devotional feeling under that of sympathy with God. But the whole
of the impelling or restraining principles, whether of this or of
another world, which he recognizes, are either self-love, or love
or hatred towards other sentient beings. That there might be no
doubt of what he thought on the subject, he has not left us to
the general evidence of his writings, but has drawn out a ‘Table
of the Springs of Action’, an express enumeration and
classification of human motives, with their various names,
laudatory, vituperative, and neutral: and this table, to be found
in Part I of his collected works, we recommend to the study of
those who would understand his philosophy.
Man is never recognized by him as a being capable of pursuing
spiritual perfection as an end; of desiring, for its own sake,
the conformity of his own character to his standard of
excellence, without hope of good or fear of evil from other
source than his own inward consciousness. Even in the more
limited form of Conscience, this great fact in human nature
escapes him. Nothing is more curious than the absence of
recognition in any of his writings of the existence of
conscience, as a thing distinct from philanthropy, from affection
for God or man, and from self-interest in this world or in the
next. There is a studied abstinence from any of the phrases
which, in the mouths of others, import the acknowledgment of such
a fact. If we find the words ‘Conscience’, ‘Principle’, ‘Moral
Rectitude’, ‘Moral Duty’, in his Table of the Springs of Action,
it is among the synonymes of the ‘love of reputation’. with an
intimation as to the two former phrases, that they are also
sometimes synonymous with the religious motive, or the motive of
sympathy. The feeling of moral approbation or disapprobation
properly so called, either towards ourselves or our
fellow-creatures, he seems unaware of the existence of; and
neither the word self-respect, nor the idea to which that word is
appropriated, occurs even once, so far as our recollection serves
us, in his whole writings.
Nor is it only the moral part of man’s nature, in the strict
sense of the term — the desire of perfection, or the feeling of
an approving or of an accusing conscience — that he overlooks;
he but faintly recognizes, as a fact in human nature, the pursuit
of any other ideal end for its own sake. The sense of honour, and
personal dignity — that feeling of personal exaltation and
degradation which acts independently of other people’s opinion,
or even in defiance of it; the love of beauty, the passion of the
artist; the love of order, of congruity, of consistency in all
things, and conformity to their end; the love of power, not in
the limited form of power over other human beings, but abstract
power, the power of making our volitions effectual; the love of
action, the thirst for movement and activity, a principle
scarcely of less influence in human life than its opposite, the
love of ease: None of these powerful constituents of human nature
are thought worthy of a place among the ‘Springs of Action’; and
though there is possibly no one of them of the existence of which
an acknowledgment might not be found in some corner of Bentham’s
writings, no conclusions are ever founded on the acknowledgment.
Man, that most complex being, is a very simple one in his eyes.
Even under the head of sympathy, his recognition does not extend
to the more complex forms of the feeling — the love of loving,
the need of a sympathizing support, or of objects of admiration
and reverence. If he thought at all of any of the deeper feelings
of human nature, it was but as idiosyncrasies of taste, with
which the moralist no more than the legislator had any concern,
further than to prohibit such as were mischievous among the
actions to which they might chance to lead. To say either that
man should, or that he should not, take pleasure in one thing,
displeasure in another, appeared to him as much an act of
despotism in the moralist as in the political ruler.
It would be most unjust to Bentham to surmise (as
narrow-minded and passionate adversaries are apt in such cases to
do) that this picture of human nature was copied from himself;
that all those constituents of humanity which he rejected from
his table of motives, were wanting in his own breast. The unusual
strength of his early feelings of virtue, was, as we have seen,
the original cause of all his speculations; and a noble sense of
morality, and especially of justice, guides and pervades them
all. But having been early accustomed to keep before his mind’s
eye the happiness of mankind (or rather of the whole sentient
world), as the only thing desirable in itself, or which rendered
anything else desirable, he confounded all disinterested feelings
which he found in himself, with the desire of general happiness:
just as some religious writers, who loved virtue for its own sake
as much perhaps as men could do, habitually confounded their love
of virtue with their fear of hell. It would have required greater
subtlety than Bentham possessed, to distinguish from each other,
feelings which, from long habit, always acted in the same
direction; and his want of imagination prevented him from reading
the distinction, where it is legible enough, in the hearts of
others.
Accordingly, he has not been followed in this grand oversight
by any of the able men who, from the extent of their intellectual
obligations to him, have been regarded as his disciples. They may
have followed him in his doctrine of utility, and in his
rejection of a moral sense as the test of right and wrong: but
while repudiating it as such, they have, with Hartley,
acknowledged it as a fact in human nature; they have endeavoured
to account for it, to assign its laws: nor are they justly
chargeable either with undervaluing this part of our nature, or
with any disposition to throw it into the background of their
speculations. If any part of the influence of this cardinal error
has extended itself to them, it is circuitously, and through the
effect on their minds of other parts of Bentham’s doctrines.
Sympathy, the only disinterested motive which Bentham
recognized, he felt the inadequacy of, except in certain limited
cases, as a security for virtuous action. Personal affection, he
well knew, is as liable to operate to the injury of third
parties, and requires as much to be kept under government, as any
other feeling whatever: and general philanthropy, considered as a
motive influencing mankind in general, he estimated at its true
value when divorced from the feeling of duty — as the very
weakest and most unsteady of all feelings. There remained, as a
motive by which mankind are influenced, and by which they may be
guided to their good, only personal interest. Accordingly,
Bentham’s idea of the world is that of a collection of persons
pursuing each his separate interest or pleasure, and the
prevention of whom from jostling one another more than is
unavoidable, may be attempted by hopes and fears derived from
three sources — the law, religion and public opinion. To these
three powers, considered as binding human conduct, he gave the
name of sanctions. the political sanction, operating by the
rewards and penalties of the law; the religious sanction, by
those expected from the Ruler of the Universe; and the popular
which he characteristically calls also the moral sanction,
operating through the pains and pleasures arising from the favour
or disfavour of our fellow-creatures.
Such is Bentham’s theory of the world. And now, in a spirit
neither of apology nor of censure, but of calm appreciation, we
are to inquire how far this view of human nature and life will
carry any one: how much it will accomplish in morals, and how
much in political and social philosophy: what it will do for the
individual, and what for society.
It will do nothing for the conduct of the individual, beyond
prescribing some of the more obvious dictates of worldly
prudence, and outward probity and beneficence. There is no need
to expatiate on the deficiencies of a system of ethics which does
not pretend to aid individuals in the formation of their own
character. which recognizes no such wish as that of self culture,
we may even say no such power, as existing in human nature; and
if it did recognize, could furnish little assistance to that
great duty, because it overlooks the existence of about half of
the whole number of mental feelings which human beings are
capable of, including all those of which the direct objects are
states of their own mind.
Morality consists of two parts. One of these is
self-education; the training, by the human being himself, of his
affections and will. That department is a blank in Bentham’s
system. The other and co-equal part, the regulation of his
outward actions, must be altogether halting and imperfect without
the first; for how can we judge in what manner many an action
will affect even the worldly interests of ourselves or others,
unless we take in, as part of the question, its influence on the
regulation of our, or their, affections and desires? A moralist
on Bentham’s principles may get as far as this, that he ought not
to slay, burn, or steal; but what will be his qualifications for
regulating the nicer shades of human behaviour, or for laying
down even the greater moralities as to those facts in human life
which tend to influence the depths of the character quite
independently of any influence on worldly circumstances — such,
for instance, as the sexual relations, or those of family in
general, or any other social and sympathetic connexions of an
intimate kind? The moralities of these questions depend
essentially on considerations which Bentham never so much as took
into the account; and when he happened to be in the right, it was
always, and necessarily, on wrong or insufficient grounds.
It is fortunate for the world that Bentham’s taste lay rather
in the direction of jurisprudential than of properly ethical
inquiry. Nothing expressly of the latter kind has been published
under his name, except the ‘Deontology’ — a book scarcely ever,
in our experience, alluded to by any admirer of Bentham without
deep regret that it ever saw the light. We did not expect from
Bentham correct systematic views of ethics, or a sound treatment
of any question the moralities of which require a profound
knowledge of the human heart; but we did anticipate that the
greater moral questions would have been boldly plunged into, and
at least a searching criticism produced of the received opinions;
we did not expect that the petite morale almost alone would have
been treated, and that with the most pedantic minuteness, and on
the quid pro quo principles which regulate trade. The book has
not even the value which would belong to an authentic exhibition
of the legitimate consequences of an erroneous line of thought;
for the style proves it to have been so entirely rewritten, that
it is impossible to tell how much or how little of it is
Bentham’s. The collected edition, now in progress, will not, it
is said, include Bentham’s religious writings; these, although we
think most of them of exceedingly small value, are at least his,
and the world has a right to whatever light they throw upon the
constitution of his mind. But the omission of the ‘Deontology’
would be an act of editorial discretion which we should seem
entirely justifiable.
If Bentham’s theory of life can do so little for the
individual, what can it do for society?
It will enable a society which has attained a certain state
of spiritual development, and the maintenance of which in that
state is otherwise provided for, to prescribe the rules by which
it may protect its material interests. It will do nothing (except
sometimes as an instrument in the hands of a higher doctrine) for
the spiritual interests of society; nor does it suffice of itself
even for the material interests. That which alone causes any
material interests to exist, which alone enables any body of
human beings to exist as a society, is national character: that
it is, which causes one nation to succeed in what it attempts,
another to fail; one nation to understand and aspire to elevated
things, another to grovel in mean ones; which makes the greatness
of one nation lasting, and dooms another to early and rapid
decay. The true teacher of the fitting social arrangements for
England, France, or America, is the one who can point out how the
English, French or American character can be improved, and how it
has been made what it is. A philosophy of laws and institutions,
not founded on a philosophy of national character, is an
absurdity. But what could Bentham’s opinion be worth on national
character? How could he, whose mind contained so few and so poor
types of individual character, rise to that higher
generalization? All he can do is but to indicate means by which,
in any given state of the national mind, the material interests
of society can be protected; saving the question, of which others
must judge, whether the use of those means would have, on the
national character, any injurious influence.
We have arrived, then, at a sort of estimate of what a
philosophy like Bentham’s can do. It can teach the means of
organizing and regulating the merely business part of the social
arrangements. Whatever can be understood or whatever done without
reference to moral influences, his philosophy is equal to; where
those influences require to be taken into account, it is at
fault. He committed the mistake of supposing that the business
part of human affairs was the whole of them; all at least that
the legislator and the moralist had to do with. Not that he
disregarded moral influences when he perceived them; but his want
of imagination, small experience of human feelings, and ignorance
of the filiation and connexion of feelings with one another, made
this rarely the case.
The business part is accordingly the only province of human
affairs which Bentham has cultivated with any success; into which
he had introduced any considerable number of comprehensive and
luminous practical principles. That is the field of his
greatness; and there he is indeed great. He has swept away the
accumulated cobwebs of centuries — he has untied knots which the
efforts of the ablest thinkers, age after age, had only drawn
tighter; and it is not exaggeration to say of him that over a
great part of the field he was the first to shed the light of
reason.
We turn with pleasure from what Bentham could not do, to what
he did. It is an ungracious task to call a great benefactor of
mankind to account for not being a greater — to insist upon the
errors of a man who has originated more new truths, has given to
the world more sound practical lessons, than it ever received,
except in a few glorious instances, from any other individual.
The unpleasing part of our work is ended. We are now to show the
greatness of the man; the grasp which his intellect took of the
subjects with which it was fitted to deal; the giant’s task which
was before him, and the hero’s courage and strength with which he
achieved it. Nor let that which he did be deemed of small account
because its province was limited: man has but the choice to go a
little way in many paths, or a great way in only one. The field
of Bentham’s labours was like the space between two parallel
lines; narrow to excess in one direction, in another it reached
to infinity.
Bentham’s speculations, as we are already aware, began with
law; and in that department he accomplished his greatest
triumphs. He found the philosophy of law a chaos, he left it a
science; he found the practice of the law an Augean stable, he
turned the river into it which is mining and sweeping away mound
after mound of its rubbish.
Without joining in the exaggerated invectives against
lawyers, which Bentham sometimes permitted to himself, or making
one portion of society alone accountable for the fault of all, we
may say that circumstances had made English lawyers in a peculiar
degree liable to the reproach of Voltaire, who defines lawyers
the ‘conservators of ancient barbarous usages’. The basis of the
En