377
JOHN STUART MILL
Remembered as a seminal thinker in the world of political philosophy and economics, John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was prodigiously gifted intellectually. By age ten he could easily read Plato and Demosthenes in the original Greek. Mill benefited greatly from his father, James Mill, an accomplished intellectual in his own right. In his Autobiography, Mill admired his father’s patience as he endeavored to master the classical languages.
My father, in all his teaching, demanded of me not only the utmost that I could do, but much that I could by no possibility could have done. What he was himself willing to undergo for the sake of my instruction, may be judged from the fact, that I went through the whole process of preparing my Greek lessons in the same room and at the same table at which he was writing: and as in those days Greek and English lexicons were not, and I could make no more use of a Greek and Latin lexicon than could be made without having yet begun to learn Latin, I was forced to have recourse to him for the meaning of every word which I did not know. This incessant interruption, he, one of the most impatient of men, submitted to, and wrote under that interruption several volumes of his History and all else that he had to write during those years.