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.
So much for the poor sceptical bewilderment of the celebrated David Hume; into which den of dust and cobwebs I certainly should not have strayed in this discourse, had experience not taught me that to deny God in the macrocosm necessarily leads to the denial of Mind in the microcosm, and to deny mind in man is to disown morality, or at least to stanch it in its principal well-head, and to poison the purest of its fountains. In forming a judgment of his character, however, we must not insist upon applying to him all the logical consequences of his own arguments. That his philosophy is speculative atheism is quite certain. By “emptying the idea of causation of its efficiency,” to use Professor Ferrier’s language,[319.1] “that is, of the element which constitutes its essence, he not only denied God, but he struck a blow which paralysed man’s nature in its most vital function;” he was not however consistently and thoroughly an atheist; as a Scot he had too much sense to remain in his practical moments entangled in the unsubstantial tissue of sophistry and cobwebs which he had spun for himself in speculation, and his want of piety was a defect of sentiment rather than a revolt of reason.[319.2] We must remember also charitably, that he lived in a flat age, when it was always impossible for a man to be truly great. A little moral earnestness, of which the eighteenth century had nothing to give him, would have saved him from a great part of the barren subtlety which disfigures so many pages of his otherwise sagacious, pleasant, and profitable works. When we observe that as the prophet of that age he was in everything acute rather than strong, that in his literary tastes he preferred Sophocles to Shakespeare, Epicurus to Plato, Lucian to the Apostle Paul, and Leo X. to Martin Luther, we shall not be surprised to find his moral treatise tainted with the notion that Christian virtue always means asceticism, and that religion is only a more respectable name for superstition. Pity only that in the present age some persons should be forward to use his arguments who have not the excuse of his position.
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.”
The state of feeling here sketched is the only thing that, in my opinion, can afford a satisfactory explanation of the extraordinary one-sidedness and dogmatism of Bentham’s moral philosophy. It was the creature of a reaction; and such a reaction as is apt to exhibit itself most emphatically in the case of the most highly-gifted young men, who however sometimes, as increasing years bring extension of view, contrive to work their way to some Aristotelian mean point which permits the recognition of two opposite truths. But such was not the nature of Bentham. He worshipped the great goddess Consistency, and could see and work only in a straight line. To his dicta there was no limitation, any more than to those of the Pope; he held himself practically infallible. So the first thing that he determined to do was to re-establish the Epicurean doctrine that “Pleasure is the chief good;” for “Epicurus,” he expressly says, “was the only one among the ancients who had the merit of having known the true source of morality.”[325.1] After this we need inquire no further. The novelty of this sentence is too dear a price to pay for its manifest error in elevating a species into the dignity of a genus, and for its manifest danger in stamping that which is highest in human nature with a label familiarly used to mark what is lowest. The great ancients whom Bentham despised made εὐδαιμονία or happiness the genus; and this happiness, they said, one class of men sought to attain by ἡδονὴ or pleasure, another class by striving after the τὸ ἀγαθὸν or the good. This language, founded on the healthy instincts of human nature, the apostles of Christianity sanctioned with their authority when they talked of persons being “lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God;” and to the present hour “a man of pleasure” is a phrase familiarly used in the English language to express one of the most trifling, contemptible, and useless members of society. And the reason of this use of language is obvious. Pleasure and Good, so far from being of a kindred nature, are generally directly opposite; no doubt they both produce enjoyment, but the enjoyment in the one case is often passive, in the other always active; in the one case generally shunning difficulty, in the other rather provoking it; of the former the senses are the main organ, of the latter the reason; the sensuous enjoyment man has in common with a pig, the rational only as a man. It was therefore a strange service that Bentham assumed himself to have done to moral philosophy by confounding the poles of moral distinction; and his conduct can only be palliated, not justified, by the tendency of every reaction to swing itself into an extreme. Any peculiar provocation in Bentham’s time calling upon him to reinstate the gospel of the flesh in the rights of which it had been deprived by St. Paul, one does not exactly see. Whatever faults he might have discovered in the morality of the clerical exclusives, purple doctors, and minute grammarians of Oxford, asceticism certainly was not one; feastings rather than fastings were the order of the day among the Dons; there remains, therefore, only the puerile delight of using a strong phrase, to palliate this gross confusion of the received terminology of moral science which he introduced. As for any other principles of morality that Bentham might have, they were merely what every other body had always professed. It did not require Hume, or any other sceptical solver of sceptical doubts, to teach mankind that Benevolence was naturally a good thing, and that no virtues were true virtues which did not tend to the public good. It happened therefore to Bentham, as it had happened to other promulgators of new gospels,—that what was most new in his system was least true, and what was most true was least new. The doctrine that Pleasure is the chief good, and that Epicurus was a better philosopher than Aristotle, will scarcely now, we apprehend, be seriously maintained; while, on the other hand, the maxim, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” has always been the war-cry by which the most generous politicians have been roused, and the load-star by which the most far-seeing statesmen have been guided. It is not, indeed, in the kingdom of ethics, strictly so called, that Bentham’s merit is to be sought; specially rather in the outlying fields of jurisprudential and legislative economy, where that doctrine of consequences justly sways, which Paley erroneously sought to make regulative in the region of personal purpose, pure motive, and noble deed; and for his services in applying his favourite maxim to various departments of political, juridical, and social reform, the world can scarcely be sufficiently grateful It is not often that so pure a philanthropist enters with victorious axe and mattock into domains bristling so rankly with all sorts of professional prejudice and professional selfishness. In this domain let him be loved as a man, reverenced as a patriarch, and even worshipped as a saint—(he was a saint in his own peculiar way unquestionably); but let him not be lifted into Christian pulpits or academic chairs to indoctrinate the ingenuous youth of this country in a curious moral arithmetic how to maximize pleasure and to minimize pain. Not by such teaching, certainly, were heroes wont to be made in Sparta, in Athens, or in Rome.
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.
Among living thinkers there is none who stands before the public more prominently as the exponent of the Utilitarian ethics than John Stuart Mill.[329.1] But whatever may be the merits of this distinguished writer in the domain of logic, politics, and economics, which seem most cognate to his genius, there can be little doubt in the minds of thoughtful persons that his book on Utilitarianism has done more to undermine than to sustain the doctrine which it professes to expound. And the reason of this lies in a cause which is not less condemnatory of the doctrine than it is complimentary to its champion. Mr. Mill is too good a man to be the consistent advocate of a system which, as compared with other systems, is fundamentally bad. He is too earnest an apostle of the real moral progress of man to be a thoroughgoing disciple of a school whose natural element is Epicurean ease, sensual indulgence, and prudential calculation. His heart revolted against the degrading tendency of a philosophy which gave a primary importance only to what is low, and left the highest elements of human nature to make a respectable show before men with a borrowed and secondary vitality. But at the same time, he was a disciple of the school, and the son of his father, and thus by education and a sort of intellectual heritage, his head was committed to a doctrine for which his heart was naturally a great deal too good. The consequence was a sort of sophistry which, while we see through it, we cannot but admire. Departing from the original idea of his school, that pleasure is the only good, and that pleasures differ from one another only in intensity, he interpolates into the general idea of quantity of happiness the discriminating element of quality; and thus is thrown back virtually on those innate ideas which it is the characteristic boast of his school to have discarded. For the essential difference in the quality of high and low pleasures is not a matter to be proved by any external induction, but springs directly out of the intellectual and emotional nature of man, asserting its own innate superiority precisely as light asserts itself over darkness, and order over confusion. And thus, while he defends Utilitarianism successfully, so far as results go, he succeeds only by throwing overboard all that is most distinctive in the doctrine, and adopting secretly all that is most peculiar to the teaching of his opponents. In ancient times, between Epicureanism and Stoicism there was a distinct and well-marked line of demarcation, which, whether in speculation or in practice, no person could miss; now under Mr. Mill’s manipulation, this distinction vanishes; the love of pleasure with which he started is sublimated into the love of virtue, and an ideal enthusiasm for the greatest possible happiness of all sentient creatures is substituted for the real and direct stimulus of pleasure which every man understands; and a Joseph Mazzini consecrating his whole life with the most intense enthusiasm and the most severe self-denial to the ideal of a possible Italian republic, is as much an Epicurean as David Hume sneering at all enthusiasm, and pleasing his soul with the delicate flatteries of fair dames in a Parisian saloon. This is to confound all things, and to reduce the whole affair to a fence of words rather than to a battle of principle. Nor need we be surprised at such a result; for the whole platform of morality in modern times has been so elevated through the influence of Christianity that Epicureanism to win a hearing is constrained to profess a standard which shall not fall beneath that laid down in the Sermon on the Mount or in the 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians; and to do this with nothing but the individual selfish love of pleasure to start with, requires, it may be imagined, a very considerable amount of dialectic jugglery and shifting glamoury of words. One is forced to explain—keeping Bentham’s language—how the original, individual, and personal love of pleasure, which is and must be selfishness, manages from mere external considerations, for such only are left open by the deniers of innate ideas, to take the shape of benevolence. Like theologians who are bound to stick to an unreasonable creed, and yet, to save its credit, must make it appear reasonable, the Utilitarians, in striving to accommodate the principles of the lowest theory of morals to the demands of the highest, have not escaped the awkwardness of the strategist who, while making a real retreat, plays off some movements that look like an advance. Only in this case the strategist knows that he is deceiving his soldiers, and deceiving the enemy; whereas the logician who dexterously assumes a new position while seeming to maintain his old one is the happy victim of his own fallacies. He has changed front by a manœuvre which many persons may be too stupid to observe, and he has saved himself from the disagreeableness of a formal recantation. Such dexterous shifts are the convenient refuge of all one-sided theorists who insist on taking nature to school, and trimming human souls, like trees in a fruit-garden, after their own favourite pattern. Meanwhile nature goes on heaving up her strong moralities from original pure fountains, regardless alike of the intense one-eyed dogmatism of the founders of ethical schools, and the ingenious apologies of their disciples, and makes preachers, as she makes poets, by inspiration, not by induction.
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.