moral weakness in the individual who was so influenced, inasmuch as he allowed one or two quantita-· tive elements to overbear so many others of equal importance. The model moral man would, in fact, display his virtue by giving this 'interest' a very inferior force, just as the same man would exhibit his virtue by giving twelve personal interests supremacy over 'Amity' and 'Reputation' in the case of transitive acts, except in so far as they were productive mediately of personal pleasures.

And in truth Benthamism, as we have seen, except occasionally and inadvertently, recognises only such external obligations to just and benevolent action as we have referred to. The sum of the possible pains to the twelve self-regarding 'interests' originating in the formal or informal (written laws or custom-laws) power of society: the penal and the externally penal is the true and sole fount of obligation.

Hence, we are driven to the conclusion that in Subjective or Intransitive acts the words obligation, authority, conscience, are quite unmeaning, and are simply the equivalents of desirableness, or (if looked at from another point of view), exact calculation; while in Transitive acts (the just and benevolent, or their opposites) obligation simply denotes possible suffering at the hands of our fellow-men. Obligation, in brief, has no concern with morality whatsoever, but properly restricts itself to the sphere of legality.

Could the Greatest Happiness' of others in itself operate as a permanent external conscience or controlling power, it might serve the purpose in the matter of

social acts, and bind communities together; but from the nature of the thing it cannot so operate. The phrase has no meaning until we have settled the individual's greatest happiness; and if that rests on the Quantitative, the greatest happiness of man cannot be morally enforced on the individual, because it finds no inner authoritative response: it has only a legal validity, and that always dubious and vacillating.

We should therefore admire the consistency of the thorough-going utilitarians, who, unable to ignore the fact of a Moral Sense, as Bentham did, find in it and in what the 'vulgar' call Conscience, only a fictitious entity, an image set up within us by imagination of the social penal forces existing outside us.1

1 It is scarcely necessary to say that in estimating Bentham's system we have excluded the Deontology from our view, accepting the repudiation of that work by the most competent of Bentham's followers. It is legitimate, however, to refer to it as illustrating the doctrine. The following quotation from vol. ii. p. 132, which may be found in Mr. Burton's Introduction to Bentham's Works, will show that we are so far from misrepresenting the true character and consequences of the Benthamite doctrine as to have given a more favourable estimate of it than its professed friends :—“ Dream not that men will move their little finger to serve you, unless their advantage in so doing be obvious to them. Men never did so, and never will, while human nature is made of its present materials. But they will desire to serve you when by so doing they can serve themselves; and the occasions on which they can serve themselves by serving you are multitudinous.' See also p. 29 of the Introduction. Again, we have the opinion of two distinguished followers of our author (Col. Thompson and Mr. Burton) that in nine cases out of ten' morality yields greater happiness than immorality, although in rare cases it may be otherwise; and, therefore, that those who do not choose 'morality,' that is to say, who do not proportion and quantify their lives, commit an error and a folly,' and are 'blockheads.' That morality should be rested at all on such a calculation is illustrative of the tenor and consequences of the doctrine.

6

G

NEW UTILITARIANISM-MR. MILL.

BENTHAMISM is neither Hobbism nor New-utilitarianism. It stands midway between them. Its errors and defects, exaggerated in the Deontology, have during the last forty years been undergoing a quiet revision, which has at last resulted in a new manifesto from the present leader of the school. The inroads which were made on pure Hobbism in the 17th and 18th centuries by Cudworth, Cumberland, Clarke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Butler, and others of less note, are conspicuously visible, as we have shown, in the utilitarian essays of David Hume, and in the ethical system of Bentham himself, notwithstanding his repudiation of a 'Moral Sense' or 'Conscience,' and the contempt with which he treated all speculations proceeding on the assumption that these existed. The influence of an advancing psychology, the widening of human sympathies through the artistic and historical literature of the past generation, and to some extent the power of German thought conveyed to us, though in a somewhat blurred form, by Coleridge and Carlyle, have modified the conceptions of all save the extreme positivist left.1 Mr. Mill, with his large

1 Were I here taking a historical survey of moral doctrine, I could not omit to notice the modification of Paley's system contained in the Discourse on Ethics, by William Smith, Barrister-at-Law, published in 1839. In that discourse, which is characterized by much subtlety and eloquence, the system of Paley is translated out of prose into poetry.

receptive as well as active nature, accepts these modifying influences, and in his Essay on Utilitarianism endeavours to reconstruct Benthamism in a spirit adapted to the needs of the time, and with implicit reference to those richer and deeper elements of life which are the inheritance of this generation, and to which the epoch that gave birth to Bentham was comparatively a stranger.

We have found that, according to Bentham, the 'interests' or 'pleasures' of each individual constitute the end of his activity, subject to only one controlling principle, The Greatest Happiness on the whole.' In other words, Morality, so far as the individual agent is concerned, is a question of mere quantity, and might be determined by caprice or perversity, provided always the agent had regard to that greater mass of possible happiness outside him which is his guide through the perplexities of moral action. Quantitative happiness and an external standard constitute the two main characteristics of the Benthamite ethics. Many as are the merits of Bentham, we do not think that it will be denied by any who derive a knowledge of his argument from his own writings, that, so far as personal morality is concerned, Benthamism cannot consistently put any check on the indulgence of the various pleasures and interests which are enumerated by him, beyond that which the idiosyncracies and circumstances and calculations of the individual may from time to time impose, until the gratification of these pleasures and interests hurts

the general utility. his governing external principle has no inherent value or attractiveness to the agent, but derives its validity and supremacy from the perception of common interests and the pains which the general opinion inflicts on the purely self-regarding citizen; that, consequently, the only obligation to do the right is to be found in those external sensations of pain and pleasure proceeding from others, and affecting for better or worse the numerous susceptibilities and 'interests' of the human constitution as these are detailed by him in his pathological psychology.

It must also be admitted that

Although we find in Mr. Mill such a departure from the strict letter of Benthamism as we should have expected from a man of wider intellectual and imaginative sympathies than the master, we confess that we do not perceive in him a deeper insight into the moral constitution of man, or a clearer apprehension of the scientific defects of the theory which he expounds. The philanthropic zeal which characterized the teacher belongs to his equally distinguished disciple; and this, while giving intensity, also gives narrowness, to the moral vision. The thoughts and desires of both being fixed exclusively on measures tending to the amelioration of society, the equalization of felicities, and the relief of human misery, they take hold of ethical questions only in their relation to the polity of communities, and pay comparatively little attention to the ethics of the individual. Had they started with a more patient analysis of man's