by Edward Bulwer-Lytton with the aid of John Stuart Mill

“ Bentham did no more than dress up the very trivial proposition, that all persons do what they feel themselves most disposed to do, in terms which appeared to him more precise, and better suited to the purposes of philosophy than those more familiar expressions. He by no means intended by this assertion to impute universal selfishness to mankind, for he reckoned the motive of sympathy as an interest, and would have included conscience under the same appellation, if that motive had found any place in his philosophy, as a distinct principle from benevolence. ”

“ I am persuaded, from experience, that this habit of speaking of all the feelings which govern mankind under the name of interests, is almost always in point of fact connected with a tendency to consider interest in the vulgar sense, that is, purely self-regarding interest, as exercising, by the very constitution of human nature, a far more exclusive and paramount control over human actions than it really does exercise. ”

“ Bentham's views of human nature appear to me to be this: he supposes mankind to be swayed by only a part of the inducements which really actuate them, but of that part he imagines them to be much cooler and more thoughtful calculators than they really are. He has, I think, been, to a certain extent, misled in the theory of politics by supposing that the submission of the mass of mankind to an established government is mainly owing to a reasoning perception of the necessity of legal protection, and of the common interest of all in a prompt and zealous obedience to the law. ”

“ Motives are innumerable: there is nothing whatever which may not become an object of desire or of dislike by association. It may be desirable to distinguish by peculiar notice the motives which are strongest and of most frequent operation; but Mr. Bentham has not even done this. In his list of motives, though he includes sympathy, he omits conscience, or the feeling of duty: one would never imagine from reading him that any human being ever did an act merely because it is right, or abstained from it merely because it is wrong. ”

“ Taking human beings as he finds them, he endeavors to supply such inducements as will constrain even persons of the dispositions the most at variance with the general happiness, to practise as great a degree of regard to it in their actual conduct, as can be obtained from them by such means without preponderant inconvenience. A theory, therefore, which considers little in an action besides that action's own consequences, will be generally be sufficient to serve the purposes of a philosophy of legislation. ”

“ The greatest service of all, that for which posterity will award most honor to his name, is one that is his exclusively, and can be shared by no man present or to come; it is the service which can be performed only once for any science, that of pointing out by what method of investigation it may be made a science. What Bacon did for physical knowledge, Mr. Bentham has done for philosophical legislation. Before Bacon's time, many physical facts had been ascertained, and previously to Mr. Bentham, mankind were in position of many just and valuable detached observations of the making of laws. ”

“ Such, certainly, was the tendency of Mr. Bentham's own opinions. Habitually, and throughout his works, the moment he has shown that a man's selfish interest would prompt him to a course of action, he lays it down without further parley that the man's interest lies that way; and, by sliding insensibly from the vulgar sense of the word into the philosophical, and from the philosophical back into the vulgar, the conclusion which is always brought out is that the man will act as the selfish interest prompts. ”

“ His conduct is determined by pain; but by a pain which precedes the act, not by one which is expected to follow it. Not only may this be so, but unless it be so, the man is not really virtuous. The fear of pain consequent upon the act, cannot arise, unless there be deliberation; and the man as well as "the woman who deliberates" is in imminent danger of being lost. With what propriety shrinking from an action without deliberation can be called yielding to an interest, I cannot see. ”

“ Bentham was the first who had the genius and courage to conceive the idea of bringing back the science to first principles. This could not be done, could scarcely even be attempted, without, as a necessary consequence, making obvious the utter worthlessness of man, and the crudity and want of precision of almost all, the maxims which had previous passed everywhere for principles of law. ”

“ Towards the advancement of the public interest, all that the most public-spirited (which is as much as to say the most virtuous) of men can do, is to do what depends upon himself toward bringing the public interest, that is, his own personal share in the public interest, to a state as nearly approaching to coincidence, and on as few occasions amounting to a state of repugnance, as possible, with his private interests. ”

“ It is scarcely necessary to point out that the habitual omission of so important a spring of action, in an enumeration professing to be complete, must tend to create a habit of overlooking the same phenomenon, and, consequently, making no allowance for it, in other moral speculations. It is difficult to imagine any more fruitful source of gross error; though one would be apt to suppose the oversight an impossible one, without this evidence of its having been committed by one of the greatest thinkers our species has produced. ”

“ The pain or pleasure which determines our conduct is as frequently one which precedes the moment of action as one which follows it. A man may, it is true, be deterred in circumstances of temptation, from perpetrating a crime, by his dread of the punishment, or of the remorse, which he fears he may have to endure after the guilty act; and in that case we may say, with some kind of propriety, that his conduct is swayed by the balance of motives, or if you will, of interests. ”

“ A certain kind of action, as for example theft, or lying, would, if commonly practised, occasion certain evil consequences to society, but those evil consequences are far from constituting the entire moral bearings of the vices of theft or lying. We shall have a very imperfect view of the relation of those practises to the general happiness, if we suppose them to exist singly, and insulated. ”

“ Bentham creates a motive, and an interest, corresponding to each pleasure or pain, and affirms that our actions are determined by our interests, by the preponderant interest, by the balance of motives. ”

“ Bentham's, if they be read and believed and their spirit imbibed, must either be hopeless despondency and gloom, or a reckless giving themselves up to a life of that miserable self-seeking, which they are there taught to regard as inherent in their original and unalterable nature. ”

“ It is difficult to form the conception of a tendency more inconsistent with all rational hope of good for the human species, than that which must be impressed by such doctrines upon any mind in which they find acceptance. ”

“ Bentham, on this subject or on any other which he has touched, the merit, and it is very great, of having brought forward into notice one of the faces of the truth, and a highly important one. Whether on government, on morals, or on any of the other topics on which his speculations are comparatively imperfect, they are still highly instructive and valuable to any one who is capable of supplying the remainder of the truth; they are calculated to mislead only by the pretension which they invariably set up of being the whole truth, a complete theory and philosophy of the subject. ”

“ Bentham's speculation's on politics in the narrow sense, that is, on the theory of government, are distinguished by his usual characteristic, that of beginning at the beginning. He places before himself man in society without a government, and considering what kind of government it would be advisable to construct, finds that the most expedient would be a representative democracy. ”

“ For it may be affirmed with few exceptions, that any act whatever has a tendency to fix and perpetuate the state or character of mind in which itself has originated. And if that important element in the moral relations of action, be not taken into account by the moralist as a cause, neither probably will it be taken into account as a consequence. ”

“ Whatever may be the value of this conclusion, the mode in which it is arrived at appears to me to be fallacious; for it assumes that mankind are alike in all time and all places, that they have the same wants and are exposed to the same evils, and that if the same institutions do not suit them, it is only because in the more backward stages of improvement, they have not wisdom to see what institutions are most for their good. ”

“ All acts suppose certain dispositions, and habits of mind and heart, which may be in themselves states of enjoyment or of wretchedness, and which must be fruitful in other consequences besides those particular acts. No person can be a thief or a liar without being much else, and if our moral judgments and feelings with respect to a person convicted of either vice were grounded solely upon the pernicious tendency of thieving and of lying, they would be partial and incomplete ”

“ Bentham was a believer in the predominance of the selfish principle in human nature, may be seen from the sweeping terms in which, in his Book of Fallacies, he expressly lays down that predominance as a philosophical axiom.
"In every human breast (rare and short-lived ebullitions, the result of some extraordinarily strong stimulus or excitement, excepted) self-regarding interest is predominant over social interest; each person's own individual interest over the interests of all other persons taken together" Pp. ”

“ This, however, is not fair treatment of the believers in other moral principles than that of utility: All modes of speech are employed in an ignorant manner, by ignorant people; but no one who had thought deeply and systematically enough to be entitled to the name of a philosopher, ever supposed that his own private sentiments of approbation and disapprobation must necessarily be well- founded, and needed not to be compared with any external standard. ”

“ Bentham would be, that by an inductive and analytical examination of the human mind, they had satisfied themselves that what we call our moral sentiments (that is, the feelings of complacency and aversion we experience when we compare actions of our own or other people with our standard of right and wrong) , are as much part of the original constitution of man's nature as the desire of happiness and the fear of suffering ”

“ Persons of weak sympathies have often a strong feeling of justice; and others, again, with the feelings of benevolence in considerable strength, have scarcely any consciousness of moral obligation at all. ”

“ It is by a sort of sympathetic contagion, or inspiration, that a noble mind assimilates other minds to itself, and no one was ever inspired by one whose own inspiration was not sufficient to give him faith in the possibility of making others feel what he feels. ”

“ But there cannot be a greater mistake than to suppose that, because we may ourselves be perfectly conscious of an ambiguity in our language, that ambiguity therefore has no effect in perverting our modes of thought. ”

“ But the power of any one to realize in himself the state of mind without which his own enjoyment of life can be but poor and scanty, and on which all our hopes of happiness or moral perfection to the species must rest, depends entirely upon his having faith in the actual exist3ence of such feelings and dispositions in others, and in their possibility for himself. ”

“ The force of argument with which he rent asunder the fantastic and illogical maxims on which the various technical systems are founded, and exposed the flagrant evils which they practically produce, is only equaled by the pungent sarcasm and exquisite humor with which he has derided their absurdities, and the eloquent declamation which he continually pours forth against them, sometimes in the form of lamentation, and sometimes of invective. ”

“ It is for those in whom the feelings of virtue are weak, that ethical writing is chiefly needful, and its proper office is to strengthen those feelings. But to be qualified for this task, it is necessary, first to have, and next to show, in every sentence and in every line, a firm unwavering confidence in man's capability of virtue. ”

“ For a tribe of North American Indians, improvement means taming down their proud and solitary self-dependence; for a body of emancipated Negroes, it means accustoming them to be self-dependent, instead of being merely obedient to others ”

“ He has largely exemplified, and contributed very widely to diffuse, a tone of thinking, according to which any kind of action or any habit, which in its own specific consequences cannot be proved to be necessarily or probably productive of unhappiness to the agent himself or to others, is supposed to be fully justified ”

“ But the case may be, and is to full as likely to be, that he recoils from the very thought of committing the act the idea of placing himself in such a situation is so painful, that cannot dwell upon it long enough to have even the physical power of perpetrating the crime. ”