marshalled in an orderly manner before him, he does not, like
people who use a looser method, forget and overlook a thing on
one occasion to remember it on another. Hence there is probably
no philosopher of so wide a range, in whom there are so few
inconsistencies. If any of the truths which he did not see, had
come to be seen by him, he would have remembered it everywhere
and at all times, and would have adjusted his whole system to it.
And this is another admirable quality which he has impressed upon
the best of the minds trained in his habits of thought: when
those minds open to admit new truths, they digest them as fast as
they receive them.
But this system, excellent for keeping before the mind of the
thinker all that he knows, does not make him know enough; it does
not make a knowledge of some of the properties of a thing suffice
for the whole of it, nor render a rooted habit of surveying a
complex object (though ever so carefully) in only one of its
aspects, tantamount to the power of contemplating it in all. To
give this last power, other qualities are required: whether
Bentham possessed those other qualities we now have to see.
Bentham’s mind, as we have already said, was eminently
synthetical. He begins all his inquiries by supposing nothing to
he known on the subject, and reconstructs all philosophy ab
initio, without reference to the opinions of his predecessors.
But to build either a philosophy or anything else, there must be
materials. For the philosophy of matter, the materials are the
properties of matter; for moral and political philosophy, the
properties of man, and of man’s position in the world. The
knowledge which any inquirer possesses of these properties,
constitutes a limit beyond which, as a moralist or a political
philosopher, whatever be his powers of mind, he cannot reach.
Nobody’s synthesis can be more complete than his analysis. If in
his survey of human nature and life he has left any element out,
then, wheresoever that element exerts any influence, his
conclusions will fail, more or less, in their application. If he
has left out many elements, and those very important, his labours
may be highly valuable; he may have largely contributed to that
body of partial truths which, when completed and corrected by one
another, constitute practical truth; but the applicability of his
system to practice in its own proper shape will be of an
exceedingly limited range.
Human nature and human life are wide subjects, and whoever
would embark in an enterprise requiring a thorough knowledge of
them, has need both of large stores of his own, and of all aids
and appliances from elsewhere. His qualifications for success
will be proportional to two things: the degree in which his own
nature and circumstances furnish them with a correct and complete
picture of man’s nature and circumstances; and his capacity of
deriving light from other minds.
Bentham failed in deriving light from other minds. His
writings contain few traces of the accurate knowledge of any
schools of thinking but his own; and many proofs of his entire
conviction that they could teach him nothing worth knowing. For
some of the most illustrious of previous thinkers, his contempt
was unmeasured. In almost the only passage of the ‘Deontology’
which, from its style, and from its having before appeared in
print, may be known to be Bentham’s, Socrates, and Plato are
spoken of in terms distressing to his great admirers; and the
incapacity to appreciate such men, is a fact perfectly in unison
with the general habits of Bentham’s mind. He had a phrase,
expressive of the view he took of all moral speculations to which
his method had not been applied, or (which he considered as the
same thing) not founded on a recognition of utility as the moral
standard; this phrase was ‘vague generalities’. Whatever
presented itself to him in such a shape, he dismissed as unworthy
of notice, or dwelt upon only to denounce as absurd. He did not
heed, or rather the nature of his mind prevented it from
occurring to him, that these generalities contained the whole
unanalysed experience of the human race.
Unless it can be asserted that mankind did not know anything
until logicians taught it to them that until the last hand has
been put to a moral truth by giving it a metaphysically precise
expression, all the previous rough-hewing which it has undergone
by the common intellect at the suggestion of common wants and
common experience is to go for nothing; it must be allowed, that
even the originality which can, and the courage which dares,
think for itself, is not a more necessary part of the
philosophical character than a thoughtful regard for previous
thinkers, and for the collective mind of the human race. What has
been the opinion of mankind, has been the opinion of persons of
all tempers and dispositions, of all partialities and
prepossessions, of all varieties in position, in education, in
opportunities of observation and inquiry. No one inquirer is all
this; every inquirer is either young or old, rich or poor, sickly
or healthy, married or unmarried, meditative or active, a poet or
a logician, an ancient or a modern, a man or a woman; and if a
thinking person, has, in addition, the accidental peculiarities
of his individual modes of thought. Every circumstance which
gives a character to the life of a human being, carries with it
its peculiar biases; its peculiar facilities for perceiving some
things, and for missing or forgetting others. But, from points of
view different from his, different things are perceptible; and
none are more likely to have seen what he does not see, than
those who do not see what he sees. The general opinion of mankind
is the average of the conclusions of all minds, stripped indeed
of their choicest and most recondite thoughts, but freed from
their twists and partialities: a net result, in which everybody’s
point of view is represented, nobody’s predominant. The
collective mind does not penetrate below the surface, but it sees
all the surface; which profound thinkers, even by reason of their
profundity, often fail to do: their intenser view of a thing in
some of its aspects diverting their attention from others.
The hardiest assertor, therefore, of the freedom of private
judgment the keenest detector of the errors of his predecessors,
and of the inaccuracies of current modes of thought — is the
very person who most needs to fortify the weak side of his own
intellect, by study of the opinions of mankind in all ages and
nations, and of the speculations of philosophers of the modes of
thought most opposite to his own. It is there that he will find
the experiences denied to himself — the remainder of the truth
of which he sees but half — the truths, of which the errors he
detects are commonly but the exaggerations. If, like Bentham, he
brings with him an improved instrument of investigation, the
greater is the probability that he will find ready prepared a
rich abundance of rough ore, which was merely waiting for that
instrument. A man of clear ideas errs grievously if he imagines
that whatever is seen confusedly does not exist: it belongs to
him, when he meets with such a thing, to dispel the mist, and fix
the outlines of the vague form which is looming through it.
Bentham’s contempt, then, of all other schools of thinkers;
his determination to create a philosophy wholly out of the
materials furnished by his own mind, and by minds like his own;
was his first disqualification as a philosopher. His second, was
the incompleteness of his own mind as a representative of
universal human nature. In many of the most natural and strongest
feelings of human nature he had no sympathy; from many of its
graver experiences he was altogether cut off; and the faculty by
which one mind understands a mind different from itself, and
throws itself into the feelings of that other mind, was denied
him by his deficiency of Imagination.
With Imagination in the popular sense, command of imagery and
metaphorical expression, Bentham was, to a certain degree,
endowed. For want, indeed, of poetical culture, the images with
which his fancy supplied him were seldom beautiful, but they were
quaint and humorous, or bold, forcible, and intense: passages
might be quoted from him both of playful irony, and of
declamatory eloquence, seldom surpassed in the writings of
philosophers. The Imagination which he had not, was that to which
the name is generally appropriated by the best writers of the
present day; that which enables us, by a voluntary effort, to
conceive the absent as if it were present, the imaginary as if it
were real, and to cloth it in the feelings which, if it were
indeed real, it would bring along with it. This is the power by
which one human being enters into the mind and circumstances of
another. This power constitutes the poet, in so far as he does
anything but melodiously utter his own actual feelings. It
constitutes the dramatist entirely. It is one of the constituents
of the historian; by it we understand other times; by it Guizot
interprets to us the middle ages; Nisard, in his beautiful
Studies on the later Latin poets, places us in the Rome of the
Caesars; Michelet disengages the distinctive characters of the
different races and generations of mankind from the facts of
their history. Without it nobody knows even his own nature,
further than circumstances have actually tried it and called it
out; nor the nature of his fellow-creatures, beyond such
generalizations as he may have been enabled to make from his
observation of their outward conduct.
By these limits, accordingly, Bentham’s knowledge of human
nature is bounded. It is wholly empirical; and the empiricism of
one who has had little experience. He had neither internal
experience nor external; the quiet, even tenor of his life, and
his healthiness of mind, conspired to exclude him from both. He
never knew prosperity and adversity, passion nor satiety. he
never had even the experiences which sickness gives; he lived
from childhood to the age of eighty-five in boyish health. He
knew no dejection, no heaviness of heart. He never felt life a
sore and a weary burthen. He was a boy to the last.
Self-consciousness, that daemon of the men of genius of our time,
from Wordsworth to Byron, from Goethe to Chateaubriand, and to
which this age owes so much both of its cheerful and its mournful
wisdom, never was awakened in him. How much of human nature
slumbered in him he knew not, neither can we know. He had never
been made alive to the unseen influences which were acting on
himself, nor consequently on his fellow-creatures. Other ages and
other nations were a blank to him for purposes of instruction. He
measured them but by one standard; their knowledge of facts, and
their capability to take correct views of utility, and merge all
other objects in it. His own lot was cast in a generation of the
leanest and barrenest men whom England had yet produced, and he
was an old man when a better race came in with the present
century. He saw accordingly in man little but what the vulgarest
eye can see; recognized no diversities of character but such as
he who runs may read. Knowing so little of human feelings, he
knew still less of the influences by which those feelings are
formed: all the more subtle workings both of the mind upon
itself, and of external things upon the mind, escaped him; and no
one, probably, who, in a highly instructed age, ever attempted to
give a rule to all human conduct, set out with a more limited
conception either of the agencies by which human conduct is, or
of those by which it should be, influenced.
This, then, is our idea of Bentham. He was a man both of
remarkable endowments for philosophy, and of remarkable
deficiencies for it: fitted, beyond almost any man, for drawing
from his premises, conclusions not only correct, but sufficiently
precise and specific to be practical: but whose general
conception of human nature and life furnished him with an
unusually slender stock of premises. It is obvious what would be
likely to be achieved by such a man; what a thinker, thus gifted
and thus disqualified, could do in philosophy. He could, with
close and accurate logic, hunt half-truths to their consequences
and practical applications, on a scale both of greatness and of
minuteness not previously exemplified; and this is the character
which posterity will probably assign to Bentham.
We express our sincere and well-considered conviction when we
say, that there is hardly anything positive in Bentham’s
philosophy which is not true: that when his practical conclusions
are erroneous, which in our opinion they are very often, it is
not because the considerations which he urges are not rational
and valid in themselves, but because some more important
principle, which he did not perceive, supersedes those
considerations, and turns the scale. The bad part of his writings
is his resolute denial of all that he does not see, of all truths
but those which he recognizes. By that alone has he exercised any
bad influence upon his age; by that he has, not created a school
of deniers, for this is an ignorant prejudice, but put himself at
the head of the school which exists always, though it does not
always find a great man to give it the sanction of philosophy.
thrown the mantle of intellect over the natural tendency of men
in all ages to deny or disparage all feelings and mental states
of which they have no consciousness in themselves.
The truths which are not Bentham’s, which his philosophy
takes no account of, are many and important; but his
non-recognition of them does not put them out of existence; they
are still with us, and it is a comparatively easy task that is
reserved for us, to harmonize those truths with his. To reject
his half of the truth because he overlooked the other half, would
be to fall into his error without having his excuse. For our own
part, we have a large tolerance for one-eyed men, provided their
one eye is a penetrating one: if they saw more, they probably
would not see so keenly, nor so eagerly pursue one course of
inquiry. Almost all rich veins of original and striking
speculation have been opened by systematic half-thinkers: though
whether these new thoughts drive out others as good, or are
peacefully superadded to them, depends on whether these
half-thinkers are or are not followed in the same track by
complete thinkers. The field of man’s nature and life cannot be
too much worked, or in too many directions; until every clod is
turned up the work is imperfect; no whole truth is possible but
by combining the points of view of all the fractional truths,
nor, therefore, until it has been fully seen what each fractional
truth can do by itself.
What Bentham’s fractional truths could do, there is no such
good means of showing as by a review of his philosophy: and such
a review, though inevitably a most brief and general one, it is
now necessary to attempt.
The first question in regard to any man of speculation is,
what is his theory of human life? In the minds of many
philosophers, whatever theory they have of this sort is latent,
and it would be a revelation to themselves to have it pointed out
to them in their writings as others can see it, unconsciously
moulding everything to its own likeness. But Bentham always knew
his own premises, and made his reader know them: it was not his
custom to leave the theoretic grounds of his practical
conclusions to conjecture. Few great thinkers have afforded the
means of assigning with so much certainty the exact conception
which they had formed of man and of man’s life.
Man is conceived by Bentham as a being susceptible of
pleasures and pains, and governed in all his conduct partly by
the different modifications of self-interest, and the passions
commonly classed as selfish, partly by sympathies, or
occasionally antipathies, towards other beings. And here
Bentham’s conception of human nature stops. He does not exclude
religion; the prospect of divine rewards and punishments he
includes under the head of ’self-regarding interest’, and the