Mill had already received the appointment which decided the future course of his life.He was appointed to a clerkship in the India House,21st May 1823,having just finished his seventeenth year.He received successive promotions,till in 1856he became chief of the office with a salary of ?000a year.Mill gives his own view of the advantages of the position,Which to a man of his extraordinary power of work were unmistakable.He was placed beyond all anxiety as to bread-winning.He was not bound to make a living by his pen,and could devote himself to writing of permanent value.He was at the same time brought into close relation with the conduct of actual affairs;forced to recognise the necessity of compromise,and to study the art of instilling his thoughts into minds not specially prepared for their reception.Mill's books show how well he acquired this art.
Whatever their other merits or defects,they reconcile conditions too often conflicting;they are the product of mature reflection,and yet presented so as to be intelligible without special initiation.He is unsurpassable as an interpreter between the abstract philosopher and the man of common-sense.The duties were not such as to absorb his powers.Though his holidays were limited to a month,he could enjoy Sunday rambles in the country and pedestrian tours at home and abroad;and though conscientiously discharging his official duties,he managed to turn out as much other work as might have occupied the whole time of average men.The Utilitarians were beginning to make themselves felt in the press.Mill's first printed writings were some letters in the Traveller in 1822,defending Ricardo and James Mill against some criticism by Torrens.He then contributed three letters to the Morning Chronicle,denouncing the prosecution of Carlisle,which then excited the rightful wrath of the Utilitarians.Two letters in continuation were too outspoken to be published.(16)Mill contributed to the Westminster Review from its start in the spring of 1824,helping his father's assault upon the Edinburgh.He was,he says,the most frequent writer of all,and between the second and eighteenth number contributed thirteen reviews.They show that he was reading widely.An article upon Scott's Napoleon in 1828shows that he had fully made up his deficiencies as to the history of the French revolution.He had not,however,as yet attained his full powers of expression;and neither the style nor the arrangement of the matter has the merits of his later work.(17)The most remarkable by far is the review of Whately's Logic in January 1828.It shows some touches of youthful arrogance,though exceedingly complimentary to the author reviewed.But the knowledge displayed and the vigour of the expression are surprising in a youth of twenty-one;and it proves that Mill was already reflecting to some purpose upon the questions treated in his Logic.
While thus serving an apprenticeship to journalism,Mill was going through a remarkable mental training.About the beginning of 1825he undertook to edit Bentham's Rationale of Evidence.He says that this work 'occupied nearly all his leisure for about a year.'That such a task should have been accomplished by a youth of twenty in a year would seem marvellous even if he had been exclusively devoted to it.He had to condense large masses of Bentham's crabbed manuscript into a continuous treatise;to 'unroll'his author's involved and parenthetic sentences;to read the standard English textbooks upon evidence;to reply to reviewers of previous works of Bentham,and to add comments especially upon some logical points.Finally,he had to see,five large volumes through the press.'(18)That this was admirable practice,and that Mill's style became afterwards,markedly superior,to what it had been before,may be well believed.It is impossible,however,not to connect the fact that Mill had gone through this labour in 1825with the singular mental convulsion which followed in 1826.
He was,he says,in a,dull state of nerves,in the autumn of that year.It occurred to him to ask whether he would be happy supposing that all his objects in life could be realised.'An irrepressible consciousness distinctly answered "No."'The cloud would not pass away.He could think of no physician of the mind who could 'raze out the rooted trouble of the brain.'His father had no experience of such feeling,nor could he give the elder man the pain of thinking that all the educational plans had failed.The father's philosophy,indeed,both explained,and showed the hopelessness of,the evil.Feelings depend upon association.Analysis tends to destroy the associations,and therefore to 'wear away the feelings.'Happiness has for its main source the pleasure of sympathy with others.But the knowledge that the feeling would give happiness could not suffice to restore the feeling itself.It seemed to be impossible to set to work again and create new associations.Mill dragged on mechanically through the winter of 1826-27,and the gloom only gathered.He made up his mind that he could not bear life for more than a year.The first ray of hope came from a passage in which Marmontel describes his father's death and his resolution to make up the loss to his family.Gradually he recovered,though he suffered several relapses.He learned,he says,two lessons:first,that though happiness must be the end,it must not be the immediate or conscious end,of life.Ask whether you are happy and you will cease to be happy.Fix upon some end external to happiness,and happiness will be 'inhaled with the air you breathe.'And in the second place,he learned to make the 'cultivation of the feelings one of the cardinal points in his ethical and philosophical creed.'He could not,however,for some time apply his new doctrine to practice.He mentions as a quaint illustration of this period one ingenious mode of self-torment.
