Mill's Autobiography, Part 1

I thought I’d try this new audio feature of Substack by recording my own reading of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography. I had been listening to the free LibriVox version of the audiobook, but the experience was unsatisfying. So I thought I might get more out of the text if I read it aloud myself.

I’m going to read in chunks of about 20 minutes each. This one covers up to the beginning of page 14 and describes the incredible reading in Greek and Latin Mill did as a very young boy, as well as advanced math. I was struck by several of the young Mill’s practices related to learning and note-making. He wrote notes on a slip of paper while reading. His father made him relate ideas he had learned in his own words to demonstrate he really understood them. He said he learned a lot from teaching his siblings. And he made “synoptic tables” when reading Aristotle’s Rhetoric (at age 12!), which are comparative tables of topics and subtopics that sound like a first step toward the comparative reading technique Mortimer Adler called syntopical.

I’ll read another chunk of the chapter and comment on it soon. When I’m done I’ll stitch it all together into an audiobook.