CHAPTER VIII
PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY
It is the constant difficulty of the literary historian, especially if he is working on no very great scale, that he is confronted with what may be called "applied" literature, in which not only is the matter of superior importance to the form, but the importance of the matter itself disappears to a greater or less extent with time. In these cases it is only possible for him to take notice of those writers who, whatever the subject they handled, would have written literature, and perhaps of those who from the unusual eminence and permanence of their position in their own subjects have attained as it were an honorary position in literature itself.
The literary importance and claim, however, of these applied branches varies considerably; and there have been times when the two divisions whose names stand at the head of this chapter even surpassed—there have been not a few in which they equalled—any section of the purest belles lettres in strictly literary attractions. With rare exceptions this has not been the case during the present century; poetry, fiction, history, and essay-writing having drawn off the best hands on the one side, while science has attracted them on the other. But the great Oxford Movement in the second quarter created no small amount of theological or ecclesiastical writing of unusual interest, while there had been earlier, and continued to be till almost the time when the occupation of the field by living writers warns us off, philosophers proper of great excellence. Latterly (indeed till quite recently, when a certain renaissance of philosophical writing not in jargon has taken place with a corresponding depression of the better kind of literary theology) the philosophers of Britain have not held a prominent place in her literature. Whether this was because they have mostly been content to Germanise, or because they have not been provided with sufficient individual talent, it is fortunately unnecessary for us to attempt to determine in this place and at this time.
Among the dead writers of the century who are known wholly or mainly for the cultivation of philosophical studies, Bentham, Mackintosh, John Stuart Mill (to whom some would add his father James), Sir William Hamilton, Dean Mansel, are likely to hold a place in history, while at present many might be disposed to add the name of Mr. T. H. Green, a tutor of Balliol College, who between 1870 and his death propagated in Oxford a sort of neo-Hegelianism much tinctured with political and social Liberalism, and obtained a remarkable personal position. It is however as yet too early to assign a distinct historical place to one whose philosophy was in no sense original, though it was somewhat originally combined and applied, and who exhibited very small literary skill in setting forth. The others are already set "in the firm perspective of the past," and, with yet others who, still living, escape our grasp, have their names clearly marked for a place in an adequate history.
Jeremy Bentham, a curious person who reminds one of a Hobbes without the literary genius, was born in London, near Houndsditch, as far back as 5th February 1748. He was the son of a solicitor who was very well off, and wished his son to take to the superior branch of the law. Jeremy was sent to Westminster, and thence to Queen's College, Oxford, in his thirteenth year. He was a Master of Arts at eighteen, and was called to the Bar six years later; but he never practised. He must have been very early drawn to the study of the French philosophes; much indeed of the doctrine which afterwards made him famous was either taken from, or incidentally anticipated by, Turgot and others of them, and it was a common remark, half in earnest half in gibe, that Bentham's views had made the tour of Europe in the French versions of Dumont before they attained to any attention in England. In 1776 he wrote a Fragment on Government, a kind of critique of Blackstone, which is distinguished by acute one-sided deduction from Whig principles; and he became a sort of prophet of the Whigs, who sometimes plagiarised and popularised, sometimes neglected, his opinions. He never married, though he would have liked to do so; and lived on his means till 1832, when he died in the eighty-fifth year of his age. His chief books after the Fragment had been his Theory of Punishments and Rewards; 1787, Letters on Usury; 1789, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; 1813, Treatise on Evidence; and 1824, Fallacies.
The central pillar and hinge of all Bentham's doctrines in politics, morals, and law is the famous principle of Utility, or to use the cant phrase which he borrowed from Priestley, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." What the greatest number is—for instance whether in a convict settlement of forty thieves and ten honest men, the thieves are to be consulted—and what happiness means, what is utility, what things have brought existing arrangements about, and what the loss of altering them might be, as well as a vast number of other points, Bentham never deigned to consider. Starting from a few crude phrases such as this, he raised a system remarkable for a sort of apparent consistency and thoroughness, and having the luck or the merit to hit off in parts not a few of the popular desires and fads of the age of the French Revolution and its sequel. But he was a political theorist rather than a political philosopher, his neglect of all the nobler elements of thought and feeling was complete, and latterly at least he wrote atrocious English, clumsy in composition and crammed with technical jargon. The brilliant fashion in which Sydney Smith has compressed and spirited his Fallacies into the famous "Noodle's Oration" is an example of the kind of treatment which Bentham requires in order to be made tolerable in form; and even then he remains one-sided in fact.
Sir James Mackintosh has been mentioned before, and is less of a philosopher pure and simple than any person included in this list—indeed his philosophical reputation rests almost wholly upon his brilliant, though rather slight, Dissertation on Ethics for the Encyclopædia Britannica. The greater part by far of his by no means short life (1765-1832) was occupied in practising medicine and law, in defending the French Revolution against Burke (Vindiciæ Gallicæ, 1791); in defending the French Royalists in the person of Peltier against Bonaparte, 1803; in acting as Recorder and Judge in India, 1804-1811; and in political and literary work at home for the last twenty years, his literature being chiefly history, and contributions to the Edinburgh Review. But there has been a certain tendency, both in his own time and since, to regard Mackintosh as a sort of philosopher thrown away. If he was so, he would probably have made his mark rather in the history of philosophy than in philosophy itself, for there are no signs in him of much original depth. But he wrote very well, and was a sound and on the whole a fair critic.