of Utilitarianism,-Macaulay, Thirlwall, Praed, Lord Howick, Samuel Wilberforce, Henry Lytton Bulwer, and others. But neither project was at first very successful. The Westminster fell into difficulties within four years of its origin; and the Debating Society for some time dragged on an existence, rather than lived, though it afterwards was more prosperous. From a religious or philosophic point of view, the chief interest of this period is the power which may be exercised by even a few men, who are distinct in their teaching, and not ashamed of it, however unpopular it may be. We hasten on to that which Mr. Mill terms himself "A Crisis in my History," a passage which, we are sure, will be so deeply interesting to all our readers that we make no sort of apology for extracting it at full length. It makes us sensible of the very great benefit which Mr. Mill conferred on posterity by writing this book, painful as it is; for the facts that follow could not have been recorded by any biographer, and they are a most singular testimony to what we cannot but call the strivings of God's Spirit in hearts which man would say had never been reached, and of the way in which men are forced to hear God's voice, though they have not always the honesty to confess it. The passage is as follows:

"From the winter of 1821, when I first read Bentham, and especially from the commencement of the Westminster Review, I had what might truly be called an object in life-to be a reformer of the world. My conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object. The personal sympathies I wished for were those of fellow-labourers in this enterprise. I endeavoured to pick up as many flowers as I could by the way; but as a serious and permanent personal satisfaction to rest upon, my whole reliance was placed on this; and I was accustomed to felicitate myself on the certainty of a happy life which I enjoyed, through placing my happiness in something durable and distant, in which some progress might be always making, while it could never be exhausted by complete attainment. This did very well for several years, during which the general improvement going on in the world, and the idea of myself as engaged with others in struggling to promote it, seemed enough to fill up an interesting and animated existence. But the time came when I awakened from this as from a dream. It was in the autumn of 1826. I was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent; the state, I should think, in which converts to Methodism usually are, when smitten by their first 'conviction of sin.' In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant; would this be a great joy and happiness to you?' And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, No!' Vol. 73.-No. 433.

G

At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for. . . . In vain I sought relief from my favourite books; those memorials of past nobleness and greatness from which I had always hitherto drawn strength and animation. I read them now without feeling, or with the accustomed feeling minus all its charm; and I became persuaded that my love of mankind, and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself out. I sought no comfort by speaking to others of what I felt. If I had loved any one sufficiently to make confiding my griefs a necessity, I should not have been in the condition I was. I felt, too, that mine was not an interesting, or in any way respectable distress. There was nothing in it to attract sympathy. Advice, if I had known where to seek it, would have been most precious. The words of Macbeth to the physician often occurred to my thoughts. But there was no one on whom I could build the faintest hope of such assistance. My father, to whom it would have been natural to me to have recourse in any practical difficulties, was the last person to whom, in such a case as this, I looked for help. Everything convinced me that he had no knowledge of any such mental state as I was suffering from, and that even if he could be made to understand it, he was not the physician who could heal it. My education, which was wholly his work, had been conducted without any regard to the possibility of its ending in this result; and I saw no use in giving him the pain of thinking that his plans had failed, when the failure was probably irremediable, and, at all events, beyond the the power of his remedies. Of other friends I had at that time none to whom I had any hope of making my condition intelligible. It was, however, abundantly intelligible to myself; and the more I dwelt upon it, the more hopeless it appeared."

The only account which Mr. Mill could give of this state of mind was, that whereas he had been always taught, and had believed, that all mental feelings were the result of associations, and that the great object was to produce associations of pleasure in connection with all things beneficial to the great whole, so that we might take pleasure in doing them, his educators had made these associations far too loose and casual, trusting to the simple methods of praise and blame, reward and punishment. Meanwhile, they had so strongly fostered the habit of analysis, of inquiring dispassionately into the real connection between things, that they had destroyed all strong feelings and desires. Hence, while he knew that sympathy and desire for the good of others was the surest source of happiness, the feeling was wanting, and could not, by any effort of will, be created. Purely physical pleasures could not make life endurable to him, and he was simply hopeless; as he himself says, "left stranded at the commencement of life's voyage, with a well equipped ship

and a rudder, but no sail." Groaning under this state, he continues:

"I frequently asked myself, if I could, or if I was bound to go on living, when life must be passed in this manner. I generally answered to myself, that I did not think I could possibly bear it beyond a year. When, however, not more than half that duration of time had elapsed, a small ray of light broke in upon my gloom. I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel's 'Mémoires,' and came to the passage which relates his father's death, the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt, and made them feel, that he would be everything to themwould supply the place of all that they had lost. A vivid conception of the scene and its feelings came over me, and I was moved to tears. From this moment my burden grew lighter. The oppression of the thought that all feeling was dead within me was gone. I was no longer hopeless; I was not a stock or a stone. I had still,

it seemed, some of the material out of which all worth of character, and all capacity for happiness, are made. Relieved from my ever present sense of irremediable wretchedness, I gradually found that the ordinary incidents of life could again give me some pleasure; that I could again find enjoyment, not intense, but sufficient for cheerfulness, in sunshine and sky, in books, in conversation, in public affairs; and that there was, once more, excitement, though of a moderate kind, in exerting myself for my opinions, and for the public good. Thus the cloud gradually drew off, and I again enjoyed life: and though I had several relapses, some of which lasted many months, I never again was as miserable as I had been."

From this time, Mr. Mill continues to say, his theory of life was changed. He saw that, while happine-s was the end of life, and the one test of all conduct, it was not to be gained by directly aiming at it, but by proposing to ourselves some other end, such as the improvement of mankind, some lofty object of pursuit; and in seeking to attain this, we should find that happiness followed; and this plan he recommends "to all those who have but a moderate degree of sensibility, and of capacity for enjoyment-that is, to the majority of mankind."

Is this, we venture to ask, in any sense, a satisfactory solution of the difficulty which Mr. Mill's philosophy professes to set at rest, and failing in the solution of which, it loses its whole raison d'être? To be a reformer of the world (p. 132) was Mr. Mill's happiness before he passed through this crisis of his mental history; to be a reformer of the world was his happiness when he emerged from it; but the moment he asked himself, was he happy? he ceased to be so. To use his own words, "The only chance is, not to treat happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation, exhaust them

selves on that; and, if otherwise fortunately circumstanced,* you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it, or thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal questioning." Now, we suppose that the greatest happiness of the greatest number is made up of the sum of happiness of individuals who compose that number; and these individuals, having nothing but happiness as the test of all rules of conduct and the end of life," are recommended never to think about their own happiness, never on any account to ask themselves the question, "Am I happy?" for instantly their happiness will vanish; but to think about something else, as we should put it, to drown the voice of conscience in the activity and cares of life,-and provided they succeed in this, provided also they are otherwise fortunately circumstanced, they may find life endurable. Truly, if we were to adopt Mr. Mill's philosophy, we should find it hard to resist the belief that this world was the creation of a demon of extraordinary malice, and that the sooner we propitiated him by devil-worship the better. Mr. Mill was circumstanced far more fortunately than the majority of men can ever expect to be, and yet he barely escaped the conclusion that he ought to seek an end to the miseries of life; and he emerged from his despair, so far as we can judge, by an effort of will, and not in the least by a satisfactory intellectual process. Men of weak wills, or oppressed by fortune, will find little help from him. It is well that, spite of Mr. Mill and his followers, the world may yet hear a voice which says, "Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.'

A most remarkable parallel to Mr. Mill's difficulties, and to his solution of them, occurs to us, though not from a quarter whence we should at all have expected it. This passage in the Autobiography vividly recalled to us Ranke's account of Igna tius Loyola. The agonies, indeed, of Loyola's mind were more directly the outgrowth of a sense of sin, yet they produced the same torture of soul, the same desire to escape from life. And how did Loyola find his way out of the labyrinth of despair? Simply by determining never to think of his past life, to resist all visions that recalled it-in short, as Ranke says, "by an engagement entered into by the will, rather than by a conviction to which the will is compelled to yield." Herein Ranke contrasts him with Luther, who passed through the same trials, but found peace for his conscience in the doctrine of the atonement, which satisfied, not his will nor his imagination, but his reason. Accept the Scriptures, and you have a rational account of happiness, of remedy for sin-in short, of all that the moral

The italics are ours.

nature demands. Reject them because of certain difficulties, and you are left, when the storm comes, simply to strength of will in order to effect an escape. We propose, however, to return to this subject shortly, and would only remind our readers here of a passage in the memoirs of Professor Conington, which presents a deeply interesting contrast to our extract from the Autobiography of Mr. Mill. We cannot help wishing that we possessed, in the former case as well as in the latter, a record of the mental struggle as it appeared to him who passed through it, and not from one who, so far as we can gather, professes no sympathy with it.

“During the Long Vacation, which intervened between his election to the Professorship and his entrance upon the discharge of its duties, he passed through a mental conflict which left a deep and permanent impression upon his character, and which, even in this brief memoir, it would be inconsistent with truthfulness to leave unmentioned. . . . As he described it himself, a sense of the reality of eternal things was instantaneously borne in upon him while he was engaged in one of his ordinary occupations. For some weeks his mind was agitated and unstrung by this overwhelming consciousness of the immediate presence of the terrors of the unseen world. He was unable to take any interest in, or even to give any sustained attention to, any subject not directly affecting the momentous questions which engaged his thoughts. He would not even read the New Testament in Greek, apparently because the very language suggested associations which for the time had become repugnant to him. When he emerged from this state of depression, it was with the fixed determination to make the obligations of religion, as he had learned them in his childhood, the sole governing principle of his life, and to this determination he consistently adhered."*

We have not space for more than this brief extract; but our readers will find that the whole passage repays perusal; and in an autobiography of Conington, we have no doubt that it would have held precisely the same place as does the crisis to which we have called attention in the mental history of Mill. Now, no one can doubt that the two men were at least equally honest in their search after truth, that to the formation of a critical estimate of the authenticity of books, and their pretensions to genuineness, Conington brought a nind, if less powerful than that of Mill, yet possessing far more professional experience, and that before yielding his assent to the teaching of the Bible, he satisfied himself of the value of its claims. That Mr. Mill ever took the last of these steps, he has nowhere left a record. In all the mention of his reading (and as his object is to show what education can do, he has left a very careful record

* Memoir by Professor Smith, prefixed to "Miscellaneous Writings of John Conington."