father, James Mill. As a boy, he often spent much time in his father’s study and regularly accompanied his father on his walks. Inevitably he acquired many of his father’s opinions and his way of defending them. He did not, however, receive this information passively as the duty of collecting and weighing evidence was impressed on him at every turn from a young age. Mill accepted this strict form of education up until he was around the age of 20 when he went though a ‘mental’ crisis and became apathetic about utilitarianism. He continued to intellectually believe in the legitimacy of the ideas of utilitarianism but was no longer interested in promoting it. He believed that his father’s method of education was too analytical and ignored the development of his emotional self. He spent time reading literature, particularly poetry, of the Romantic period to cultivate the emotions that had been neglected by his father’s style of education. He became less of a ‘manufactured man’, produced to his father’s specification, and began to form his own ideas, considering his father’s views to be narrow and doctrinaire. After this, Mill decided to develop a new version of utilitarianism that did not conflict with his newly discovered attitude.Jeremy Bentham was born into a wealthy Tory family and was educated at Westminster school and Queen’s College, Oxford. He trained as a lawyer and was called to the bar in 1769. He soon, however became disillusioned with the law, especially after hearing the lectures of the leading authority of the day, Sir William Blackstone (1723-80). Instead of practising the law, he decided to write about it, and he spent his life criticising the existing law and suggesting ways for its improvement. Bentham was closely associated with the doctrine of Utilitarianism and the principle of `the greatest happiness of the greatest number' but this was only the startin...
