AutobiographyJohn Stuart Mill
About Autobiography
Mill's was published in 1873, the year of his death. It is the history of a mind educated into a system and then forced to revise that system from within. The early chapters describe the extraordinary regimen imposed by his father, James Mill: Greek at three, Latin at eight, logic, political economy, and Benthamite radicalism before most boys had finished school. The purpose was to produce a reforming intellect. The cost, Mill later judges, was an education of the understanding that left the feelings starved.
Chapter V records the crisis of 1826. Asking whether the complete success of all his reform projects would make him happy, he found that the answer was no, and the basis of his life collapsed. Recovery came partly through Wordsworth's poetry, which restored the capacity for feeling without abandoning analysis, and partly through a gradual enlargement of his philosophy beyond strict Benthamism. Later chapters treat his intellectual friendships, his work at the East India Company, and above all his companionship with Harriet Taylor, whom he married after her first husband's death and whom he credits as joint author of his best thought. The book closes with the mature labors of , , and parliamentary life.
The is both personal narrative and philosophical document. It shows how utilitarianism met Romanticism inside one life, and why Mill came to hold that the cultivation of individuality and the higher pleasures of character are themselves conditions of human happiness. Readers who know only the public treatises meet here the education that made them possible.