 Chapter 5 Part Number 1 of Autobiography For some years after this time I wrote very little and nothing regularly for publication, and great were the advantages which I derived from the intermission. It was of no common importance to me, at this period, to be able to digest and mature my thoughts for my own mind only, without any immediate call for giving them out in print. Had I gone on writing, it would have much disturbed the important transformation in my opinions and character which took place during those years. The origin of this transformation, or at least the process by which I was prepared for it, can only be explained by turning some distance back. 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 laborers in this enterprise. I endeavored 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 affected at this very instant. Would this be a great joy in 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 again be any interest in the means? I seem to have nothing left to live for. At first I hoped that the cloud would pass away of itself. But it did not. A night's sleep, the sovereign remedy for the smaller vexations of life, had no effect on it. I awoke to a renewed consciousness of the woeful fact. I carried it with me into all companies, into all occupations. Hardly anything had power to cause me even a few minutes' oblivion of it. For some months the cloud seemed to grow thicker and thicker. The lines and cholerages dejection. I was not then acquainted with them exactly describe my case. A grief without a pang. Void dark and drear. A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief. Which finds no natural outlet or relief in a word or sigh or tear. In vain I sought relief from my favorite books, those memorials of past nobleness and greatness from which I had always hitherto drawn strength and 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 and 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. 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 irredeal and at all events beyond the power of his remedies. Of other friends I had at the 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. My course of study had led me to believe that all mental, moral feelings and qualities, whether of a good or of a bad kind, were the results of association, that we love one thing and hate another, take pleasure in one sort of action or contemplation and pain in another sort. Through the clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to those things, from the effect of education or of experience, as a corollary from this, I had always heard it maintained by my father and was myself convinced that the object of education should be to form the strongest possible associations of the salutary class, associations of pleasure with all things beneficial to the great whole, and of pain without all things hurtful to it. This doctrine appeared inexpungable, but it now seemed to me, on retrospect, that my teachers had occupied themselves, but superficially with the same means of forming and keeping up these salutary associations. They seemed to have trusted altogether to the old familiar instruments praise and blame, reward and punishment. Now, I did not doubt that by these means begun early and applied unremittingly intense associations of pain and pleasure, especially of pain, might be created and might produce desires and aversions capable of lasting, undiminished to the end of life. But there must always be something artificial and casual in associations thus produced. The pains and pleasures thus forcibly associated with things are not connected with them by any natural tie, and it is therefore I thought essential to the durability of these associations that they should have become so intense and inveterate as to be practically indissoluble before the habitual exercise of the power of analysis had commenced. For I now saw or thought I saw what I had always before received with incredulity that the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings. As indeed it has, when no other mental habit is cultivated and the analyzing spirit remains without its natural compliments and correctives, the very excellence of analysis I argued is that it tends to weaken and undermine whatever is the result of prejudice, that it enables us mentally to separate ideas which have only casually clung together, and no associations whatever could ultimately resist this dissolving force. Were it not that we owe to analysis our clearest knowledge of the permanent sequences in nature, the real connections between things not dependent on our will and feelings, natural laws, by virtue of which in many cases one thing is inseparable from another, in fact, which laws in proportion as they are clearly perceived and imaginatively realized cause our ideas of things which are always joined together in nature, to cohere more and more closely in our thoughts. Analytic habits may thus even strengthen the associations between causes and effects, means and ends, but tend altogether to weaken those which are, to speak familiarly, a mere matter of feeling. They are therefore, I thought, favorable to prudence and clear-sidedness, but a perpetual worm at the root both of the passions and of the virtues, and above all, fearfully undermine all desires and all pleasures, which are the effects of association that is, according to the theory I held, all accept the purely physical and organic of the entire insufficiency of which to make life desirable. No one had a stronger conviction than I had. These were the laws of human nature by which, as it seemed to me, I had been brought to my present state. All those to whom I looked up were of opinion that the pleasure of sympathy with human beings and the feelings which made the good of others and especially of mankind on a large scale the object of existence were the greatest and surest sources of happiness, of the truth of this I was convinced, but to know that a feeling would make me happy, if I had it, did not give me the feeling my education, I thought, had failed to create these things in sufficient strength to resist the dissolving influence of analysis, while the whole course of my intellectual cultivation had made precocious and premature analysis the inveterate habit of my mind. I was thus, as I said to myself, left stranded at the commencement of my voyage, with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but no sail. Without any real desire for the ends which I had been so carefully fitted out to work for, no delight in virtue or the general good, but also just a little in anything else, the fountains of vanity and ambition seemed to have dried up within me as completely as those of benevolence. I had had, as I reflected, some gratification of vanity as at too early an age. I had obtained some distinction and felt myself of some importance, but the desire of distinction and of importance had grown into a passion, and little as it was which I had attained, yet having attained it too early, like all pleasures enjoy too soon, it had made me blasé and indifferent to the pursuit. Thus neither selfishness nor unselfish pleasures were pleasures to me, and there seemed no power and nature sufficient to begin the formation of my character anew, and create in a mind now irretrievably analytic fresh associations of pleasure with any of the objects of human desire. This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Vicky Rands. During this time I was not incapable of my usual occupations. I went on with them mechanically by the mere force of habit. I had been so drilled in a certain sort of mental exercise that I could still carry it on when all the spirit had gone out of it. I even composed and spoke several speeches at the debating society, how or with what degree of success I know not, of four years continual speaking at that society this is the only year of which I remember next to nothing. Two lines of collage, in whom alone of all writers I have found a true description of what I felt, were often in my thoughts. Not at this time, for I had never read them, but in a later period of the same mental malady. Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, and hope without an object cannot live. In all probability my case was by no means so peculiar as I fancy did, and I doubt not that many others have passed through a similar state, but the idiosyncrasies of my education had given to the general phenomenon a special character which made it seem the natural effect of causes that it was hardly possible for time to remove. 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 Marmin Tell's memoirs, 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 them, would 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 irredeal 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 and books and conversation and public affairs, and that there was once more excitement, though 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. The experiences of this period had two very marked effects on my opinions and character. In the first place they led me to adopt a theory of life, very unlike that on which I had before I acted, and having much in common with what at the time I certainly had never heard of the anti-self-consciousness theory of Carlisle, I never indeed wavered in the conviction that happiness is the test of all rules of conduct and the end of life, but I now thought that this end was only to be obtained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy, I thought, who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness, on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness, by the way. The enjoyments of life, such was now my theory, are sufficient to make it a pleasant thing. When they are taken on passant, without being made a principal object, once make them so and they are immediately felt to be insufficient, they will not bear a scrutinizing examination. 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. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation exhaust themselves on that, and if otherwise fortunately circumstance, 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. This theory now became the basis of my philosophy of life, and I still hold to it as the best theory for all those who have but a moderate degree of sensibility and of capacity for enjoyment, that is, for the great majority of mankind. The other important change, which my opinions at this time underwent, was that I for the first time gave its proper place among the prime necessities of human well-being to the internal culture of the individual. I ceased to attach almost exclusive importance to the ordering of outward circumstances and the training of the human being for speculation and for action. I had now learned by experience that the passing susceptibilities needed to be cultivated as well as the active capacities and required to be nourished and enriched as well as guided. I did not, for an instant, lose sight of, or undervalue, that part of the truth which I had seen before. I never turned, recurrent, to intellectual culture or ceased to consider the power and practice of analysis as an essential condition both of individual and of social improvement, but I thought that it had consequences which required to be corrected by joining other kinds of cultivation with it. The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties now seemed to be of primary importance. The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed, and my thoughts and inclinations turned in an increasing degree towards whatever seemed capable of being instrumental to that object. I now began to find meaning in the things which I had read or heard about, the importance of poetry and art as instruments of human culture, but it was some time longer before I began to know this by personal experience. The only one of the imaginative arts in which I had from childhood taking great pleasure was music, the best effect of which, and in this it surpasses perhaps every other art, consists an exciting enthusiasm in winding up to a high pitch those feelings of an elevated kind, which are already in the character, but to which this excitement gives a glow and fervor, which though transitory at its utmost height, is precious for sustaining them at other times. This effect of music I had often experienced, but like all my pleasurable susceptibilities, it was suspected during the gloomy period. I had sought relief again and again from this quarter, but found none. After the tide had turned, and I was in process of recovery, I had been helped forward by music, but in a much less elevated manner. I, at this time, first became acquainted with Weber's Oberon, and the extreme pleasure which I drew from its delicious melodies did me good by showing me a source of pleasure, to which I was as susceptible as ever. The good, however, was much impaired by the thought that the pleasure of music is quite true of such pleasure as this was that of mere tune fades with familiarity and requires either to be revived by intermittent or fed by continual novelty, and it is very characteristic both of my then state and of the general tone of my mind at this period of my life that I was seriously tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of musical combinations. The octave consists only of five tones and two semi-tones, which can be put together in only a limited number of ways, of which but a small portion are beautiful. Most of these, it seemed to me, must have been already discovered, and there could not be room for a long session of Mozart's and Weber's to strike out as these had done. Entirely new and surpassingly rich veins of musical beauty, this source of anxiety may, perhaps, be thought to resemble that of the philosophers of Laputa, who feared lest the sun should be burnt out. It was, however, connected with the best feature in my character, and the only good point to be found in my very unromantic and in no way honorable distress. For though my dejection honestly looked at, could not be called other than egotistical, produced by the ruin as I thought of my fabric of happiness, yet the destiny of mankind in general was ever in my thoughts and could not be separated from my own. I felt that the flaw in my life must be a flaw in life itself, that the question was whether, if the reformers of society and government could succeed in their objects and every person in the community were free and in the state of physical comfort, the pleasures of life being no longer kept up by struggle and privation, would cease to be pleasures, and I felt that unless I could see my way to some better hope than this for human happiness in general, my dejection must continue, but that if I could see such an outlet I should then look on the world with pleasure, content as far as I was my self-concern with any fair share of the general lot. This state of my thoughts and feelings made the fact of my reading Wordsworth for the first time in the autumn of 1828 an important event of my life. I took up this collection of his poems from Curiosity with no expectation of mental relief from it, though I had before resorted to poetry with that hope in the worst period of my depression I had read through the whole of Byron, then knew to me to try whether a poet whose particular department was supposed to be that of the intenser feelings could rouse any feeling in me. As might be expected, I got no good from this reading but the reverse. The poet's state of mind was too like my own. His was the lament of a man who had worn out all pleasures, and who seemed to think that life, to all who possessed the good things of it, must necessarily be the vapid, uninteresting thing which I found it. His Herald and Manfred had the same burden on them which I had, and I was not in a frame of mind to desire any comfort from the veheminent sensual passion of his Giarus, or the sullenness of his Larus. But while Byron was exactly what did not suit my condition, Wordsworth was exactly what did. I had looked into the excursion two or three years before and found little in it, and I should probably have found as little had I read it at this time. But the miscellaneous poems in the two-volume edition of 1815, to which little of value was added in the latter part of that author's life, proved to be the precise thing for my mental wants at that particular juncture. In the first place, these poems addressed themselves powerfully to one of the strongest of my pleasurable susceptibilities, the love of rural objects and natural scenery, to which I had been indebted not only for much of the pleasure of my life, but quite recently for relief from one of my longest relapses into depression. In this power of rural beauty over me there was a foundation laid for taking pleasure in Wordsworth's poetry, the more so as his scenery lies mostly along mountains, which owing to my early Perinian excursion were my ideal of natural beauty. But Wordsworth would never have had any great effect on me if he had merely placed before me beautiful pictures of natural scenery. Scott does this still better than Wordsworth, in a very second rate landscape does it more effectually than any poet. What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of mind was that they expressed not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling and of thought colored by feeling under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings which I was inquest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy a sympathetic and imaginative pleasure which could be shared in by all human beings which had no connection with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed, and I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence. There has certainly been even in our own age greater poets than Wordsworth, but poetry of deeper and loftier feeling could not have done for me at the time what his did. I needed to be made to feel that there was real permanent happiness and tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this not only without turning away from but with a greatly increased interest in the common feelings and common destiny of human beings and the delight which these poems gave me proved that with culture of this sort there was nothing to dread from the most confirmed habit of analysis. At the conclusion of the poems came the famous ode, falsely called platonic, intimations of immortality in which along with more than his usual sweetness of melody and rhythm and along with the two passages of grand imagery but bad philosophy so often quoted I found that he too had had similar experience to mine, that he also had felt that the first freshness of youthful enjoyment of life was not lasting but that he had sought for compensation and found it in the way in which he was now teaching me to find it. The result was that I gradually but completely emerged from my habitual depression and was never again subject to it. I long continued to value Wordsworth less according to his intrinsic merits than by the measure of what he had done for me. Compared with the greatest poets he may be said to be the poet of un-Poetical natures possessed of quiet and contemplative tastes but un-Poetical natures are precisely those which require poetic cultivation. This cultivation Wordsworth is much more fitted to give than poets who are intrinsically far more poets than he. It so fell out that the merits of Wordsworth were the occasion of my first public decoration of my new way of thinking and the separation from those of my habitual companions who had not undergone a similar change. The person with whom at the time I was most in the habit of comparing notes on such subjects was Robuck and I induced him to read Wordsworth in whom he also at first seemed to find much to admire but I like most Wordsworthians threw myself into strong antagonism to Byron both as a poet and as to his influence on the character. Robuck all whose instincts were those of action and struggle had on the contrary a strong relish and great admiration of Byron whose writings he regarded as the poetry of human life while Wordsworths according to him was that of flowers and butterflies. We agreed to have the fight at our debating society where we accordingly discussed for two evenings the comparative merits of Byron and Wordsworth were pounding and illustrating by long recitations our respective theories of poetry. Sterling also in a brilliant speech putting forward his particular theory this was the first debate on any weighty subject in which Robuck and I had been on opposite sides. The schism between us widened from this time more and more though we continued for some years longer to be companions. In the beginning our chief divergence related to the cultivation of the feelings. Robuck was in many respects very different from the vulgar notion of a benthomite or utilitarian. He was a lover of poetry and of most of the fine arts. He took great pleasure in music and dramatic performances especially in painting and himself drew in designed landscapes with great facility and beauty but he could never be made to see that these things have any value as aids in the formation of character personally instead of being as benthomites are supposed to be void of feeling. He had very quick and strong sensibilities but like most Englishmen who have feelings he found his feelings stand very much in his way. He was much more susceptible to the painful sympathies than to the pleasurable and looking for his happiness elsewhere he wished that his feelings should be deadened rather than quickened and in truth the English character and English social circumstances make it so seldom possible to derive happiness from the exercise of the sympathies that it is not wonderful if they count for little in an English man's scheme of life. In most other countries the paramount importance of the sympathies as a constituent of individual happiness is an axiom taken for granted rather than needing any formal statement but most English thinkers always seem to regard them as necessary evils required for keeping men's actions benevolent and compassionate. Roebuck was or appeared to be this kind of English man. He was little good in any cultivation of the feelings and none at all in cultivating them through the imagination which he thought was only cultivating illusions. It was in vain I urged on him that the imaginative emotion which an idea when vividly conceived excites in us is not an illusion but a fact as real as any of the other qualities of objects and far from implying anything erroneous and elusive in our mental apprehension of the object is quite consistent with the most accurate knowledge and most perfect practical recognition of all its physical and intellectual laws and relations. The intensest feeling of the beauty of a cloud lighted by the setting sun is no hindrance to my knowing that the cloud is vapor of water. Subject to all the laws of vapors in a state of suspension and I am just as likely to allow for and act on these physical laws whenever there is occasion to do so as if I had been incapable of perceiving any distinction between beauty and ugliness while my intimacy with Roebuck diminished. I fell more and more into friendly intercourse with our Colorigian adversaries in the society Frederick Maurice and John Sterling both subsequently so well known the former by his writings the latter through the biographies by Hare and Carlisle. Of these two friends Maurice was the thinker Sterling the orator an impassioned expositor of thoughts which at this period were almost entirely formed for him by Maurice. With Maurice I had for some time been acquainted through Eaton Took who had known him at Cambridge and although my discussions with him were almost always disputes I had carried away from them much that helped to build up my new fabric of thought in the same way as I was deriving much from Colorig and from the writings of ghosts and other German authors which I read during these years I have so deep respect for Maurice's character and purposes as well as for his great mental gifts that it is with some unwillingness I say anything which may seem to place him on a less high eminence than I would gladly be able to accord to him but I have always thought that they there was more intellectual power wasted in Maurice than in any other of my contemporaries few of them certainly have had so much to waste great powers of generalization rare ingenuity and subtlety and a wide perception of important and unobvious truths served him not for putting something better into the place of the worthless heap of received opinions on the great subjects of thought but for proving to his own mind that the church of England had known everything from the first and that all the truths on the grounds of which the church and orthodoxy have been attacked many of which he saw as clearly as anyone are not only consistent with the 39 articles that are better understood and expressed in those articles than by anyone who rejects them I have never been able to find any other explanation of this than by attributing it to that timidity of conscience combined with original sensitiveness of temperament which has so often driven highly gifted men into Romanism from the need of a firmer support than they can find in the independent conclusions of their own judgment any more vulgar kind of timidity no one who knew Maurice would ever think of imputing to him even if he had not given public proof of his freedom from it by his ultimate collision with some of the opinions commonly regarded as orthodox and by his noble origination of the Christian socialist movement the nearest parallel to him in a moral point of view this collage to whom in merely intellectual power apart from poetical genius I think him decidedly superior at this time however he might be described as a disciple of collage and sterling as a disciple of collage and of him the modifications which were taking place in my old opinions gave me some points of contact with them and both Maurice and sterling were of considerable use to my development with sterling I soon became very intimate and was more attached to him than I have ever been to any other man he was indeed one of the most lovable of men his frank cordial affectionate and expansive character a love of truth alike conspicuous in the highest things and the humblest a generous and ardent nature which through itself with impetuosity into the opinions it adopted but was as eager to do justice to the doctrines and the men it was supposed to as to make war on what it thought their errors and an equal devotion to the two cardinal points of liberty and duty formed a combination of qualities as attractive to me as to all others who knew him as well as I did with his open mind and heart he found no difficulty in joining hands with me across the Gulf which as yet divided our opinions he told me how he and others had looked upon me from hearsay information as a made or manufactured man having had a certain impress of opinion stamped on me which I could only reproduce and what a change took place in his feelings when he found in the discussion on Wordsworth and Byron that Wordsworth and all of which that name implies belong to me as much as to him and his friends the failure of his health soon scattered all his plans of life and compelled him to live at a distance from London so that after the first year or two of our acquaintance we only saw each other at distant intervals but as he said himself in one of his letters to Carlisle when we did meet it was like brothers though he was never in the full sense of the word a profound thinker his openness of mind and the moral courage in which he greatly surpassed Maurice made him outgrow the dominion which Maurice and collage had once exercised over his intellect though he retained the last a great but discriminating admiration of both and towards Maurice a warm affection except in that short and transitory fascist of his life during which he made the mistake of becoming a clergyman his mind was ever progressive and the advance he always seemed to have made when I saw him after an interval made me apply to him what Goath said of Schiller Erhard Ein Fertlich Fort Schröten he and I started from intellectual points almost as wide apart as the polls the distance between us was always diminishing if I made steps towards some of his opinions he during his short life was constantly approximating more and more to several of mine and if he had lived and had health and vigor to prosecute his ever assiduous self-culture there is no knowing how much further this spontaneous assimilation might have proceeded after 1829 I withdrew from attendance on the debating society I had had enough speech making and was glad to carry on my private studies and meditations without any immediate call for outward assertion of their results I found the fabric of my old and taught opinions giving way in many fresh places and I never allowed it to fall to pieces but was incessantly occupied in wearing it anew I never in the course of my transition was content to remain forever so short a time confused and unsettled when I had taken in any new idea I could not rest till I had adjusted its relation to my old opinions and ascertained exactly how far its effect ought to extend in modifying or superseding them the conflicts which I had so often had to sustain in defending the theory of government laid down in Bentham's and my father's writings and the acquaintance I had obtained with other schools of political thinking made me aware of many things which that doctrine professing to be a theory of government in general ought to have made room for and did not but these things as yet remained with me rather as corrections to be made in applying the theory to practices than as to defects in the theory I felt that politics could not be a science of specific experience and that the accusations against the Benthamic theory of being a theory of proceeding a priori by way of general reasoning instead of Baconian experiment showed complete ignorance of Bacon's principles and of the necessary conditions of experimental investigation at this juncture appeared in the Edinburgh review Macaulay's famous attack on my father's essay on government this gave me much to think about I saw that Macaulay's conception of the logic of politics was erroneous that he stood up for the empirical mode of treating political phenomena against the philosophical that even in physical science his notions of philosophizing might have recognized Kepler but who would have excluded Newton and Laplace but I could not help feeling that though the tone was unbecoming an error for which the writer at a later period made the most ample and honorable amends there was truth in several of his strictures on my father's treatment of the subject that my father's premises were really too narrow and included but a small number of the general truth on which in politics the important consequences depend identity of interest between the governing body and the community at large is not in any practical sense which can be attached to it the only thing on which good government depends neither can this identity of interest be secured by the mere conditions of election I was not at all satisfied with the mode in which my father met the criticisms of Macaulay he did not as I thought he ought to have done justify himself by saying I was not writing a scientific treaty on politics I was writing an argument for parliamentary reform he treated Macaulay's argument as simply irrational and attack upon the reasoning facility an example of the saying of Hobbes that when reason is against a man a man will be against reason this made me think that there was really something more fundamentally erroneous in my father's conception of philosophical method as applicable to politics then I had hitherto suppose there was but I did not at first see clearly what the error might be at last it flashed upon me all at once in the course of other studies in the early part of 1830 I had begun to put on paper the ideas of logic chiefly on the distinctions among terms and the import of propositions which had been suggested and in part worked out in the morning conversations already spoken of having secured these thoughts from being lost I pushed on into the other parts of the subject to try whether I could do anything further towards clearing up the theory of logic generally I grappled at once with the problem of induction postponing that of reasoning on the ground that it is necessary to obtain premises before we can reason from them now induction is mainly a process for finding the causes of effects and an attempting to fathom the mode of tracing causes and effects in physical science I soon saw that in the more perfect of the sciences we ascend by generalization from particulars to the tendencies of causes considered singly and then reasoned down from those separate tendencies to the effect of the same causes when combined I then asked myself what is the ultimate analysis of this deductive process the common theory of the syllogism evidently throwing no light upon it my practice learned from Hobbes and my father being to study abstract principles by means of the best concrete instances I could find the composition of forces in dynamics occurred to me as the most complete example of the logical process I was investigating on examining accordingly what the mind does when it applies the principle of the composition of forces I found that it performs a simple act of addition it adds the separate effect of the one force to the separate effect of the other and puts down the sum of these separate effects as the joint effect but is this a legitimate process I think in dynamics and in all the mathematical branches of physics it is but in some other cases as in chemistry it is not and I then recollected that something not unlike this was pointed out as one of the distinctions between chemical and mechanical phenomena I then asked myself out as one of the distinctions between chemical and mechanical phenomena in the introduction to that favorite of my boyhood Thompson's system of chemistry this distinction at once made my mind clear as to what was perplexing me in respect to the philosophy of politics I now saw that a science is either deductive or experimental according as in the province it deals with the effects of causes when conjoined are or are not the sums of the effects which the same causes produce when separate it followed that politics must be a deductive science it thus appeared that both Macaulay and my father were wrong the one in assimilating the method of philosophizing in politics to the purely experimental method of chemistry while the other though right in adopting a deductive method had made a wrong selection of one having taken as the type of deduction not the appropriate process that of the deductive branches of natural philosophy but the inappropriate one of pure geometry which not being a science of causation at all does not require or admit of any summing up of effects a foundation was thus laid in my thoughts for the principle chapters of what I afterwards published on the logic of the moral sciences and my new position in respect to my old political creed now became perfectly definite if I am asked what system of political philosophy I substituted for that which as a philosophy I had abandoned I answer no system only a conviction that the true system was something much more complex and many cited than I had previously had any idea of and that its office was to supply not a set of model institutions but principles from which the institution suitable to any given circumstances might be deduced the influences of European that is to say continental thought and especially those of the reaction of the 19th century against the 18th were now streaming in upon me they came from various quarters from the writings of Coleridge which I had begun to read with interest even before the change in my opinions from the Coleridgeians with whom I was in personal intercourse from what I had read of both from Carlisle's early articles in the Edinburgh and foreign reviews that for a long time I saw nothing in these as my father saw nothing in them to the last but insane rhapsody from these sources and from the acquaintance I kept up with the French literature of the time I derived among other ideas which the general turning upside down of the opinions of European thinkers had brought uppermost these in particular that the human mind has a certain order of possible progress in which some things must proceed others an order which governments and public instructors can modify to some but not to an unlimited extent that all questions of political institutions are relative not absolute and that different stages of human progress not only will have but ought to have different institutions that government is always either in the hands or passing into the hands of whatever is the strongest power in society and that what this power is does not depend on institutions but institutions on it and that any general theory or philosophy of politics supposes a previous theory of human progress and that this is the same thing with the philosophy of history these opinions true in the main were held in an exaggerated and violent manner by the thinkers with whom I was now most accustomed to compare notes and who as usual with a reaction ignored that half of the truth which the thinkers of the 18th century saw but though at one period of my progress I for some time undervalued that great century I never joined in the reaction against it but kept as firm hold of one side of the truth as I took of the other the fight between the 19th century and the 18th century always reminded me of the battle about the shield one side of which was white and the other black I marveled at the blind rage with which the combatants rushed against one another I applied to them and to collage himself many of collages sayings about half truth and ghost device many sightedness was one which I would most willingly at this period have taken for mine the writers by whom more than by any others a new mode of political thinking was brought home to me with those of the Saint Simeon school in France in 1829 and 1830 I became acquainted with some of their writings they were then only in the earlier stages of their speculations they had not yet dressed out their philosophy as a religion nor had they organized their scheme of socialism they were just beginning to question the principle of hereditary property I was by no means prepared to go with them even this length but I was greatly struck with the connected view which they for the first time presented to me of the natural order of human progress and especially with their division of all history into organic periods and critical periods during the organic periods they said mankind accept with firm conviction some positive creed claiming jurisdiction over all their actions in containing more or less of truth and adaptation to the needs of humanity under its influence they make all the progress compatible with the creed and finally outgrow it when a period follows of criticism and negation in which mankind lose their old convictions without acquiring any new ones of a general or authoritative character except the conviction that the old are false the period of Greek and Roman polytheism so long as really believed in by instructed Greeks and Romans was an organic period succeeded by the critical or skeptical period of the Greek philosophers another organic period came in with Christianity the corresponding critical period began with the reformation has lasted ever since still lasts and cannot altogether cease until a new organic period has been inaugurated by the triumph of a yet more advanced creed these ideas I knew were not peculiar to the St. Simonians on the contrary they were the general property of Europe or at least of Germany in France but they had never to my knowledge been so completely systemized as by these writers nor the distinguishing characteristics of a critical period so powerfully set forth for I was not then acquainted with fish's lecture on the characteristics of the present age in Carlisle indeed I found bitter denunciations of an age of unbelief and of the present age as such which I like most people at the time supposed to be passionate protest in favor of the old modes of belief but all that was true in these denunciations I thought that I found more calmly and philosophically stated by the St. Simonians among their publications to there was one which seemed to me far superior to the rest in which the general idea was matured into something much more definite and instructive this was an early work of August Compt who then called himself and even announced himself in the title page as a pupil of St. Simon in this tract Monsieur Compt first put forth a doctrine which he afterwards so copiously illustrated of the natural succession of three stages in every department of human knowledge first the theological next the metaphysical and lastly the positive stage and contended that social science must be subject to the same law that the feudal and Catholic system faces of the theological state of the social science Protestantism the commencement and the doctrines of the French Revolution the consummation of the metaphysical and that its positive state was yet to come this doctrine harmonized well with my existing notions to which it seemed to give a scientific shape I already regarded the methods of physical science as the proper models for political but the chief benefit which I derived at this time from the trains of thought suggested by the St. Simeons and by Compt was that I obtained a clear conception than ever before of the peculiarities of an error of transition and opinion and ceased to mistake the moral and intellectual characteristics of such an error for the normal attributes of humanity I looked forward to the present age of loud disputes but generally weak convictions to a future which shall unite the best qualities of the critical with the best qualities of the organic periods unchecked liberty of thought unbounded freedom of individual action and all modes not hurtful to others but also convictions as to what is right and wrong useful and pernicious deeply engraved on the feelings by early education in general unanimity of sentiment and so firmly grounded and reason and in the true exigencies of life that they shall not like all former and present creeds religious ethical and political required to be periodically thrown off and replaced by others and of chapter five part two recording by Vicki Rans chapter five part three of autobiography this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Vicki Rans chapter five a crisis in my mental history sure comp soon left the saint simonians and I lost sight of him and his writings for a number of years but saint simonians I continued to cultivate I was kept all current of their progress by one of their most enthusiastic disciplines Mr. Gustav the Eichel who about that time passed a considerable interval in England I was introduced to their chiefs bizarre and on fountain in 1830 and as long as their public teachings and proselytism continued I read nearly everything they wrote their criticisms on the common doctrines of liberalism seemed to me full of important truth and it was partly by their writings that my eyes were opened to the very limited and temporary value of the old political economy which assumes private property and inheritance as in the feasible facts and freedom of production in exchange as the near month of social improvement the scheme gradually unfolded by the saint simonians under which the labor and capital of society would be managed for the general account of the community every individual being required to take a share of labor either as thinker teacher artist or producer all being classed according to their capacity and renumerated according to their work appeared to me a far superior description of socialism to Owens their aim seemed to me desirable and rational however their means might be in efficacious and though I never believed in the practicability nor in the beneficial operation of their social machinery I felt that the proclamation of such an ideal of human society could not pretend to give a beneficial direction to the efforts of others to bring society as that present constituted near to some ideal standard I honored them most of all for what they had been most cry down for the boldness and freedom from prejudice with which they treated the subject of the family the most important of any and needing more fundamental alterations than remain to be made in any other great social institution but on which scarcely any reformer has the courage to touch in proclaiming the perfect equality of men and women and entirely new order of things in regard to their relations with one another the saint simonians in common with Owen and Fourier have entitled themselves to the grateful remembrance of future generations and giving an account of this period of my life I have only specified such of my new impressions as appeared to me both at the time and since to be a kind of turning points marking a definite progress in my mode of thought but these few selected points give a very insufficient idea of the quantity of thinking which I carried on respecting a host of subjects during these years of transition much of this it is true consisted in rediscovering things known to all the world which I had previously displayed or disregarded but the rediscovery was to me a discovery giving me plenary possession of the truth not as traditional platitudes but fresh from their source and it seldom failed to place them in some new light but which they were reconciled with and seem to confirm while they modified the truth less generally known which lay in my early opinions and in no essential part of which I at any time wavered all my new thinking only laid the foundation of these more deeply and strongly while it often removed misapprehension and confusion of ideas which had perverted their effect for example during the later returns of my dejection the doctrine of what is called philosophical necessity weighed on my existence 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 and remembering the wish of fox respecting the doctrine of resistance to governments that it might never be forgotten by kings nor remembered by subjects I said that it would be a blessing if the doctrine of necessity could be believed by all quote the characters of others and disbelieved in regard to their own I pondered painfully on the subject till gradually I saw light through it I perceived the word necessity as a name for the doctrine of cause and effect applied to human action carried with it a misleading association and that this association was the operative force in the depressing and paralyzing influence which I had experienced I saw that our character is formed by circumstances and our own desires can do much to shape those circumstances and that what is really inspiring and ennobling in the doctrine of free will is the conviction that we have real power over the formation of our own character that our will by influencing some of our circumstances can modify our future habits or capabilities of willing all this was entirely consistent with the doctrine of circumstances or rather was the doctrine itself properly understood at the time I drew in my own mind a clear distinction between the doctrine of circumstances and fatalism discarding altogether the misleading word necessity the theory which I now for the first time rightly apprehended ceased altogether to be discouraging and besides the relief to my spirits I no longer suffered under the birth so heavy to one who aims at being a reformer in opinions of thinking one doctrine true and the contrary doctrine morally beneficial the train of thought which had extricated me from this dilemma seemed to me in after years fitted to render a similar service to others and it now forms the chapter on liberty and necessity in the concluding book of my system of logic again in politics though I no longer accepted the doctrine of the essay on government as a scientific theory though I cease to consider representative democracy as an absolute principle and regarded it as a question of time place and circumstance though I now looked upon the choice of political institutions as a moral and educational question more than one of material interest thinking that it ought to be decided mainly by the consideration but great improvement in life and culture stands next in order for the people concerned as the condition of their further progress and what institutions are most likely to promote that nevertheless this change in the premises of my political philosophy did not alter my practical political creed as to the requirements of my own time and country I was never as much as ever a radical and Democrat for Europe and especially for England I thought the predominance of the aristocratic classes the noble and the rich in the English Constitution and evil worth any struggle to get rid of not on account of taxes or any such comparatively small inconvenience but as the great demoralizing agency in the country to moralizing first because it made the conduct of the government an example of gross public immorality through the predominance of private over public interest in the state and the abuse of powers of legislation for the advantage of classes secondly and in still greater degree because the respect of the multitude always attaching itself principally to that which in the existing state of society is the chief passport to power and under English institutions which is hereditary or acquired being the almost exclusive source of political importance riches in the signs of riches were almost the only things really respected and the life of the people was mainly devoted to the pursuit of them I thought that while the higher and richer classes held the power of government the instruction and improvement of the mass of the people were contrary to the self interest of those classes because tending to render the people more powerful for throwing off the yoke but if the democracy obtained a large and perhaps the principal share in the governing power it would become the interest of the opulent classes to promote their education in order to ward off really mischievous errors and especially those which would lead to unjust violations of property on these grounds I was not only as ardent as ever for democratic institutions but earnestly hoped that Owenite St. Simeon and all other anti property doctrines might spread widely among the poor classes not that I thought that those doctrines true or desired that they should be acted on but in order that the higher classes might be made to see that they had more to fear from the poor when uneducated than when educated in this frame of mind the French Revolution of July found me it roused my utter most enthusiasm and gave me as it were a new existence I went at once to Paris was introduced to Lafayette and laid the groundwork of the intercourse I afterwards kept up with several of the active chiefs of the extreme popular party after my return I entered warmly as a writer into the political discussions of the time which soon became still more exciting by the coming in of Lord Gray's ministry and the proposing of the reform bill for the next few years I wrote copiously in newspapers it was about this time that Fawn Blanc who had for some time written the political articles and the examiner became the proprietor and editor of the paper it is not forgotten with what verb and talent as well as Fawn Witt he carried it on during the whole period of Lord Gray's ministry and what importance it assumed as the principal representative in the newspaper press of radical opinions the distinguishing character of the paper was given to it entirely by his own articles which formed at least three-fourths of all the original writing contained in it but of the remaining fourth I contributed to the reform of the newspaper and the reform of the original writing contained in it but of the remaining fourth I contributed during those years a much larger share than anyone else I wrote nearly all the articles on French subjects including a weekly summary of French politics often extending to considerable length together with many leading articles on general politics commercial and financial legislation and any miscellaneous subjects in which I felt interested and which were suitable to the paper including occasional reviews of books mere newspaper articles on the occurrences or questions of the moment gave no opportunity for the development of any general mode of thought but I attempted in the beginning of 1831 to embody in a series of articles headed the spirit of the age some of my new opinions and especially to point out in the character of present age the anomalies and the evils characteristic of the transition from a system of opinions which had worn out to another only in process of being formed. These articles were I fancy lumbering in style and not lively or striking enough to be at any time acceptable to newspaper readers but had they been far more attractive still at that particular moment when great political changes were impending and engrossing all minds these discussions were ill timed and misfired altogether. The only effect which I know to have been produced by them was that Carlisle then living in a secluded part of Scotland read them in his solitude and sang to himself as he afterwards told me here is a new mystic inquired on coming to London that autumn respecting their authorship and inquiry which was the immediate cause of our becoming personally acquainted. I have already mentioned Carlisle's earlier writings as one of the channels through which I received the influences which enlarged my early narrow creed but I do not think that those writings by themselves would ever have had any effect on my opinions with truth they contained though of the very kind which I was already receiving from other quarters were presented in a form and vesture less suited than any other to give them access to a mind trained as mine had been. They seemed to haze a poetry in German metaphysics in which almost the only clear thing was a strong animosity to most of the opinions which were the basis of my mode of thought. Utilitarianism the doctrine of circumstances and the attaching any importance to democracy logic or political economy instead of my having been taught anything in the first instance by Carlisle it was only in the proportion as I came to see the same truth through media more suited to my mental constitution that I recognized them in his writings then indeed the wonderful power with which he put them forth made a deep impression upon me and I was during a long period one of his most fervent admirers but the good his writings did me was not as philosophy to instruct but as poetry to animate even at the time when our acquaintance commenced I was not sufficiently advanced in my new modes of thought to appreciate him fully a proof of which is that on his showing me the manuscript of Sartor Rezardus his best and greatest work which he just then finished and I made a little of it though when it came out about two years afterwards in Frazier's magazine I read it with enthusiastic admiration and the keenest delight I did not seek and cultivate Carla less on account of the fundamental differences in our philosophy he soon found out that I was not another mystic and when for the sake of my own integrity I wrote to him a distinct profession of all those of my opinions between us was that I was as yet consciously nothing of a mystic I do not know at what period he gave up the expectation that I was destined to become one but though both his and my opinions underwent in subsequent years considerable changes we never approached much nearer to each other's modes of thought than we were in the first years of our acquaintance I did not however deem myself a confident that I was not that he was a man of intuition which I was not and that as such he not only saw many things long before me which I could only when they were pointed out to me hobble after and prove but that it was highly probable he could see many things which were not visible to me even after they were pointed out I knew that I could not see round him and could never be certain that I saw him with any deafness until he was interpreted to me by one greatly the superior of both of us who was more a poet than he and more a thinker than I whose own mind and nature included his and infinitely more among the persons of intellect whom I had known of old the one with whom I had now most points of agreement was the other Austin I have mentioned that he always set up early sectarians and latterly he had like myself come under new influences having been appointed professor of jurisprudence in the London University now college university he had lived for some time at bond to study for his lectures and the influence of German literature and of the German character and state of society had made a very perceptible change in his views of life his personal disposition was much softened he was less distaste had begun to turn themselves towards the poetic and contemplative he attached much less importance than formerly to outward changes unless accompanied by a better cultivation of the inward nature he had a strong distaste for the general meanness of English life the absence of enlarged thoughts and unselfish desires the low objects on which the faculties of all classes of the English are intent very little steam he thought that there was more practical good government and which is true enough infinitely more care for the education and mental improvement of all ranks of people under the Prussian monarchy then under the English representative government and he held with the French economy stays that the real security for good government is un pupil eclair which is not always the fruit of popular institutions and which there were better than they though he approved of the reform bill he predicted what in fact occurred that it would not produce the great immediate improvements in government which many expected from it the men he said who could do these great things did not exist in the country there were many points of sympathy between him and me both in new opinions he had adopted and in the old ones which he adopted with all his love for the Germans and enjoyment of their literature never became in the smallest degree reconciled to the innate principle metaphysics he cultivated more and more a kind of German religion of religion of poetry and feeling with little if anything of positive dogma while in politics and here it was that I most differed with him he acquired an indifference bordering on contempt he rejoiced in that of socialism as the most effectual means of compelling the powerful classes to educate the people and to impress on them the only real means of permanently improving their material condition a limitation of their numbers neither was he at this time fundamentally opposed to socialism in itself as an ultimate result of improvement he professed great disrespect for what he called the universal principles of human history and daily experience afford of the extraordinary pliability of human nature a phrase which I have somewhere borrowed from him nor did he think it is possible to set any positive bounds to the moral capabilities which might unfold themselves in mankind under an enlightened direction of social and educational influences whether he retained all these opinions to the end of life I know not but I know that all of his publications were much more Tory in their general character than those which he held at this time my father's tone of thought and feeling I now felt myself at a great distance from greater indeed than a full and calm explanation and reconsideration on both sides might have shown to exist in reality but my father was not one with whom calm and full explanations on fundamental doctrine could be expected at least with one whom he might consider as in some sort a deserter from his standard fortunately we were almost always in strong agreement on the political questions of the day which engrossed a large part of his interest and of his conversation on those matters of opinion on which we differed we talked little he knew that the habit of thinking of himself which his mode of education had fostered sometimes led me to opinions different from his and he perceived from time to time that I did not always tell him how different I expected no good but only pain to both of us from discussing our differences and I never expressed them but when he gave utterance to some opinion or feeling repugnant to mine in a manner which was not on my part to remain silent it remains to speak of what I wrote during these years which independently of my contributions to newspapers was considerable in eighteen thirty and eighteen thirty one I wrote the five essays since published under the title of essays on some unsettled questions political economy almost as they now stand except that in eighteen thirty I partially rewrote the fifth essay they were written with no immediate purpose of publication and when some years later I offered them to a publisher he declined them they were only printed in eighteen forty four after the success of the system of logic I also resumed my speculations on this last subject and puzzled myself like others before me with the great paradox of the discovery of new truths by general reasoning as to the fact there could be no doubt as little could it be doubted that all reasoning is resolvable into syllogisms and that in every syllogism the conclusion is actually contained and implied in the premises how being so contained and implied it could be new truth and how the coherence from the definitions and axioms could be all contained in these was the difficulty which no one I thought had sufficiently felt and which at all events no one has succeeded in clearing up the explanations offered by Watley and others though they might give a temporary satisfaction always in my mind left a mist still hanging over the subject at last when reading a second or third time the chapters on reasoning in the second volume of Doug Old Stewart interrogating myself on every point and following out as far as I knew how every topic of thought which the book suggested I came upon an idea of his respecting the use of axioms and ratio senation which I did not remember to have before noticed how in meditating on it seemed to me not only true of axioms but of all general propositions whatever and to be the key of the whole perplexity from this germ through the theory of the syllogism propounded in the second book of the logic which I immediately fixed by writing it out and now with greatly increased hope of being able to produce a work on logic I proceeded to write the first book from the rough and imperfect draft I had already made what I now wrote became the basis of that part of the subsequent treaties except that it did not contain the theory of kinds which was a later addition suggested by otherwise inextricable difficulties which met me in my first attempt to work out the subject of some concluding chapters of the third book at the point which I had now reached I made a halt which lasted five years I had come to the end of my tether I could make nothing satisfactory of induction at this time I continued to read any book which seemed to promise light on the subject and appropriated as well as I could the results before a long time I found nothing which seemed to open to me any very important vein of meditation in 1832 I wrote several papers for the first series of Tate's magazine and one for a quarterly periodical called The Jurist which had been founded and for a short time carried on by a set of friends all lawyers and law reformers with several of whom I was acquainted the paper in question is the one on the rights and duties of the state respecting corporation and church property now standing first among the collected dissertations and discussions where one of my articles in Tate the currency juggle also appears in the whole mass of what I wrote previous to these there is nothing of sufficient permanent value the paper in the jurist which I still think a very complete discussion of the rights of the state over foundations showed both sides of my opinions asserting as firmly as I should have done at any time the doctrine that all endowments are national property which the government may and ought to control but not as I should once have done condemning endowments in themselves assuming that they should be taken to pay off the national debt on the contrary I urged strenuously the importance of a provision for education not dependent on the mere demand of the market that is on the knowledge and discernment of average parents but calculated to establish and keep up a higher standard of instruction that is likely to be spontaneously demanded by the buyers of the article all these opinions have been confirmed and strengthened by the whole of my subsequent reflections End of Chapter 5 Part 3 Recording by Vicki Rands