MR J. S. MILL'S PHILOSOPHY AS TESTED IN HIS LIFE.
WE drew attention last week to a remarkable passage in Mr. J. S. Mill's " Autobiography " describing a moral crisis through which he passed at the age of twenty. We return to it now to notice the curious bearing which that passage has on Mr. Mill's philosophy, a bearing of which he seems to have been himself only obscurely conscious. It will be remembered that the melancholy into Which he fell was caused, as far as he knew, by suddenly becoming aware that, if all the chief aims which he had in life,—his aims as ri social and poli- tical reformer,—were in an instant completely effected, instead of deriving a great happiness from the knowledge, he would have derived none, nay, apparently, would have been conscious of a great blank, from the sudden failure of all the moral claims on
his energies. This induced him to consider more carefully the view of life in which he had been educated, and though
he "never wavered in the conviction that happiness is the test of all rules of conduct and the end of life," he was led by his new experience to modify his general conception of life in two directions. First, he made up his mind that though happi- ness is the only end of life, it must not be directly aimed at, if it is to be successfully secured. Next, he discovered that no mani- pulation of mere outward circumstances without a special culture of the feelings, can so educate the character as to make a man what he should be. Let us take the first point first. Happiness, Mr. Mill said, is the true measure of human good, and the one thing that makes life worth having ;—but, nevertheless, he had now discovered that there is this peculiarity about it, that it cannot be obtained by driving directly at it ; you must aim at something else, and then you may get happiness in the rebound. "Those only are happy (I thought), who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness ; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. The enjoyments of life (such was now my theory) are sufficient to make it a pleasant thing, when they are taken en passant, with- out being made a principal object. Once make them so, and they
are immediately felt to be insufficient. They will not bear a scrutinising examination. Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat not happiness, but some end external to it as the purpose of life. Let your self- consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation exhaust themselves on that ; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced, you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagination or putting it to flight by fatal questioning. This theory now became the basis of my philosophy of life. And I still hold to it as the beet theory for all those who have but a moderate degree of sensibility and of capacity for enjoyment, that is, for the great majority of mankind."
Now surely it is a very curious comment on the Utilitarian principle, to discover that the one absolute end, according to the utilitarian theory, of human existence, won't bear being made the direct and acknowledged end, but can only be success- fully obtained, if at all, as the reward of aiming at something else which is not the true end of human life, but utterly subordi- nate to it. Is not this a paradox which should Bugged to utilitarians the deepest possible suspicion of the truth of the fundamental idea of their philosophy ? That the time end of life should be always in the position of the old gentleman's macaroons, which he hid about amongst his papers and books, because he said he enjoyed them so much more when he came upon them unawares, than he did if he went to the cupboard avowedly for them, is surely a very odd compliment to the true end of life. The old gentleman in ques- tion did not regard the macaroons as the true end of life ; and as a rule, unquestionably what we do regard as the true end of life will bear contemplating and working for as such, while only the secondary and incidental ends are the better for being taken in by side glimpses, in the way which Mr. Mill seems to regard as the best mode of mastering the main end. We hear, no doubt, sometimes of ambitious men who lose the prize of their ambition by aiming directly at power, while others who are not ambitious, and who aim directly at the public good, gain power by the very indiffer- ence to power which they show. Of course that is so, but the reason is very plain. It is obvious that it is so because the desire of power itself is universally held to be inferior to the desire of the public good as the ulterior end of power, and because, therefore, the man who has the inferior desire para- mount, is distrusted by society whose help is needful for the possession of power, while he who has the superior desire paramount is trusted and aided to obtain it. But in the case of happiness, there is no such reason for the failure of the direct aim. According to the utilitarian, the final aim is happiness, and any other ideal aim is goad only so far as it results in happiness. Why, then, should it be necessary to put the cart before the horse, the means before the end? In the other case, the public good is held to be a better end than the possession of power, to which power should only be a means, atd therefore the man who visibly pursues the means with more eager- ness than the end, is not likely to succeed even in getting the means. But in the belief of utilitarians, all ideal ends, even including 'good' itself, are only names for the various ways to happiness. It seems, then, to be perfectly inexplicable why it should be advisable to hoodwink yourself as to the end, and aim only at the means for the purpose of attaining the end. Take another case where the pursuit of the end defeats itself. The love of being loved, the love of social admiration and popularity, is, as we all know, apt to defeat itself. The man who aims at being popular and admired is not nearly so likely to be popular and admired as the man who thinks little or nothing about it, but aims simply at his own individual ideal. Here, again, the failure- of the direct aim appears to be due to its real and perceived in- feriority to those aims which usually secure it. The man who- directly aims at getting admiration and esteem will hardly deserve them, for he cannot deserve them without cherishing plenty of aims which would be very likely to risk or forfeit other persons' admiration and esteem. The man who lives for the good opinions of others cannot be deserving of those good opinions, for he cannot contribute much to teach others, by the independence of his own life, to what those good opinions ought to be given. In this case also, then, the ill-success of the direct pursuit of admira- tion is simply due to the fact that that pursuit is a lower aim than any consistent with the attainment of the admiration pursued. But if happiness be the true standard and end of life, why should it fall into the hands only of those who do not directly seek it ?. Surely, if it is not safe to pursue it directly, it can only be because it is not the proper end and aim of life,—because while it may be the natural reward of the pursuit of better ends, it is not itself the chief end. Nothing surely could well be more im- probable than that the one standard and best fruit of human action ought to be carefully wrapped up in the folds of inferior ends, so that you may come upon it by accident, if you are to taste- it properly at all. The very fact that pleasures are so much more enjoyable when they are not made the ultimate aims of life, seems to us to be something very like proof that they are not the ultimate aims of life, but only the incidental refreshments which help us to- attain them.
Again, it seems to us to be deducible from Mr. Mill's second' result of the moral crisis through which he had passed, that the great principle of "the association of ideas" from which his father and he derived so much, was no more equal to what was expected from it, than the utilitarian theory had been. He had learned to believe implicity in the hard-worked doctrine of "the association of ideas," and especially to believe as one application of that doctrine, that "all mental and moral feelings and qualities, whether of a good or of a bad kind, were the results of associa- tions; that we love one thing and hate another, take pleasure- in one sort of action or contemplation, and pain in another sort, through the clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to those things from the effect of education or of experience." All our loves, and hatreds, therefore, are, to a very great extent, of an arbitrary kind, dependent on habits of association. "There must always be something artificial and casual in associations thus produced. The pains and pleasures thus forcibly associated with things are not connected with them by any natural tie, and it is therefore, I thought, essential to the durability of these associations, that they should have become so intense and inveterate as to be practically indissoluble before the habitual exercise of the power of analysis had commenced." As it was not so with Mr. Mill himself,—as he found on experiment that he could dissolve again the tie between the personal pleasure he had learnt to associate with the happiness of others and the perception of that happiness, and that he was liable to find himself none the happier for seeing other men suddenly better and more prosperous, he at first saw no hope for his own future. The principle of "the association of ideas" had left him at the commencement of his voyage "with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but no sail," "without any real desire for the ends which I had been so carefully fitted oat to work for, no delight in virtue or the general good, but also just as little in anything else." And what was his remedy for this ? Why, the cultivation of the same class of artificial emotions which had thus left him stranded, only in a direction a little more inward than before ;—to try and take delight in that in which be found it so difficult to- take delight, by the help of his imagination, — to try and create anew more subtle ties of association between the hap- piness of others and his own. lie thought he knew that all such feelings were purely artificial, liable to be dissolved at, the touch of analysis into their separate elements,—namely, a pleasure of his own, felt simultaneously with a perception of another's happiness, — the selfish pleasure being, however, not connected with the perception of external happiness by any real tie, except indeed the almost accidental one of contiguity in time. And yet he encouraged himself and others to try and form more and more of these artificial emotions by the use of more- subtle means, and he praises the poet Wordsworth especially for- helping him in this delicate attempt,—for having developed &- happy knack of connecting a personal pleasure of fancy or imagination with a vivid vision of the common joys of ordinars human beings. Indeed this culture of the feelings,—this deliberate attempt to associate, as Wordsworth's poetry succeeds in doing, personal enjoyments of the imagination with the picture of even common-place persons' common-place happiness,—became a part, he tells us, of his new philosophy. Instead of only studying as in time past how to make external circumstances contribute to the happiness-producing qualities of human character, he proposed for the future to teach men that they might so form their internal circumstances as to get various subtle and artificial enjoyments out of associations between their own visionary faculty and the common ways of vulgar men. It was true, of course, that this association of ideas was as purely artificial as any one of those associations which had lost their 'power for him so early. There could be no real connection (except of time and habit) between the thrill of imaginative pleasure in his own intellect, and the perception of the common- place sources of human enjoyment which accompanied it ; but none the less—rather, indeed, the more heartily—would he strive to rivet the artificial link between the two, if it promised, from the very fact of its intellectual character, to survive in minds in which powers of analysis had done so much to dissolve the ordinary rivets of the associative faculty.
We confess we can hardly imagine a more remarkable admis- sion than all this, that the principle of the association of ideas was as insufficient for the explanation of Mr. Mill's real state of mind on this second point, as the Utilitarian principle had been for the explanation of his state of mind on the first point. Is it not clear that Mr. Mill's spirit of philanthropic reform was very far indeed from that artificial compound of pleasant associations with a particular kind of effort., which, for example, will sometimes make any study closely associated with childish memories of marmalade or treacle, delightful not only to the child, but to the man ? If that kind of accidental association had been the origin of Mr. Mill's feeling, why should it have grieved him to think that the complete success of his efforts would not make him happy ? According to the associative theory, it was the effort itself which was delightful,—as riding is delightful for the sake of the motion and the air,—not any end which it might attain. The rider does not lose his pleasure in riding, because the place he reaches in his ride is uninteresting to him ; nor the child his pleasure in the study associated with marmalade or other such delights, be- cause he finds the ultimate outcome of that study flat and profitless. Mr. Mill's melancholy itself proves that his reforming zeal was not due to the artificial compound of associations to which he attributed it. Analysis does not weaken the pleasure of memories associated with the fragrance of violets and primroses and the spring woods ; and analysis would not have weakened Mr. Mill's delight in philanthropic labours, if his delight had ever been due to the mere strength of pleasant early associations. The very fact that he lost his pleasure in the means, directly he fancied that he felt no delight in the end, shows that it was the presumed nobility of his desire or purpose which had animated him, and not the mere thrill of pleasant associations. Nothing could show more clearly than this how false is that analysis of his father's school which makes a desire to consist iu "the idea of a pleasure," instead of a pleasure in the satisfaction of a desire,--which makes the pleasure generate the desire, instead of the desire generating the pleasure. And then, again, how could the remedy he discovered for his melan- choly have been a real remedy, if the "associative" theory had been adequate? Wordsworth taught him to cultivate a new class of meditative exercises, by the help of which he might find personal delight in realising to himself the common pleasures of the common lot. But if that remedy were due merely to the forging of a new link of association between the pleasures of his own imagination and the lot of the multitude, it would not have been a remedy at all, for it would have asso- ciated the pains quite as much as .the pleasures of the multitude with this new imaginative joy. In point of fact, Wordsworth's poems on the sufferings of common hearts are as fine or finer than those on the joys, and inspire as much meditative rapture in the reader. The obvious explanation of moral crisis is that Mill, in the ardour of his study of the means, had lost his full grasp of the meaning of the end in view,—had forgotten, in his various abstract prescriptions for the diminution of social miseries, the compre- hensive human detail involved in all popular joys and miseries. Wordsworth's homely raptures restored to him the fullness of that
meaning, helped him to see what common human joys and suffer- ings were, and so flooded once more the failing well-springs of his sympathy. But this they could never have done, without the real existence of that sympathy in him. Wordsworth's poems did not make for him a new feeling, but only appealed to an old one,
well-nigh choked up by the fragments of a dreary and false philo- sophy. In short, as far as we can see, the chief use of Mr. Mill's curious " moral crisis " is to show that, tried by the standard of his own experience, his Utilitarianism would not hold water ; and again, that the great magic-wand to which such extraordinary trans- formation scenes are due in the dissolving views of his own and his father's psychology,—the vaunted principle of the association of Ideas,'—is quite innocent of nine-tenths of the wonders to which it is supposed to give rise. Nothing is stranger than that Mr. Mill did not see how ill his own philosophy explains the most unique and intense of his own moral experiences. But it may help others to discover what he never discovered himself,— that his father's psychology was, to a true psychology of human nature, much what the science of the manufacture of artificial flowers is to the science of the growth of blade and leaf and blossom.
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