modifications of the later phases of adolescent experience. No boy ever had
more diligent and earnest training than his father gave him or responded better.
He can not remember when he began to learn Greek, but was told that it was at
the age of three. The list of classical authors alone that he read in the original, to
say nothing of history, political, scientific, logical, and other works before he
was twelve, is perhaps unprecedented in all history. He associated with his father
and all his many friends on their own level, but modestly ascribes everything to
his environment, insists that in natural gifts he is other below than above par, and
declares that everything he did could be done by every boy of average capacity
and healthy physical constitution. His father made the Greek virtue of
temperance or moderation cardinal, and thought human life "a poor thing at best
after the freshness of youth and unsatisfied curiosity had gone by." He scorned
"the intense" and had only contempt for strong emotion.
In his teens Mill was an able debater and writer for the quarterlies, and devoted
to the propagation of the theories of Bentham, Ricardo, and associationism.
From the age of fifteen he had an object in life, viz., to reform the world. This
gave him happiness, deep, permanent, and assured for the future, and the idea of
struggling to promote utilitarianism seemed an inspiring program for life. But in
the autumn of 1826, when he was twenty years of age, he felt into "a dull state of
nerves," where he could no longer enjoy and what had produced pleasure
seemed insipid; "the state, I should think, in which converts to Methodism
usually are when smitten by their first 'conviction of sin.' In this frame of mind it
occurred to me to put the question directly to myself; 'Suppose that all your
objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions
which you are looking forward to could be completely effected at this very
instant; would this be a great joy and happiness to you?' And an irrepressible
self-consciousness distinctly answered, 'No.' At this my heart sank within me:
the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my
happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end
had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the
means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for. At first I hoped that the cloud
would pass away of itself, but it did not. A night's sleep, the sovereign remedy
for the smaller vexations of life, had no effect on it. I awoke to a renewed
consciousness of the woful fact. I carried it with me into all companies, into all
occupations. Hardly anything had power to cause me even a few minutes'
oblivion of it. For some months the cloud seemed to grow thicker and thicker.
The lines in Coleridge's 'Dejection'—I was not then acquainted with them—