The individuality of power

What's more insistently individual than a toddler? Not much, as Cleo's increasingly withering nos - skillfully issued with a curt shake of the head - and her recent decision to mix pears and lentil soup imply. But of course it's not just Cleo. We recently had friends, with a toddler of their own, over for dinner, and thus got to watch a protracted conversation about whether pants of any sort were needed for the journey, in 26-degree weather, home. Call it control, unfettered id, or mere whimsy - whatever your view, toddlers are suddenly individuals bursting at the seams.

Which is why I smiled when I came across this passage from John Stuart Mill's 'Of Individuality' this morning. Few persons, wrote Mill (who was quoting, in turn, the Prussian reformer Wilhelm von Humboldt), fully understand that the object

'towards which every human being must ceaselessly direct his efforts... is the individuality of power and development'; that for this there are two requisites, 'freedom, and variety of situations', and that from the union of these arise 'individual vigour and manifold diversity,' which combine themselves to 'originality.'

Hi-falutin' language, for sure. But I choose to see it, today, as an affirmation. Instead of feeling residually embarrassed about sitting on a mall floor an hour ago and feeding a vocally hungry Cleo part of a peanut-butter sandwich, I'll recast my diregard for polite convention as an attempt to give her the 'freedom' to eat in a 'variety of situations.' And the frustrated cry, from the car seat, after she'd dropped a plastic egg? Merely, I now see, the manifestation of 'individual vigour.'

Pace, Mill. I'd never read you closely, and now begin to see the wisdom in doing so. And what I'd feared was odd or overly conciliatory now acquires the rich patina of utopian philosophy.