In vain I sought relief from my favourite books; those memorials of past nobleness and greatness from which I had always hitherto drawn strength and animation. I read them now without feeling, or with the accustomed feeling minus all its charm; and I became persuaded, that my love of mankind, and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself out. I sought no comfort by speaking to others of what I felt. If I had loved any one sufficiently to make confiding my griefs a necessity, I should not have been in the condition I was. I felt, too, that mine was not an interesting, or in any way respectable distress. There was nothing in it to attract sympathy. Advice, if I had known where to seek it, would have been most precious. The words of Macbeth to the physician often occurred to my thoughts. But there was no one on whom I could build the faintest hope of such assistance. My father, to whom it would have been natural to me to have recourse in any practical difficulties, was the last person to whom, in such a case as this, I looked for help. Everything convinced me that he had no knowledge of any such mental state as I was suffering from, and that even if he could be made to understand it, he was not the physician who could heal it. My education, which was wholly his work, had been conducted without any regard to the possibility of its ending in this result; and I saw no use in giving him the pain of thinking that his plans had failed, when the failure was probably irremediable, and, at all events, beyond the power of his remedies. Of other friends, I had at that time none to whom I had any hope of making my condition intelligible. It was however abundantly intelligible to myself; and the more I dwelt upon it, the more hopeless it appeared.
Note from KBJ: Mill uses the expression "love of mankind." That was his problem. Nobody can love mankind. Love is a relation between individuals. It is deep, not broad. It is not an attitude toward a collection of individuals, much less toward an abstraction such as "humanity." How many people have you known who claim to love humanity but seem to dislike most or all human beings they know? It's a common malady, especially on the political left. The secret to happiness, as well as to the good life in a moral sense, is to love and care for a few particular individuals. When you try to do right by humanity as a whole, or, God forbid, the entire sentient creation, you end up making things worse rather than better, both for yourself and for those for whom you profess to care.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 