Page:Works of Jeremy Bentham - 1843 - Volume 1.djvu/32

6 sions, must follow his chain of reasoning link by link. In performing such a task, impatient intellects will perhaps find a precision and minuteness of reasoning, which they would have been content to dispense with, and will see conclusions which they may think might have been leaped to, arrived at by systematic demonstration. But in submitting to this precision of intellectual exertion, they only subject themselves to the mental discipline, without which none of the more abstruse sciences can be mastered. Bentham found the whole field of morals and legislation crowded with fallacies which lurked behind slovenly expressions or incomplete arguments. He worked in perpetual fear of any fallacy finding a hiding-place in his own system; and he examined every word and every idea with scrupulous accuracy. It mattered not how unimportant might be the ground of deception: like a scrupulous merchant's book-keeper, who hunts out an error about a farthing, he would not allow the most trifling defect in argument to escape correction, because the principle of overlooking any defect is a dangerous one.

It must be admitted that this characteristic,—the keeping in view demonstration in preference to elucidation, is chiefly to be found in his later works. In those which he published early in life, there is more ornament and less of the character of severe logic. His mind was at all times rich in the produce of logical inquiry; but, in his earlier years, it was his practice to give the results of his reasonings, with the arguments generally and popularly stated, illustrated, and adorned by similes and examples; while in his more advanced years, he omitted mo portion of the process by which he arrived at his conclusions, and indulged but slightly in rhetorical ornament. Of the habits of thinking, and of composition, which accompanied these distinct methods, some elucidation will be attempted farther on; but in the meantime it may be serviceable to give a few remarks on the peculiarities of the two very distinct styles which Bentham wrote at different periods of his life.

The characteristics of Bentham's early style were, power, simplicity, and clearness. There was no writer of his age whose style had less of mannerism; and the absence of all peculiarity in that of his earliest work—the Fragment on Government, led those who naturally sought for the author of a work so bold and original among the names known to fame, to attribute it to various great men whose respective styles were strikingly dissimilar. It was not the least pleasing feature in these early works, that while the matter was wonderfully original, there was nothing in the manner of communicating it to startle the most fastidious taste. The Author's great skill, acquired by untiring study, is exhibited in the facility with which he adapts the common language of our literature to philosophical purposes, for which it had never at any previous time been used. There is never any vagueness in the expression of the most abstruse propositions; and yet they are framed out of a nomenclature which had not been intended for the elucidation of distinctions so subtle. Indeed, it would not be possible to find in the English language a style better adapted, in every respect, to describe in clear terms that which is, of all things with which language has to deal, the least easily made clear—The operations of the mind. The reader who is acquainted with his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, his Panopticon, his Defence of Usury, and his other works written in the 18th century, will require no confirmation of this opinion. As an illustration may be acceptable to some readers, the following is taken at random— it is from the Defence of Usury:— "The business of a money-lender, though only among Christians and in Christian times a proscribed profession, has nowhere, nor at any time, been a popular one. Those who have the resolution to sacrifice the present to the future, are natural objects of envy to those who have sacrificed the future to the present. The children who have eaten their cake, are the natural enemies of the children who have theirs. While the money is hoped for, and for a short time after it has been received, he who lends it is a friend and benefactor: by the time the money is spent, and the evil hour of reckoning is come, the benefactor is"