Journals and Debating Speeches
In Francis E. Mineka (ed.) Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto, 1963
Abstract
Empirical observations of the English landscape characterize early records of travels through various southern and northern counties between 1827 and 1832. These entries emphasize topographical, botanical, and architectural details, reflecting a rigorous approach to naturalistic and social observation during field excursions. By contrast, personal records from 1854 shift toward theoretical speculation and socio-political critique. These later reflections examine the stagnation of contemporary intellectual life, the necessity of a “Philosophy of Life” grounded in a secular religion of humanity, and the structural impediments to social progress, including the subjection of women and the rigid traditionalism of the British aristocracy. The transition from the accumulation of empirical data to the formulation of a comprehensive social philosophy is supported by ancillary materials documenting foundational intellectual discipline, such as early translations of Cicero and systematic notes on formal logic. Collectively, these documents provide a chronological view of intellectual development, moving from youthful empirical inquiry toward mature, systemic critiques of governance, morality, and the potential for human improvement. – AI-generated abstract.
Quotes from this work
Everybody knows that the same sum of money is of much greater value to a poor man that to a rich one. Give £10 a year to the man who has but £10 a year, you double his income, and you nearly double his enjoyments. Add £10 more, you do not add to his enjoyments so much as you did by the first £10. The third £10 is less valuable than the second, and the fourth less valuable than the third. To the possessor of £1,000 a year the addition of £10 would be scarcely perceptible; to the possessor of £10,000 it would not be worth slooping for.
The richer a man is the less he is benefited by any further addition to his income. The man of £4,000 a year has four times the income of the man who has but £1,000; but does anybody suppose that he has four times the happiness?
[N]ot the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage, and wisdom is supposed to consist not in seeing further than other people, but in not seeing so far.
There always seems something stunted about the intellect of those who have no humour, however earnest and enthusiastic, and however highly cultivated, they often are.
If it were possible to blot entirely out the whole of German metaphysics, the whole of Christian theology, and the whole of the Roman and English systems of technical jurisprudence, and to direct all the minds that expand their faculties in these three pursuits to useful speculation or practice, there would be talent enough set at liberty to change the face of the world.
If mankind were capable of deriving the most obvious lessons from the facts before them, in opposition to their preconceived opinions, Mormonism would be to them one of the most highly instructive phenomena of the present age. Here we have a new religion, laying claim to revelation and miraculous powers, forming within a few years a whole nation of proselytes, with adherents scattered all over the earth, in an age of boundless publicity, and in the face of a hostile world. And the author of all this, in no way imposing or even respectable by his moral qualities, but, before he became a prophet, a known cheat and liar. And with this example before them, people can still think the success of Christianity in an age of credulity and with neither newspapers nor public discussion a proof of its divine origin!
The remedies for all our diseases will be discovered long after we are dead; and the world will be made a fit place to live in, after the death of most of those by whose exertions it will have been made so. It is to be hoped that those who live in those days will look back with sympathy to their known and unknown benefactors.