Psychology and parenthood

by H. Addington Bruce

Of course there were not lacking wiseacres who dolefully predicted all manner of unpleasant things for these “unhappy victims of a father’s folly,” who must inevitably fade into an early grave. But the father only smiled serenely, confident that the future would vindicate his educational innovation. And, of a surety, the future did. For James Thomson, the older of the two, living to the age of seventy, left behind him the reputation of one of England’s leading authorities on engineering; while William, who did not die until he was eighty-three, became even more famous, winning, as Lord Kelvin of Largs, a place in the annals of science fairly comparable with that held by the immortal Newton.

A similar process of intensive child culture was carried out, with similarly happy results, in the case of John Stuart Mill, whose father modelled his whole upbringing in accordance with the theory that the mind, like the body, grows with exercise, and that the sooner the process of exercising and training it begins, the better the child’s prospects for a worthy and efficient manhood. Like James Thomson the elder Mill was an exceedingly busy man, but this did not prevent him from making the intellectual development of his son a matter of patient, personal attention. Almost as soon as the little John could talk, his formal education began, and throughout his childhood was continued along lines that have provoked indignant comment in many quarters.

“I have no remembrance,” he tells us, in his interesting “Autobiography,” “of the time when I began to learn Greek. I have been told that it was when I was three years old. My earliest recollection on the subject is that of committing to memory what my father termed vocables, being lists of common Greek words, with their signification in English, which he wrote out for me on cards. Of grammar, until some years later, I learned no more than the inflexions of the nouns and verbs, but after a course of vocables, proceeded at once to translation; and I faintly remember going through ‘Æsop’s Fables,’ the first Greek book which I read. The ‘Anabasis,’ which I remember better, was the second. I learned 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 ‘Cyropaedia’ and ‘Memorials of Socrates’; some of the lives of the philosophers by Diogenes Laertius; part of Lucian; and ‘Isocrates ad Demonicum’ and ‘Ad Nicoclem.’... What he himself was willing to undergo for the sake of my instruction, may be judged from the fact that I went through the whole process of preparing my Greek lessons in the same room and at the same table at which he was writing; and as in those days Greek and English lexicons were not, and I could make no more use of a Greek and Latin lexicon than could be made without having yet begun to learn Latin, I was forced to have recourse to him for the meaning of every word which I did not know. This incessant interruption he, one of the most impatient of men, submitted to, and wrote under that interruption several volumes of his history and all else that he had to write during those years.

“The only thing besides Greek that I learned as a lesson in this part of my childhood was arithmetic; this also my father taught me. It was the task of the evenings, and I well remember its disagreeableness. But the lessons were only a part of the daily instruction I received. Much of it consisted in the books I read by myself, and my father’s discourses to me, chiefly during our walks.

“From 1810 to 1813 (that is, from Mill’s fourth to eighth year) we were living in Kensington Green, then an almost rustic neighbourhood. My father’s health required considerable and constant exercise, and he walked habitually before breakfast, generally in the green lanes toward Hornsey. In these walks I always accompanied him, and with my earliest recollections of green fields and wild-flowers, is mingled that of the account I gave him daily of what I had read the day before. To the best of my remembrance, this was a voluntary rather than a prescribed exercise. I made notes on slips of paper while reading, and from these in the morning walks I told the story to him....

“In these frequent talks about the books I read, he used, as opportunity offered, to give me explanations and ideas respecting civilisation, government, morality, mental cultivation, which he required me afterward to restate to him in my own words.... He was fond of putting into my hands books which exhibited men of energy and resource in unusual circumstances, struggling against difficulties and overcoming them: of such works I remember Beaver’s ‘African Memoranda,’ and Collins’s ‘Account of the First Settlement of New South Wales.’... Of children’s books, any more than of playthings, I had scarcely any, except an occasional gift from a relation or acquaintance: among those I had, ‘Robinson Crusoe’ was pre-eminent, and continued to delight me through all my boyhood.

“It was no part, however, of my father’s system to exclude books of amusement, though he allowed them very sparingly. Of such books he possessed at that time next to none, but he borrowed several for me; those which I remember are the ‘Arabian Nights,’ Cazotte’s ‘Arabian Tales,’ ‘Don Quixote,’ Miss Edgeworth’s ‘Popular Tales,’ and a book of some reputation in its day, Brooke’s ‘Fool of Quality.’”

In one respect, it must be conceded, Mill’s early education was deficient—it depended altogether too much on the knowledge to be gained from books, and not enough on direct study of the laws and beauties of Nature. But against this stands the unquestionable fact that it did establish in him lifelong habits of industry and thoroughness, and an abiding joy in intellectual achievement; and, more important, it had the happy result of habituating him to regard himself as consecrated to a life of labour for the public good. As to the “wrong” done to Mill by “robbing him of the joys of childhood,” one of his biographers, Professor William Minto, justly observes: