Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/457

 Rr.WWS 435 regions inaccessible to such shafts as these. ' Mit der Dummheit kampfen Gotter eelbet vergebens.' But if there is little living interest about the subject of the book, it is still of great value as an illustration of past modes of thought and of Bentham's work in overthrowing them. It helps us to understand what the Greatest Happiness principle really meant in his hands. For, as M.r. Montague very rightly says, Bentham' must be judged as a theorist upon legislation.' It is in his application of the principle of Utility to this end that he is truly original and great. The principle itself was old enough. ' He was not the first to lay down the axiom that happiness means the greatest possible amount of pleasure together with the least possible amount of pain. This axiom was fundamental with the whole English school of psychology. That man's only possible end is happiness was a truism with the whole English school of Moral Philosophy.' ' His moral philosophy is, in its essence, neither less nor more than the current moral philosophy n f the time... The. fashionable moral theory was that which asserted the crudest form the fight of man to enjoy himself in this life, and the right of every nan to an equal chance of enjoyment. This doctrine, like those of earlier ages, produced its own prophets, martyrs, persecutors, and moral lunatics. With those doctrines it also may rest in peace. We need not abuse Bentham because, living when he did, he took it for granted. That happiness is not a sum of pleasures, and that a human society is not a sum of individuals, are the great ethical discoveries of the nineteenth century; and we must not complain that Bentham did not anticipate them. Hedonism and individualism indeed were just beginning to grow dead and rotten when Bentham suddenly snatched them up, like the jaw-bone of an ass, to smite the philistines. It is our merit now to throw that putrid thing aside: it was his merit then to grasp it stubbornly and fight with it doggedly to the end. That this was a merit even Carlyle acknowledges. ' Bentham himself,' he says,  ' and even the creed of Bentham seems to me comparatively worthy of praise. It is a determinate being what all the world, in a cowardly half-and-half manner, was tending to be. Let us have the crisis; we shall either have death or the cure. I call this gross, steam-engine Utilitarianism, an approach towards new Faith. It was a laying-down of cant, a saying to one's self: "Well then, this world is a dead iron machine, the god of it Gravitation and selfish Hunger; let us see what, by checking and balancing, and good adjust- ment of tooth and pinion, can be made of it." Benthamism has something complete, manful, in such fearless committal of itself to what it finds true; you may call it Heroic, though a Heroism with its eyes put out ! It is the culminating point, and fearless ultimatum, of what lay in the haft-and-half state, pervading man's whole existence in that Eighteenth Century. 'a It was Bentham's merit to grasp this The Hero as Man of Letters. - Mr. Montague remarks. (p. 57)that' that remarkable age of thought, which is commonly styled the eighteenth century,' 'really extended from the cessation of the wars of religion to the outbreak of the wars of the French Revolution.' F F2