INTRODUCTORY NOTE
John Stuart Mill was born in London, May 20, 1806. He was the eldest of the nine children of James Mill, the chief disciple of Bentham and one of the most important leaders in the Utilitarian movement in England. J. S. Mill as a child was almost incredibly precocious. He began Greek at three, and by the time he was eight had read such authors as Herodotus and Plato in the original, besides such English historians as Gibbon and Hume. At twelve he was studying logic "seriously"; at thirteen he went through a complete course in political economy which his father gave him in conversation during their walks, and the summaries he made of these talks were the basis of James Mill's treatise on this subject. These and other intellectual feats will be found related in the "Autobiography," not in a spirit of boastfulness, but in support of more profitable educational methods.
So far young Mill had been educated entirely by his father; but when he was fourteen he was sent to France for a year, where he mastered the language, learned much of French society and politics, and continued his studies in mathematics, economics, and science. In 1823 he entered the India House as a clerk in the examiner's office, of which his father was the head; rose rapidly, and finally succeeded to his father's position as chief examiner.
His official labors left him considerable leisure, which he employed with the industry that had been habitual with him almost from infancy. He wrote for the papers, helped his father on the "Westminster Review," and, before he was twenty, edited Bentham's "Treatise on Evidence." His first original work of importance was his "Essays upon Unsettled Questions of Political Economy," written when he was about twenty-four, but not published till 1844.
In religion, Mill had been brought up an agnostic, and, in philosophy, a utilitarian of the school of Bentham; but after a nervous illness in 1836, he began to be dissatisfied with the high and dry intellectualism of his father's circle. He "learnt that happiness was to be found not in directly pursuing it, but in the pursuit of other ends; and learnt, also, the importance of a steady cultivation of the feelings." He had already a wide acquaintance among the most active minds in London, and some of these, like F. D. Maurice and John Sterling, aided in the process of humanising Mill's philosophy. He became a disciple of Wordsworth's
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