Sigh...

Ok, so I'm boring. I like John Stuart Mill. He really was a boring character wasn't he?

Just listen the narrator of this you tube video:

Talking about fallacies isn't exactly fun is it? It's like mental masturbation, some would say, to sit around and talk about John Stuart Mill. Yet, as boring as it seems, I find him to be one of the most fascinating figures of any era.  When I think of him, I think of him as being funnier than most people think. How would one know exactly what Mill was like? That's like saying that Abe Lincoln uttered, "thus to the tyrants"  as Booth ran off screaming "the south is avenged" as a complete accurate account of history. And tho these things likely aren't true, we're still free to say these things about honest Abe....

How do you like your Abe?

abe125.jpg 600×289 pixels

"The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties now seemed to me of primary importance. The cultivation of the feelings became one of the feeling became one of the 

cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed. And my thoughts and inclinations turned in an increasing degree toward whatever seemed capable of being instrumental to that object." (694)

Though boring, I think John Stuart Mill surpasses Abe Lincoln as far as substantive qualities. A lot of people remember the more salacious aspects of Lincoln, yet Mill was, according to some documented "historians" a dry, sexless character.

I have a hard time believing that he really was. "And the delight delight which these poems gave me proved that with culture of this sort; there was nothing to dread from the most confirmed habit of analysis." (695)

When you read this, you wonder why people say he was, "oh, so boring!" 

Come to think of it, that could be. He might have been boring. He was awkward alright, but his mind influenced so many people that it's a pity think that we teach our youth about Abe Lincoln rather than characters like John Stuart Mill. Further, Mill did this by writing his thoughts. Abe Lincoln couldn't give basic drill instructions. But Mill would say, you're free to think whatever you want.

Perhaps, though, this will change as do the ages. As Mill once said, "persecution is an ordeal in which the truth ought to pass."

Happy blogging, pilgrims, i'm off to my boring box... 

"There have been certainly been, even in our own age, greater poets than Wadsworth; but poetry of deeper and loftier feeling could not have done for me at the time what his did."

longfellow.jpg 270×420 pixels

Mill, on Wadsworth. . .