He held that the sole end of morality was to produce happiness, and at the same time he did not believe in happiness. 'He thought human life a poor thing at best after the freshness of youth and unsatisfied curiosity had gone by.' He and his disciples denounced all emotion as 'sentimentality,' and fully shared that English prejudice which, as J. S. Mill declares, regards feeling, especially if it has a touch of the romantic or exalted, to be something intrinsically disgraceful. Here then was the uncomfortable dilemma into which the younger Mill was driven, and which made him miserable. A rigid sense of duty was the sole rule of life; duty meant the production of happiness; and happiness was a mere illusion and unsubstantial phantom. No wonder if a period followed during which the world seemed to him weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable. To feel that all that is left for one is to be a machine grinding out theorems in political economy is certainly not an exhilarating state of things. The escape from this condition, as Mill represents, involved two discoveries, which, like all such discoveries, are old enough in the state of abstract theory, and new only in so far as they become actual possessions and active principles of conduct. Happiness, he discovered, was to be found by not aiming at happiness; by working for some external end and not meditating upon your own feelings. And, secondly, he discovered the importance of cultivating those sympathies and sentiments which he had previously been inclined to despise as mere encumbrances to his reasoning machinery. But do not the two doctrines clash? Is not an æsthetic cultivation of happiness a name for that introspective brooding of which Rousseau is the great example, implying precisely that thirst for happiness as an ultimate end and aim which his other principles showed to be suicidal? Consciously to cultivate the emotions is to become a sentimentalist—the very thing which he was anxious to renounce. The apparent paradox was solved for him by the help of Wordsworth, who taught him that the charm of tranquil contemplation might be heightened instead of dulled by a vivid interest in the common feelings and common destinies of human beings; and that æsthetic delight in nature was perfectly compatible with scientific interest in its laws. The famous ode proved to him that the first freshness of youthful enjoyment could be replaced by a wider interest in our fellows; and that the thoughts which gather round the setting sun are not something distinct from, but really identical with, those suggested by a watch over man's mortality. This teaching, he says, dispersed for ever his youthful depression.