J. S. Mill (1806-1873) set out in his Autobiography (1873) to document not so much his life as a whole, but more specifically to provide a record of what he called his “unusual and remarkable education.” In its pages Mill described how he began to learn to read Greek at age three under his father’s tutelage, which thus launched his journey towards mastering an astonishing number of classics in their original languages by the time he entered his teens. This was a remarkable scholarly achievement, for sure, for both Mill and his father (James Mill), but it was also a remarkably unbalanced and unhappy one for Mill’s own feelings and personal development.

Mill described himself as a child as “an inmate” of his father’s study. He described his father as “constitutionally irritable” who was otherwise ashamed and starved of feelings. And not once in the Autobiography did Mill mention his mother.

Emotionally and spiritually impoverished by his twenties Mill fell into a severe depression that lasted nearly two years. As Mill put it, “the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down; I seemed to have nothing left to live for.” “At first I hoped that the cloud would pass away of itself; but it did not;”

“In vain I sought relief from my favourite books,” Mill said, “and I sought no comfort by speaking to others of what I felt. If I had loved anyone sufficiently to make confiding my griefs a necessity, I should not have been in the condition I was.”

What did help Mill?

—Poetry, by Wordsworth.

Mill explained,

What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in all human beings. …And I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence.

“Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied,” Mill wrote famously in Utilitarianism (1863).

Considering all that he went through, however, I wonder if Mill might also have conceded that it’s better to be a fool with feelings than Socrates dissociated . . . ?