through comparison with the opinions of other thinkers and from experience of life itself. Mill's early writings are, therefore, and quite naturally, little more than the expression of the views of his father with such acute modifications as might be expected from one gifted with his powerful intellect.
THE STARVING OF EMOTION
In the course of time the utilitarian philosophy, in the form in which it had come to him from his father, ceased to satisfy the distinctly more emotional nature of the son. He became so completely disillusioned with the dry content of this philosophy that he became depressed, lost all joy in work and therewith the capacity for constructive intellectual effort.[1] Perhaps the most valuable part of the "Autobiography" is the account of this distressed and anxious period, and of the various influences which widened his horizon and humanized his views of life and its significance. Being a man of books, it was largely through a change in the character of his reading that he found solace. The poems of Wordsworth were the most potent single influence. It is altogether likely that a person born with less varied natural endowments would have remained content with and fixed in the cast of thought resulting from premature acquaintance with a single school of philosophy.
MILL'S CONTRIBUTION TO UTILITARIANISM AND LIBERALISM
This experience is reflected in the contribution made by Mill to utilitarian ethical theories. While adhering to the position that happiness is simply the sum total of pleasures, he made a distinction between higher and lower qualities of pleasure, regarding the higher as indefinitely more desirable than the lower. The criteria for making an exact classification of pleasures were, however, not fully and adequately worked out by Mill. Various branches of knowledge, in particular psychology and sociology, had not been developed sufficiently far for the purpose. On this, as on many other subjects, the work of Mill has been superseded, owing to fundamental differences in methods of approach even more than to the accumulation of additional data. Among influences of special far-reaching impor-
- ↑ See H. C., xxv, 85–95.
