Jeremy Bentham

“ Jeremy Bentham! The Minister goes to the Sultan of Morocco, and after many months, perhaps Mr. Bentham is found, perhaps he is not. Suppose that he is found and brought down to Tangier,--what next, I beg you? There will be talk about Mr. Bentham, there will be gentlemen everywhere, behind bushes, under tables, everywhere, so that the great British public may know the colours of the ties he wears, and at last be happy. His name will be in the papers, and more, Mrs. Warriner, his portrait too. ”

“ Very delicate in early life, he developed into a man of huge proportions, athletic power and iron constitution. Jeremy Bentham, very weak and delicate in childhood, became healthy and robust and lived to eighty-four ”

“ It seems to be spreading a kind of education mania in the world.... Jeremy Bentham is a man who will not be forgotten in the world; though neglected by a great part of his countrymen, he is held in the highest esteem by the enlightened and honest.... To him, as the [171] author of a work on education, and as a man of the greatest influence, Matthew presented a copy of our book. ”

“ What was Noah to Jeremy Bentham! Although I am pained to confess the shortcomings of Jeremy; for, though he did much to meliorate the severity of the British penal code, he went not, by any means, to those happy lengths, which we approve, in shielding the unfortunate murderer from the halter.
[Pg 177] There was a very amiable, old gentleman in England, who lived, through the times of Charles I., both Cromwells, and Charles II. He was reputed so wise, and learned, and just, and pious, that his judgment was highly prized, by all men. ”

“ By the present arrival, too, we learn that two of the ornaments of Great Britain have paid the debt of nature, viz Sir James Macintosh and Jeremy Bentham. Sir James Macintosh was distinguished by his varied and extensive knowledge of mental philosophy and polite literature. His conversational talents were ambitious and imposing and his oratorical powers of the first order His health had long been feeble, and his illness, towards the close, was severe and trying. Jeremy Bentham was a philosopher of a totally different character from Sir James Macintosh. ”

“ Not that one would mean offence against the man Jeremy Bentham, or those who respect and believe him. Bentham himself, and even the creed of Bentham, seems to me comparatively worthy of praise. It is a determinate being what all the world, in a cowardly half-and-half manner, was tending to be. Let us have the crisis; we shall either have death or the cure. I call this gross, steam-engine Utilitarianism an approach towards new Faith. It was a laying-down of cant; a saying to oneself: "Well then, this world is a dead iron machine, the god of it Gravitation and selfish Hunger ”

“ For why is it an evil to a country that the minds of those who have the Law under their management should be thus enfeebled? It is because it finds them impotent to every enter prize of improvement.
Not that a race of lawyers and politicians of this enervate breed is much less dangerous to the duration of that share of felicity which the State possesses at any given period, than it is mortal to its chance of attaining to a greater. If the designs of a Minister are inimical to his country, what is the man of all others for him to make an instrument of or a dupe? ”

“ The next most prominent critic of the period is one upon whom Ruskin has always poured his bitterest scorn, and who yet will be ever remembered with warmest reverence by those who are old enough to have been his contemporaries. I mean John Stuart Mill.
Jeremy Bentham, who gave such an impulse to all political reform, and made a complete revolution in English jurisprudence, died in 1832. His friend James Mill, who wrote the "History of India" and an "Analysis of the Human Mind," died four years later. ”

“ Jeremy Bentham came and played at battledore and shuttlecock with him—an almost appalling idea, for it will not do to trust too implicitly to Leigh Hunt's declaration that Jeremy's object was to suggest "an improvement in the constitution of shuttlecocks." The Examiner itself continued undisturbed, and except for the "I can't get out" feeling, which even of itself cannot be compared for one moment to that of a modern prisoner condemned to his cell and{209} the exercising-ground, it is rather difficult to see much reason for Leigh Hunt's complaints. ”

“ A society, to come within the notion of what is originally meant by a political one, must be such as, in its nature, is not incapable of continuing for ever in virtue of the principles which gave it birth. This, it is plain, is not the case with such a family society, of which a parent, or a pair of parents are at the head. In such a society, the only principle of union which is certain and uniform in its operation, is the natural weakness of those of its members that are in a state of subjection ”

“ James persuaded her to return to England by the promise of an annuity, but had his daughter stolen and concealed until her mother's departure. He then brought her up carefully. She showed a talent for painting, and grew up a beautiful and accomplished woman. Jeremy Bentham met her at her father's house in 1785, accompanied her on the violin, and said that she was the only woman he had met who could keep time. She soon afterwards married William Reveley, an architect who had been travelling in Greece to make sketches for Sir Richard Worsley. ”

“ In 1788 Dumont visited Paris with Romilly. During a stay of two months in that city he had almost daily intercourse with Mirabeau, and a certain affinity of talents and pursuits led to an intimacy between two persons diametrically opposed to each other in habits and in character. On his return from Paris Dumont made the acquaintance of Jeremy Bentham. Filled with admiration for the genius of Bentham, Dumont made it one of the chief objects of his life to recast and edit the writings of the great English jurist in a form suitable for the ordinary reading public. ”

“ Jeremy Bentham, when he firmly believed that he was near his last hour, said to one of his disciples, who was watching over him:—"I now feel that I am dying. Our care must be to minimize the pain. Do not let any of the servants come into the room, and keep away the youths. ”

“ He gave also courses of popular lectures on physiology at the London Institution and elsewhere. To those at the London Institution ladies were admitted—a permission unusual in those times.
One lecture, delivered on a very remarkable occasion, must be mentioned here. My grandfather was the friend and physician of Jeremy Bentham, and was called upon, after his death, to perform a duty which he had solemnly undertaken. The venerable philosopher died in 1832 at the age of eighty-five, and by will desired that his body should be used for the purposes of dissection. ”

“ I have a right to put myself upon a par with everybody in every respect: here we have it in its substantive sense, forming with the other words a phrase equivalent to this, wherever I find a man who will not let me put myself on a par with him in every respect, it is right, and proper, and becoming, that I should knock him down, if I have a mind to do so, and if that will not do, knock him on the head, and so forth. ”

“ If in their collective, whatever this article, or any other article drawn up in the same view, does or can do for them, amounts to nothing: whatever it would have them do, it gives them no facilities for doing it, which they did not possess without it. Whatever it would have them do, if one and all rise for the purpose of doing it, bating what hindrance they may receive from one another, there will be nobody to hinder them. ”

“ Nor is a disposition to find `every thing as it should be,' less at variance with itself, than with reason and utility. The commonplace arguments in which it vents itself justify not what is established, in effect, any more than they condemn it: since whatever now is established, once was innovation.
Precipitate censure, cast on a political institution, does but recoil on the head of him who casts it. From such an attack it is not the institution itself, if well grounded, that can suffer. What a man says against it either makes impression or makes none. ”

“ If none, it is just as if nothing had been said about the matter: if it does make an impression, it naturally calls up some one or other in defence. For if the institution is in truth a beneficial one to the community in general, it cannot but have given an interest in its preservation to a number of individuals. ”

“ In the next place I don’t know that I should be for allowing him the power of beating his boarders, nor, in short, of punishing them in any shape. Anywhere else, such an exemption must have been visionary and impracticable. Without either punishment, or interest given him in the profits of his labour—an interest which, to get the better of so many adverse motives, must have been a pretty strong one, how could you have insured a man’s doing a single stroke of work? ”

“ The consequence of a private instrument's being void is, that all persons concerned are to act as if no such instrument had existed. The consequence, accordingly, of a law's being void must be, that people shall act as if there were no such law about the matter: and therefore that if any person in virtue of the mandate of the law should do anything in coercion of another person, which without such law he would be punishable for doing, he would still be punishable ”

“ Unbounded resistance to oppression; that is, unbounded exercise of the faculty of guarding himself against whatever unpleasant circumstance may present itself to his imagination or his passions under that name. Nature, say some of the interpreters of the pretended law of nature-nature gave to each man a right to everything; which is, in effect, but another way of saying-nature has given no such right to anybody; for in regard to most rights, it is as true that what is every man's right is no man's right, as that what is every man's business is no man's business. ”

“ A law to the effect in question is a violation of the natural and indefeasible rights of man. What does this signify? That my resolution of using my utmost influence in opposition to such a law is wound up to such a pitch, that should any law be ever enacted, which in my eyes appears to come up to that description, my determination is, to behave to the persons concerned in its enactment, as any man would behave towards those who had been guilty of a notorious and violent infraction of his rights. ”

“ But all these existing governments being fundamentally repugnant to the rights of man, are null and void, and incapable of filling up this or any other gap in the texture of the new code. Besides, this right of not being hindered from doing anything which the law itself has not forbidden, nor compelled to do anything which it has not commanded, is an article of natural, unalienable, sacred, and imprescriptible right, over which political laws have no sort of power ”

“ The aggregate, of the property belonging to the individuals, had been formed into one common fund: the management—too great a burden for the united labours of the eleven Apostles, with their new associate Mathias—had, under the name so inappositely represented at present by the English word deacon, been committed to seven trustees; one of whom, Stephen, had, at the instance of Paul, been made to pay, with his life, for the imprudence, with which he had, in the most public manner, indulged himself, in blaspheming the idol of the Jews—their temple. ”

“ The phrases can and can not, are employed in this way with greater and more pernicious effect, inasmuch as, over and above physical and moral impossibility, they are made use of with much less impropriety and violence to denote legal impossibility. In the language of the law, speaking in the character of the law, they are used in this way without ambiguity or inconvenience. "Such a magistrate cannot do so and so," that is, he has no power to do so and so. If he issue a command to such an effect, it is no more to be obeyed than if it issued from any private person. ”

“ A jealousy of abstract propositions is an aversion to whatever is beside the purpose an aversion to impertinence.
The great enemies of public peace are the selfish and dissocial passions: - necessary as they are the one to the very existence of each individual, the other to his security. On the part of these affections, a deficiency in point of strength is never to be apprehended: all that is to be apprehended in respect of them, is to be apprehended on the side of their excess. ”

“ I grow daily to honor Facts more and more, and Theory less and less. A Fact, it seems to me, is a great thing: a Sentence printed if not by God, then at least by the Devil;—neither Jeremy Bentham nor Lytton Bulwer had a hand in that. ”

“ In the first place, who is spoken of — are meant, by all the citizens? Does it mean all, collectively acting in a body, or every citizen, every individual, that is, any one that pleases? This right of mine,— is it a right which I may exercise by myself at any whenever it happens to suit me, and the concurrence of anybody else, or which can only exercise if and when I can get every body else, or at least the major part of every else, to join me in the exercise of it? The difference in a practical view is enormous ”

“ By the bent of a man's inclinations may be understood the propensity he has to expect pleasure or pain from certain objects, rather than from others. A man's inclinations may be said to have such or such a bent, when, amongst the several sorts of objects which afford pleasure in some degree to all men, he is apt to expect more pleasure from one particular sort, than from another particular sort, or more from any given particular sort, than another man would expect from that sort ”