The Spiritual Experience of John Stuart Mill
TL;DR: We show how a spiritual experience helped pull the philosopher John Stuart Mill out of deep depression, caused at least partially by suffering through an emotionally abusive childhood.
Cover art by Diana Mariño
Mental Health Crisis
In our last post, we saw how John Stuart Mill, one of the 19th century “classical” founders of modern economics, tumbled into a mental health crisis and deep depression at age twenty. Likely, this was at least partially the fallout of an emotionally abusive childhood suffered at the hands of his intellectually gifted but stern father, James Mill.
Then suddenly, after about a half-year of his suffering, Mill wrote that a “small ray of light broke in upon [his] gloom.”
Gradually, the dark clouds of depression dissipated, and Mill began to recover his former vigor.
That this happened, in our reading, was due to a spiritual experience.
Beauty and Spirituality
We must be clear that in Mills’ case, we do not refer to the spirituality of religious seekers. Mill was adamant in his rejection of religion. “I was brought up from the first,” he wrote, “without any religious belief, in the ordinary acceptation of the term.”
The influence of John’s father was at work here. The elder Mill, after a lifetime of reflection, came to view religion as “a great moral evil.”
Rather, John Stuart Mill’s rehabilitating spiritual experience was the variety that occurs upon the soul’s contact with “Beauty;” a sort of “aesthetic spirituality.”
Mill’s initial episode of this sort came from a deep reading of the French encyclopedist Jean Francois Marmontel’s Mémoires; Mill was deeply touched by a passage Marmontel wrote about the death of his father.
In his Autobiography, Mill recalls that on reading the vivid scene, he was moved to tears. As the feelings of honest emotion and empathy came over him, he felt the hard shell of depression crack, and from that moment his psychological burden grew lighter.
His recovery gathered strength as his conviction grew that contact with “Beauty” was a most effective antidote for his mental suffering. At first, he turned to music, a tonic he had taken since childhood. In his depressed state, however, he found that its pleasures were transitory.
Instead, when he turned to poetry, he finally found an anodyne of more permanent effect; especially in Wordsworth. In particular, Mill found solace in Wordsworth’s famous “Ode.” The poem laments the loss of the innocent bliss of childhood, but also expresses conviction that one can still experience earthly joy, especially through contact with nature. Because of Mill’s own appreciation for the “power of rural beauty” and love of nature, he identified strongly with the poem’s message.
“Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind.”
Although he had several more relapses into depression after that, some of them lasting several months, none were as bad as the first, and he was never again as miserable as he was during the melancholy winter of 1826-27. In the contemplation of Beauty, Mill found the perfect balance between his scientific mind, and the yearnings of his soul. Upon emerging from his depression, he observed:
“The intense feeling of the beauty of a cloud lighted by the setting sun, is no hindrance to my knowing that the cloud is vapor of water, subject to all the laws of vapors in a state of suspension.”
Beauty as Manifestation of the Divine
Mill was not alone in these feelings. Stretching back to the fountainhead of philosophical rationalism, there have always been those who consider earthly displays of Beauty as manifestations of the Divine.
Plato taught that being moved by earthly beauty is effectively a portal to contemplation of the “absolute beauty” of the Divine. He explained this in the Symposium:
“The right way of approaching… the mysteries of love, [is] to begin with examples of beauty in this world, and [use] them as steps to ascend continually with that absolute beauty as one's aim, from one instance of physical beauty to two and from two to all, then from physical beauty to moral beauty, and from moral beauty to the beauty of knowledge, until… one arrives at the supreme knowledge whose sole object is that absolute beauty, and knows at last what absolute beauty is.”
Mill intuitively describes a similar process, when he explains that Wordsworth’s poems were a “medicine for my state of mind,” because they expressed “not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought colored by feeling, under the excitement of beauty.”
The 20th century philosopher Hans Urs von Balthasar spent a lifetime considering just such an approach to God. In his Theological Aesthetics, he postulated that “Beauty,” was on par with Goodness and Truth.
“Beauty…. dances as an uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another… Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters …We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name … can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”
The Truth Lies Within
Regardless of any larger context to which John Stuart Mill’s spiritual experience might belong, it brought his suffering to an end. He emerged from his depressive episode with a deepened humility and a much-broadened perspective on his own humanity. Inexorably, yet unintentionally, he had stumbled upon the truth, taught by virtually all of our spiritual masters, that the source of freedom from existential suffering, lies within each of us.
“The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”
Christianity, Luke 17: 20-21
“I know well that fire which leads to the realm of heaven… It is hidden in the heart of all beings.”
Hinduism. The Upanishads
“The Immaculate Lord is within your heart, and yet you search for Him in the wilderness.”
Sikhism, Shri Guru Granth Sahib
Balance Between Heart and Mind
Put another way, Mill came to realize that for him to lead a healthy, happy life, there needed to be balance between his intellectual being and his emotional being; equilibrium between one’s mind and one’s heart.
In Mill’s words, he “ceased to attach almost exclusive importance to the ordering of outward circumstances,” and instead garnered a deep appreciation for “internal culture of the individual.”
In other words, he had connected with his “higher self.”
Next week, we shall tell the love story of Mill and his soul-mate, Harriet Taylor. Together, they wrote ahead-of-their-time works on gender equality, as well as On Liberty, one of the most important philosophical tracts of the 19th century, which defends the sanctity of individual freedom.
The week after that, we shall show how Mill, when he turned his attention to economics, left behind these higher order conceptualizations of human experience, and instead built his economic theories on the idea that people care solely about “acquiring and consuming wealth.”