"Thus prepared," he writes, "it will easily be believed that when I came into close intellectual communion with a person of the most eminent faculties, whose genius, as it grew and unfolded itself in thought, struck out truths far in advance of me, but in which I could not, as I had done in those others, detect any mixture of error, the greatest part of my mental growth consisted in the assimilation of those truths; and the most valuable part of my intellectual work was in building the bridges and clearing the paths which connected them with my general system of thought."[266]
Mill seems to have been incapable of a healthful sentiment of any kind. The same quality in his stunted and warped moral nature which caused him to have a false and exaggerated sense of the evil that is in the world, leading him to atheism, made him a blind and superstitious worshipper of the imaginary endowments of his wife. But one must read the book itself to realize how far he carried this idolatry.
When she dies, he again sinks into the gloom which his superstition had seemed to cause him partially to forget; and if he continues to work, it is only with the feeble strength "derived from thoughts of her and communion with her memory." Her death was a calamity which took from him all hope, and he found some slight alleviation only in the mode of life which best enabled him to feel her still near him.
She died at Avignon, and he bought a cottage as close as possible to the place where she was buried; and there he settled down in helpless misery, feeling that all that remained to him in the world was a memory.
"Her memory," he writes, "is to me a religion, and her approbation the standard by which, summing up, as it does, all worthiness, I endeavor to regulate my life."[267]
He did not believe in God, in the soul, in a life beyond life; he had scarcely any faith in the practical efforts of the age to improve the condition of the masses, upon whom he looked as the common herd; his own countrymen especially he despised as selfish and narrow above all other men, grovelling in their instincts, and low in the objects which they aim at; happiness he held to be the sole end of existence; and at the close of his life, an old man, in a foreign land, in immedicable misery, he stood beside a grave, and sought with feeble fingers to clutch the shadow of a dream, which he called his religion; and so he died.
We have never read a sadder book, nor one which to our mind contains stronger proof that the soul longs with an infinite craving for God, and, not finding him, will worship anything—a woman, a stone, a memory.
FOOTNOTES:
[249] Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by Rev. I. T. Hecker, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.
[250] Autobiography. By John Stuart Mill. New York: Holt & Co. 1873.