John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), was the leading British philosopher of the nineteenth century. An exponent and developer of the empiricism of John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume, and of the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, he made major contributions to economics and political philosophy and is generally considered to be the founder of British Liberalism.

Upbringing

Mill was born in Pentonville to Harriet Barrow and James Mill, a Scotsman and disciple of utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. James Mill gave John Stuart an unconventional, rigorous education in Greek, mathematics and many other subjects, from an early age, of which Mill wrote:

my father, in all his teaching, demanded of me not only the utmost that I could do, but much that I could by no possibility have done

From the age of eight, Mill started on Latin, and also started teaching his younger siblings, as well as encountering Homer's Iliad both in Greek and in Pope's translation. Between the age of eight and twelve, Mill writes of having read the Aeneid of Virgil, Horace, the Fables of Phaedrus, Livy, Sallust, the Metamorphoses by Ovid, Lucretius, Terence and Cicero, as well as Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Thucydides and many, many other writers. Mill writes of his education:

My father never permitted anything which I learnt to degenerate into a mere exercise of memory. He strove to make the understanding not only go along with every step of the teaching, but, if possible, precede it. Anything which could be found out by thinking I never was told, until I had exhausted my efforts to find it out for myself... One of the evils most liable to attend on any sort of early proficiency, and which often fatally blights its promise, my father most anxiously guarded against. This was self-conceit. He kept me, with extreme vigilance, out of the way of hearing myself praised, or of being led to make self-flattering comparisons between myself and others. From his own intercourse with me I could derive none but a very humble opinion of myself; and the standard of comparison he always held up to me, was not what other people did, but what a man could and ought to do. He completely succeeded in preserving me from the sort of influences he so much dreaded. I was not at all aware that my attainments were anything unusual at my age.