Note 329.1 — UTILITARIANISM.

Among living thinkers there is none who stands before the public more prominently as the exponent of the Utilitarian ethics than John Stuart Mill.[329.1] But whatever may be the merits of this distinguished writer in the domain of logic, politics, and economics, which seem most cognate to his genius, there can be little doubt in the minds of thoughtful persons that his book on Utilitarianism has done more to undermine than to sustain the doctrine which it professes to expound. And the reason of this lies in a cause which is not less condemnatory of the doctrine than it is complimentary to its champion. Mr. Mill is too good a man to be the consistent advocate of a system which, as compared with other systems, is fundamentally bad. He is too earnest an apostle of the real moral progress of man to be a thoroughgoing disciple of a school whose natural element is Epicurean ease, sensual indulgence, and prudential calculation. His heart revolted against the degrading tendency of a philosophy which gave a primary importance only to what is low, and left the highest elements of human nature to make a respectable show before men with a borrowed and secondary vitality. But at the same time, he was a disciple of the school, and the son of his father, and thus by education and a sort of intellectual heritage, his head was committed to a doctrine for which his heart was naturally a great deal too good. The consequence was a sort of sophistry which, while we see through it, we cannot but admire. Departing from the original idea of his school, that pleasure is the only good, and that pleasures differ from one another only in intensity, he interpolates into the general idea of quantity of happiness the discriminating element of quality; and thus is thrown back virtually on those innate ideas which it is the characteristic boast of his school to have discarded. For the essential difference in the quality of high and low pleasures is not a matter to be proved by any external induction, but springs directly out of the intellectual and emotional nature of man, asserting its own innate superiority precisely as light asserts itself over darkness, and order over confusion. And thus, while he defends Utilitarianism successfully, so far as results go, he succeeds only by throwing overboard all that is most distinctive in the doctrine, and adopting secretly all that is most peculiar to the teaching of his opponents. In ancient times, between Epicureanism and Stoicism there was a distinct and well-marked line of demarcation, which, whether in speculation or in practice, no person could miss; now under Mr. Mill’s manipulation, this distinction vanishes; the love of pleasure with which he started is sublimated into the love of virtue, and an ideal enthusiasm for the greatest possible happiness of all sentient creatures is substituted for the real and direct stimulus of pleasure which every man understands; and a Joseph Mazzini consecrating his whole life with the most intense enthusiasm and the most severe self-denial to the ideal of a possible Italian republic, is as much an Epicurean as David Hume sneering at all enthusiasm, and pleasing his soul with the delicate flatteries of fair dames in a Parisian saloon. This is to confound all things, and to reduce the whole affair to a fence of words rather than to a battle of principle. Nor need we be surprised at such a result; for the whole platform of morality in modern times has been so elevated through the influence of Christianity that Epicureanism to win a hearing is constrained to profess a standard which shall not fall beneath that laid down in the Sermon on the Mount or in the 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians; and to do this with nothing but the individual selfish love of pleasure to start with, requires, it may be imagined, a very considerable amount of dialectic jugglery and shifting glamoury of words. One is forced to explain—keeping Bentham’s language—how the original, individual, and personal love of pleasure, which is and must be selfishness, manages from mere external considerations, for such only are left open by the deniers of innate ideas, to take the shape of benevolence. Like theologians who are bound to stick to an unreasonable creed, and yet, to save its credit, must make it appear reasonable, the Utilitarians, in striving to accommodate the principles of the lowest theory of morals to the demands of the highest, have not escaped the awkwardness of the strategist who, while making a real retreat, plays off some movements that look like an advance. Only in this case the strategist knows that he is deceiving his soldiers, and deceiving the enemy; whereas the logician who dexterously assumes a new position while seeming to maintain his old one is the happy victim of his own fallacies. He has changed front by a manœuvre which many persons may be too stupid to observe, and he has saved himself from the disagreeableness of a formal recantation. Such dexterous shifts are the convenient refuge of all one-sided theorists who insist on taking nature to school, and trimming human souls, like trees in a fruit-garden, after their own favourite pattern. Meanwhile nature goes on heaving up her strong moralities from original pure fountains, regardless alike of the intense one-eyed dogmatism of the founders of ethical schools, and the ingenious apologies of their disciples, and makes preachers, as she makes poets, by inspiration, not by induction.