Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/326

Rh 308 MILL remember going through ^ffsop s Fables, the first Greek book which I read. The Anabasis, which I remember better, was the second. I learnt no Latin until my eighth year. At that time I had read under my father s tuition a number of Greek prose authors, among whom I remember the whole of Herodotus and of Xenophon s Cyropsedia and Memorials of Socrates, some of the lives of the philosophers by Diogenes Laertius, part of Lucian, and Isocrates Ad Demonicum and Ad Nicoclem. I also read, in 1813, the first six dialogues (in the common arrangement) of Plato, from the Euthypkron to the Thesetetus inclusive.&quot; Besides all these Greek books, he had read a great deal of history in English Robertson s histories, Hume, Gibbon, Watson s Philip II. and III., Hooke s Roman History, Rollin s Ancient History, Langhorne s Plutarch, Burnet s History of My Own Times, thirty volumes of the Annual Register, Millar s Historical View of the English Government, Mosheim s Ecclesiastical History, M Crie s Knox, and two histories of the Quakers. That Mill &quot; knew Greek &quot; and &quot; read Plato &quot; before he was eight years old is often repeated, sometimes as an instance of amazing precocity, sometimes as an awful example of injudicious parental forcing. The astonishment that a child should have done so much at such an age is probably as little grounded in reason as was Mill s own opinion that any child might have done the same. It is forgotten that many thousands of persons have known Greek before the age of eight without a knowledge of the technicalities of Greek grammar. In presence of the fact that Mill was never distinguished for great memory of detail or richness of historical or literary allusion, it is a fair conclusion that the matter of his reading at this age was of as little service to him in after life as if he had read the trashiest of boy s own books. This is not to say that for educational purposes his early years were wasted as in his own and his father s opinion they generally are. But undoubtedly the main factor in Mill s education was not the literature put into his hands, but his constant inter course with the active richly stored mind and strenuous character of his father. If any should be tempted to imitate the method, they should bear in mind that this was the cardinal element of it. The tutor was of more importance than the books. The reading of Plato s dialogues would have been only an exercise in rough translation if the boy had not had a Socrates with him in living communion. The child was a constant inmate of his father s study, and trotted by his side in his walks, giving from jottings on slips of paper as good an account as he could of what he had read. He thus learnt at an unusually early age by example, precept, and practice the habit of strenuous application to difficult work. The fact that Mill was taught thus early to take his chief pleasure in overcoming intellectual difficulties, and to realize the meaning of general terms, accounts for the singular and altogether unparalleled ease which he acquired in the treatment of political and social generalizations, not in barren abstract vagueness, but in close relation with facts. This on the intellectual side ; and on the moral side the child was almost from the dawn of consciousness instructed to regard himself as consecrated to a life of labour for the public good; his ambition was kindled to follow in the footsteps of the great men of all ages, and at the same time the utmost care was taken to purify that ambition from unworthy motives. A contemporary record of Mill s studies from eight to thirteen is published in Dr Bain s sketch of his life. It shows that the Autobiography rather understates than overstates the amount of work done. At the age of eight he began Latin, Euclid, and algebra, and was appointed schoolmaster to the younger children of the family a post, he hints, more serviceable to his intellect than to his manners. His main reading was still history, but he went through all the Latin and Greek authors commonly read in the schools and universities, besides several that are not commonly read by undergraduates. He was not taught to compose either in Latin or in Greek, and he was never an exact scholar in the academic sense ; it was for the subject- matter that he was required to read, and by the age of ten he could read Plato and Demosthenes with ease. His father s History of India was published in 1818; immedi ately thereafter, about the age of twelve, John, under his energetic direction, began a thorough study of the scholastic logic, at the same time reading Aristotle s logical treatises in the original. In the following year he was introduced to political economy. And there, when the pupil was nearly fourteen, this remarkable education terminated. From that time he worked less immediately under his father s eye. It was an inevitable incident of such an education that Mill should acquire many of his father s speculative opinions, and his father s way of defending them. But his mind did not receive the impress passively and mechanically. &quot; One of the grand objects of educa tion,&quot; according to the elder Mill, &quot; should be to generate a constant and anxious concern about evidence&quot;; and he laboured with all the energy of his strong will against allowing his son to become a parrot of his own opinions and arguments. The duty of collecting and weighing evidence for himself was at every turn impressed upon the boy ; he was taught to accept no opinion upon authority ; he was soundly rated if he could not give a reason for his beliefs. John Stuart Mill was deliberately educated as an apostle, but it was as an apostle of reasoned truth in human affairs, not as an apostle of any system of dogmatic tenets. It was purposely to prevent any falling off from this high moral standard till it should become part of his being that his father kept the boy so closely with himself. Much pity has been expressed over the dreary cheerless existence that the child must have led, cut off from all boyish amusements and companionship, working day after day on his father s treadmill ; but a childhood and boyhood spent in the daily enlargement of knowledge, with the continual satisfaction of difficulties conquered, buoyed up by day-dreams of emulating the greatest of human benefactors, need not have been an unhappy childhood, and Mill expressly says that his was not unhappy. It seems unhappy only when we compare it with the desires of childhood left more to itself, and when we decline to imagine its peculiar enjoyments and aspirations. Mill complains that his father often required more than could reasonably be expected of him, but his tasks were not so severe as to prevent him from growing up a healthy, hardy, and high-spirited boy, though he was not constitutionally robust, and his tastes and pursuits were so different from those of other boys of the same age. Most of Mill s fifteenth year was spent in France in the family of Sir Samuel Bentham. Away from his father, he maintained his laborious habits ; the discipline held. Copious extracts from a diary kept by him at this time are given by Dr Bain, and show how methodically and incessantly he read and wrote, studied botany, tackled advanced mathematical problems, made notes on the scenery and the people and customs of the country. On his return in 1821 he continued his old studies with the addition of some new ones. One of the new studies was Roman law, which he read with John Austin, his father having half decided on the bar as the best profession open to him. Another was psychology. In 1823, when he had just completed his seventeenth year, the notion of the bar as a livelihood was abandoned, and he entered as a clerk in the examiner s office of the India House, &quot; with the under-