UTILITARIANISM.

Of recent British phenomena in the domain of ethical philosophy, what is called Utilitarianism is the most notable, certainly the most noisy. If, indeed, there is anything distinctive in the most recent tone of philosophic thought and sentiment in this country, apart from speculations springing out of pure physical science, it is this very thing, or something that claims close kindred with it. It is talked of in the streets and commented on in the closet; and numbering, as it does, amongst its advocates some of the most astute intellects of the age, it certainly deserves an attentive examination. No doubt its merits, whatever they be, are likely to fall short of its pretensions; for never was a system ushered in with a greater flourish of trumpets and a more stirring consciousness on the part of its promulgators that a new gospel was being preached which was to save the world at last from centuries of hereditary mistake. At the watchword of the system, shot from Edinburgh to Westminster more than a hundred years ago, the son of a London attorney felt “the scales fall from his eyes;” all was now clear that had hitherto been dim; a distinct test was revealed for marking out by a sharp line a domain where, previous to the arrival of the great discriminator, all had been mere floating clouds, shifting mists, and aërial hallucinations; the unsubstantial idealism of Plato and the unreasonable asceticism of the New Testament were destined at length to disappear; only let schools be established for the creation of universal intelligence to assert itself by universal suffrage, and the redemption of the world from imaginary morality and superstitious sentiment would be complete. This, so far as my observation has gone, is the sort of tone under the inspiration of which the doctrine of Utility has been proclaimed to the world; and that I am not exaggerating but rather understating the self-gratulation of the school, is evident from the fact that Dr. Southwood Smith, one of Bentham’s most admiring disciples, actually believed and printed that his discovery of the principle of utility marked an era in moral philosophy as important as that achieved for physical science by Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of the principle of gravitation. Nor was Dr. Smith at all singular in this tone of transcendental laudation. The dogmatism which, as we shall see, was a characteristic feature in the intellectual character of Bentham, was inherited more or less by most of his disciples; and the importance which they attribute to themselves and their own discoveries is only surpassed by the superciliousness with which they ignore whatever has been done by their predecessors. This ignoring of the past, indeed, to the best of my judgment, seems to be the radical defect, not only of the Benthamites, but of the great body of our British philosophers from Locke downwards; we do not start from a large and impartial survey of the inherited results of thought, so much as from some point of local or sectional prominence; our petty systems are of the nature of a reaction rather than an architecture, and like all reactions are one-sided in their direction and extravagant in their estimate of their own importance. If scholars sometimes make their learning useless by their ignorance of the present, the men of the present are not less apt to make their intellectual position ridiculous by ignoring, misunderstanding, or misrepresenting their relation to the past;—for a large appreciation of what has been achieved by our predecessors alone can guarantee a just estimate of the true value of our own labours. All judgments are comparative; and as Primrose Hill is a mighty mountain to the boy born within the chime of the Bow Bells, so Locke and Hume and Bentham may be taken for the greatest captains of thinking by men to whom Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are unknown.

The Utilitarian school, therefore, judged by its name, and by its favourite shibboleth, has no distinctive character; and its chosen appellation merely shows an utter deficiency of the first principles of a scientific nomenclature. To say that morality consists in happiness, falls logically under the same category with the proposition that a cat is an animal—we knew that; but what we wish to know is, by what differentiating marks a cat is distinguished from other animals, and specially from others of the feline family. Wherein does the special happiness of the creature called Man consist? Aristotle, to my thinking, answered that question with as much precision as it ever can be answered, and neither Hume nor Bentham added anything to his definition. So far as these spokesmen of modern ethics said that virtue consisted in acting according to reason, as necessarily involving the greatest happiness of the reasonable being called Man, they said what was quite true, but nothing that was new; they merely repeated the Stagirite, putting the element of εὐδαιμονία into the van, which he had wisely kept in the rear. So far as they went beyond this, they said what was neither new nor true, but only a refurbishment of the old doctrine of Epicurus, that for man, as for beast, pleasure is the only good, and there is no need of a distinctive phraseology for the happiness of creatures so essentially the same. What then is the distinctive character of Utilitarianism, if we fail to discover it in its name? for that the school, as a matter of fact, does stand on a very distinct basis, and in an attitude of very decided antagonism to other systems, is unquestioned. Between Paley, the model churchman of the eighteenth century, and Bentham, the stereotyped hater of all churchmen, churches, and creeds, there is no doubt a great gap; still there is a strong family likeness even between these two extremes of the school; and the point in which this likeness asserts itself we think may be best expressed by the phrase Externalism. From Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury down to Alexander Bain of Aberdeen, the morality of the Utilitarians is a morality in which the moral virtue of the inner soul is as much as possible denied, and the moral virtue of outward institutional or other machinery as much as possible asserted. Look everywhere for the origin of right and wrong—only not in the soul. The kingdom of heaven, according to the prophets of this gospel, is not within you, but without. This, if I am not mistaken, is the keynote which gives a unity and a significance to all the variations of Utilitarianism from Bentham to Bain. Let us hear it in their own words: “What one expects to find in an ethical principle is something that points out some external consideration as a means of warranting and guiding the internal sentiments of approbation and disapprobation:” so Bentham. “Conscience is moulded on external authority as its type.” “Utility sets up an outward standard in the room of an inward, being the substitution of a regard to consequences for a mere unreasoning sentiment or feeling:” so Bain. “The contest between the morality which appeals to an external standard and that which grounds itself on internal conviction, is the contest of progressive morality against stationary; of reason and argument against the deification of mere opinion and habit:” so Mill. The assumptions implied in these last sentences, no less than the proposition stated, are peculiarly interesting. They are redolent of all that narrowness, exclusiveness, and dogmatism, which we have already noticed as so characteristic of Bentham. It is assumed that the advocates of an innate morality hold it to be a thing that acts apart from, or contrary to reason. It is assumed that moral progress is possible only under the action of an ethical system founded on the doctrine of consequences, whereas experience has proved that a morality of motives, such as Christianity contains, is as much capable of expansion and of new applications as any other morality. It is assumed that all our sentiments and feelings, that is, the whole emotional part of our nature, is to be supposed false, till its right to exist and to energize shall have been approved by reason. But what if emotions be primary sources of all moral life, which reason indeed may examine, but which it has no more authority to disown than it has power to create? What if the emotions and the sentiments, which you treat with such disrespect, really supply the steam without which your curious ratiocinative machinery were utterly worthless? But these questions anticipate part of our coming argument. Meanwhile let Externalism stand here as the only significant designation for the system of ethics which we are now to examine; and let the word Utility be remitted to that limbo of vagueness and confusion whence it originally came forth.

I said above that Mr. Locke was a sensible man; and it is nothing contrary to this to admit that by the incautious use of one or two strong similes—“the empty cabinet, the sheet of blank paper, and the dark room,”—he became the originator of a school which made itself famous by the ingenious maintenance of the nonsense that judgment and sensation are the same thing. A vain Frenchman, pleased to utter glittering paradoxes in gay saloons, might say this, might even go so far as to parade the proposition that if horses had only possessed human hands they would have been men, and if men had been armed with equine hoofs they would have been horses; such paradoxes were, no doubt, a logical deduction from the doctrine that sensation is the father of ideas, and that all internal faculties are the result of mere external forces; but Mr. Locke was too much of a solid and sober Englishman to allow himself to be led into sheer nonsense by the charm of mere logical consistency, and chose rather to prove his good sense by his inconsistency. After asserting in the strongest terms that the only origin of ideas is sensation, he goes on to divide ideas into ideas of sensation and ideas of reflection, which division instantly suggests the question—What is reflection, and whence comes the reflecting power? And by raising this question the empirical speculator at once brings in the whole of Platonism and innate ideas by a side gate, just after they had been driven out at the grand entrance; for how can this question be answered except in the well-known words of Leibnitz—“Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu, nisi intellectus ipse.” Mr. Locke’s successors, however, have shown no inclination to follow his example in this respect. They have been ambitious of the cheap popular virtue of consistency, which even thieves and murderers may achieve; and verily they have had their reward. Their master may be compared to a man who held out a poison in his right hand, and administered forthwith the antidote with his left. His followers, from Helvetius to Mill, thinking—naturally enough perhaps—that the right hand contained the right thing, instantly snapt it up and ran away with it, not choosing to encumber themselves with the incongruous bounty of the left. The fruit has been that climax of nonsense in which half truths always issue when left to blossom by themselves. The one-sidedness of the philosophy taken from Locke’s right hand, which, in a popular way we may call Materialism, culminates in the Nihilism of John Stuart Mill. Under his cunning manipulation not only mind vanishes but the outward world also. “It may be safely laid down as a truth that of the outward world we know and can know nothing, except the sensations which we experience from it; ontology therefore is not possible.” So what Plato called the human mind and the New Testament the human soul, becomes only a bundle of sensations. But the fallacy involved in this phraseology is easily pointed out. Instead of saying, We know nothing but sensations, he ought to have said, Nothing but sensations, and the thoughts or ideas vulgarly called classes of things and laws of nature which we recognise in the outward world, by virtue of the thoughts and ideas that arise out of the necessary action of the thinking Unity, the Creator of thoughts and ideas within us; and an ontology therefore is possible, because we know what we are as thinking beings by the very act of thinking, and we know what the world is as the general and absolute thought, or rather the product and manifestation of absolute thought, by the recognised identity of its working and products with the working and products of our own minds. In other words, Thought, or Reason, or Mind—God the absolute thought, and man in his little world of limited thinking, is the only thing that is or can be meant by an ontology, and is known partly as direct fact, partly as indirect, but assured inference from unequivocal manifestation. This is the common sense of the whole matter; and whosoever will not accept this may content himself with Nihilism and Atheism. I cannot.

So much for the strictly metaphysical part of the empirical doctrine. Let us now consider shortly its application to morals. “Moral principles,” says Mr. Locke (i. 3), “are even further removed than intellectual ones from any title to be innate. Will any one say that those who live by fraud and rapine have innate principles of truth which they allow and assent to?” This question displays in the most vivid manner the extraordinary misconception, not to say wrong-headedness, which possessed the English philosopher as to this whole matter. The nature of innate ideas implies neither universality nor inaccessibility to corruption. A man may be born with an innate sense for music, though all his fellows were as harsh as asses or as deaf as stones. If some men are colour-blind, and others purblind, and others altogether blind, these defects, inadequacies, or total eclipses of vision, do not make light intrinsically a less enjoyable thing, or the healthy eye an organ less marvellously adapted for enjoying it. As with vision so with morals. A whole population given to drunkenness does not make drunkenness a whit less beastly, nor will the general practice of fraud and rapine render the appropriation of my labour by another man’s rapacity a whit more reasonable. Again says Mr. Locke (i. 3, 4), “There cannot any one moral rule be proposed whereof a man may not justly demand a reason,” from which sentence it plainly appears, that, whereas by innate ideas Plato means the necessary expression of reason in a normally developed mind, Locke understands by them some blind unaccountable impulse independent of and extrinsic to reason. The supplying of a reason for any course of action, say for speaking the truth or keeping a man’s word, does not in the least make that course of action less the product of a truthful instinct in nature, or an innate love of truth. Morality is not the less innate because it is reasonable; but inasmuch as it is an essential element in the universal or divine Reason, in virtue of this it is necessarily an inborn quality in the individual or human reason, always of course with the probability of those large exceptions and defections which the very nature of finite existence implies. But we need not detain ourselves with a chapter of such shallow misunderstandings. The immoralities and follies of men, though a thousand times as many as they are, no more affect the inborn necessity and absolute immutability of the moral law, than the false summing of a class of schoolboys affects the relations of number. Errors are as common in arithmetic as in morals; only men hire those special pleaders, their passions, to justify the moral law, while the arithmetical blunder is exposed by the master of accounts. But though Mr. Locke argues against the existence of innate ideas in morals with even more self-gratulation than in his psychological account of the formation of ideas, we are not to suppose that his ethical theory was in any respect identical with that of the modern Utilitarians. He sowed the seed for their doctrine, no doubt, but himself had his garner well stored with grain from a very different source. He was a Christian, and believed in Divine law; he was a theist and believed in God. The modern Utilitarian believes only in a bundle of sensations and in an invariable sequence. By denying innate ideas of morality, Mr. Locke, as his illustrations prove, only meant to proclaim the very obvious fact, that, as all men obviously do not agree in their principles of action, it is reasonable to demand of them some reason for accepting one principle of action rather than another. No man can object to such a reasonable demand. But this does not prevent him in another place (ii. 33. 11), from talking, as no modern Utilitarian would, of “the unchangeable rule of right and wrong which the law of God hath established.” This method of speaking, common to Locke I believe with many of the most solid thinkers of his time, would lead me to class his ethical doctrine under the rubric of what might be called theocratic institutionalism; that is to say, he looks on morality as the result of a law laid down and sanctioned by the ultimate source of all laws, physical as well as moral. This, no doubt, seems to imply something arbitrary, which neither Plato nor Aristotle would allow to be possible in any of the fundamental manifestations of Divine reason; but notwithstanding this preference of the word νόμος, law, to φύσις, nature, had the English thinker been cross-questioned on the subject, he would probably have said that these institutions or laws which God lays on man flow necessarily from the excellence of the Divine nature; and this would have been pure Platonism. That he was sound-hearted at bottom no less than sound-headed, his book amply proves, notwithstanding the confusion of ideas in which he entangled himself by the assertion of propositions which, when logically followed out, lead directly to materialism in philosophy, atheism in theology, and sensualism in morals.

The next significant name in the genealogical tree of modern Utilitarianism is David Hartley. As it was the distinction of Mr. Locke to have given respectability to the vulgar British prejudice against innate ideas, so the claim of Hartley to reputation rests on his having first given prominence to the doctrine of the association of ideas, a doctrine which from its originator down to the most recent times, plays an important part in every form and phasis of speculative and practical externalism. Hartley was a Yorkshireman, born at Armley, near Leeds, in the year 1705, educated at Cambridge originally for the Church; but having a thoughtful mind and a tender conscience, he did not feel himself in a condition to subscribe the Church Articles in the offhand way which academical morality sanctioned; and accordingly betook himself to the study of medicine, an art which he afterwards practised with success, first in Newark and London, and then at Bath, where he died. These facts are of great significance, as indicating the remarkable combination in his character and works of an extremely sensitive evangelic morality, with a tendency to give physical explanations of spiritual operations, from which evangelic moralists are naturally averse. The object of his great work, Observations on Man, published in the year 1749, is to give a complete treatise of human nature on the inductive method of Locke and Newton; and accordingly the first volume, which contains his most peculiar views, is merely a following into detail of the doctrine of Locke, that all our knowledge proceeds from sensation, and that ideas in the brain are the product of impressions on the sensuous nerves. This one-sided notion Hartley pursues into the inmost network and curious membranous wrappings of the brain, and by the action and reaction and interaction of vibrations and vibratiuncles in that region, attempts to explain the generation of thought and reasoning; and this he does through long chapters, and with not a little iteration, in language than which the most extreme materialist could desire nothing more crass. In fact, we find in Hartley the great precursor of those masters of physical science in the present day, who seem to expect some important discovery in mental science from the curious comparison of cerebral structure in the monkey and the man. A few short extracts will make this more obvious. “Simple ideas,” he says, “run into clusters and create complex ideas”—(i. 75.) Here we have that vague use of the word “idea,” which serves equally for a sensation and a thought, and which lies at the bottom of all that strange confusion of thought which runs with such unhappy persistency through all the speculations of Mr. Locke. Again, “Ideas, intellect, memory, fancy, affections, will, all these are of the same original, and differ only in degree, or some accidental circumstance; they are all deducible from the external impressions made on the senses, the vestiges, or ideas of these, and their mutual connexion by means of association taken together and operating on one another” (i. 80). And in harmony with this (i. 101), he afterwards gives a formal derivation of ideal vibratiuncles from sensory vibrations; and (103) talks of that “idea or state of mind, i.e. set of compound vibratiuncles, which we term the Will;” and again (p. 212) he says, “the permanence of sensations is of the nature of an idea.” Here the great mystery which puzzled the Greeks so much, the mysterious bond which unites the ἕν and the πολλά—the one and the many—is solved very decidedly, as it would appear, on the Epicurean side. It is not the one which produces the many, but the many which produce the one; the one—what I call Mind, Will—is only a modification of the many. The radical objection to all this is that every man who is not a professional metaphysician feels it to be nonsense; the popular feeling protests; Shakespeare, who represents the thoughts and the language of a high and a healthy humanity, never talks in this style; and, more than that, the profoundest thinkers from Plato down to Hegel find in the proposition that thought is manufactured out of sensations a much greater mystery than that which this theory was invented to explain. One feels conscious that sensations might go on for ever, and not produce anything that had the slightest semblance to a thought; just as rain and sunshine acting on thistle-down from summer to summer produce only thistles and not roses. It appears, indeed, that our inductive philosopher is here involving himself in the vulgar fallacy of confounding the occasion or the condition of a thing with the cause. An accidental occasion, or an indispensable condition, are equally remote from the idea of a cause. The accidental occasion, for instance, of a house being built on a certain site, is that a certain gentleman, happening to take a walk in a certain district, and being not averse to house-building, determines to have a house on that site; the indispensable condition of the house being erected is that there should be a site for it to stand on, and stone and lime for it to be built with; but the only proper efficient cause of the house being a house is the mind of the architect, the plan which that mind originates, and the instructions which he gives to the contractor, and the contractor to the masons. The sensuous tendency which Hartley’s medical studies had given to his thoughts comes out strongly in another passage (i. 342), where he attempts to explain the evidence of mathematical axioms:—“We infer that 2+2=4 only from prior instances of having actually perceived this; and from the necessary coincidence of all these instances with all other possible ones.” This recalls a famous passage in J. Stuart Mill’s treatise against Sir W. Hamilton, in which he stamps with his authority the ingenious demonstration of a London barrister, to the effect that “in some possible world two and two may make five”—where, however, the more recent is grandly consistent as compared with the wavering double-sidedness of the more ancient speculator. The fact of the matter is, that Hartley, like Locke, was swayed at bottom by a sound sense and a lofty religious philosophy which crossed his mechanical theories; whereas the modern thinker, not believing in Mind, properly so called, at all, but only in a bundle of sensations and a thread of associations, like the Romanist Transubstantiation doctors, had no scruple in flinging open defiance in the face of Reason, and making a public ovation of unmitigated nonsense. Such is the natural culmination of all one-sided philosophizing. The seed of a favourite fancy grows up into a stately dogma; the dogma blossoms into a paradox; and the paradox ripens into an absurdity. The extreme nonsensicality of Mill, and the mildly modified error of Hartley with regard to the nature of mathematical evidence, arise from the same cause. They are only the natural expression of the principle that thought is sensation and sensation is thought; thought the matured sensation, and sensation the nascent thought. Mill denies altogether the existence of thought as a distinct thing from sensation; therefore he is quite consistent to say that in some possible world two and two may make five; for it is as a thing thought, and not as a thing perceived, that in the science of number 2+2=4. Mill, in fact, by this paradox, with a hardihood of consistency which is almost sublime, denies the possibility of science altogether; there is no ἐπιστήμη of any kind possible any more than ontology; only ἐμπειρία is possible—an experience of something that is accidentally what it is, and may have been otherwise. This is the highest power of what the Germans call the “Lockian empiricism;” and Mr. Mill in asserting the contingency of all science, has argued, as a good logician could not but do, from that half of the truth of things which it has been the unfortunate destiny of him and his school to mistake for the whole. As for Hartley, he qualifies his one-sidedness with a condition which takes the sting from its nonsense, and, like Locke, saves himself by a very transparent inconsistency; for he talks of a “necessary coincidence” of a certain number of observed equalities with all possible equalities; interpolating thus into the product of sensations the idea of necessity which belongs to a different region altogether, and by no possibility could grow out of a mere succession of sensuous impressions and nervous thrills, however often repeated. A tide-waiter may feel convinced that the tide will flow to-morrow just as it has flowed to-day, and has flowed regularly ever since he began to observe its motions; but no degree of strength in this conviction comes up to the certainty which every sane man has that two and two not only always do make four, and always have made four, but in every possible world must make four. The two certainties differ not in degree only but in kind; and mathematical demonstration having to do only with thoughts, the creation of pure mind, cannot in the slightest degree be affected by any complete or incomplete realization of these thoughts in any time, past, present, or to come. When I say that all the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, or that the angle at the centre of a circle is double the angle at the circumference, I prove this from certain necessary relations of lines to lines drawn under conditions of which my thought is the absolute master. The proof is only the evolution of what lies in the thing,—of what cannot be otherwise, so long as the figure remains subject to the dictatorial power of my conception.

Gross self-interest, Refined self-interest, and Rational self-interest,

which, when analysed, turn out to be altogether different things baptized with the same name. If a rational self-interest convinces me that, when I see my neighbour fall into the sea, it is my duty to jump in after him at the risk of being drowned myself, it requires an open force put upon language to say that such an action is the result of any kind of deliberate self-regard; it seems more like the result of a social instinct, and so far from being the product of any sort of prudential calculation, it is more likely to be strangled in the first conception than brought to a brilliant birth by the consideration of self in any shape. It seems to me indeed quite unworthy of anything styling itself philosophy to deal in such manifest quibbles. I might in a similar way, for instance, classify all religions under a common name, according as they are inspired by

Gross reverence, Refined reverence, and Rational reverence;

but though the name is the same in all the three cases, the feeling may be very different, and the product altogether opposed; for the gross reverence of vulgar superstition may be founded on fear, while the rational reverence of enlightened piety may be based on philosophic wonder and on that perfect love which casteth out fear.

Reason + sentiment = virtue = happiness.

The foundation of this monstrous doctrine of Atheism is laid by our subtle Scotch Epicurus in the following way. In his chapter entitled “Sceptical Doubts,” speaking of the origin of our ideas of cause and effect, he says, “When we find that any particular objects are constantly conjoined with each other, as the communication of motion by one billiard-ball to another, this knowledge arises entirely from experience, and is not a matter of à priori reasoning.” Again: “The effect in this and in every case is totally different from the cause; the conjunction of every effect with its cause must appear arbitrary; every effect is in fact a distinct event from its cause. Hence we may discover the reason why no philosopher who is rational and modest has ever pretended to assign the ultimate cause of any natural operation, or to show distinctly the action of that power which produces any single effect in the universe. The ultimate springs or principles productive of natural phenomena are totally shut up from human curiosity and inquiry.” Then in the next section he goes on to argue against the legitimacy of the common postulate of all scientific thought, that “similar sensible qualities proceed from similar secret powers.” “All that experience can do is to show us a number of uniform effects resulting from certain objects, and to teach us that those particular objects at that particular time were endowed with such powers and forces.” After this, in the chapter entitled “Sceptical Solution of Sceptical Doubts,” he lays it down that since our belief that similar effects imply similar causes does not depend on reasoning, the only, “principle on which it depends is Custom or Habit.” In fact, “All inferences from experience are the effect of custom, not of reasoning.” Cause means only “customary conjunction.” Then, towards the conclusion of the same chapter, he says, “There is a kind of pre-established harmony between the course of nature and the succession of our ideas; and though the Powers and Forces by which the former is governed be wholly unknown to us, yet our thoughts and conceptions have still, we find, gone on in the same train with the other works of nature. Custom is that principle by which this correspondence has been effected.” Cognate with these chapters on Causation are some discussions that follow on the idea of power or necessary connexion, in which he maintains that this idea is not copied either from the observation of the operation of forces in the external world or in the world of volition within us; that in all cases what we know is only “the frequent conjunction of objects, not their connexion;” “all events seem entirely loose and separate; and at bottom we have no idea of connexion or power at all, and these words are absolutely without any meaning;” and, philosophically expressed, “the sentiment or impression from which we form the idea of power or necessary connexion,” is only “the customary transition of the imagination from one object to its usual attendant.” And so “we may define a Cause to be one object followed by another, and where all the objects similar to the first are followed by objects similar to the second.” Lastly, to crown this whole elaborate edifice of Scottish atheism, we have, in the chapter on “Providence and a Future State,” the following sentences:—“When we infer any particular cause from an effect, we must proportion the one to the other, and can never be allowed to ascribe to the cause any qualities but what are exactly sufficient to produce the effect. Allowing, therefore, the gods to be the Authors of the existence or order of the universe, it follows that they possess that precise degree of power, intelligence, and benevolence which appears in their workmanship; but nothing further can be proved. The supposition of further attributes is mere hypothesis.” This argument is levelled against the perfection of the Divine workmanship and attributes. He then proceeds to annihilate, as he conceives, the Socratic argument from design in the following fashion:—“If you saw a half-finished building, surrounded with heaps of brick and stone and mortar, and all the instruments of masonry, you might justly infer from this effect that it was a work of design and contrivance; and in reference to works of human art this reasoning is good, because man is a being whom we know by experience. But the case is not the same with our reasonings from the works of Nature. The Deity is known to us only by his productions, and is a single Being in the universe not comprehended under any species or genus, from whose experienced attributes or qualities we can by analogy infer any attribute or quality in him. The method of reasoning which we legitimately use in reference to the intentions and projects of men, can never have place with regard to a Being so remote and incomprehensible, who bears much less analogy to any other being in the universe than the sun does to a wax taper, and who discovers himself only by some faint traces or outlines, beyond which we have no authority to ascribe to him any attribute or perfection.”

We have been at pains to transcribe these articulate sentences verbatim, selected from a sweep of some hundred pages of the Essays, because they really contain all that can be said in justification or palliation of that sort of positive or negative atheism which has recently been haunting the intellectual atmosphere of Europe, and poisoning the sources of social morality. Let us now see what they amount to.

In the first place, then, with regard to the general source of all our knowledge of matters of fact, it is quite certain we gain such knowledge only from experience; but this of course does not mean merely external experience of external objects. Whatever exists, the thinking I that is capable of taking cognisance of objects, no less than the objects cognised, are known only by experience, could not be known otherwise. A thing must exist in order that it may be known to exist. Nothing is known by mere abstract reasoning independent of existence. If it be said that mathematics are so known, the answer is, that mathematics imply the existence of a thinker, and the existence of laws of thinking, and further, that the objects of mathematical science are thoughts, not existences, mere hypothetical conditions and arbitrary limitations of space and time. We are not therefore entitled to start with a presumption that whatever is not known by abstract reasoning falls under the category of mere accident or custom; in the wide range of what we know by experience some things may be accidental or customary, many things may be necessary; what things are absolutely necessary the Supreme Cause alone may know; but that customary conjunction is not a sufficient explanation of the order of phenomena which we admire in the outer or inner world, human reason may be quite strong enough without hesitation to assert. For, let us inquire how the idea of Cause arises. According to Mr. Hume it is nonsense; it is merely another word for custom; a constant custom is a cause. Now, according to the general sense of mankind in all ages, and the use of all languages,—a consent and a use to which Mr. Hume himself, as we have seen, in another place attaches the utmost importance,—while the inconstancy of a custom, by introducing the idea of whim and caprice, excludes the notion of a cause, at least of a cause which falls under the category of science, a constant custom is the very thing which naturally suggests the question, What is the cause of this constancy? It is therefore something different from the constancy; and whether discoverable or not, is not to be confounded with the existence of that thing, or series of things, of which it is required as the explanation. Take an example. I see a certain person pass along the street before my window every morning at a quarter before nine o’clock, and another person following him regularly at ten minutes before nine. Here is a customary conjunction. If it happened once, or even twice, I should ask no questions, it might have been what men call accidental; but it has happened every day for six months, and I ask the cause. Am I wrong in doing so? Is there no cause? Or do I give a sufficient answer when I say it is a customary conjunction, or an invariable sequence? The invariability of the sequence, so far from offering any explanation of the cause, is the very thing that suggests it. I insist on believing that this invariability has a cause, and that it is neither an accident nor a custom. Of course it may be possible that I shall not be able to find out the cause; but that there is a cause I believe as firmly as that two and two are four. Now why am I entitled to demand a cause here, or in the case of any such conjunction? and what do I mean by it? I mean something that has an inherent and necessary virtue to produce effect; and I am entitled to make the demand, just because I am a reasonable being, and because the exercise of reason has proved to me directly that invariable sequences are not produced except by the persistent application of some calculated force of which energizing reason is the source. I know by experience that whenever this presidency of reason is abolished, the world in which I move instantly becomes a chaos; and the living unity of that mind which I exercise in thinking, and which brings its own unity into the wide sphere of my thoughts, feelings, and actions, displays to me in the most direct way that the unity of plan between the different members of an invariable sequence can proceed only from that of which plan and unity can be predicated, viz., Reason. I derive my notion of cause therefore primarily from the most direct and certain of all sources, from my own existence; and if Mr. Hume objects that I do not know how my mind acts on my body, or how my limb does not follow my will in the case of palsy in the motor nerves, this ignorance does not in the least shake my conviction that a cause is something different from a custom; a piston or a paddle may be deranged, but the steamboat is moved by a cause nevertheless, and that cause is twofold,—the steam, and the mind of James Watt. These conclusions with regard to the works of man even Mr. Hume seems to regard as perfectly justifiable; for, like all puzzle-headed paradox-mongers, he is forced to forget his own distinctions, and to speak of a cause after all, as something different from a custom. We are justified, therefore, in finding in the energizing reason of man a cause, and the only sufficient cause, for the reasonable works of man. But it is different, you say, with the works of God. Different unquestionably in some respects; as the ocean, for example, is different from a drop of salt water, or the sun, as you say, from a wax taper, or a scuffle between two Irishmen at a fair from a great battle betwixt Prussia and France. Let it be so. There is an immense difference in magnitude betwixt man and God, betwixt the works of man and the works of God. Still that will not make a gulf sufficiently large to prevent mutual recognition. A drop of salt water, the chemist will tell you, contains every element that makes the mighty ocean a salt ocean, and not a fresh-water lake. The smallest spark from the largest conflagration is an affair of the same oxygen gas; and petty differences in the management of the smallest borough in Great Britain are the result of the same play of vanities, jealousies, stupidities, and spites that provoke the greatest wars on the battle-field of Europe. We shall therefore not be deterred by the magnitude of the Creator’s works from recognising the excellence of their cause; we shall rather feel the more occasion to sing with the royal Hebrew psalmist, “How excellent in all the earth, Lord, our Lord, is Thy name!” No doubt there is another difference that separates human work from Divine. The work of God is vital work, ours is mechanical, mere puppetry, all the motive forces of which are borrowed from the exhaustless batteries of the Divine electricity. But this is only another reason for wondering with so much the more admiration, and worshipping with so much the more fervour. How healthy-minded, how noble, and how sublime, in reference to this matter, does that grand old Hebrew singer appear, with the flaming wings of his devout Muse, compared with this peeping Scotch metaphysician, keeping himself jealously free from the contagion of all intellectual enthusiasm, and discovering in this glorious universe only “some faint traces and outlines” of a self-existent Reason, enough to lead a man into puzzles but not to lift him into hymns! Truly a sorry spectacle! They will not worship God, forsooth, these philosophers, because they do not know Him exactly as they know the machinery of their watches, because they do not see Him with their carnal eyes, because they cannot lay their fingers on Him. Well, let me ask them, Does any man see any man? Can any man put his finger upon me, or you, upon that which is properly called me and you? No; he sees only the man as revealed in his flesh, as manifested in his works. His soul looks through the windows of his eye; and his eye directs his hand where to strike. We believe in the man; we do not see him. If his works are full of order and beauty and purpose, we conclude that the man is reasonable; if they are mere disorder, ugliness, and haphazard, we conclude he is unreasonable. Not otherwise with our knowledge of God. “No man hath seen God at any time, nor can see.” Creation is the face of God; the sun is the eye of God. Everywhere I see Him in his works radiant with reason, instinct with soul. I know Him as a child knows his father, as the shepherd’s dog knows the shepherd, as a common soldier knows the great projector of the campaign, though he may never have seen him. I may not comprehend many of His movements (it would be a strange thing if I did), I may not understand much of that which most nearly concerns myself; but this necessary inadequacy of my finite faculty shall not prevent my acknowledgment, my loyalty, and my obedience. I know enough of God always to inspire wonder and to annihilate criticism; and this is my highest human wisdom.

We have now finished our notice of those who are entitled to be called the founders of the Utilitarian school; those who follow, as the mere inheritors of principles already largely discussed, need not detain us long. Of these by far the most distinguished unquestionably is Bentham; so distinguished indeed, as in popular estimate to be accounted, the founder of the school. But there is need of a distinction here. Those men found a school in the proper sense who teach the principles which it acknowledges; but in another sense he founds it who applies those principles to practice. In the first sense, the founders of the ethical doctrine which we are considering were Locke, Hartley, and Hume; in the other sense, Bentham. His glory lies not so much in expounding as in applying principles; he is a lawyer and a politician rather than a philosopher. Not however that he did not give himself the airs of a philosopher; this he did with observation, and was accepted by his disciples accordingly. Therein lay the mistake. It is not every man, not even every great man, who knows how to recognise the limits which nature has laid down to the exercise of his faculty. Napoleon the Great, in the pride of imperial command, overlooked the moral forces that lay slumbering in the heart of the people, and was punished by a three days’ cannonade at Leipzig, the prelude to his final chastisement at Waterloo. Jeremy Bentham, because he could tabulate Acts of Parliament with the astuteness of a barrister, the purity of a philanthropist, and the comprehensiveness of a statesman, conceited himself throned on a moral eminence from which he might look down with contempt on Plato and Socrates, and all the great moral teachers of the past. In the third chapter of the first volume of Deontology, or Doctrine of Duty, we read, “While Xenophon was writing history, and Euclid giving instruction in geometry, Socrates and Plato were talking nonsense under pretence of teaching wisdom. This morality of theirs consisted in words,—this wisdom of theirs was the denial of matters known to every man’s experience, and the assertion of other matters opposed to every man’s experience. And exactly in the proportion in which their notions on this subject differed from those of the mass of mankind, exactly in that proportion were they below the level of mankind.” Such an exhibition of ignorance, insolence, and impertinence as this in a man of undoubted genius, were truly inexplicable, did we not bear in mind that genius even of the very highest kind is often accompanied by a very decided one-sidedness; and more than that, there were in the circumstances of Bentham’s life not a few things that tended to raise to a maximum the dogmatism with which he was naturally endowed. He is by no means a solitary example of a great man, the sublime of whose excellence has been turned into the ridiculous for lack of a little Christian humility. “Who is that young man who discourses on all subjects with such a wealth of resources?” said a distinguished guest at Worcester to Bishop Stillingfleet one day after dinner. “That is my chaplain, sir,” replied the Bishop; “Bentley is his name—Richard Bentley—a very remarkable man, a man of gigantic learning, and who might be the greatest man in Europe, had he only a little modesty.” Young Bentham had the misfortune to be a spoiled child—and not without cause, for he was by no means a common boy; his intellectual and moral endowments were both rare; this was the good gift of God; but he was brought up as a prodigy; this was the great blunder of his parents. Nor was the blunder mended when at a remarkably early age he was sent to Oxford. Public schools and colleges are often admirable institutions for teaching young men to find their level, but it was not so with Bentham; he had the misfortune to be born in a flat century, and fell among flat people. Everything that he saw in the great seat of English learning tended rather to pamper than to prune his conceit. He could write Latin verses as well as the best of them; but he rightly judged that at this time of day, in reference to the highest demands of a rational culture, this sort of exercise is at best a very pretty kind of trifling, and anything better did not grow there at that time. He seems to have got a taste of Aristotle’s Logic—that was part of the academical routine,—but he had logic enough in his own brain, and could not be expected to reap much benefit from any barren exercitations of a school-book. Logic is useful only as a flail, when it gets corn to thresh from other quarters; of itself it is utterly unfruitful. Into the real gist and marrow of Aristotle and Plato it does not appear he ever entered, nor amongst the tutors of his college did any one offer a manuduction into these intellectual penetralia; it was the age of elegant grammarians and low churchmen; and when the Articles were duly subscribed and the Latin verses properly turned off, there seemed nothing more in prospect for the academical mind but port wine and chapel service, and, in pleasant summer weather, a little languid activity on the bowling-green. But this was not the sort of nutriment which could feed the fine spirit of a young Bentham, whose food was mere intellectual truth, and his drink pure human love. He had been born in a Tory family; he was bred in a Tory college; he had been kidnapped (to his life-long horror) to sign the Articles of a Tory Church; but from all this Toryism the best part of his nature had received no nourishment. The consciousness grew, and one day burst out with a flash upon him, that Toryism was selfishness: that the British people, in common with himself, were lying languid and downtrodden, and rotting beneath the selfish dominance of an oligarchy, an oligarchy perhaps the most powerful that the history of the world knew; for as he knew it, it certainly seemed fourfold,—an oligarchy of pedants, an oligarchy of priests, an oligarchy of lawyers, and an oligarchy of peers. Against all this the spirit of young Bentham, as courageous as it was pure, rebelled. He would pull it all down; though he stood alone in the world, like Plato’s just man, he would pull it all down. And so he set himself valiantly to protest against the oligarchy of pedants, founded on a blind reverence for the letter of dead books; against the oligarchy of priests, founded on the real desire of power and the pretended admiration of an ascetic morality; against the oligarchy of lawyers, who strangled the rights of the present by the fictions of the past; against the oligarchy of peers, which in the government of the State preferred the interests of the favoured few to the happiness of the neglected many. And the issue was that young Bentham returned from Oxford, not to prosecute his legal studies at one of the Inns of Court, and advance himself to a position of wealth and honour by practising the curious art of giving a reasonable face to the most unreasonable of fictions, but as an armed apostle of intellectual, moral, juridical, and political democracy, and full of that sort of sacred fury which inspired the French democrats when they looked forward to a speedy millennium as the time “when the last king should be strangled with the bowels of the last priest.”

With Bentham the edifice of Utilitarianism is complete, and there is little more to say about the matter. Those who came afterwards were expositors, not founders; they employed themselves in explaining the doctrines of their master, sometimes also in explaining them away; for, while bound to maintain the honour of the sect, they were sometimes dimly conscious and more than half ashamed of the base element out of which it sprang. One of their foremost spokesmen was James Mill, the father of the present distinguished logician and politician, John Stuart Mill. This gentleman, who is much respected by the school to which he belongs, in the year 1829 published a work entitled An Analysis of the Human Mind. This treatise I have read carefully, and am constrained to say that it appears to me an extremely meagre production; somewhat as if the mind of the author had been blasted and frosted by the arid and sharp east wind in the face of which—near Montrose—he was born. From his life it would appear that he studied at the University of Edinburgh in the days of the great metaphysical school there, and that he devoted considerable attention to Plato. I have not the slightest reason to believe that the great idealist was much known even to the best thinkers in our Scottish metropolis at that time; but if Mill did study Plato thoroughly, it must have been, as Grote has done in our time, for the purpose of not understanding him. Certainly in his book I have found nothing but the materialistic side of Locke and Hartley worked out into a monstrosity; a cold thin horror of all spiritual mystery, and the shallow conceit that the primary divine force, which we call mind, can be explained by a laboriously minute dissection of a merely physical machinery. Whatever that great juggler Association can be made to do in order to explain knowledge out of sensation, mind out of matter, and unity generally out of multiplicity, has been done in this book. For the special ethics of Utilitarianism there is nothing in James Mill that the student of Hume and Bentham will be likely to think worth remembering.

After J. S. Mill, the only other living champion of the Utilitarian school who demands special notice here is Professor Bain. This subtle, various, and accomplished writer, while agreeing with Hume and Mill in reverting to the old Socratic principle of original benevolent instincts in man, and thus denying pure externalism in one important part of the human soul, is nevertheless upon the whole a much more thorough-going and consistent externalist than Mr. Mill; so thorough, indeed, as not to have hesitated to assert, in the most unqualified language, that conscience in the breast is a mere reflection of the external model in the statute-book, instead of the statute-book being, as the Idealists teach, a very fragmentary and inadequate projection from the moral pattern in a normal conscience. This revival of Hobbism in one of its extreme forms is not likely to meet with much acceptance in a country where the popular conscience, from long centuries of combined Christian and chivalrous culture, has attained a very high degree of refined sensibility; and the numerous admirers of Mr. Mill, who are grateful to that gentleman for the skill with which he has disposed the ethics of Empiricism in the drapery of Idealism, will scarcely be thankful to Mr. Bain for presenting their pet system in the naked prose of its early cradle. The acute northern professor would certainly have been more consistent, though less amiable, if he had asserted in its broadest form the Hobbesian doctrine of an original war of all against all; and he would have found no greater difficulty in evolving from the primeval tiger a Xavier or a Howard, than others have found in elevating the primeval monkey into a Newton or La Place.

We have now concluded our proposed survey of the Utilitarian philosophy, and the result may be summarily stated thus:—Utilitarianism generally is a method of thinking which, while professing to clear up dim ideas, brings confusion and disorder into every region of human thought and action; and specially—

1. Which, by deriving thought from mere sensation, by deducing the one from the many, instead of the many from the one, and thus reducing mind to a mere blank impressibility, confounds the essential distinction between necessary and contingent truth, and renders all science impossible.

2. Which, by confounding causation with sequence, pulls up philosophy by the roots, disembowels theology of all substance, and freezes the breath of all natural piety.

3. Which, in the realm of the fine arts, for the harmonies and congruities of eternal reason, substitutes the arbitrary associations of ephemeral fashion, local habit, and individual conceit.

4. And which, in the all-important science of human life, degrades morality from a manifestation of true expression, pure emotion, and lofty purpose, into a low consideration and a slippery calculation of external consequences.

This may seem perhaps a sufficiently condemnatory sentence; but it does not by any means follow that Utilitarianism has proved utterly useless in the world, or that its power for good is exhausted. It is only as a philosophy of human thought, feeling, and action that it is weighed in the balance and found wanting; as an aspect of social morals, and in the hands of good men like Bentham and Mill, as an amiable half of moral truth giving itself out for the whole, it has done good service in its day, and may be expected to do more. No man certainly can quarrel with the zealous endeavour to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number, provided it be made clear, in the first place, wherein human happiness and the true dignity of human nature consists. And though thinking men abroad, who take a cosmopolitan review of our insular sects and parties, will continue to look upon Paleyism and Benthamism as only the natural rank product of the unweeded garden of Locke’s empiricism, practical men in this country, who are more politicians than philosophers, and more anxious to reform their institutions than to remodel their thinking, will continue to find in the Utilitarian principle a useful war-cry against traditional abuses, and a motto of which no lover of his kind requires to be ashamed. Scientific men also working correctly with Baconian tools on the forces of the external world, may be ready to ally themselves with a system of ethical philosophy which professes to make no assumptions, to proceed by cautious induction, and to educe the role of right not from dim feelings, flaming passions, and lofty aspirations, but from statistical tables and other externalities that can be felt and fingered. As a practical power, therefore, in this country, Utilitarianism cannot be considered as extinct; on the contrary, the recent upheaval of the democratic element which Whigs and Tories have conspired to produce, cannot but carry along with it, for a season, the glorification of that maxim which so felicitously seems to foretell the doom of all aristocratic privilege and oligarchic abuse. To deal with men in one gregarious mass, counting them only by units without respect to quality, seems characteristic no less of Benthamite philosophy than of democratic policy; the element of Number is made prominent in both; and both seem to aim at a sort of general level of social bliss which can be most easily attained by taking the superfluities from the few and dividing them amongst the many. The heretical and anti-theological tendencies of the age also, will aid the Utilitarian movement; partly, no doubt, because theologians have not always sufficiently considered that a clean cottage is sometimes as necessary for the well-being of a people as a clean conscience, and partly because those who find in the several creeds of Christendom ground of moral offence, may not be unwilling to welcome in the Utilitarianism of the present day an ethical system which jealously shuns the contagion of piety, and scarcely with a cold and distant reverence recognises God. But this manifest hostility to religion which so characteristically separates the modern Utilitarian writers from Locke and Hartley will in all probability be the first thing that shall cause a salutary reaction against them. For religion is as essential to human nature as poetry; and however violent men may attempt to stamp it out, or supercilious men to overlook it, or meagre men to deny it, it will always know to assert its own place, and ever the more powerfully from the void which its absence has occasioned. With democracy, presenting as it does, from every point, the most flattering appeals to individual self-importance, the masses of men readily become intoxicated; but from absolute irreligion, except in fits of social madness, they revolt, and stagger back from the brink of the black abyss which it reveals. The difficulties of the Church Articles may be removed by judicious pruning or happy inoculation; but in Atheism there dwells no healing; it is sheer emptiness and despair.

[The End]