Mill's Qualitative Distinction between Higher and Lower Pleasures

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), raised under an extraordinarily rigorous educational regimen designed by his father James Mill, reading Greek by age three and Aristotelian logic and political economy well before adolescence, suffered a severe mental crisis in 1826–1827, recounted in his posthumously published Autobiography (1873), which he attributed partly to an education that had cultivated his analytic faculties while starving his emotional ones. Partly in response, Mill's mature ethical writing sought to defend and refine, rather than abandon, the Benthamite utilitarianism of his upbringing. His essay Utilitarianism, serialized in three installments in Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and published as a single volume in 1863, restates the greatest-happiness principle but introduces a crucial qualification that Bentham had explicitly rejected: that pleasures differ not only in quantity but in intrinsic quality, so that some kinds of pleasure are simply of higher worth than others, independent of their intensity or duration.