indoctrination, which involved starting to learn ancient Greek at the age of three, with gruelling studies from 6 to 9 am and from 10 am to 1 pm every day. There were no holidays. There was no birching, but his father’s sarcasm was almost as unpleasant. There was to be no mixing with other children – the young John wasn’t even allowed to go to church. What he learned in the morning, he was expected to pass on to his eight brothers and sisters in the afternoon.
John could not exactly love his father tenderly, he said later in his Autobiography. He described him as ‘the most impatient of men’, and we can imagine what that simple sentence conceals. For the rest of his life, he confessed that his conscience spoke with his father’s voice. But he certainly gave him a 25-year head start over his contemporaries, which must have helped him slip into the role of the great Liberal philosopher of the Victorian age. The only area of human knowledge that he was kept in ignorance of was Utilitarianism: this he had to choose for himself, his father decided. Mill Senior needn’t have worried. When he introduced the idea to his 16-year-old son in a series of ‘lectures’ as they walked along, demanding an essay on the subject the next morning which would be re-written and re-written again, John Stuart was so enthusiastic that he formed his own Utilitarian Society. James Mill’s friends and allies looked on in astonishment. There was no doubt that John was a prodigy, said Francis Place, but he would probably end up ‘morose and selfish’. Unfortunately, he was right.
In 1820, just before he left for a life-broadening trip to Paris, James Mill took his son for a grave walk in Hyde Park, and told him that his education would single him out, and this should not be a source of pride. It was because of his father’s efforts and nothing to do with him. In fact, it would be disgraceful if he didn’t know more than everybody else in those circumstances.
It is hard to warm to Mill senior, or any of the unemotional utilitarians. Bentham said that his sympathy for the many sprang out of his hatred for the few. James Mill despised passionate emotions, describing them as a kind of madness. He showed almost no feelings at all – except for one: he was quite unable to hide how much he disliked his wife. He ‘had scarcely any belief in pleasure’, according to his son. ‘He would sometimes say that if life was made what it might be, by good government and good education, it would be worth having: but he never spoke with anything like enthusiasm even for that possibility.’
James Mill lived only a few years longer than Bentham. The dust he inhaled in his regular journeys to his country cottage in Mickleham gave him a serious lung haemorrhage in 1835, and he died on 23 June the following year, leaving it to his son John as the second generation to carry the baton for Utilitarianism. It was John who gave the movement its name: he found it in a novel called Annals of the Parish about a Scottish clergyman who warns his parishioners not to abandon God and become ‘utilitarians’.
At 20 John Stuart Mill – regarded by both his father and Bentham as their spiritual heir – set to with a will to finish Bentham’s Rationale of Evidence for publication. ‘Mr Bentham had begun his treatise three times at considerable intervals, each time in a different manner, and each time without reference to the preceding,’ he wrote. He spent months unpicking his crabbed handwriting, chopping his sentences up into manageable parts, and finally sending five volumes off to the printers. The following year he had a nervous breakdown or a ‘mental convulsion’ as the Victorians put it. The breakdown took the form of a series of doubts about the whole Bentham legacy.
‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realised; 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!’ 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 be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.
It was an important question and it seemed to fly in the face of everything that Bentham stood for, just as the harsh unemotional education that he had received at the hands of his father seemed completely inadequate to deal with it. If the question couldn’t be answered, how could any calculation of pleasure come to any conclusion? Life seemed complex beyond anything Bentham could have imagined.
For much of the year, Mill could hardly work at all. Music was a relief, and so were the poems of William Wordsworth, who he was convinced had experienced something similar himself. But, still in the grip of Bentham, Mill worried about music. If there were only a limited number of notes, wouldn’t the music run out? Can you calculate the potential number of pieces of music in the world? Experience shows that it is too complicated to count, just as you can’t count the combination of possible poems by the 26 letters of the alphabet. But these are the fears of a Utilitarian who has looked into the abyss.
He never fully recovered. A decade later he had another collapse, and for the rest of his life he suffered from a nervous twitching over one eye.
With antecedents like Bentham and Mill, it is touching to think of John Stuart struggling to find some kind of emotional meaning. He found it by coming out of his reclusion to dine twice a week with Harriet Taylor, the intelligent wife of a wholesale druggist. Mr Taylor seems to have been generous enough to overlook whatever was going on between them. His family roundly condemned him for the relationship and he retired from the world completely, finding that any reference to her by anybody else made him overexcited.
Instead he wrote a book about logic, then his magnum opus Political Economy. And when Harriet’s husband died in 1849, he married her. When she died in Avignon of congestion of the lungs, he was absolutely devastated, and bought a house there so he could spend half his time near his wife’s grave. ‘The highest poetry, philosophy, oratory, and art seemed trivial by the side of her,’ he said. At last love had come to the Utilitarians. She probably enabled him to humanize the Utilitarian gospel. She certainly inspired him to write The Subjugation of Women in 1869, and his lifelong support for votes for women.
In 1865, he was persuaded back into public life to stand for Parliament for the Liberal Party. He agreed, on condition that he didn’t have to canvass, spend any money or answer any questions about religion. His disarming honesty seemed to win him support. ‘Did you declare that the English working classes, though differing from some other countries in being ashamed of lying, were yet “generally liars”?’ asked a hostile questioner during a public meeting.
‘I did,’ he replied, to tremendous applause, and found himself elected with an enormous majority. And there he sat until he lost his seat to W. H. Smith the newsagent in 1868, small and slight with his eyebrow twitching, his weak voice hard to hear above the hubbub. Sometimes he would lose his drift during a speech and stand in complete silence for a moment, but his fellow parliamentarians listened with respect. It was Mill who first dubbed the Conservatives the ‘stupid party’. On 5 May 1873, he walked 15 miles in a botanical expedition near Avignon, and died unexpectedly three days later. He was, in a real sense, the last of the line.
V
‘All emotions were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind,’ wrote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, introducing the great detective Sherlock Holmes to the public just over half a century after Bentham’s death. You can point to other figures, from Victor Frankenstein to the Duke of Wellington, who provided role models for human beings as calculating machines – Wellington’s dispatch from the battle of Waterloo was so modestly written that the American ambassador reported back home that he had lost. But it was Bentham the ‘reasoning machine’ who tried to strip morality and government of its emotional and traditional baggage, who made Sherlock Holmes possible, with his detailed knowledge of inks and papers.
‘He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning
