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(EDUCATION). MILL, JOHN STUART. Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews, Feb. 1st 1867. Boston: Littell & Gay, [1867]. 1st American ed. 8vo. 31, [1 (blank)] pp., printed double column. Original printed wraps, wear to spine and extremities. Some pencil markings in text. Good. $150.00

 

This address was given in February of 1867, on the occasion of Mill's election to the office of Lord Rector by the students of St. Andrews. It represents a mature statement of Mill's views on education. Taking for granted that the two principal aims of education are to cultivate knowledge and the moral faculty, Mills wishes to add a third,

I mean the aesthetic branch; the power that comes through poetry and art, and may be described as the education of the feelings, and the cultivation of the beautiful.

It is only through the education of the feelings, in conjunction with the exercise of reason and conscience, that one may achieve the ultimate end of education, that of becoming a civilized human being. This insight had been hard won. Mill himself had been the subject of a rigorously analytic system of education imposed by his father. It was only through reading the poetry of Wordsworth that he was able to pull himself from severe depression in 1828.