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 en passant,9 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
6. The last two lines of Coleridge's short poem 8. See 'The Everlasting Yea' (p. 1017), of Car' Work without Hope' (1828). lyle's Sartor Resartus (1833-34). 7. Published in I 804; Jean-Francois Marmontel 9. In passing (French). (1723?1799), French dramatist and critic.
.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY / 107 5
circumstanced 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 sensibility1 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 learnt by experience that the passive 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 recreant 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 me 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 toward 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 taken great pleasure was music; the best effect of which (and in this it surpasses perhaps every other art) consists in 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 a 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 suspended 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,2 and the extreme pleasure which I drew from its delicious melodies did me good, by showing me a source of pleasure to which 1 was as susceptible as ever. The good, however, was much impaired by the thought that the pleasure of music (as is quite true of such pleasure as this was, that of mere tune) fades with familiarity, and requires either to be revived by intermittence, 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 semitones, which can be put together in only a limited number of ways, of which but a small proportion are beautiful: most of these, it seemed to me, must have been already discovered, and there could
1. Sensitivity. 2. A romantic opera (1826) composed by Carl Maria von Weber (1786?1826).
.
1076 / JOHN STUART MILL
not be room for a long succession of Mozarts and Webers, 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 phi
losophers of Laputa,3 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 govern
ment could succeed in their objects, and every person in the community were
free and in a 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 myself concerned, with any fair share of the general lot.
This state of my thoughts and feelings made the fact of my reading Words- worth for the first time (in the autumn of 1828), an important event in my life. I took up the 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 new to me), to try whether a poet, whose peculiar
