Men appealed in the name of right, of justice, of the inborn dignity of the human soul, of God-given liberty, and the conscience of the nations was awakened. They gave no thought to the idle theories of brains, from which the heart and soul had been strained, about a greatest-happiness principle. What have atheists ever done but talk, and mock, and criticise, and seek their own ease whilst discoursing on the general good?
Mill takes the greatest care to record, in more than one place, that he and his father occasionally wrote articles for the Westminster Review without receiving pay for them; thinking it, evidently, worthy of remark that an atheist should even write except for money. Here we may note a vice inherent in atheism, which proves at once its untruth and its impotence. It leaves man without enthusiasm, without hope, without love, to fall back upon himself, a wilted, shrunken thing, to mix with matter, or to vanish in lifeless, logical formalism. It has no heroes, no saints, no martyrs, no confessors. Its advocates either abandon themselves to lust and the senses, or, making a divinity of their own imagined superiority, worship the ghost they have conjured up, whilst looking down upon the rest of mankind as a vulgar herd still intellectually walking on four feet. Mill makes no effort to conceal his contempt for the mass of mankind; and contempt does not inspire love, which alone renders man helpful to man.
The gloom which settled around the life of John Stuart Mill, when he once fully realized that, holding the intellectual opinions which he held, nothing was worth living for, and that he was consequently left without a motive or an object in life, never really left him. He tells us, indeed, that the cloud gradually drew off, and that, though he had several relapses which lasted many months, he was never as miserable as he had been; but it is quite evident, from the whole tone of this Autobiography, that his disappointed soul, like the wounded dove, drew the wings that were intended to lift it to God close to itself, and, hopeless, sank into philosophical despair. Happiness he considered the sole end of life; and yet he says that the enjoyments of life, which alone make it worth having, when made its principal object, pall upon us and sicken the heart. "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."
In other words, in Mill's philosophy, the end of life is happiness, which can be possessed only by those who persuade themselves that this is not the end of life. The doctrine of philosophical necessity, during the later returns of his despondency, weighed upon him like an incubus: "I felt as if I was scientifically proved to be the helpless slave of antecedent circumstances; as if my character and that of all others had been formed for us by agencies beyond our control, and was wholly out of our own power. I often said to myself, What a relief it would be if I could disbelieve the doctrine of the formation of character by circumstances!"[265]
He tries to escape from the fatal web in which his soul hung helpless; but sophisms and quibbles of the brain cannot minister to a mind diseased or pluck sorrow from the heart.
But the saddest part of Mill's Autobiography is the portion devoted to the woman whose friendship he called the honor and chief blessing of his existence. The picture which he has drawn of his childhood is at once painful and ludicrous.
He does not even incidentally allude to a single fact which would lead one to suppose that he had a mother or had ever known a mother's love.
The father, as described by the son, was cold, fanatical, morose, almost inhuman, acting as though he thought children are born merely for the purpose of being crammed with Greek roots and logical formulas. John Stuart was put at Greek vocables when only three years old. His father demanded of him not only the utmost that he could do, but much that it was utterly impossible that he should do. He was guilty, for instance, of the incredible folly of making him read the Dialogues of Plato when only seven years old. He never knew anything of the freshness or joyousness of childhood, or what it is to be "boy eternal." He grew up without the companionship of children, blighted and dwarfed by the abiding presence of the narrow and unnatural man who nipped the flower of his life in the bud, and repressed within him all the sentiments and aspirations which are the spontaneous and healthful product of youth. He was not taught to delight in sunshine and flowers, and music and song; but even in his boyish rambles there strode ever by his side the analytical machine, dissecting, destroying, marring God's work with his lifeless, hopeless theories. The effect of this training was, as we have already seen, that when the boy became a man, he found himself like a ship on the ocean without sail or compass, and there gathered around his life the settled gloom of despair, which his philosophical opinions tended only to deepen.
Without a mother's love, without a father whom it was possible to love, without friends of his own age, without God, dejected, despondent, hopeless, he met the wife of a friend of his father, who, from the manner in which she controlled her first and second husbands, must have been a clever woman, and he became an idolater, giving to her the adoration which his father had taught him to withhold from God. That there is no exaggeration in this statement every one who will take the trouble to read the seventh chapter of Mill's Autobiography will be ready to confess.
He married this woman in 1851, when he was forty-five and she but two years younger, and seven years later her death occurred. Mill wishes the world to believe that this woman was the prodigy of the XIXth century, surpassing in intellectual vigor and moral strength all men and all other women; that to her he owed all that is best in his own writings; and that he is but the interpreter of the wonderful thoughts of this incomparable woman, whom others have deemed merely a commonplace woman's rights woman.