John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

38 MENTAL CRISIS OF 1826. 1820-1840.
mental ; the physical counterpart being wholly omitted ; the
only expression used,
"
a dull state of nerves such as everybody
is liable to" is merely to help out the description on the mental
side. Nothing could be more characteristic of the man.
There was one thing he never would allow, which was that
work could be pushed to the point of being injurious to either
body or mind. That the dejection so feelingly depicted was
due to physical causes, and that the chief of these causes was
over-working the brain, may I think be certified beyond all
reasonable doubt. We know well enough what amount of
mental strain the human constitution, when at its very best,
has been found to endure ; and I am unable to produce an
instance of a man going through as much as Mill did before
twenty, and yet living a healthy life of seventy years. The
narrative of his labours in the previous year alone, 1825 (a lad
of 19), is sufficient to account for all that he underwent in the
years immediately following. Moreover, it was too early to
have exhausted his whole interest in life, even supposing that
he had drawn somewhat exclusively upon the side of activity
and reforming zeal. Fifteen or twenty years later was soon
enough to re-adjust his scheme of enjoyment, by delicate
choice and variation of stimulants, by the cultivation of poetry
and passive susceptibility.
It so happened that, on the present
occasion, his morbid symptoms were purely subjective ; there
was no apparent derangement in any bodily organ. Judging,
however, from what followed a few years later, we can plainly
"
see in this mental
"
crisis the beginning of the maladies that
oppressed the second half of his life in a way that could not
be mistaken. He got over the attack apparently in two or
three years, with powers of enjoyment considerably impaired.
That spirit left him for a time, but returned afterwards with
another still worse.
I may here introduce some memoranda of conversations
that I had with Roebuck not long before his death.