Until the age of eighteen, I continued to believe in a deist’s God, because the First-Cause argument seemed to me irrefutable. Then, in John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, I found that James Mill had taught him the refutation of that argument, namely that it gives no answer to the question “Who made God?” It is curious that Mill should have had so much influence on me, for he was my father’s and mother’s close friend, and the source of many of their opinions, but I did not know this until a much later date. Without being aware that I was following in my father’s footsteps, I read, before I went
...more
