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Rh founded on authority and tradition. He examines the intensity, persistence, certainty, intimacy, purity and fruitfulness of pleasurable feelings which follow our acts and which condition the value of an act. He investigates the motives of action in order to discover what motives should be fostered and what others should be restrained. He regards self-interest, properly understood, as the most reliable motive, because he believed that self-interests, properly understood, are harmonious, so that the individual must necessarily be interested in the general welfare even for prudential considerations. This idea is expressed very one-sidely and harshly in a work (Deontology) that was published posthumously, and perhaps interpolated by the publisher.

Bentham's friend, James Mill (1772-1836), was a zealous exponent of the radical application of the principle of utility. This energetic man, whose high official position in the East India Company excluded him from Parliament, acted as counsellor of the radical politicians who were working for parliamentary reform, and above all else the emancipation of the middle classes. He undertook the theoretical task of furnishing a psychological basis for Bentham's ethical theory, the so-called utilitarianism. He discovered such a basis in the Associational psychology founded by Hume and Hartley, which he greatly simplified by referring all combinations of ideas to association between such ideas as frequently take place together (association by contiguity) (Analysis of the Human Mind, 1829). He attaches special importance to the fact that the association may be so completely subjective that an entirely new totality may arise, without containing any traces of the original elements whatever. By this method he aims to show,