”
“In addition to the influence which this characteristic in him had on me and others, we found all the opinions to which we attached most importance, constantly attacked on the ground of feeling. . . . Although we were generally in the right, as against those who were opposed to us, the effect was that the cultivation of feeling (except the feelings of public and private duty), was not in much esteem among us, and had very little place in the thoughts of most of us, myself in particular. What we principally thought of, was to alter people's opinions; to make them believe according to evidence, and know what was their real interest, which when they once knew, they would, we thought, by the instrument of opinion, enforce a regard to it upon one another.”
“I do not believe that any one of the survivors of the Benthamites or Utilitarians of that day, now relies mainly upon it for the general amendment of human conduct.”
“From this neglect both in theory and in practice of the cultivation of feeling,” he continues, “naturally resulted, among other things, an under-valuing of poetry, and of Imagination generally, as an element of human nature.” Thus Mill was raised to look at religion with a jaundiced eye, and to look at emotions with similar distrust. His father was what might be regarded an “arch enemy” of Romanticism.
“For passionate emotions of all sorts, and for everything which has 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."
I found it interesting how John Stewart Mill describes the writing of his mentor Jeremy Bentham, a man so opposed to “flowery” poetic, or even rhetorical language that he refused to write anything but the densest of arguments. “Bentham's later style,” confesses Mill,
“as the world knows, was heavy and cumbersome, from the excess of a good quality, the love of precision, which made him introduce clause within clause into the heart of every sentence, that the reader might receive into his mind all the modifications and qualifications simultaneously with the main proposition: and the habit grew on him until his sentences became, to those not accustomed to them, most laborious reading.”
I suspect that there are many intellects trained without the aid of poetry who fall into similar traps (this blog may well be evidence).
At the risk of adding the burden of reading to anyone who may have gotten this far in this review, I think it worth noting that John Stewart Mill met the love of his life when he was twenty five (Harriet Taylor was twenty three and had been married since she was eighteen). For some twenty years, John Mill and Harriet Taylor maintained an active and lively discourse about many of the ideas that he wrote about. Two years after her husband died, they were married. I quote Mill at length here.
“It was the period of my mental progress which I have now reached that I formed the friendship which has been the honour and chief blessing of my existence, as well as the source of a great part of all that I have attempted to do, or hope to effect hereafter, for human improvement. My first introduction to the lady who, after a friendship of twenty years, consented to become my wife, was in 1830, when I was in my twenty-fifth and she in her twenty-third year.”
“Although it was years after my introduction to Mrs. Taylor before my acquaintance with her became at all intimate or confidential, I very soon felt her to be the most admirable person I had ever known. It is not to be supposed that she was, or that any one, at the age at which I first saw her, could be, all that she afterwards became.”
“To her outer circle she was a beauty and a wit, with an air of natural distinction, felt by all who approached her: to the inner, a woman of deep and strong feeling, of penetrating and intuitive intelligence, and of an eminently meditative and poetic nature. Married at a very early age, to a most upright, brave, and honourable man, of liberal opinions and good education, but without the intellectual or artistic tastes which would have made him a companion for her, though a steady and affectionate friend, for whom she had true esteem and the strongest affection through life, and whom she most deeply lamented when dead; shut out by the social disabilities of women from any adequate exercise of her highest faculties in action on the world without; her life was one of inward meditation, varied by familiar intercourse with a small circle of friends, of whom one only (long since deceased) was a person of genius, or of capacities of feeling or intellect kindred with her own, but all had more or less of alliance with her in sentiments and opinions. Into this circle I had the good fortune to be admitted, and I soon perceived that she possessed in combination, the qualities which in all other persons whom I had known I had been only too happy to find singly.”
“Alike in the highest regions of speculation and in the smaller practical concerns of daily life, her mind was the same perfect instrument, piercing to the very heart and marrow of the matter; always seizing the essential idea or principle. The same exactness and rapidity of operation, pervading as it did her sensitive as well as her mental faculties, would, with her gifts of feeling and imagination, have fitted her to be a consummate artist, as her fiery and tender soul and her vigorous eloquence would certainly have made her a great orator, and her profound knowledge of human nature and discernment and sagacity in practical life, would, in the times when such a carrière was open to women, have made her eminent among the rulers of mankind. Her intellectual gifts did but minister to a moral character at once the noblest and the best balanced which I have ever met with in life. Her unselfishness was not that of a taught system of duties, but of a heart which thoroughly identified itself with the feelings of others, and often went to excess in consideration for them by imaginatively investing their feelings with the intensity of its own. The passion of justice might have been thought to be her strongest feeling, but for her boundless generosity, and a lovingness ever ready to pour itself forth upon any or all human beings who were capable of giving the smallest feeling in return. The rest of her moral characteristics were such as naturally accompany these qualities of mind and heart: the most genuine modesty combined with the loftiest pride; a simplicity and sincerity which were absolute, towards all who were fit to receive them; the utmost scorn of whatever was mean and cowardly, and a burning indignation at everything brutal or tyrannical, faithless or dishonourable in conduct and character, while making the broadest distinction between mala in se and mere mala prohibita -- between acts giving evidence of intrinsic badness in feeling and character, and those which are only violations of conventions either good or bad, violations which whether in themselves right or wrong, are capable of being committed by persons in every other respect lovable or admirable.”
“To be admitted into any degree of mental intercourse with a being of these qualities, could not but have a most beneficial influence on my development; though the effect was only gradual, and many years elapsed before her mental progress and mine went forward in the complete companionship they at last attained. The benefit I received was far greater than any which I could hope to give; though to her, who had at first reached her opinions by the moral intuition of a character of strong feeling, there was doubtless help as well as encouragement to be derived from one who had arrived at many of the same results by study and reasoning: and in the rapidity of her intellectual growth, her mental activity, which converted everything into knowledge, doubtless drew from me, as it did from other sources, many of its materials.”
At times, John Stewart Mill and Harriet Taylor would even travel together though Mill insists that this should give no cause for slander. He walks the delicate line on tiptoe.
“At this period she lived mostly with one young daughter, in a quiet part of the country, and only occasionally in town, with her first husband, Mr Taylor. I visited her equally in both places; and was greatly indebted to the strength of character which enabled her to disregard the false interpretations liable to be put on the frequency of my visits to her while living generally apart from Mr Taylor, and on our occasionally travelling together, though in all other respects our conduct during those years gave not the slightest ground for any other supposition than the true one, that our relation to each other at that time was one of strong affection and confidential intimacy only. For though we did not consider the ordinances of society binding on a subject so entirely personal, we did feel bound that our conduct should be such as in no degree to bring discredit on her husband, nor therefore on herself.”
Mill describes his seven year marriage to Harriet in the following words.
“Between the time of which I have now spoken, and the present, took place the most important events of my private life. The first of these was my marriage, in April, 1851, to the lady whose incomparable worth had made her friendship the greatest source to me both of happiness and of improvement, during many years in which we never expected to be in any closer relation to one another. Ardently as I should have aspired to this complete union of our lives at any time in the course of my existence at which it had been practicable, I, as much as my wife, would far rather have foregone that privilege forever, than have owed it to the premature death of one for whom I had the sincerest respect, and she the strongest affection. That event, however, having taken place in July, 1849, it was granted to me to derive from that evil my own greatest good, by adding to the partnership of thought, feeling, and writing which had long existed, a partnership of our entire existence. For seven and a half years that blessing was mine; for seven and a half only! I can say nothing which could describe, even in the faintest manner, what that loss was and is. But because I know that she would have wished it, I endeavour to make the best of what life I have left, and to work on for her purposes with such diminished strength as can be derived from thoughts of her, and communion with her memory.”
I will leave it to the reader, if interested to look further into the autobiography for John Mill’s great love, respect, and admiration for Harriet Taylor. It makes him hard to dislike even if you disagree with him. A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startles us,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. And I think that captures the essence of John Stewart Mill and through his memory of her, Harriett Taylor.
Question for Comment: If you were to write an autobiography, what would the chapter titles be?
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