Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. CRISIS?(1823-1840). THE interest attaching to Mill, not only as a thinker, but as a man, is centred in the fifteen years which succeeded his first e.ntry of the India House. At the commencement of this period he is his father’s own son; at the end of it he has written an article on Bentham, which, by his early friends, was looked upon as almost an apostasy. Amongst the many gifts of Mill’s disposition, the greatest, perhaps, was a rare candour and honesty of mind, to which he owes his own somewhat independent position in the ranks of the school to which by inheritance and taste, he belonged. In 1823 he might have been a dogmatist and a bigot; he seems to suggest, in his Autobiography, that such was the case; but this was the inevitable intolerance of a precocious youth. He speedily showed himself keenly receptive of influences which came from quarters with which his father could not sympathise, while at the same time he had the moral courage to publish his changing opinions to the world. It is easy, of course, for the critic to point out some of the inconsistencies, begotten of this change, which are to be observed in differentparts of his work. It should be no less easy for a biographer to admire that higher inconsistency which is but the synonym of a mental growth?continuous, conscientious, and in the best sense, progressive. It is necessary to attempt to sketch the position of Mill at the outset of his public career. Democrat, Empiricist, Benthamite, Utilitarian?such terms were, doubtless, the current description of him in the mouth of his contemporaries. We can trace the various features of his character in the successive mental influences which at this time he underwent. In 1822 he first reads the history of the French Revolution. He learns with astonis…