The experiment proves,he says,the possibility of instilling into a child an amount of knowledge such as is rarely acquired before manhood.He was,he considers,rather below than above par in quickness of apprehension,retentiveness of memory,and energy of character.What he did,therefore,could be done by any child of average health and capacity.His later achievements,he thinks,were due to the fact that,among other favourable circumstances,his father's training had given him the start of his contemporaries by 'a quarter of a century.'(6)His opinion is probably coloured by his tendency to set down all differences between men as due to external circumstances.He and his father,as Professor Bain notes,inclined to the doctrine of Helvius that children all start alike.(7)Mill,by those who dissent from this view,will probably be held to have been endowed by nature with an extraordinary power of acquiring and assimilating knowledge,and presumably had from infancy whatever intellectual qualities are implied in that gift.His experience in teaching his own family might have taught him that the gift is not shared by the average child.So far,however,as Mill's judgment refers to his own case,it asserts what I take to be a truth not always admitted.He is sometimes noticed as an example of the evils done by excessive instruction.Yet,after all,he certainly became one of the leading men of his generation,and,if this strenuous education was not the sole cause,it must be reckoned as having been one main condition of his success.His father's teaching had clearly one,and that the highest,merit.The son had been taught really to use his mind;he had been trained to argue closely;to test conclusions instead of receiving them passively,and to systematise his knowledge as he acquired it.The course of strenuous mental gymnastics qualified him to appear in early youth as a vigorous controversialist,and to achieve an immense quantity of valuable work before he passed middle age.It seems improbable that more could have been made of his faculties by any other system;and he gave a rarely approached instance of a life in which the waste of energy is reduced to a minimum.
Mill's verdict must,however,be qualified upon another ground,which he might have been expected to recognise.No one was more anxious to assert in general that an education is good in proportion as it stimulates the faculties instead of simply storing the mind with facts.Undoubtedly Mill's knowledge was of use to him.He became widely read and interested in a large circle of subjects.But we cannot hold that the mere knowledge gave him a 'quarter of a century'start.The,knowledge,which can be acquired by a child of fourteen is necessarily crude;the Theaetetus or the history of Thucydides could not represent real thought for him;and one would rather say that a year's activity at twenty would have enabled him,if he had read only a quarter as much by fourteen,to make up the deficiency.The knowledge was no doubt a useful foundation;but,so far as it was acquired at the cost of excessive strain,the loss would greatly overbalance the gain.It seems clear that Mill's health did in fact suffer;and a loss of energy was far more serious than any childish knowledge could compensate.I cannot help thinking,with the stalled 'Philistine,'that a little cricket would have been an excellent substitute for half the ancient literature instilled into a lad who was not prepared really to appreciate either the thought or the literary charm.
The system had further and permanent results.Mill saw little of other boys.His father was afraid of his being corrupted or at least vulgarised by association with the average schoolboy.He had leisure enough,he declares,though he was never allowed a holiday;but his leisure was dedicated to quiet and 'even bookish'amusements.He was unready and awkward;untrained in the ordinary accomplishments which come from the society of contemporaries.The result was --besides the trifling loss of mere physical accomplishments --that Mill was a recluse even in childhood.There was another special reason for this isolation.
Mill himself says that he was brought up without any religious instruction;and though Professor Bain tells us that the boy went to church in his infancy,it must have been at so early a period as to leave no mark upon his memory.(8)Up to the age of fourteen,therefore,Mill,while kept apart from the ordinary influences,was imbibing with astonishing rapidity a vast amount of knowledge,and inevitably taking for granted the general opinions of his father's party.
