No More Learning

JEREMY BENTHAM.



Mr. Bentham is one of those persons who verify the old adage, that "A
prophet has no honour, except out of his own country. " His reputation
lies at the circumference; and the lights of his understanding are
reflected, with increasing lustre, on the other side of the globe. His
name is little known in England, better in Europe, best of all in the
plains of Chili and the mines of Mexico. He has offered constitutions
for the New World, and legislated for future times. The people of
Westminster, where he lives, hardly know of such a person; but the
Siberian savage has received cold comfort from his lunar aspect, and may
say to him with Caliban--"I know thee, and thy dog and thy bush! " The
tawny Indian may hold out the hand of fellowship to him across the GREAT
PACIFIC. We believe that the Empress Catherine corresponded with him;
and we know that the Emperor Alexander called upon him, and presented
him with his miniature in a gold snuff-box, which the philosopher, to
his eternal honour, returned. Mr. Hobhouse is a greater man at the
hustings, Lord Rolle at Plymouth Dock; but Mr. Bentham would carry it
hollow, on the score of popularity, at Paris or Pegu. The reason is,
that our author's influence is purely intellectual. He has devoted
his life to the pursuit of abstract and general truths, and to those
studies--

"That waft a _thought_ from Indus to the Pole"--

and has never mixed himself up with personal intrigues or party
politics. He once, indeed, stuck up a hand-bill to say that he (Jeremy
Bentham) being of sound mind, was of opinion that Sir Samuel Romilly was
the most proper person to represent Westminster; but this was the whim
of the moment. Otherwise, his reasonings, if true at all, are true
everywhere alike: his speculations concern humanity at large, and are
not confined to the hundred or the bills of mortality. It is in moral as
in physical magnitude. The little is seen best near: the great appears
in its proper dimensions, only from a more commanding point of view, and
gains strength with time, and elevation from distance!

Mr. Bentham is very much among philosophers what La Fontaine was among
poets:--in general habits and in all but his professional pursuits, he
is a mere child. He has lived for the last forty years in a house
in Westminster, overlooking the Park, like an anchoret in his cell,
reducing law to a system, and the mind of man to a machine. He scarcely
ever goes out, and sees very little company. The favoured few, who have
the privilege of the _entrée_, are always admitted one by one. He does
not like to have witnesses to his conversation. He talks a great deal,
and listens to nothing but facts. When any one calls upon him, he
invites them to take a turn round his garden with him (Mr. Bentham is
an economist of his time, and sets apart this portion of it to air and
exercise)--and there you may see the lively old man, his mind still
buoyant with thought and with the prospect of futurity, in eager
conversation with some Opposition Member, some expatriated Patriot, or
Transatlantic Adventurer, urging the extinction of Close Boroughs, or
planning a code of laws for some "lone island in the watery waste,"
his walk almost amounting to a run, his tongue keeping pace with it in
shrill, cluttering accents, negligent of his person, his dress, and his
manner, intent only on his grand theme of UTILITY--or pausing, perhaps,
for want of breath and with lack-lustre eye to point out to the stranger
a stone in the wall at the end of his garden (overarched by two
beautiful cotton-trees) _Inscribed to the Prince of Poets_, which
marks the house where Milton formerly lived. To shew how little the
refinements of taste or fancy enter into our author's system, he
proposed at one time to cut down these beautiful trees, to convert the
garden where he had breathed the air of Truth and Heaven for near half
a century into a paltry _Chreistomathic School_, and to make Milton's
house (the cradle of Paradise Lost) a thoroughfare, like a three-stalled
stable, for the idle rabble of Westminster to pass backwards and
forwards to it with their cloven hoofs. Let us not, however, be getting
on too fast--Milton himself taught school! There is something not
altogether dissimilar between Mr. Bentham's appearance, and the
portraits of Milton, the same silvery tone, a few dishevelled hairs, a
peevish, yet puritanical expression, an irritable temperament corrected
by habit and discipline. Or in modern times, he is something between
Franklin and Charles Fox, with the comfortable double-chin and sleek
thriving look of the one, and the quivering lip, the restless eye, and
animated acuteness of the other. His eye is quick and lively; but it
glances not from object to object, but from thought to thought. He is
evidently a man occupied with some train of fine and inward association.
He regards the people about him no more than the flies of a summer. He
meditates the coming age. He hears and sees only what suits his purpose,
or some "foregone conclusion;" and looks out for facts and passing
occurrences in order to put them into his logical machinery and grind
them into the dust and powder of some subtle theory, as the miller looks
out for grist to his mill! Add to this physiognomical sketch the minor
points of costume, the open shirt-collar, the single-breasted coat, the
old-fashioned half-boots and ribbed stockings; and you will find in Mr.
Bentham's general appearance a singular mixture of boyish simplicity and
of the venerableness of age. In a word, our celebrated jurist presents a
striking illustration of the difference between the _philosophical_ and
the _regal_ look; that is, between the merely abstracted and the merely
personal. There is a lackadaisical _bonhommie_ about his whole aspect,
none of the fierceness of pride or power; an unconscious neglect of
his own person, instead of a stately assumption of superiority; a
good-humoured, placid intelligence, instead of a lynx-eyed watchfulness,
as if it wished to make others its prey, or was afraid they might turn
and rend him; he is a beneficent spirit, prying into the universe, not
lording it over it; a thoughtful spectator of the scenes of life, or
ruminator on the fate of mankind, not a painted pageant, a stupid idol
set up on its pedestal of pride for men to fall down and worship with
idiot fear and wonder at the thing themselves have made, and which,
without that fear and wonder, would in itself be nothing!

Mr. Bentham, perhaps, over-rates the importance of his own theories. He
has been heard to say (without any appearance of pride or affectation)
that "he should like to live the remaining years of his life, a year at
a time at the end of the next six or eight centuries, to see the effect
which his writings would by that time have had upon the world. " Alas!
his name will hardly live so long! Nor do we think, in point of fact,
that Mr. Bentham has given any new or decided impulse to the human mind.
He cannot be looked upon in the light of a discoverer in legislation
or morals. He has not struck out any great leading principle or
parent-truth, from which a number of others might be deduced; nor has he
enriched the common and established stock of intelligence with original
observations, like pearls thrown into wine. One truth discovered is
immortal, and entitles its author to be so: for, like a new substance
in nature, it cannot be destroyed. But Mr. Bentham's _forte_ is
arrangement; and the form of truth, though not its essence, varies with
time and circumstance. He has methodised, collated, and condensed all
the materials prepared to his hand on the subjects of which he treats,
in a masterly and scientific manner; but we should find a difficulty
in adducing from his different works (however elaborate or closely
reasoned) any new element of thought, or even a new fact or
illustration. His writings are, therefore, chiefly valuable as _books of
reference_, as bringing down the account of intellectual inquiry to the
present period, and disposing the results in a compendious, connected,
and tangible shape; but books of reference are chiefly serviceable for
facilitating the acquisition of knowledge, and are constantly liable
to be superseded and to grow out of fashion with its progress, as the
scaffolding is thrown down as soon as the building is completed. Mr.
Bentham is not the first writer (by a great many) who has assumed the
principle of UTILITY as the foundation of just laws, and of all moral
and political reasoning:--his merit is, that he has applied this
principle more closely and literally; that he has brought all the
objections and arguments, more distinctly labelled and ticketted, under
this one head, and made a more constant and explicit reference to it at
every step of his progress, than any other writer. Perhaps the weak side
of his conclusions also is, that he has carried this single view of his
subject too far, and not made sufficient allowance for the varieties of
human nature, and the caprices and irregularities of the human will. "He
has not allowed for the _wind_. " It is not that you can be said to see
his favourite doctrine of Utility glittering everywhere through his
system, like a vein of rich, shining ore (that is not the nature of the
material)--but it might be plausibly objected that he had struck the
whole mass of fancy, prejudice, passion, sense, whim, with his petrific,
leaden mace, that he had "bound volatile Hermes," and reduced the theory
and practice of human life to a _caput mortuum_ of reason, and dull,
plodding, technical calculation. The gentleman is himself a capital
logician; and he has been led by this circumstance to consider man as a
logical animal. We fear this view of the matter will hardly hold water.
If we attend to the _moral_ man, the constitution of his mind will
scarcely be found to be built up of pure reason and a regard to
consequences: if we consider the _criminal_ man (with whom the
legislator has chiefly to do) it will be found to be still less so.

Every pleasure, says Mr. Bentham, is equally a good, and is to be taken
into the account as such in a moral estimate, whether it be the pleasure
of sense or of conscience, whether it arise from the exercise of virtue
or the perpetration of crime. We are afraid the human mind does not
readily come into this doctrine, this _ultima ratio philosophorum_,
interpreted according to the letter. Our moral sentiments are made up of
sympathies and antipathies, of sense and imagination, of understanding
and prejudice. The soul, by reason of its weakness, is an aggregating
and an exclusive principle; it clings obstinately to some things, and
violently rejects others. And it must do so, in a great measure, or it
would act contrary to its own nature. It needs helps and stages in its
progress, and "all appliances and means to boot," which can raise it to
a partial conformity to truth and good (the utmost it is capable of) and
bring it into a tolerable harmony with the universe. By aiming at too
much, by dismissing collateral aids, by extending itself to the farthest
verge of the conceivable and possible, it loses its elasticity and
vigour, its impulse and its direction. The moralist can no more do
without the intermediate use of rules and principles, without the
'vantage ground of habit, without the levers of the understanding, than
the mechanist can discard the use of wheels and pulleys, and perform
every thing by simple motion. If the mind of man were competent to
comprehend the whole of truth and good, and act upon it at once, and
independently of all other considerations, Mr. Bentham's plan would be
a feasible one, and _the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth_ would be the best possible ground to place morality upon. But
it is not so. In ascertaining the rules of moral conduct, we must have
regard not merely to the nature of the object, but to the capacity of
the agent, and to his fitness for apprehending or attaining it. Pleasure
is that which is so in itself: good is that which approves itself as
such on reflection, or the idea of which is a source of satisfaction.
All pleasure is not, therefore (morally speaking) equally a good; for
all pleasure does not equally bear reflecting on. There are some tastes
that are sweet in the mouth and bitter in the belly; and there is a
similar contradiction and anomaly in the mind and heart of man. Again,
what would become of the _Posthaec meminisse juvabit_ of the poet, if
a principle of fluctuation and reaction is not inherent in the very
constitution of our nature, or if all moral truth is a mere literal
truism? We are not, then, so much to inquire what certain things are
abstractedly or in themselves, as how they affect the mind, and to
approve or condemn them accordingly. The same object seen near strikes
us more powerfully than at a distance: things thrown into masses give
a greater blow to the imagination than when scattered and divided into
their component parts. A number of mole-hills do not make a mountain,
though a mountain is actually made up of atoms: so moral truth must
present itself under a certain aspect and from a certain point of view,
in order to produce its full and proper effect upon the mind. The laws
of the affections are as necessary as those of optics. A calculation of
consequences is no more equivalent to a sentiment, than a _seriatim_
enumeration of square yards or feet touches the fancy like the sight of
the Alps or Andes!

To give an instance or two of what we mean. Those who on pure
cosmopolite principles, or on the ground of abstract humanity affect an
extraordinary regard for the Turks and Tartars, have been accused of
neglecting their duties to their friends and next-door neighbours. Well,
then, what is the state of the question here? One human being is, no
doubt, as much worth in himself, independently of the circumstances of
time or place, as another; but he is not of so much value to us and
our affections. Could our imagination take wing (with our speculative
faculties) to the other side of the globe or to the ends of the
universe, could our eyes behold whatever our reason teaches us to be
possible, could our hands reach as far as our thoughts or wishes, we
might then busy ourselves to advantage with the Hottentots, or hold
intimate converse with the inhabitants of the Moon; but being as we are,
our feelings evaporate in so large a space--we must draw the circle of
our affections and duties somewhat closer--the heart hovers and fixes
nearer home. It is true, the bands of private, or of local and natural
affection are often, nay in general, too tightly strained, so as
frequently to do harm instead of good: but the present question is
whether we can, with safety and effect, be wholly emancipated from them?
Whether we should shake them off at pleasure and without mercy, as the
only bar to the triumph of truth and justice? Or whether benevolence,
constructed upon a logical scale, would not be merely _nominal_, whether
duty, raised to too lofty a pitch of refinement, might not sink into
callous indifference or hollow selfishness? Again, is it not to exact
too high a strain from humanity, to ask us to qualify the degree
of abhorrence we feel against a murderer by taking into our cool
consideration the pleasure he may have in committing the deed, and in
the prospect of gratifying his avarice or his revenge? We are hardly so
formed as to sympathise at the same moment with the assassin and
his victim. The degree of pleasure the former may feel, instead of
extenuating, aggravates his guilt, and shews the depth of his malignity.
Now the mind revolts against this by mere natural antipathy, if it is
itself well-disposed; or the slow process of reason would afford but a
feeble resistance to violence and wrong. The will, which is necessary to
give consistency and promptness to our good intentions, cannot extend so
much candour and courtesy to the antagonist principle of evil: virtue,
to be sincere and practical, cannot be divested entirely of the
blindness and impetuosity of passion! It has been made a plea (half
jest, half earnest) for the horrors of war, that they promote trade
and manufactures. It has been said, as a set-off for the atrocities
practised upon the negro slaves in the West Indies, that without their
blood and sweat, so many millions of people could not have sugar to
sweeten their tea. Fires and murders have been argued to be beneficial,
as they serve to fill the newspapers, and for a subject to talk of--
this is a sort of sophistry that it might be difficult to disprove on
the bare scheme of contingent utility; but on the ground that we have
stated, it must pass for a mere irony. What the proportion between the
good and the evil will really be found in any of the supposed cases,
may be a question to the understanding; but to the imagination and the
heart, that is, to the natural feelings of mankind, it admits of none!

Mr. Bentham, in adjusting the provisions of a penal code, lays too
little stress on the cooperation of the natural prejudices of mankind,
and the habitual feelings of that class of persons for whom they are
more particularly designed. Legislators (we mean writers on legislation)
are philosophers, and governed by their reason: criminals, for whose
controul laws are made, are a set of desperadoes, governed only by their
passions. What wonder that so little progress has been made towards a
mutual understanding between the two parties! They are quite a different
species, and speak a different language, and are sadly at a loss for a
common interpreter between them. Perhaps the Ordinary of Newgate bids
as fair for this office as any one. What should Mr. Bentham, sitting at
ease in his arm-chair, composing his mind before he begins to write by a
prelude on the organ, and looking out at a beautiful prospect when he
is at a loss for an idea, know of the principles of action of rogues,
outlaws, and vagabonds? No more than Montaigne of the motions of his
cat! If sanguine and tender-hearted philanthropists have set on foot an
inquiry into the barbarity and the defects of penal laws, the practical
improvements have been mostly suggested by reformed cut-throats,
turnkeys, and thief-takers. What even can the Honourable House, who when
the Speaker has pronounced the well-known, wished-for sounds "That this
house do now adjourn," retire, after voting a royal crusade or a loan of
millions, to lie on down, and feed on plate in spacious palaces, know
of what passes in the hearts of wretches in garrets and night-cellars,
petty pilferers and marauders, who cut throats and pick pockets with
their own hands? The thing is impossible. The laws of the country are,
therefore, ineffectual and abortive, because they are made by the rich
for the poor, by the wise for the ignorant, by the respectable and
exalted in station for the very scum and refuse of the community. If
Newgate would resolve itself into a committee of the whole Press-yard,
with Jack Ketch at its head, aided by confidential persons from the
county prisons or the Hulks, and would make a clear breast, some _data_
might be found out to proceed upon; but as it is, the _criminal mind_ of
the country is a book sealed, no one has been able to penetrate to the
inside! Mr. Bentham, in his attempts to revise and amend our criminal
jurisprudence, proceeds entirely on his favourite principle of Utility.
Convince highwaymen and house-breakers that it will be for their
interest to reform, and they will reform and lead honest lives;
according to Mr. Bentham. He says, "All men act from calculation, even
madmen reason. " And, in our opinion, he might as well carry this maxim
to Bedlam or St. Luke's, and apply it to the inhabitants, as think to
coerce or overawe the inmates of a gaol, or those whose practices
make them candidates for that distinction, by the mere dry, detailed
convictions of the understanding. Criminals are not to be influenced by
reason; for it is of the very essence of crime to disregard consequences
both to ourselves and others. You may as well preach philosophy to a
drunken man, or to the dead, as to those who are under the instigation
of any mischievous passion. A man is a drunkard, and you tell him he
ought to be sober; he is debauched, and you ask him to reform; he
is idle, and you recommend industry to him as his wisest course; he
gambles, and you remind him that he may be ruined by this foible; he
has lost his character, and you advise him to get into some reputable
service or lucrative situation; vice becomes a habit with him, and you
request him to rouse himself and shake it off; he is starving, and you
warn him that if he breaks the law, he will be hanged. None of this
reasoning reaches the mark it aims at. The culprit, who violates and
suffers the vengeance of the laws, is not the dupe of ignorance, but the
slave of passion, the victim of habit or necessity. To argue with strong
passion, with inveterate habit, with desperate circumstances, is to talk
to the winds. Clownish ignorance may indeed be dispelled, and
taught better; but it is seldom that a criminal is not aware of the
consequences of his act, or has not made up his mind to the alternative.
They are, in general, _too knowing by half_. You tell a person of this
stamp what is his interest; he says he does not care about his interest,
or the world and he differ on that particular. But there is one point on
which he must agree with them, namely, what _they_ think of his conduct,
and that is the only hold you have of him. A man may be callous and
indifferent to what happens to himself; but he is never indifferent to
public opinion, or proof against open scorn and infamy. Shame, then,
not fear, is the sheet-anchor of the law. He who is not afraid of being
pointed at as a _thief_, will not mind a month's hard labour. He who is
prepared to take the life of another, is already reckless of his own.
But every one makes a sorry figure in the pillory; and the being
launched from the New Drop lowers a man in his own opinion. The lawless
and violent spirit, who is hurried by headstrong self-will to break the
laws, does not like to have the ground of pride and obstinacy struck
from under his feet. This is what gives the _swells_ of the metropolis
such a dread of the _tread-mill_--it makes them ridiculous. It must be
confessed, that this very circumstance renders the reform of criminals
nearly hopeless. It is the apprehension of being stigmatized by public
opinion, the fear of what will be thought and said of them, that deters
men from the violation of the laws, while their character remains
unimpeached; but honour once lost, all is lost. The man can never be
himself again! A citizen is like a soldier, a part of a machine, who
submits to certain hardships, privations, and dangers, not for his own
ease, pleasure, profit, or even conscience, but--_for shame_. What is
it that keeps the machine together in either case? Not punishment or
discipline, but sympathy. The soldier mounts the breach or stands in
the trenches, the peasant hedges and ditches, or the mechanic plies his
ceaseless task, because the one will not be called a _coward_, the other
a _rogue_: but let the one turn deserter and the other vagabond, and
there is an end of him. The grinding law of necessity, which is no other
than a name, a breath, loses its force; he is no longer sustained by
the good opinion of others, and he drops out of his place in society,
a useless clog! Mr. Bentham takes a culprit, and puts him into what he
calls a _Panopticon_, that is, a sort of circular prison, with open
cells, like a glass bee-hive. He sits in the middle, and sees all the
other does. He gives him work to do, and lectures him if he does not do
it. He takes liquor from him, and society, and liberty; but he feeds and
clothes him, and keeps him out of mischief; and when he has convinced
him, by force and reason together, that this life is for his good, he
turns him out upon the world a reformed man, and as confident of the
success of his handy-work, as the shoemaker of that which he has just
taken off the last, or the Parisian barber in Sterne, of the buckle
of his wig. "Dip it in the ocean," said the perruquier, "and it will
stand! " But we doubt the durability of our projector's patchwork. Will
our convert to the great principle of Utility work when he is from under
Mr. Bentham's eye, because he was forced to work when under it? Will he
keep sober, because he has been kept from liquor so long? Will he not
return to loose company, because he has had the pleasure of sitting
vis-a-vis with a philosopher of late? Will he not steal, now that his hands
are untied? Will he not take the road, now that it is free to him? Will
he not call his benefactor all the names he can set his tongue to, the
moment his back is turned? All this is more than to be feared. The charm
of criminal life, like that of savage life, consists in liberty, in
hardship, in danger, and in the contempt of death, in one word, in
extraordinary excitement; and he who has tasted of it, will no more
return to regular habits of life, than a man will take to water after
drinking brandy, or than a wild beast will give over hunting its prey.
Miracles never cease, to be sure; but they are not to be had wholesale,
or _to order_. Mr. Owen, who is another of these proprietors and
patentees of reform, has lately got an American savage with him, whom he
carries about in great triumph and complacency, as an antithesis to his
_New View of Society_, and as winding up his reasoning to what it mainly
wanted, an epigrammatic point. Does the benevolent visionary of the
Lanark cotton-mills really think this _natural man_ will act as a foil
to his _artificial man_? Does he for a moment imagine that his _Address
to the higher and middle classes_, with all its advantages of fiction,
makes any thing like so interesting a romance as _Hunter's Captivity
among the North American Indians? _ Has he any thing to shew, in all the
apparatus of New Lanark and its desolate monotony, to excite the thrill
of imagination like the blankets made of wreaths of snow under which the
wild wood-rovers bury themselves for weeks in winter? Or the skin of a
leopard, which our hardy adventurer slew, and which served him for great
coat and bedding? Or the rattle-snake that he found by his side as a
bedfellow? Or his rolling himself into a ball to escape from him? Or his
suddenly placing himself against a tree to avoid being trampled to death
by the herd of wild buffaloes, that came rushing on like the sound of
thunder? Or his account of the huge spiders that prey on bluebottles and
gilded flies in green pathless forests; or of the great Pacific Ocean,
that the natives look upon as the gulf that parts time from eternity,
and that is to waft them to the spirits of their fathers? After all
this, Mr. Hunter must find Mr. Owen and his parallellograms trite and
flat, and will, we suspect, take an opportunity to escape from them!

Mr. Bentham's method of reasoning, though comprehensive and exact,
labours under the defect of most systems--it is too _topical_. It
includes every thing; but it includes every thing alike. It is rather
like an inventory, than a valuation of different arguments. Every
possible suggestion finds a place, so that the mind is distracted as
much as enlightened by this perplexing accuracy. The exceptions seem
as important as the rule. By attending to the minute, we overlook the
great; and in summing up an account, it will not do merely to insist on
the number of items without considering their amount. Our author's
page presents a very nicely dove-tailed mosaic pavement of legal
common-places. We slip and slide over its even surface without being
arrested any where. Or his view of the human mind resembles a map,
rather than a picture: the outline, the disposition is correct, but it
wants colouring and relief. There is a technicality of manner, which
renders his writings of more value to the professional inquirer than
to the general reader. Again, his style is unpopular, not to say
unintelligible. He writes a language of his own, that _darkens
knowledge_. His works have been translated into French--they ought to
be translated into English. People wonder that Mr. Bentham has not been
prosecuted for the boldness and severity of some of his invectives. He
might wrap up high treason in one of his inextricable periods, and
it would never find its way into Westminster-Hall. He is a kind of
Manuscript author--he writes a cypher-hand, which the vulgar have no key
to. The construction of his sentences is a curious framework with pegs
and hooks to hang his thoughts upon, for his own use and guidance,
but almost out of the reach of every body else. It is a barbarous
philosophical jargon, with all the repetitions, parentheses,
formalities, uncouth nomenclature and verbiage of law-Latin; and what
makes it worse, it is not mere verbiage, but has a great deal of
acuteness and meaning in it, which you would be glad to pick out if you
could. In short, Mr. Bentham writes as if he was allowed but a single
sentence to express his whole view of a subject in, and as if, should he
omit a single circumstance or step of the argument, it would be lost to
the world for ever, like an estate by a flaw in the title-deeds.
Owen and his parallellograms trite and
flat, and will, we suspect, take an opportunity to escape from them!

Mr. Bentham's method of reasoning, though comprehensive and exact,
labours under the defect of most systems--it is too _topical_. It
includes every thing; but it includes every thing alike. It is rather
like an inventory, than a valuation of different arguments. Every
possible suggestion finds a place, so that the mind is distracted as
much as enlightened by this perplexing accuracy. The exceptions seem
as important as the rule. By attending to the minute, we overlook the
great; and in summing up an account, it will not do merely to insist on
the number of items without considering their amount. Our author's
page presents a very nicely dove-tailed mosaic pavement of legal
common-places. We slip and slide over its even surface without being
arrested any where. Or his view of the human mind resembles a map,
rather than a picture: the outline, the disposition is correct, but it
wants colouring and relief. There is a technicality of manner, which
renders his writings of more value to the professional inquirer than
to the general reader. Again, his style is unpopular, not to say
unintelligible. He writes a language of his own, that _darkens
knowledge_. His works have been translated into French--they ought to
be translated into English. People wonder that Mr. Bentham has not been
prosecuted for the boldness and severity of some of his invectives. He
might wrap up high treason in one of his inextricable periods, and
it would never find its way into Westminster-Hall. He is a kind of
Manuscript author--he writes a cypher-hand, which the vulgar have no key
to. The construction of his sentences is a curious framework with pegs
and hooks to hang his thoughts upon, for his own use and guidance,
but almost out of the reach of every body else. It is a barbarous
philosophical jargon, with all the repetitions, parentheses,
formalities, uncouth nomenclature and verbiage of law-Latin; and what
makes it worse, it is not mere verbiage, but has a great deal of
acuteness and meaning in it, which you would be glad to pick out if you
could. In short, Mr. Bentham writes as if he was allowed but a single
sentence to express his whole view of a subject in, and as if, should he
omit a single circumstance or step of the argument, it would be lost to
the world for ever, like an estate by a flaw in the title-deeds. This
is over-rating the importance of our own discoveries, and mistaking the
nature and object of language altogether. Mr. Bentham has _acquired_
this disability--it is not natural to him. His admirable little work _On
Usury_, published forty years ago, is clear, easy, and vigorous. But Mr.
Bentham has shut himself up since then "in nook monastic," conversing
only with followers of his own, or with "men of Ind," and has
endeavoured to overlay his natural humour, sense, spirit, and style
with the dust and cobwebs of an obscure solitude. The best of it is, he
thinks his present mode of expressing himself perfect, and that whatever
may be objected to his law or logic, no one can find the least fault
with the purity, simplicity, and perspicuity of his style.

Mr. Bentham, in private life, is an amiable and exemplary character.
He is a little romantic, or so; and has dissipated part of a handsome
fortune in practical speculations. He lends an ear to plausible
projectors, and, if he cannot prove them to be wrong in their premises
or their conclusions, thinks himself bound _in reason_ to stake his
money on the venture. Strict logicians are licensed visionaries. Mr.
Bentham is half-brother to the late Mr. Speaker Abbott[A]--_Proh pudor_!
He was educated at Eton, and still takes our novices to task about
a passage in Homer, or a metre in Virgil. He was afterwards at the
University, and he has described the scruples of an ingenuous
youthful mind about subscribing the articles, in a passage in his
_Church-of-Englandism_, which smacks of truth and honour both, and does
one good to read it in an age, when "to be honest" (or not to laugh at
the very idea of honesty) "is to be one man picked out of ten thousand! "
Mr. Bentham relieves his mind sometimes, after the fatigue of study, by
playing on a fine old organ, and has a relish for Hogarth's prints. He
turns wooden utensils in a lathe for exercise, and fancies he can turn
men in the same manner. He has no great fondness for poetry, and can
hardly extract a moral out of Shakespear. His house is warmed and
lighted by steam. He is one of those who prefer the artificial to the
natural in most things, and think the mind of man omnipotent. He has a
great contempt for out-of-door prospects, for green fields and
trees, and is for referring every thing to Utility. There is a little
narrowness in this; for if all the sources of satisfaction are taken
away, what is to become of utility itself? It is, indeed, the great
fault of this able and extraordinary man, that he has concentrated his
faculties and feelings too entirely on one subject and pursuit, and has
not "looked enough abroad into universality. "[B]


[Footnote A: Now Lord Colchester. ]

[Footnote B: Lord Bacon's Advancement of Learning. ]





* * * * *





WILLIAM GODWIN



The Spirit of the Age was never more fully-shewn than in its treatment
of this writer--its love of paradox and change, its dastard submission
to prejudice and to the fashion of the day. Five-and-twenty years ago he
was in the very zenith of a sultry and unwholesome popularity; he blazed
as a sun in the firmament of reputation; no one was more talked of, more
looked up to, more sought after, and wherever liberty, truth, justice
was the theme, his name was not far off:--now he has sunk below the
horizon, and enjoys the serene twilight of a doubtful immortality. Mr.
Godwin, during his lifetime, has secured to himself the triumphs and the
mortifications of an extreme notoriety and of a sort of posthumous fame.

His bark, after being tossed in the revolutionary tempest, now raised to
heaven by all the fury of popular breath, now almost dashed in pieces,
and buried in the quicksands of ignorance, or scorched with the
lightning of momentary indignation, at length floats on the calm wave
that is to bear it down the stream of time. Mr. Godwin's person is not
known, he is not pointed out in the street, his conversation is not
courted, his opinions are not asked, he is at the head of no cabal, he
belongs to no party in the State, he has no train of admirers, no
one thinks it worth his while even to traduce and vilify him, he has
scarcely friend or foe, the world make a point (as Goldsmith used to
say) of taking no more notice of him than if such an individual had
never existed; he is to all ordinary intents and purposes dead and
buried; but the author of _Political Justice_ and of _Caleb Williams_
can never die, his name is an abstraction in letters, his works are
standard in the history of intellect. He is thought of now like any
eminent writer a hundred-and-fifty years ago, or just as he will be
a hundred-and-fifty years hence. He knows this, and smiles in silent
mockery of himself, reposing on the monument of his fame--

"Sedet, in eternumque sedebit infelix Theseus. "

No work in our time gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the
country as the celebrated _Enquiry concerning Political Justice_. Tom
Paine was considered for the time as a Tom Fool to him; Paley an old
woman; Edmund Burke a flashy sophist. Truth, moral truth, it was
supposed, had here taken up its abode; and these were the oracles of
thought. "Throw aside your books of chemistry," said Wordsworth to a
young man, a student in the Temple, "and read Godwin on Necessity. " Sad
necessity! Fatal reverse! Is truth then so variable? Is it one thing at
twenty, and another at forty? Is it at a burning heat in 1793, and below
_zero_ in 1814? Not so, in the name of manhood and of common sense! Let
us pause here a little. --Mr. Godwin indulged in extreme opinions, and
carried with him all the most sanguine and fearless understandings of
the time. What then? Because those opinions were overcharged, were they
therefore altogether groundless? Is the very God of our idolatry all of
a sudden to become an abomination and an anathema? Could so many young
men of talent, of education, and of principle have been hurried away by
what had neither truth, nor nature, not one particle of honest feeling
nor the least shew of reason in it? Is the _Modern Philosophy_ (as it
has been called) at one moment a youthful bride, and the next a withered
beldame, like the false Duessa in Spenser? Or is the vaunted edifice
of Reason, like his House of Pride, gorgeous in front, and dazzling to
approach, while "its hinder parts are ruinous, decayed, and old? " Has
the main prop, which supported the mighty fabric, been shaken and given
way under the strong grasp of some Samson; or has it not rather been
undermined by rats and vermin? At one time, it almost seemed, that "if
this failed,

"The pillar'd firmament was rottenness,
And earth's base built of stubble:"

now scarce a shadow of it remains, it is crumbled to dust, nor is it
even talked of! "What then, went ye forth for to see, a reed shaken
with the wind? " Was it for this that our young gownsmen of the greatest
expectation and promise, versed in classic lore, steeped in dialectics,
armed at all points for the foe, well read, well nurtured, well provided
for, left the University and the prospect of lawn sleeves, tearing
asunder the shackles of the free born spirit, and the cobwebs of
school-divinity, to throw themselves at the feet of the new Gamaliel,
and learn wisdom from him? Was it for this, that students at the bar,
acute, inquisitive, sceptical (here only wild enthusiasts) neglected for
a while the paths of preferment and the law as too narrow, tortuous, and
unseemly to bear the pure and broad light of reason? Was it for this,
that students in medicine missed their way to Lecturerships and the top
of their profession, deeming lightly of the health of the body, and
dreaming only of the renovation of society and the march of mind? Was
it to this that Mr. Southey's _Inscriptions_ pointed? to this that Mr.
Coleridge's _Religious Musings_ tended? Was it for this, that Mr. Godwin
himself sat with arms folded, and, "like Cato, gave his little senate
laws? " Or rather, like another Prospero, uttered syllables that with
their enchanted breath were to change the world, and might almost stop
the stars in their courses? Oh! and is all forgot? Is this sun of
intellect blotted from the sky? Or has it suffered total eclipse? Or is
it we who make the fancied gloom, by looking at it through the paltry,
broken, stained fragments of our own interests and prejudices? Were we
fools then, or are we dishonest now? Or was the impulse of the mind less
likely to be true and sound when it arose from high thought and warm
feeling, than afterwards, when it was warped and debased by the example,
the vices, and follies of the world?

The fault, then, of Mr. Godwin's philosophy, in one word, was too much
ambition--"by that sin fell the angels! " He conceived too nobly of his
fellows (the most unpardonable crime against them, for there is nothing
that annoys our self-love so much as being complimented on imaginary
achievements, to which we are wholly unequal)--he raised the standard
of morality above the reach of humanity, and by directing virtue to the
most airy and romantic heights, made her path dangerous, solitary, and
impracticable. The author of the _Political Justice_ took abstract
reason for the rule of conduct, and abstract good for its end. He places
the human mind on an elevation, from which it commands a view of the
whole line of moral consequences; and requires it to conform its acts to
the larger and more enlightened conscience which it has thus acquired.
He absolves man from the gross and narrow ties of sense, custom,
authority, private and local attachment, in order that he may devote
himself to the boundless pursuit of universal benevolence. Mr. Godwin
gives no quarter to the amiable weaknesses of our nature, nor does he
stoop to avail himself of the supplementary aids of an imperfect virtue.
Gratitude, promises, friendship, family affection give way, not that
they may be merged in the opposite vices or in want of principle; but
that the void may be filled up by the disinterested love of good, and
the dictates of inflexible justice, which is "the law of laws, and
sovereign of sovereigns. " All minor considerations yield, in his system,
to the stern sense of duty, as they do, in the ordinary and established
ones, to the voice of necessity. Mr. Godwin's theory and that of more
approved reasoners differ only in this, that what are with them the
exceptions, the extreme cases, he makes the every-day rule. No one
denies that on great occasions, in moments of fearful excitement, or
when a mighty object is at stake, the lesser and merely instrumental
points of duty are to be sacrificed without remorse at the shrine of
patriotism, of honour, and of conscience. But the disciple of the _New
School_ (no wonder it found so many impugners, even in its own bosom! )
is to be always the hero of duty; the law to which he has bound himself
never swerves nor relaxes; his feeling of what is right is to be at
all times wrought up to a pitch of enthusiastic self-devotion; he must
become the unshrinking martyr and confessor of the public good. If it
be said that this scheme is chimerical and impracticable on ordinary
occasions, and to the generality of mankind, well and good; but those
who accuse the author of having trampled on the common feelings and
prejudices of mankind in wantonness or insult, or without wishing to
substitute something better (and only unattainable, because it is
better) in their stead, accuse him wrongfully. We may not be able to
launch the bark of our affections on the ocean-tide of humanity, we
may be forced to paddle along its shores, or shelter in its creeks and
rivulets: but we have no right to reproach the bold and adventurous
pilot, who dared us to tempt the uncertain abyss, with our own want of
courage or of skill, or with the jealousies and impatience, which deter
us from undertaking, or might prevent us from accomplishing the voyage!

The _Enquiry concerning Political Justice_ (it was urged by its
favourers and defenders at the time, and may still be so, without either
profaneness or levity) is a metaphysical and logical commentary on some
of the most beautiful and striking texts of Scripture. Mr. Godwin is
a mixture of the Stoic and of the Christian philosopher. To break the
force of the vulgar objections and outcry that have been raised against
the Modern Philosophy, as if it were a new and monstrous birth in
morals, it may be worth noticing, that volumes of sermons have been
written to excuse the founder of Christianity for not including
friendship and private affection among its golden rules, but rather
excluding them. [A] Moreover, the answer to the question, "Who is thy
neighbour? " added to the divine precept, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour
as thyself," is the same as in the exploded pages of our author,--"He to
whom we can do most good. " In determining this point, we were not to be
influenced by any extrinsic or collateral considerations, by our own
predilections, or the expectations of others, by our obligations to them
or any services they might be able to render us, by the climate they
were born in, by the house they lived in, by rank or religion, or party,
or personal ties, but by the abstract merits, the pure and unbiassed
justice of the case. The artificial helps and checks to moral conduct
were set aside as spurious and unnecessary, and we came at once to the
grand and simple question--"In what manner we could best contribute to
the greatest possible good? " This was the paramount obligation in all
cases whatever, from which we had no right to free ourselves upon any
idle or formal pretext, and of which each person was to judge for
himself, under the infallible authority of his own opinion and the
inviolable sanction of his self-approbation. "There was the rub that
made _philosophy_ of so short life! " Mr. Godwin's definition of morals
was the same as the admired one of law, _reason without passion_; but
with the unlimited scope of private opinion, and in a boundless field of
speculation (for nothing less would satisfy the pretensions of the New
School), there was danger that the unseasoned novice might substitute
some pragmatical conceit of his own for the rule of right reason, and
mistake a heartless indifference for a superiority to more natural and
generous feelings. Our ardent and dauntless reformer followed out the
moral of the parable of the Good Samaritan into its most rigid and
repulsive consequences with a pen of steel, and let fall his "trenchant
blade" on every vulnerable point of human infirmity; but there is a want
in his system of the mild and persuasive tone of the Gospel, where "all
is conscience and tender heart. " Man was indeed screwed up, by mood and
figure, into a logical machine, that was to forward the public good with
the utmost punctuality and effect, and it might go very well on smooth
ground and under favourable circumstances; but would it work up-hill
or _against the grain_? It was to be feared that the proud Temple of
Reason, which at a distance and in stately supposition shone like the
palaces of the New Jerusalem, might (when placed on actual ground) be
broken up into the sordid styes of sensuality, and the petty huckster's
shops of self-interest! Every man (it was proposed--"so ran the tenour
of the bond") was to be a Regulus, a Codrus, a Cato, or a Brutus--every
woman a Mother of the Gracchi.

"------------It was well said,
And 'tis a kind of good deed to say well. "

But heroes on paper might degenerate into vagabonds in practice,
Corinnas into courtezans. Thus a refined and permanent individual
attachment is intended to supply the place and avoid the inconveniences
of marriage; but vows of eternal constancy, without church security, are
found to be fragile. A member of the _ideal_ and perfect commonwealth of
letters lends another a hundred pounds for immediate and pressing use;
and when he applies for it again, the borrower has still more need of it
than he, and retains it for his own especial, which is tantamount to the
public good. The Exchequer of pure reason, like that of the State, never
refunds. The political as well as the religious fanatic appeals from
the over-weening opinion and claims of others to the highest and most
impartial tribunal, namely, his own breast. Two persons agree to
live together in Chambers on principles of pure equality and mutual
assistance--but when it comes to the push, one of them finds that the
other always insists on his fetching water from the pump in Hare-court,
and cleaning his shoes for him. A modest assurance was not the least
indispensable virtue in the new perfectibility code; and it was hence
discovered to be a scheme, like other schemes where there are all prizes
and no blanks, for the accommodation of the enterprizing and cunning, at
the expence of the credulous and honest. This broke up the system, and
left no good odour behind it! Reason has become a sort of bye-word, and
philosophy has "fallen first into a fasting, then into a sadness,
then into a decline, and last, into the dissolution of which we all
complain! " This is a worse error than the former: we may be said to have
"lost the immortal part of ourselves, and what remains is beastly! "
The point of view from which this matter may be fairly considered, is
two-fold, and may be stated thus:--In the first place, it by no means
follows, because reason is found not to be the only infallible or safe
rule of conduct, that it is no rule at all; or that we are to discard it
altogether with derision and ignominy. On the contrary, if not the sole,
it is the principal ground of action; it is "the guide, the stay and
anchor of our purest thoughts, and soul of all our moral being. " In
proportion as we strengthen and expand this principle, and bring our
affections and subordinate, but perhaps more powerful motives of action
into harmony with it, it will not admit of a doubt that we advance to
the goal of perfection, and answer the ends of our creation, those ends
which not only morality enjoins, but which religion sanctions. If with
the utmost stretch of reason, man cannot (as some seemed inclined to
suppose) soar up to the God, and quit the ground of human frailty, yet,
stripped wholly of it, he sinks at once into the brute. If it cannot
stand alone, in its naked simplicity, but requires other props to
buttress it up, or ornaments to set it off; yet without it the moral
structure would fall flat and dishonoured to the ground. Private reason
is that which raises the individual above his mere animal instincts,
appetites and passions: public reason in its gradual progress separates
the savage from the civilized state. Without the one, men would resemble
wild beasts in their dens; without the other, they would be speedily
converted into hordes of barbarians or banditti. Sir Walter Scott, in
his zeal to restore the spirit of loyalty, of passive obedience and
non-resistance as an acknowledgment for his having been created a
Baronet by a Prince of the House of Brunswick, may think it a fine thing
to return in imagination to the good old times, "when in Auvergne
alone, there were three hundred nobles whose most ordinary actions were
robbery, rape, and murder," when the castle of each Norman baron was
a strong hold from which the lordly proprietor issued to oppress and
plunder the neighbouring districts, and when the Saxon peasantry
were treated by their gay and gallant tyrants as a herd of loathsome
swine--but for our own parts we beg to be excused; we had rather live
in the same age with the author of Waverley and Blackwood's Magazine.
Reason is the meter and alnager in civil intercourse, by which each
person's upstart and contradictory pretensions are weighed and approved
or found wanting, and without which it could not subsist, any more than
traffic or the exchange of commodities could be carried on without
weights and measures. It is the medium of knowledge, and the polisher of
manners, by creating common interests and ideas. Or in the words of a
contemporary writer, "Reason is the queen of the moral world, the soul
of the universe, the lamp of human life, the pillar of society, the
foundation of law, the beacon of nations, the golden chain let down from
heaven, which links all accountable and all intelligent natures in one
common system--and in the vain strife between fanatic innovation and
fanatic prejudice, we are exhorted to dethrone this queen of the world,
to blot out this light of the mind, to deface this fair column, to break
in pieces this golden chain! We are to discard and throw from us with
loud taunts and bitter execrations that reason, which has been the lofty
theme of the philosopher, the poet, the moralist, and the divine, whose
name was not first named to be abused by the enthusiasts of the French
Revolution, or to be blasphemed by the madder enthusiasts, the advocates
of Divine Right, but which is coeval with, and inseparable from the
nature and faculties of man--is the image of his Maker stamped upon him
at his birth, the understanding breathed into him with the breath of
life, and in the participation and improvement of which alone he is
raised above the brute creation and his own physical nature! "--The
overstrained and ridiculous pretensions of monks and ascetics were never
thought to justify a return to unbridled licence of manners, or the
throwing aside of all decency. The hypocrisy, cruelty, and fanaticism,
often attendant on peculiar professions of sanctity, have not banished
the name of religion from the world. Neither can "the unreasonableness
of the reason" of some modern sciolists "so unreason our reason," as to
debar us of the benefit of this principle in future, or to disfranchise
us of the highest privilege of our nature. In the second place, if it is
admitted that Reason alone is not the sole and self-sufficient ground of
morals, it is to Mr. Godwin that we are indebted for having settled the
point. No one denied or distrusted this principle (before his time) as
the absolute judge and interpreter in all questions of difficulty;
and if this is no longer the case, it is because he has taken this
principle, and followed it into its remotest consequences with more
keenness of eye and steadiness of hand than any other expounder of
ethics. His grand work is (at least) an _experimentum crucis_ to shew
the weak sides and imperfections of human reason as the sole law of
human action. By overshooting the mark, or by "flying an eagle flight,
forth and right on," he has pointed out the limit or line of separation,
between what is practicable and what is barely conceivable--by imposing
impossible tasks on the naked strength of the will, he has discovered
how far it is or is not in our power to dispense with the illusions of
sense, to resist the calls of affection, to emancipate ourselves from
the force of habit; and thus, though he has not said it himself, has
enabled others to say to the towering aspirations after good, and to the
over-bearing pride of human intellect--"Thus far shalt thou come, and no
farther! " Captain Parry would be thought to have rendered a service
to navigation and his country, no less by proving that there is no
North-West Passage, than if he had ascertained that there is one: so Mr.
Godwin has rendered an essential service to moral science, by attempting
(in vain) to pass the Arctic Circle and Frozen Regions, where the
understanding is no longer warmed by the affections, nor fanned by the
breeze of fancy! This is the effect of all bold, original, and powerful
thinking, that it either discovers the truth, or detects where error
lies; and the only crime with which Mr. Godwin can be charged as a
political and moral reasoner is, that he has displayed a more ardent
spirit, and a more independent activity of thought than others, in
establishing the fallacy (if fallacy it be) of an old popular prejudice
that _the Just and True were one_, by "championing it to the Outrance,"
and in the final result placing the Gothic structure of human virtue
on an humbler, but a wider and safer foundation than it had hitherto
occupied in the volumes and systems of the learned. Mr. Godwin is an
inventor in the regions of romance, as well as a skilful and hardy
explorer of those of moral truth. _Caleb Williams_ and _St. Leon_ are
two of the most splendid and impressive works of the imagination that
have appeared in our times. It is not merely that these novels are very
well for a philosopher to have produced--they are admirable and complete
in themselves, and would not lead you to suppose that the author, who is
so entirely at home in human character and dramatic situation, had ever
dabbled in logic or metaphysics. The first of these, particularly, is
a master-piece, both as to invention and execution. The romantic and
chivalrous principle of the love of personal fame is embodied in the
finest possible manner in the character of Falkland;[B] as in Caleb
Williams (who is not the first, but the second character in the piece)
we see the very demon of curiosity personified. Perhaps the art with
which these two characters are contrived to relieve and set off each
other, has never been surpassed in any work of fiction, with the
exception of the immortal satire of Cervantes. The restless and
inquisitive spirit of Caleb Williams, in search and in possession of
his patron's fatal secret, haunts the latter like a second conscience,
plants stings in his tortured mind, fans the flame of his jealous
ambition, struggling with agonized remorse; and the hapless but
noble-minded Falkland at length falls a martyr to the persecution of
that morbid and overpowering interest, of which his mingled virtues and
vices have rendered him the object. We conceive no one ever began Caleb
Williams that did not read it through: no one that ever read it could
possibly forget it, or speak of it after any length of time, but with an
impression as if the events and feelings had been personal to himself.
This is the case also with the story of St. Leon, which, with less
dramatic interest and intensity of purpose, is set off by a more
gorgeous and flowing eloquence, and by a crown of preternatural imagery,
that waves over it like a palm-tree! It is the beauty and the charm of
Mr. Godwin's descriptions that the reader identifies himself with the
author; and the secret of this is, that the author has identified
himself with his personages. Indeed, he has created them. They are the
proper issue of his brain, lawfully begot, not foundlings, nor the
"bastards of his art. " He is not an indifferent, callous spectator of
the scenes which he himself pourtrays, but without seeming to feel them.
There is no look of patch-work and plagiarism, the beggarly copiousness
of borrowed wealth; no tracery-work from worm-eaten manuscripts, from
forgotten chronicles, nor piecing out of vague traditions with fragments
and snatches of old ballads, so that the result resembles a gaudy,
staring transparency, in which you cannot distinguish the daubing of the
painter from the light that shines through the flimsy colours and gives
them brilliancy. Here all is clearly made out with strokes of the
pencil, by fair, not by factitious means. Our author takes a given
subject from nature or from books, and then fills it up with the ardent
workings of his own mind, with the teeming and audible pulses of his own
heart. The effect is entire and satisfactory in proportion. The work
(so to speak) and the author are one. We are not puzzled to decide upon
their respective pretensions. In reading Mr. Godwin's novels, we know
what share of merit the author has in them. In reading the _Scotch
Novels_, we are perpetually embarrassed in asking ourselves this
question; and perhaps it is not altogether a false modesty that prevents
the editor from putting his name in the title-page--he is (for any thing
we know to the contrary) only a more voluminous sort of Allen-a-Dale.
At least, we may claim this advantage for the English author, that the
chains with which he rivets our attention are forged out of his own
thoughts, link by link, blow for blow, with glowing enthusiasm: we see
the genuine ore melted in the furnace of fervid feeling, and moulded
into stately and _ideal_ forms; and this is so far better than peeping
into an old iron shop, or pilfering from a dealer in marine stores!
There is one drawback, however, attending this mode of proceeding, which
attaches generally, indeed, to all originality of composition; namely,
that it has a tendency to a certain degree of monotony. He who draws
upon his own resources, easily comes to an end of his wealth. Mr.
Godwin, in all his writings, dwells upon one idea or exclusive view of a
subject, aggrandises a sentiment, exaggerates a character, or pushes an
argument to extremes, and makes up by the force of style and continuity
of feeling for what he wants in variety of incident or ease of manner.
This necessary defect is observable in his best works, and is still more
so in Fleetwood and Mandeville; the one of which, compared with his more
admired performances, is mawkish, and the other morbid. Mr. Godwin is
also an essayist, an historian--in short, what is he not, that belongs
to the character of an indefatigable and accomplished author?