Gideon Madill, 1862
Gideon considered himself a nihilist philosopher and was therefore quite out of fashion amongst his contemporaries. While John Stewart Mill spoke of securing the greatest happiness for the largest number of people, Gideon stuck to his anomie, writing excessively long papers about the futility of life and his conviction that the world around him was entirely meaningless.
Later scholars came to believe that this gloomy view of life was directly related to the death of his childhood sweetheart at the age of eighteen, only a few months before their wedding was to happen. Nevertheless, as a philosopher he made some interesting forays into the subject of life's futility and wrote elegantly about his crushing malaise.
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