The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Mill is the classic instance of the child prodigy who, despite an abnormal education, manages to live a good and useful life. You will find his story in his sober but extremely interesting Autobiography.

The elder Mill was a follower of Jeremy Bentham. Bentham^ name is linked with utilitarianism, an unimaginative if well-intentioned doctrine that stressed utility and reason, two terms it never strictly defined. It taught that the object of social action was to bring about the greatest happiness for the great- est number, and tended to ignore the temperamental and psy- chic differences among human beings. Young John was brought up in the shadow of this doctrine, caricatured by Dickens [77] in his Gradgrind.

Educated entirely by his logic-factory of a father, Mill was reading Greek at three and starting a history of Roman gov­ernment at eleven. At thirteen he was about as well educated as an English university graduate. This force-feeding saved him at least ten of the years most first-rate minds are com- pelled to waste in our own school system. But it had its draw- backs: "I never was a boy," confessed Mill. The morbid emphasis on reason produced a mental crisis in his twentieth year, from which he was saved partly by the youthful resilience of his own fine mind and partly by his reading. Wordsworth [64] in particular revealed to him the existence of a life of feel- ing. (This criticai experience \yould appear to give the lie to W. H. Auden's [126] famous statement, ". . . for poetry makes nothing happen.")

His crisis, together with the influence of Mrs. Harriet Taylor, whom he met in 1830 and married twenty-one years later, led Mill to recognize the weaknesses of his fathers iron calculus of pleasures and pains. He was to spend much of his life, as writer, Member of Parliament, and social reformer, in liberalizing and humanizing utilitarianism. Thus, working with other "philosophical radicais," he helped to create a climate of opinion that led to many of the reform movements of the last hundred years, from woman suffrage to the New Deal. His The Subjection of Women stands as a milestone in the history of the evolution of human freedom.

Mill thought that except for his Logic his essay On Liberty would outlast his other works. In its own unemotional, English way it is a masterpiece of lucid persuasion and humane feel- ing. Probably no finer plea has ever been written for the claims of the individual against the state. Mill stresses the need for creating a great diversity of temperaments. He urges the protection of minorities. He advocates the utmost possible freedom of thought and expression. He comes out for the encouragement of nonconformist, even eccentric thinkers. His central principie is still far from realization in our state- dominated era, and still worth realizing: "The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection."

Mill should be read as the representative of the purest lib­eral English thought of his century. His American brothers are Thoreau [80] and Emerson [69], though he lacks the radical daring of the first and the eloquence of the second.

C.F.

73

CHARLES DARWIN

1809-1882

The Voyage of the Beagle, The Origin of Species

But for the good luck of having been invited to participate in the round-the-world voyage of the survey ship Beagle, Charles Darwin might well have spent his life as a country parson, giv- ing lackluster sermons, indulging his amateur passion for geol- ogy and natural history, and presenting obscure papers on his observations at meetings of the county's learned society. His powers of observation and deduction would have been keen even in such a humble setting; presented instead with the fos- sils of Argentina, the geology of the Andes, the finches of the Galapagos Islands, and much more, his genius took root, blos- somed, and bore fruit. Darwin^ powerful intellect and his uncompromising intellectual honesty led him down paths that he was reluctant to follow, finally making him one of the great- est scientific revolutionaries of ali time.