Bentham By John Stuart Mill Essay, Research Paper
Bentham
by John Stuart Mill
London and Westminster Review, Aug. 1838, revised in 1859 in
Dissertations and Discussion, vol. 1.
There are two men, recently deceased, to whom their country
is indebted not only for the greater part of the important ideas
which have been thrown into circulation among its thinking men in
their time, but for a revolution in its general modes of thought
and investigation. These men, dissimilar in almost all else,
agreed in being closet-students — secluded in a peculiar degree,
by circumstances and character, from the business and intercourse
of the world: and both were, through a large portion of their
lives, regarded by those who took the lead in opinion (when they
happened to hear of them) with feelings akin to contempt. But
they were destined to renew a lesson given to mankind by every
age, and always disregarded — to show that speculative
philosophy, which to the superficial appears a thing so remote
from the business of life and the outward interests of men, is in
reality the thing on earth which most influences them, and in the
long run overbears every other influence save those which it must
itself obey. The writers of whom we speak have never been read by
the multitude; except for the more slight of their works, their
readers have been few.. but they have been the teachers of the
teachers; there is hardly to be found in England an individual of
any importance in the world of mind, who (whatever opinions he
may have afterwards adopted) did not first learn to think from
one of these two; and though their influences have but begun to
diffuse themselves through these intermediate channels over
society at large, there is already scarcely a publication of any
consequence addressed to the educated classes, which, if these
persons had not existed, would not have been different from what
it is. These men are, Jeremy Bentham and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
– the two great seminal minds of England in their age.
No comparison is intended here between the minds or
influences of these remarkable men: this was impossible unless
there were first formed a complete judgment of each, considered
apart. It is our intention to attempt, on the present occasion,
an estimate of one of them; the only one, a complete edition of
whose works is yet in progress, and who, in the classification
which may be made of all writers into Progressive and
Conservative, belongs to the same division with ourselves. For
although they were far too great men to be correctly designated
by either appellation exclusively, yet in the main, Bentham was a
Progressive philosopher, Coleridge a Conservative one. The
influence of the former has made itself felt chiefly on minds of
the Progressive class; of the latter, on those of the
Conservative: and the two systems of concentric circles which the
shock given by them is spreading over the ocean of mind, have
only just begun to meet and intersect. The writings of both
contain severe lessons to their own side, on many of the errors
and faults they are addicted to: but to Bentham it was given to
discern more particularly those truths with which existing
doctrines and institutions were at variance; to Coleridge, the
neglected truths which lay in them.
A man of great knowledge of the world, and of the highest
reputation for practical talent and sagacity among the official
men of his time (himself no follower of Bentham, nor of any
partial or exclusive school whatever) once said to us, as the
result of his observation, that to Bentham more than to any other
source might be traced the questioning spirit, the disposition to
demand the why of everything, which had gained so much ground and
was producing such important consequences in these times. The
more this assertion is examined, the more true it will be found.
Bentham has been in this age and country the great questioner of
things established. It is by the influence of the modes of
thought with which his writings inoculated a considerable number
of thinking men, that the yoke of authority has been broken, and
innumerable opinions, formerly received on tradition as
incontestable, are put upon their defence, and required to give
an account of themselves. Who, before Bentham (whatever
controversies might exist on points of detail) dared to speak
disrespectfully, in express terms, of the British Constitution,
or the English Law? He did so; and his arguments and his example
together encouraged others. We do not mean that his writings
caused the Reform Bill, or that the Appropriation Clause owns him
as its parent: the changes which have been made, and the greater
changes which will be made, in our institutions, are not the work
of philosophers, but of the interests and instincts of large
portions of society recently grown into strength. But Bentham
gave voice to those interests and instincts: until he spoke out,
those who found our institutions unsuited to them did not dare to
say so, did not dare consciously to think so; they had never
heard the excellence of those institutions questioned by
cultivated men, by men of acknowledged intellect; and it is not
in the nature of uninstructed minds to resist the united
authority of the instructed. Bentham broke the spell. It was not
Bentham by his own writings; it was Bentham through the minds and
pens which those writings fed — through the men in more direct
contact with the world, into whom his spirit passed. If the
superstition about ancestorial wisdom has fallen into decay; if
the public are grown familiar with the idea that their laws and
institutions are in great part not the product of intellect and
virtue, but of modern corruption grafted upon ancient barbarism;
if the hardiest innovation is no longer scouted because it is an
innovation — establishments no longer considered sacred because
they are establishments — it will be found that those who have
accustomed the public mind to these ideas have learnt them in
Bentham’s school, and that the assault on ancient institutions
has been, and is, carried on for the most part with his weapons.
It matters not although these thinkers, or indeed thinkers of any
description, have been but scantily found among the persons
prominently and ostensibly at the head of the Reform movement.
All movements, except directly revolutionary ones, are headed,
not by those who originate them, but by those who know best how
to compromise between the old opinions and the new. The father of
English innovation both in doctrines and in institutions, is
Bentham: he is the great subversive, or, in the language of
continental philosophers, the great critical, thinker of his age
and country.
We consider this, however, to be not his highest title to
fame. Were this all, he were only to be ranked among the lowest
order of the potentates of mind — the negative, or destructive
philosophers; those who can perceive what is false, but not what
is true; who awaken the human mind to the inconsistencies and
absurdities of time-sanctioned opinions and institutions, but
substitute nothing in the place of what they take away. We have
no desire to undervalue the services of such persons: mankind
have been deeply indebted to them; nor will there ever be a lack
of work for them, in a world in which so many false things are
believed, in which so many which have been true, are believed
long after they have ceased to be true. The qualities, however,
which fit men for perceiving anomalies, without perceiving the
truths which would rectify them, are not among the rarest of
endowments. Courage, verbal acuteness, command over the forms of
argumentation, and a popular style, will make, out of the
shallowest man, with a sufficient lack of reverence, a
considerable negative philosopher. Such men have never been
wanting in periods of culture; and the period in which Bentham
formed his early impressions was emphatically their reign, in
proportion to its barrenness in the more noble products of the
human mind. An age of formalism in the Church and corruption in
the State, when the most valuable part of the meaning of
traditional doctrines had faded from the minds even of those who
retained from habit a mechanical belief in them, was the time to
raise up all kinds of sceptical philosophy. Accordingly, France
had Voltaire, and his school of negative thinkers, and England
(or rather Scotland) had the profoundest negative thinker on
record, David Hume: a man, the peculiarities of whose mind
qualified him to detect failure of proof, and want of logical
consistency, at a depth which French sceptics, with their
comparatively feeble powers of analysis and abstractions stop far
short of, and which German subtlety alone could thoroughly
appreciate, or hope to rival.
If Bentham had merely continued the work of Hume, he would
scarcely have been heard of in philosophy. for he was far
inferior to Hume in Hume’s qualities, and was in no respect
fitted to excel as a metaphysician. We must not look for
subtlety, or the power of recondite analysis, among his
intellectual characteristics. In the former quality, few great
thinkers have ever been so deficient; and to find the latter, in
any considerable measure, in a mind acknowledging any kindred
with his, we must have recourse to the late Mr. Mill — a man who
united the great qualities of the metaphysicians of the
eighteenth century, with others of a different complexion,
admirably qualifying him to complete and correct their work.
Bentham had not these peculiar gifts; but he possessed others,
not inferior, which were not possessed by any of his precursors;
which have made him a source of light to a generation which has
far outgrown their influence, and, as we called him, the chief
subversive thinker of an age which has long lost all that they
could subvert.
To speak of him first as a merely negative philosopher — as
one who refutes illogical arguments, exposes sophistry, detects
contradiction and absurdity; even in that capacity there was a
wide field left vacant for him by Hume, and which he has occupied
to an unprecedented extent; the field of practical abuses. This
was Bentham’s peculiar province: to this he was called by the
whole bent of his disposition: to carry the warfare against
absurdity into things practical. His was an essentially practical
mind. It was by practical abuses that his mind was first turned
to speculation — by the abuses of the profession which was
chosen for him, that of the law. He has himself stated what
particular abuse first gave that shock to his mind, the recoil of
which has made the whole mountain of abuse totter; it was the
custom of making the client pay for three attendances in the
office of a Master in Chancery; when only one was given. The law,
he found, on examination, was full of such things. But were these
discoveries of his? No; they were known to every lawyer who
practised, to every judge who sat on the bench, and neither
before nor for long after did they cause any apparent uneasiness
to the consciences of these learned persons, nor hinder them from
asserting, whenever occasion offered, in books, in parliament, or
on the bench, that the law was the perfection of reason. During
so many generations, in each of which thousands of educated young
men were successively placed in Bentham’s position and with
Bentham’s opportunities, he alone was found with sufficient moral
sensibility and self-reliance to say to himself that these
things, however profitable they might be, were frauds, and that
between them and himself there should be a gulf fixed. To this
rare union of self-reliance and moral sensibility we are indebted
for all that Bentham has done. Sent to Oxford by his father at
the unusually early age of fifteen — required, on admission, to
declare his belief in the Thirty-nine Articles — he felt it
necessary to examine them; and the examination suggested
scruples, which he sought to get removed, but instead of the
satisfaction he expected was told that it was not for boys like
him to set up their judgment against the great men of the Church.
After a struggle, he signed; but the impression that he had done
an immoral act, never left him; he considered himself to have
committed a falsehood, and throughout life he never relaxed in
his indignant denunciations of all laws which command such
falsehoods, all institutions which attach rewards to them.
By thus carrying the war of criticism and refutation, the
conflict with falsehood and absurdity, into the field of
practical evils, Bentham, even if he had done nothing else, would
have earned an important place in the history of intellect. He
carried on the warfare without intermission. To this, not only
many of his most piquant chapters, but some of the most finished
of his entire works, are entirely devoted: the ‘Defence of
Usury’. the ‘Book of Fallacies’; and the onslaught upon
Blackstone, published anonymously under the title of ‘ A Fragment
on Government’, which, though a first production, and of a writer
afterwards so much ridiculed for his style, excited the highest
admiration no less for its composition than for its thoughts, and
was attributed by turns to Lord Mansfield, to Lord Camden, and
(by Dr. Johnson) to Dunning, one of the greatest masters of style
among the lawyers of his day. These writings are altogether
original; though of the negative school, they resemble nothing
previously produced by negative philosophers; and would have
sufficed to create for Bentham, among the subversive thinkers of
modern Europe, a place peculiarly his own. But it is not these
writings that constitute the real distinction between him and
them. There was a deeper difference. It was that they were purely
negative thinkers, he was positive: they only assailed error, he
made it a point of conscience not to do so until he thought he
could plant instead the corresponding truth. Their character was
exclusively analytic, his was synthetic. They took for their
starting-point the received opinion on any subject, dug round it
with their logical implements, pronounced its foundations
defective, and condemned it: he began de novo, laid his own
foundations deeply and firmly, built up his own structure, and
bade mankind compare the two; it was when he had solved the
problem himself, or thought he had done so, that he declared all
other solutions to be erroneous. Hence, what they produced will
not last; it must perish, much of it has already perished, with
the errors which it exploded: what he did has its own value, by
which it must outlast all errors to which it is opposed. Though
we may reject, as we often must, his practical conclusions, yet
his premises, the collections of facts and observations from
which his conclusions were drawn, remain for ever, a part of the
materials of philosophy.
A place, therefore, must be assigned to Bentham among the
masters of wisdom, the great teachers and permanent intellectual
ornaments of the human race. He is among those who have enriched
mankind with imperishable gifts; and although these do not
transcend all other gifts, nor entitle him to those honours
‘above all Greek, above all Roman fame’, which by a natural
reaction against the neglect and contempt of the ignorant, many
of his admirers were once disposed to accumulate upon him, yet to
refuse an admiring recognition of what he was, on account of what
he was not, is a much worse error, and one which, pardonable in
the vulgar, is no longer permitted to any cultivated and
instructed mind.
If we were asked to say, in the fewest possible words, what
we conceive to be Bentham’s place among these great intellectual
benefactors of humanity; what he was, and what he was not; what
kind of service he did and did not render to truth; we should say
he was not a great philosopher, but he was a great reformer in
philosophy. He brought into philosophy something which it greatly
needed, and for want of which it was at a stand. It was not his
doctrines which did this, it was his mode of arriving at them. He
introduced into morals and politics those habits of thought and
modes of investigation, which are essential to the idea of