Chapter XI: Part 11

Much less ingenious than Hartley as a speculator, but more distinct, perspicuous, and effective as a writer, was Dr. PALEY, a man whose position among the thinkers of the last century, though somewhat dwarfed by the contemporary magnitude of Hume and Bentham, will ever secure him an honourable place among the preachers of the Utilitarian doctrine. As an author, he commanded a wider circle of intelligent readers than any of his contemporaries who handled the same subjects; he was a Churchman too, the only clergyman, so far as I know, among the Utilitarian doctors; and the last of that school--Austin only excepted[300.1]--who did not think it a disgrace but an honour to keep on friendly terms with Christianity. The salient points of his moral philosophy are four--Utility, the doctrine of Consequences, the Will of God, and the Future life. Of the first, what remains to be said will be said more opportunely when, in the next section, we shall have to discuss Hume; the doctrine of Consequences a passing hint under Bentham will dismiss; and for the other two points a few sentences may suffice. “Virtue,” according to Paley, “is the doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of God for the sake of everlasting happiness.” {301} This definition characterizes the man, the book, the age, the country, and the profession to which he belonged admirably. It is a definition that, taken as a matter of fact, in all likelihood expressed the feeling of nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand British Christians living in these islands in the generation immediately preceding the French Revolution; still, it is a definition which contains as many errors as it contains clauses. In the first place, as to the doing good to mankind, it is a principle which lies at the basis of the doctrine of Utility, and has its origin doubtless not so much in modern anti-Christian systems as in the prominence which Christianity gives to works of charity and brotherly-kindness; than which practically of course there can be nothing better, but as part of the definition of virtue in this place it is faulty; for virtue of various kinds may be exercised where no men exist to be the objects of our benevolence, as with Adam in Paradise, and Robinson Crusoe in his desert island, and the poet Campbell’s Last Man. Then as to the Will of God, that no doubt is a power which overrules all; tides and tempests and thunderstorms must obey that, and human life of course no less; but what constitutes the Divine will, and how is it to be learned, in what way by the Christian, and in what other way by the unbeliever? Properly speaking, the will of God rather expresses the ultimate source of virtuous conduct than furnishes a practical definition of its quality. Lastly, as to the everlasting happiness, this is the greatest blunder of the three. It may no doubt be very true under the relations in which it was spoken, that “if in this life only we have hope in Christ we are of all men {302} most miserable:” that was a sentence which applied with the most vivid pointedness to St. Paul and to many others in similar circumstances; but it is very far from furnishing a warrant for the general proposition that the sure expectation of an everlasting reward is a motive necessary for the existence of virtue in this mortal life. For if this really were the case, either the virtue of Socrates was no virtue at all, or a virtue far above the standard of any Christian virtue according to Paley’s definition; for Socrates died the death of a martyr with a very doubtful faith of what might happen to him after death. But, in fact, the prospect of an external reward is no part of any virtue, either Christian or heathen,--rather in many cases would annihilate the very idea of virtue. To give away ten pounds to-day with the sure expectation of getting a thousand pounds for it to-morrow would be no act of generosity. Aristotle says that a man is bound to be virtuous by the distinctive law of his nature, whether he lives seventy years or seven hundred years; and Christianity surely ought to say no less. It is plain therefore that Dr. Paley was no great master of definitions. Nevertheless he wrote a most useful practical book; such a book as justly commended itself to the practical English mind; such a book as might have been expected from the finished manhood of a young man of whom when he went to college it had been said by his father, that “he had by far the clearest head he had ever met with.” A clear head unquestionably is a most useful quality in business and in daily life, but a quality which of itself will not make a great philosopher, or even a great man.

DAVID HUME, born at Edinburgh in the year {303} 1710, was older than Dr. Paley by more than thirty years, though we have placed Paley first, as with Locke and Hartley completing the band of decidedly Christian Externalists. But in Hume we find the father of an altogether new school, the real progenitor of that living sect of philosophers whom the popular memory traces back no further than to Bentham and James Mill. In him therefore we may reasonably expect to find in one form or another all that came afterwards, some parts of course less worked out and less consistent, but the whole more rich, various, and complete; and, as in the case of Locke and Hartley, we may probably have cause to rejoice that by a certain broad and salutary inconsistency he saved himself from a narrow and pedantic dogmatism. We shall not therefore err in calling him comparatively a great man, but only comparatively; compared with the highest style of men, great with first-rate position and constructive minds, he is not great; he is only rich, various, and subtle. Nevertheless in respect of those who followed him with kindred tendencies, his stature remains unapproached. He is, as Emerson says of Plato, “a terrible destroyer of originalities.” In the page of intellectual record he stands unquestioned as the man who shook all the easy thinkers of an easy century out of their easy seats with much observation; but there are two ways of shaking people out of their seats--first in the manner of an architect who pulls down a crazy old cabin in order that he may set quarrymen, masons, plasterers, carpenters, painters, and other artisans to work that they may erect a palatial structure in its stead; secondly, in the manner of a strong Samson, who shakes the pillars of some temple of Dagon, and buries himself {304} and all the Philistines beneath its roof. That this is too much the manner of Hume as a philosopher is obvious; only he does not actually die like Samson, but gets himself paralysed for a moment, and then recovers partially by virtue of that strong infection of common sense which, as a Scotchman, he naturally had. We have called him a rich man; for unquestionably his treatise on the Principles of Morals, perhaps on the whole the best of his works, exhibits him as at once a subtle thinker, a shrewd observer, and a graceful stylist, in a combination as happy as it is rare. The man of the world is present here as well as the philosopher; and perhaps the philosopher is not fully aware how much the acceptance of his abstract speculations is due to his secular shrewdness and his gentlemanly demeanour. But with all his wealth there is a certain meagreness about Hume arising out of his ignorance and entire misprision of the past. It is difficult for a man to write well on morals with an entire disregard of Aristotle and Plato, and with a fashionable Parisian contempt for the New Testament. No doubt this was to a great extent the misfortune of the philosopher rather than his fault; yet the fact remains, and cannot but weigh heavily with all who would make a true estimate of the permanent value of his contributions to ethical philosophy. In Hume’s time, as we have seen above (p. 131), Aristotle had not yet recovered from the supposed blows inflicted on him by Bacon--“his fame,” to use Hume’s own language, “was utterly decayed;”[304.1] and as for Plato, St. Paul, and St. John, our subtle Scotch David had no organ for them, and could appreciate their excellence {305} as some kilted piper picked up from Celtic games at Braemar might be expected to appreciate the harmonies of Sebastian Bach. Greek certainly he had--the fruit of private study in his riper years--more than usually falls to the lot of Scottish philosophers; and what he had of that noble language he knew how to use more effectively and with more grace and originality than many English scholars with ten times his erudition; but in reading his Principles of Morals I find no trace of any appreciation of the work done by his great Hellenic predecessors; on the contrary, I find the strange delusion possessing both him and Bentham that they were commencing a new epoch, and doing for moral science what Newton had done for physical, and what Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, not to mention St. Paul and St John, had altogether failed to do. Hume’s own view of his relation to the ancient moralists is distinctly stated thus--“I found that the moral philosophy transmitted to us by antiquity laboured under the same inconvenience that has been found in their natural philosophy, of being entirely hypothetical and depending more on invention than experience; every one consulted his fancy in erecting schemes of virtue and happiness, without regarding human nature, upon which every moral conclusion must depend.”[305.1] The complacent conceit of this passage to a man who really knows the ancient moralists, {306} is only less ludicrous than the benign self-satisfaction which inspires the well-known overture to the _Deontology_ of Bentham. And the conceit becomes the more ludicrous when, in searching for this new principle which is to redeem ethics from fancifulness and transport it into certainty, we find nothing but the old Socratic formula:--

Reason + sentiment = virtue = happiness.

Nay more; he defines this sentiment to be “an internal sense or feeling which nature has made universal in the whole species.” _Risum teneatis, amici?_ Here we have the innate ideas of Plato, one part of them certainly, which Mr. Locke was supposed to have blown into smoke. And afterwards, in language even more distinctly Platonic, in the section “Why Utility Pleases,” he says, “Had nature made no original moral distinctions independently of education, distinctions founded on the original constitution of the mind, the words _honourable_ and _shameful_, _lovely_ and _odious_, _noble_ and _despicable_, had never had place in any language; nor could politicians, had they invented those terms, ever have been able to render them intelligible, or make them convey any idea to the audience.” We see therefore in these passages plainly, that Hume was by no means a thorough and consistent Externalist; he protests stoutly against Hobbes and all who declare that there is naturally no difference between men and tigers till the policeman introduced it; and he does not seem to have approached Professor Bain’s conception, that Conscience is always and everywhere modelled on the statute-book. He agrees entirely with Socrates in assigning to love and the {307} social affections--the τὰ φιλικά--as strong a sway in human society as to the selfish principle. Here his common sense and his knowledge of the world saved him signally from the perverse ingenuity of Hartley. It will be observed through all his works, indeed, that though he was fond of puzzling himself as a thinker, he had fundamentally far more faith in the common instincts and feelings of the great masses of men than in the conclusions of the metaphysicians. “Nature,” he says wisely, “will always assert her rights, and prevail in the end over any abstract reasoning whatsoever;”[307.1] while with regard to individual speculators he says, “It is easy for a profound philosopher to commit a mistake in his subtle reasonings, and one mistake is the necessary parent of another, while he pushes on his consequences, and is not deterred from embracing any conclusion by its unusual appearance or its contradiction to common sense.”[307.2] And accordingly he makes no scruple of shelving the whole theory of the Ethics of Selfishness by the single sentence that it “seems to have proceeded entirely from that love of simplicity which has been the source of much false reasoning in philosophy.”[307.3] What then have we to lay hold of as distinctively Humian? Hitherto all is mere Socrates. A well-disciplined reason and a well-educated natural instinct of benevolence acting together for the public weal.--This is Utility; this is Hume; this is Socrates also, and Aristotle; for these great ancient thinkers had the εὐδαιμονία and the ὠφέλιμον in their eye and on their tongue as {308} much as any modern Utilitarian. Where then lies the differentiating element of this great progenitor of the most modern school? The difference, we must reply, is partly imaginary, arising out of the gross misconception of the character of ancient philosophy, transparent in all the writings of the Utilitarians; partly real, in so far as the ancients, while acknowledging Utility as a principle, kept Reason in the foreground, while the moderns push Utility into the van, and use Reason only as an instrument to make that point alone prominent. The modern Utilitarian accordingly looks more to the consequences of the action, the ancient Rationalist to the quality of the actor; but how this should be looked upon as a great discovery in morals, or as tending in any way to the elevation of human character or the regeneration of society, seems difficult to understand. It rather appears to me that the prominence thus given to the results of action has a tendency to turn the eye of men away from the great work of purifying the sources of action, the foulness of which is the constant cause of foul results; prudential considerations will be very apt to obtain undue preponderance; and everywhere, as Lecky observes, “the philosophy of sensation will be found to be accompanied with the morals of interest.”

The extreme meagreness of the Utilitarian doctrine as thus produced from the propositions of its great progenitor, is something so remarkable that one is naturally driven to look about for some cause that may have given artificial importance to a matter in itself so insignificant; and this cause, so far as I can discover, lies nowhere so much as in the general reaction against Christianity which distinguished the {309} age of which Voltaire in France was the great spokesman, Hume in Scotland, and Bentham in England. Reaction is the universal law of all mundane forces: and it was not to be expected that Christianity should escape it. Christian ethics being based purely, as we have seen, on a regard to the will of God, on purity of motive, and lofty self-sacrifice, even had they been left to work in all their natural integrity, would have demanded a doctrine of moral consequences to neutralize the necessary one-sidedness of their action. To have a good conscience was a most excellent thing, but to have a clean shirt was also a virtue. The Divine sanction given by Christian piety to Christian morals was naturally beneficial, but it was also possible, or rather from human weakness almost certain, that the science of human ethics might lose as much as it gained from alliance with Christian theologians, who are only too apt to “bend every branch of knowledge to their own purposes, without much regard to the phenomena of nature, or to the unbiassed sentiments of the mind.”[309.1] Add to this the tawdry mummeries of ritualism, the insolence of haughty churchmen, the gross worldliness of fat beneficiaries, the morbid sanctitude of pietistical devotees, the unnatural austerities of monkish ascetics, and the grim severity of damnatory dogmatists, and we shall easily understand how a revulsion should have taken place, which would not be content till on the throne of morals it had supplanted Christ by Socrates, and Socrates by Epicurus. And this consideration opens up to us the second notable achievement of the subtle Scot in the important field of morals. Not content with {310} withdrawing virtue as much as possible from the region of personal sentiment into the wider domain of social wellbeing, he determined to strike at the root of the whole evil, as it appeared to him, by not only attacking Christianity, but by undermining that primary idea of CAUSALITY on which the idea of religion and the very conception of a God reposes. This was a daring business no doubt; but Hume was not the man to take things of that nature overseriously; he would keep himself quite easy as to results; he would not make himself miserable by any unnecessary enthusiasm even for his own philosophy;[310.1] if he did not choke the Church-doctors, he would at least give them something to chew; and at all events he might effect a permanent divorce between human ethics and that sectarian theology to which it had been so unpropitiously yoked.

The foundation of this monstrous doctrine of ATHEISM is laid by our subtle Scotch Epicurus in the following way. In his chapter entitled “Sceptical Doubts,” speaking of the origin of our ideas of _cause and effect_, he says, “When we find that any particular objects are constantly conjoined with each other, as the communication of motion by one billiard-ball to another, this knowledge arises entirely from _experience_, and is not a matter of _à priori_ reasoning.” Again: “The effect in this and in every case is totally different from the cause; the conjunction of every effect with its cause must appear arbitrary; every effect is in fact a distinct event from its cause. Hence we may discover the reason why no philosopher who is rational and modest has ever pretended {311} to assign the ultimate cause of any natural operation, or to show distinctly the action of that power which produces any single effect in the universe. The ultimate springs or principles productive of natural phenomena are totally shut up from human curiosity and inquiry.” Then in the next section he goes on to argue against the legitimacy of the common postulate of all scientific thought, that “similar sensible qualities proceed from similar secret powers.” “All that experience can do is to show us a number of uniform effects resulting from certain objects, and to teach us that those particular objects at that particular time were endowed with such powers and forces.” After this, in the chapter entitled “Sceptical Solution of Sceptical Doubts,” he lays it down that since our belief that similar effects imply similar causes does not depend on reasoning, the only, “principle on which it depends is Custom or Habit.” In fact, “All inferences from experience are the effect of CUSTOM, not of REASONING.” Cause means only “customary conjunction.” Then, towards the conclusion of the same chapter, he says, “There is a kind of pre-established harmony between the course of nature and the succession of our ideas; and though the Powers and Forces by which the former is governed be wholly unknown to us, yet our thoughts and conceptions have still, we find, gone on in the same train with the other works of nature. CUSTOM is that principle by which this correspondence has been effected.” Cognate with these chapters on Causation are some discussions that follow on the idea of power or necessary connexion, in which he maintains that this idea is not copied either from the observation of the operation of forces {312} in the external world or in the world of volition within us; that in all cases what we know is only “the frequent CONJUNCTION of objects, not their connexion;” “all events seem entirely loose and separate; and at bottom we have no idea of connexion or power at all, and these words are absolutely without any meaning;” and, philosophically expressed, “the sentiment or impression from which we form the idea of power or necessary connexion,” is only “the customary transition of the imagination from one object to its usual attendant.” And so “we may define a CAUSE to be one object followed by another, and where all the objects similar to the first are followed by objects similar to the second.” Lastly, to crown this whole elaborate edifice of Scottish atheism, we have, in the chapter on “Providence and a Future State,” the following sentences:--“When we infer any particular cause from an effect, we must proportion the one to the other, and can never be allowed to ascribe to the cause any qualities but what are exactly sufficient to produce the effect. Allowing, therefore, the gods to be the Authors of the existence or order of the universe, it follows that they possess that precise degree of power, intelligence, and benevolence which appears in their workmanship; but nothing further can be proved. The supposition of further attributes is mere hypothesis.” This argument is levelled against the perfection of the Divine workmanship and attributes. He then proceeds to annihilate, as he conceives, the Socratic argument from design in the following fashion:--“If you saw a half-finished building, surrounded with heaps of brick and stone and mortar, and all the instruments of masonry, {313} you might justly infer from this effect that it was a work of design and contrivance; and in reference to works of human art this reasoning is good, because _man is a being whom we know by experience_. But the case is not the same with our reasonings from the works of Nature. The Deity is known to us only by his productions, and is a single Being in the universe not comprehended under any species or genus, from whose experienced attributes or qualities we can by analogy infer any attribute or quality in him. The method of reasoning which we legitimately use in reference to the intentions and projects of men, can never have place with regard to a Being so remote and incomprehensible, who bears much less analogy to any other being in the universe than the sun does to a wax taper, and who discovers himself only by some faint traces or outlines, beyond which we have no authority to ascribe to him any attribute or perfection.”

We have been at pains to transcribe these articulate sentences verbatim, selected from a sweep of some hundred pages of the Essays, because they really contain all that can be said in justification or palliation of that sort of positive or negative atheism which has recently been haunting the intellectual atmosphere of Europe, and poisoning the sources of social morality. Let us now see what they amount to.

In the first place, then, with regard to the general source of all our knowledge of matters of fact, it is quite certain we gain such knowledge only from experience; but this of course does not mean merely external experience of external objects. Whatever exists, the thinking I that is capable of taking cognisance {314} of objects, no less than the objects cognised, are known only by experience, could not be known otherwise. A thing must exist in order that it may be known to exist. Nothing is known by mere abstract reasoning independent of existence. If it be said that mathematics are so known, the answer is, that mathematics imply the existence of a thinker, and the existence of laws of thinking, and further, that the objects of mathematical science are thoughts, not existences, mere hypothetical conditions and arbitrary limitations of space and time. We are not therefore entitled to start with a presumption that whatever is not known by abstract reasoning falls under the category of mere accident or custom; in the wide range of what we know by experience some things may be accidental or customary, many things may be necessary; what things are absolutely necessary the Supreme Cause alone may know; but that customary conjunction is not a sufficient explanation of the order of phenomena which we admire in the outer or inner world, human reason may be quite strong enough without hesitation to assert. For, let us inquire how the idea of CAUSE arises. According to Mr. Hume it is nonsense; it is merely another word for custom; a constant custom is a cause. Now, according to the general sense of mankind in all ages, and the use of all languages,--a consent and a use to which Mr. Hume himself, as we have seen, in another place attaches the utmost importance,--while the inconstancy of a custom, by introducing the idea of whim and caprice, excludes the notion of a cause, at least of a cause which falls under the category of science, a constant custom is the very thing which naturally suggests the question, What {315} is the cause of this constancy? It is therefore something different from the constancy; and whether discoverable or not, is not to be confounded with the existence of that thing, or series of things, of which it is required as the explanation. Take an example. I see a certain person pass along the street before my window every morning at a quarter before nine o’clock, and another person following him regularly at ten minutes before nine. Here is a customary conjunction. If it happened once, or even twice, I should ask no questions, it might have been what men call accidental; but it has happened every day for six months, and I ask the cause. Am I wrong in doing so? Is there no cause? Or do I give a sufficient answer when I say it is a customary conjunction, or an invariable sequence? The invariability of the sequence, so far from offering any explanation of the cause, is the very thing that suggests it. I insist on believing that this invariability has a cause, and that it is neither an accident nor a custom. Of course it may be possible that I shall not be able to find out the cause; but that there is a cause I believe as firmly as that two and two are four. Now why am I entitled to demand a cause here, or in the case of any such conjunction? and what do I mean by it? I mean something that has an inherent and necessary virtue to produce effect; and I am entitled to make the demand, just because I am a reasonable being, and because the exercise of reason has proved to me directly that invariable sequences are not produced except by the persistent application of some calculated force of which energizing reason is the source. I know by experience that whenever this presidency of reason is abolished, the {316} world in which I move instantly becomes a chaos; and the living unity of that mind which I exercise in thinking, and which brings its own unity into the wide sphere of my thoughts, feelings, and actions, displays to me in the most direct way that the unity of plan between the different members of an invariable sequence can proceed only from that of which plan and unity can be predicated, viz., REASON. I derive my notion of cause therefore primarily from the most direct and certain of all sources, from my own existence; and if Mr. Hume objects that I do not know how my mind acts on my body, or how my limb does not follow my will in the case of palsy in the motor nerves, this ignorance does not in the least shake my conviction that a cause is something different from a custom; a piston or a paddle may be deranged, but the steamboat is moved by a cause nevertheless, and that cause is twofold,--the steam, and the mind of James Watt. These conclusions with regard to the works of man even Mr. Hume seems to regard as perfectly justifiable; for, like all puzzle-headed paradox-mongers, he is forced to forget his own distinctions, and to speak of a cause after all, as something different from a custom. We are justified, therefore, in finding in the energizing reason of man a cause, and the only sufficient cause, for the reasonable works of man. But it is different, you say, with the works of God. Different unquestionably in some respects; as the ocean, for example, is different from a drop of salt water, or the sun, as you say, from a wax taper, or a scuffle between two Irishmen at a fair from a great battle betwixt Prussia and France. Let it be so. There is an immense difference in magnitude betwixt man and God, betwixt {317} the works of man and the works of God. Still that will not make a gulf sufficiently large to prevent mutual recognition. A drop of salt water, the chemist will tell you, contains every element that makes the mighty ocean a salt ocean, and not a fresh-water lake. The smallest spark from the largest conflagration is an affair of the same oxygen gas; and petty differences in the management of the smallest borough in Great Britain are the result of the same play of vanities, jealousies, stupidities, and spites that provoke the greatest wars on the battle-field of Europe. We shall therefore not be deterred by the magnitude of the Creator’s works from recognising the excellence of their cause; we shall rather feel the more occasion to sing with the royal Hebrew psalmist, “_How excellent in all the earth, Lord, our Lord, is Thy name!_” No doubt there is another difference that separates human work from Divine. The work of God is vital work, ours is mechanical, mere puppetry, all the motive forces of which are borrowed from the exhaustless batteries of the Divine electricity. But this is only another reason for wondering with so much the more admiration, and worshipping with so much the more fervour. How healthy-minded, how noble, and how sublime, in reference to this matter, does that grand old Hebrew singer appear, with the flaming wings of his devout Muse, compared with this peeping Scotch metaphysician, keeping himself jealously free from the contagion of all intellectual enthusiasm, and discovering in this glorious universe only “some faint traces and outlines” of a self-existent Reason, enough to lead a man into puzzles but not to lift him into hymns! Truly a sorry spectacle! They will not {318} worship God, forsooth, these philosophers, because they do not know Him exactly as they know the machinery of their watches, because they do not see Him with their carnal eyes, because they cannot lay their fingers on Him. Well, let me ask them, Does any man see any man? Can any man put his finger upon me, or you, upon that which is properly called me and you? No; he sees only the man as revealed in his flesh, as manifested in his works. His soul looks through the windows of his eye; and his eye directs his hand where to strike. We believe in the man; we do not see him. If his works are full of order and beauty and purpose, we conclude that the man is reasonable; if they are mere disorder, ugliness, and haphazard, we conclude he is unreasonable. Not otherwise with our knowledge of God. “No man hath seen God at any time, nor can see.” Creation is the face of God; the sun is the eye of God. Everywhere I see Him in his works radiant with reason, instinct with soul. I know Him as a child knows his father, as the shepherd’s dog knows the shepherd, as a common soldier knows the great projector of the campaign, though he may never have seen him. I may not comprehend many of His movements (it would be a strange thing if I did), I may not understand much of that which most nearly concerns myself; but this necessary inadequacy of my finite faculty shall not prevent my acknowledgment, my loyalty, and my obedience. I know enough of God always to inspire wonder and to annihilate criticism; and this is my highest human wisdom.

So much for the poor sceptical bewilderment of the celebrated David Hume; into which den of dust {319} and cobwebs I certainly should not have strayed in this discourse, had experience not taught me that to deny God in the macrocosm necessarily leads to the denial of Mind in the microcosm, and to deny mind in man is to disown morality, or at least to stanch it in its principal well-head, and to poison the purest of its fountains. In forming a judgment of his character, however, we must not insist upon applying to him all the logical consequences of his own arguments. That his philosophy is speculative atheism is quite certain. By “emptying the idea of causation of its efficiency,” to use Professor Ferrier’s language,[319.1] “that is, of the element which constitutes its essence, he not only denied God, but he struck a blow which paralysed man’s nature in its most vital function;” he was not however consistently and thoroughly an atheist; as a Scot he had too much sense to remain in his practical moments entangled in the unsubstantial tissue of sophistry and cobwebs which he had spun for himself in speculation, and his want of piety was a defect of sentiment rather than a revolt of reason.[319.2] We must remember also charitably, that he lived in a flat age, when it was always impossible for a man to be truly great. A little moral earnestness, of which the eighteenth century had nothing to give him, would have saved him from a great part of the barren subtlety which disfigures so many pages of his otherwise sagacious, pleasant, and profitable works. When we observe that as the prophet of that age he was in everything acute rather than strong, that in his literary tastes {320} he preferred Sophocles to Shakespeare, Epicurus to Plato, Lucian to the Apostle Paul, and Leo X. to Martin Luther, we shall not be surprised to find his moral treatise tainted with the notion that Christian virtue always means asceticism, and that religion is only a more respectable name for superstition. Pity only that in the present age some persons should be forward to use his arguments who have not the excuse of his position.

We have now finished our notice of those who are entitled to be called the founders of the Utilitarian school; those who follow, as the mere inheritors of principles already largely discussed, need not detain us long. Of these by far the most distinguished unquestionably is Bentham; so distinguished indeed, as in popular estimate to be accounted, the founder of the school. But there is need of a distinction here. Those men found a school in the proper sense who teach the principles which it acknowledges; but in another sense he founds it who applies those principles to practice. In the first sense, the founders of the ethical doctrine which we are considering were Locke, Hartley, and Hume; in the other sense, Bentham. His glory lies not so much in expounding as in applying principles; he is a lawyer and a politician rather than a philosopher. Not however that he did not give himself the airs of a philosopher; this he did with observation, and was accepted by his disciples accordingly. Therein lay the mistake. It is not every man, not even every great man, who knows how to recognise the limits which nature has laid down to the exercise of his faculty. Napoleon the Great, in the pride of imperial command, overlooked the moral forces that {321} lay slumbering in the heart of the people, and was punished by a three days’ cannonade at Leipzig, the prelude to his final chastisement at Waterloo. Jeremy Bentham, because he could tabulate Acts of Parliament with the astuteness of a barrister, the purity of a philanthropist, and the comprehensiveness of a statesman, conceited himself throned on a moral eminence from which he might look down with contempt on Plato and Socrates, and all the great moral teachers of the past. In the third chapter of the first volume of _Deontology_, or _Doctrine of Duty_, we read, “While Xenophon was writing history, and Euclid giving instruction in geometry, Socrates and Plato were talking nonsense under pretence of teaching wisdom. This morality of theirs consisted in words,--this wisdom of theirs was the denial of matters known to every man’s experience, and the assertion of other matters opposed to every man’s experience. And exactly in the proportion in which their notions on this subject differed from those of the mass of mankind, exactly in that proportion were they below the level of mankind.” Such an exhibition of ignorance, insolence, and impertinence as this in a man of undoubted genius, were truly inexplicable, did we not bear in mind that genius even of the very highest kind is often accompanied by a very decided one-sidedness; and more than that, there were in the circumstances of Bentham’s life not a few things that tended to raise to a maximum the dogmatism with which he was naturally endowed. He is by no means a solitary example of a great man, the sublime of whose excellence has been turned into the ridiculous for lack of a little Christian humility. {322} “Who is that young man who discourses on all subjects with such a wealth of resources?” said a distinguished guest at Worcester to Bishop Stillingfleet one day after dinner. “That is my chaplain, sir,” replied the Bishop; “Bentley is his name--Richard Bentley--a very remarkable man, a man of gigantic learning, and who might be the greatest man in Europe, had he only a little modesty.” Young Bentham had the misfortune to be a spoiled child--and not without cause, for he was by no means a common boy; his intellectual and moral endowments were both rare; this was the good gift of God; but he was brought up as a prodigy; this was the great blunder of his parents. Nor was the blunder mended when at a remarkably early age he was sent to Oxford. Public schools and colleges are often admirable institutions for teaching young men to find their level, but it was not so with Bentham; he had the misfortune to be born in a flat century, and fell among flat people. Everything that he saw in the great seat of English learning tended rather to pamper than to prune his conceit. He could write Latin verses as well as the best of them; but he rightly judged that at this time of day, in reference to the highest demands of a rational culture, this sort of exercise is at best a very pretty kind of trifling, and anything better did not grow there at that time. He seems to have got a taste of Aristotle’s Logic--that was part of the academical routine,--but he had logic enough in his own brain, and could not be expected to reap much benefit from any barren exercitations of a school-book. Logic is useful only as a flail, when it gets corn to thresh from other quarters; of itself it is utterly {323} unfruitful. Into the real gist and marrow of Aristotle and Plato it does not appear he ever entered, nor amongst the tutors of his college did any one offer a manuduction into these intellectual penetralia; it was the age of elegant grammarians and low churchmen; and when the Articles were duly subscribed and the Latin verses properly turned off, there seemed nothing more in prospect for the academical mind but port wine and chapel service, and, in pleasant summer weather, a little languid activity on the bowling-green. But this was not the sort of nutriment which could feed the fine spirit of a young Bentham, whose food was mere intellectual truth, and his drink pure human love. He had been born in a Tory family; he was bred in a Tory college; he had been kidnapped (to his life-long horror) to sign the Articles of a Tory Church; but from all this Toryism the best part of his nature had received no nourishment. The consciousness grew, and one day burst out with a flash upon him, that Toryism was selfishness: that the British people, in common with himself, were lying languid and downtrodden, and rotting beneath the selfish dominance of an oligarchy, an oligarchy perhaps the most powerful that the history of the world knew; for as he knew it, it certainly seemed fourfold,--an oligarchy of pedants, an oligarchy of priests, an oligarchy of lawyers, and an oligarchy of peers. Against all this the spirit of young Bentham, as courageous as it was pure, rebelled. He would pull it all down; though he stood alone in the world, like Plato’s just man, he would pull it all down. And so he set himself valiantly to protest against the oligarchy of pedants, founded on a blind reverence {324} for the letter of dead books; against the oligarchy of priests, founded on the real desire of power and the pretended admiration of an ascetic morality; against the oligarchy of lawyers, who strangled the rights of the present by the fictions of the past; against the oligarchy of peers, which in the government of the State preferred the interests of the favoured few to the happiness of the neglected many. And the issue was that young Bentham returned from Oxford, not to prosecute his legal studies at one of the Inns of Court, and advance himself to a position of wealth and honour by practising the curious art of giving a reasonable face to the most unreasonable of fictions, but as an armed apostle of intellectual, moral, juridical, and political democracy, and full of that sort of sacred fury which inspired the French democrats when they looked forward to a speedy millennium as the time “when the last king should be strangled with the bowels of the last priest.”

The state of feeling here sketched is the only thing that, in my opinion, can afford a satisfactory explanation of the extraordinary one-sidedness and dogmatism of Bentham’s moral philosophy. It was the creature of a reaction; and such a reaction as is apt to exhibit itself most emphatically in the case of the most highly-gifted young men, who however sometimes, as increasing years bring extension of view, contrive to work their way to some Aristotelian mean point which permits the recognition of two opposite truths. But such was not the nature of Bentham. He worshipped the great goddess Consistency, and could see and work only in a straight line. To his dicta there was no limitation, any more than to those {325} of the Pope; he held himself practically infallible. So the first thing that he determined to do was to re-establish the Epicurean doctrine that “Pleasure is the chief good;” for “Epicurus,” he expressly says, “was the only one among the ancients who had the merit of having known the true source of morality.”[325.1] After this we need inquire no further. The novelty of this sentence is too dear a price to pay for its manifest error in elevating a species into the dignity of a genus, and for its manifest danger in stamping that which is highest in human nature with a label familiarly used to mark what is lowest. The great ancients whom Bentham despised made εὐδαιμονία or happiness the genus; and this happiness, they said, one class of men sought to attain by ἡδονὴ or PLEASURE, another class by striving after the τὸ ἀγαθὸν or the GOOD. This language, founded on the healthy instincts of human nature, the apostles of Christianity sanctioned with their authority when they talked of persons being “lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God;” and to the present hour “a man of pleasure” is a phrase familiarly used in the English language to express one of the most trifling, contemptible, and useless members of society. And the reason of this use of language is obvious. Pleasure and Good, so far from being of a kindred nature, are generally directly opposite; no doubt they both produce enjoyment, but the enjoyment in the one case is often passive, in the other always active; in the one case generally shunning difficulty, in the other rather provoking it; of the former the senses are the main organ, of the latter the reason; the sensuous enjoyment man has in common with a {326} pig, the rational only as a man. It was therefore a strange service that Bentham assumed himself to have done to moral philosophy by confounding the poles of moral distinction; and his conduct can only be palliated, not justified, by the tendency of every reaction to swing itself into an extreme. Any peculiar provocation in Bentham’s time calling upon him to reinstate the gospel of the flesh in the rights of which it had been deprived by St. Paul, one does not exactly see. Whatever faults he might have discovered in the morality of the clerical exclusives, purple doctors, and minute grammarians of Oxford, asceticism certainly was not one; feastings rather than fastings were the order of the day among the Dons; there remains, therefore, only the puerile delight of using a strong phrase, to palliate this gross confusion of the received terminology of moral science which he introduced. As for any other principles of morality that Bentham might have, they were merely what every other body had always professed. It did not require Hume, or any other sceptical solver of sceptical doubts, to teach mankind that Benevolence was naturally a good thing, and that no virtues were true virtues which did not tend to the public good. It happened therefore to Bentham, as it had happened to other promulgators of new gospels,--that what was most new in his system was least true, and what was most true was least new. The doctrine that Pleasure is the chief good, and that Epicurus was a better philosopher than Aristotle, will scarcely now, we apprehend, be seriously maintained; while, on the other hand, the maxim, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” has always been the war-cry by which the most generous politicians have {327} been roused, and the load-star by which the most far-seeing statesmen have been guided. It is not, indeed, in the kingdom of ethics, strictly so called, that Bentham’s merit is to be sought; specially rather in the outlying fields of jurisprudential and legislative economy, where that doctrine of consequences justly sways, which Paley erroneously sought to make regulative in the region of personal purpose, pure motive, and noble deed; and for his services in applying his favourite maxim to various departments of political, juridical, and social reform, the world can scarcely be sufficiently grateful It is not often that so pure a philanthropist enters with victorious axe and mattock into domains bristling so rankly with all sorts of professional prejudice and professional selfishness. In this domain let him be loved as a man, reverenced as a patriarch, and even worshipped as a saint--(he was a saint in his own peculiar way unquestionably); but let him not be lifted into Christian pulpits or academic chairs to indoctrinate the ingenuous youth of this country in a curious moral arithmetic how to maximize pleasure and to minimize pain. Not by such teaching, certainly, were heroes wont to be made in Sparta, in Athens, or in Rome.

With Bentham the edifice of Utilitarianism is complete, and there is little more to say about the matter. Those who came afterwards were expositors, not founders; they employed themselves in explaining the doctrines of their master, sometimes also in explaining them away; for, while bound to maintain the honour of the sect, they were sometimes dimly conscious and more than half ashamed of the base element out of which it sprang. One {328} of their foremost spokesmen was JAMES MILL, the father of the present distinguished logician and politician, John Stuart Mill. This gentleman, who is much respected by the school to which he belongs, in the year 1829 published a work entitled _An Analysis of the Human Mind_. This treatise I have read carefully, and am constrained to say that it appears to me an extremely meagre production; somewhat as if the mind of the author had been blasted and frosted by the arid and sharp east wind in the face of which--near Montrose--he was born. From his life it would appear that he studied at the University of Edinburgh in the days of the great metaphysical school there, and that he devoted considerable attention to Plato. I have not the slightest reason to believe that the great idealist was much known even to the best thinkers in our Scottish metropolis at that time; but if Mill did study Plato thoroughly, it must have been, as Grote has done in our time, for the purpose of not understanding him. Certainly in his book I have found nothing but the materialistic side of Locke and Hartley worked out into a monstrosity; a cold thin horror of all spiritual mystery, and the shallow conceit that the primary divine force, which we call MIND, can be explained by a laboriously minute dissection of a merely physical machinery. Whatever that great juggler Association can be made to do in order to explain knowledge out of sensation, mind out of matter, and unity generally out of multiplicity, has been done in this book. For the special ethics of Utilitarianism there is nothing in James Mill that the student of Hume and Bentham will be likely to think worth remembering.

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