It is curious to trace this in one of the most interesting of modern autobiographies. J. S. Mill begins his recollections by disavowing—with obvious sincerity—any egoistic motive. He wishes to show the effect of a particular mode of education, to trace the influence upon a receptive mind of various currents of modern thought; and, above all, to show how large a debt he owed to certain persons who, but for this avowal, would not receive their due meed of recognition. He is to give a lecture upon his own career as dispassionately as Professor Owen might lecture upon a creature which died in the palæozoic era. In pursuing this end, Mill made more revelations as to his own character than he perhaps knew himself. The book is much else, but it is also an exposition of a definite theory of life. Some readers were astonished to find that, as Mill puts it, a Benthamite might be something more than a mere 'reasoning machine.' That description, he admits, was applicable in some cases, and even to himself at one period of his life. But nothing could be clearer to readers of the autobiography—as, indeed, it was clear enough to the observers of his later career—that, so far from being a mere reasoning machine, Mill was a man of strong affections, and even feminine sensibility. And in this, as some critics have said, consists the peculiar pathos of the book. It was the story of a man of strong feelings, who had been put into a kind of moral and logical strait-waistcoat and kept there till it had become a part of himself. The diagnosis of the case showed it, upon this understanding, to be one of partial atrophy of the affections—or rather—for the affections clearly survived—illustrated the effect of depriving them of their natural sustenance. To Mill himself, it was rather a record of the means by which the strait-waistcoat had been forced to yield. Like Bunyan, he had been locked up by Giant Despair, and had escaped from the dungeons, though by a different method. The account of the crisis in his moral development which corresponds to a conversion in the case of Bunyan, gives the real key to his story. He had been put into the strait-waistcoat by that tremendous old gentleman, James Mill, whose force of mind produced less effect through his books than by his personal influence upon his immediate surroundings. His doctrine repelled most readers till it had been made more sympathetic by passing through the more sensitive and emotional nature of his son. The ultimate effect was not to suppress J. S. Mill's affections, but to confine them to certain narrow channels. The primary effect, however, was to produce that 'reasoning machine' period in which the son was a simple logic-mill grinding out the materials supplied by the father and Bentham. Now old Mill was not simply a kind of personified 'categorical imperative'—a rigid external conscience imposing a fixed rule upon his filial disciple, but his doctrine was certainly a trying one. He held that the sole end of morality was to produce happiness, and at the same time he did not believe in happiness. 'He thought human life a poor thing at best after the freshness of youth and unsatisfied curiosity had gone by.' He and his disciples denounced all emotion as 'sentimentality,' and fully shared that English prejudice which, as J. S. Mill declares, regards feeling, especially if it has a touch of the romantic or exalted, to be something intrinsically disgraceful. Here then was the uncomfortable dilemma into which the younger Mill was driven, and which made him miserable. A rigid sense of duty was the sole rule of life; duty meant the production of happiness; and happiness was a mere illusion and unsubstantial phantom. No wonder if a period followed during which the world seemed to him weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable. To feel that all that is left for one is to be a machine grinding out theorems in political economy is certainly not an exhilarating state of things.