The Influence of John Stuart Mill's Mental Crisis on His Thoughts

It has always seemed to me that the great question offered by John Stuart Mill's progression as a philosopher is: what caused the man who felt in the early 1820's that Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarianism offered a basis for the unification of his own personality to conclude, in 1838, that Bentham had a severely limited conception of the agencies by which the human mind is molded and by which human conduct is influenced? I believe that the explanation for that change lies in the mental crisis which occurred in Mill's life in 1826, and that this crisis may be attributed not only to the nature of Mill's early education but also to his personal relations with his father.

The plan for Mill's education was formed by his father, James Mill, and Jeremy Bentham in 1808-1809. The two men sought a successor to continue their Utilitarian propaganda; since Bentham had no son, John Stuart Mill was the logical choice. The plan, somehow, has overtones of cruelty, noticed by contemporaries and later critics. In 1874, a reviewer of the Autobiography was of the opinion that the elder Mill undertook an experiment with his son to satisfy his own vanity. The critic wrote:

We remember to have heard him [James Mill] say that nothing interested him so much as to watch the efforts of the childish intelligence, even in infants; and it would seem that, in enforcing this extraordinary system of education on his

Page 369

son, he was trying an experiment for the gratification of his own love of theory and love of power. (1)

“With sublime and ruthless confidence,” wrote Emery Neff, in 1926, “James Mill offered his own flesh and blood for an experimentum in corpore vile to test Helvetius' theory of the omnipotence of education.” (2) Perhaps these opinions are justified, for we know that, in 1812, James Mill, afraid of an early death, wrote to Bentham and asked him to complete young John's education so that he might be left “a successor worthy of both of us.” (3) The tone of the letter is not that of a father anx