[212] Works, x. 35, 77. References are given to this book in Works, vii. 219-20 ('Rationale of Evidence'). Several editions appeared from 1725 to 1761. See Works, vi. 465, for a recollection of similar experiences.
[213] Ibid. viii. 148 n.; x. 183.
Though lost to the bar, he had really found himself. He had taken the line prescribed by his idiosyncrasy. His father's injudicious forcing had increased his shyness at the bar, and he was like an owl in daylight. But no one, as we shall see, was less diffident in speculation. Self-confidence in a philosopher is often the private credit which he opens with his imagination to compensate for his incapacity in the rough struggles of active life. Bentham shrank from the world in which he was easily browbeaten to the study in which he could reign supreme. He had not the strong passions which prompt commonplace ambition, and cared little for the prizes for which most men will sacrifice their lives. Nor, on the other hand, can he be credited with that ardent philanthropy or vehement indignation which prompts to an internecine struggle with actual wrongdoers. He had not the ardour which led Howard to devote a life to destroy abuses, or that which turned Swift's blood to gall in the struggle against triumphant corruption. He was thoroughly amiable, but of kindly rather than energetic affections. He, therefore, desired reform, but so far from regarding the ruling classes with rancour, took their part against the democrats. 'I was a great reformist,' he says, 'but never suspected that the "people in power" were against reform. I supposed they only wanted to know what was good in order to embrace it.'[214] The most real of pleasures for him lay in speculating upon the general principles by which the 'people in power' should be guided. To construct a general chart for legislation, to hunt down sophistries, to explode mere noisy rhetoric, to classify and arrange and re-classify until his whole intellectual wealth was neatly arranged in proper pigeon-holes, was a delight for its own sake. He wished well to mankind; he detested abuses, but he hated neither the corrupted nor the corruptors; and it might almost seem that he rather valued the benevolent end, because it gave employment to his faculties, than valued the employment because it led to the end. This is implied in his remark made at the end of his life. He was, he said, as selfish as a man could be; but 'somehow or other' selfishness had in him taken the form of benevolence.[215] He was at any rate in the position of a man with the agreeable conviction that he has only to prove the wisdom of a given course in order to secure its adoption. Like many mechanical inventors, he took for granted that a process which was shown to be useful would therefore be at once adopted, and failed to anticipate the determined opposition of the great mass of 'vested interests' already in possession.
At this period he made the discovery, or what he held to be the discovery, which governed his whole future career. He laid down the principle which was to give the clue to all his investigations; and, as he thought, required only to be announced to secure universal acceptance. When Bentham revolted against the intellectual food provided at school and college, he naturally took up the philosophy which at that period represented the really living stream of thought. To be a man of enlightenment in those days was to belong to the school of Locke. Locke represented reason, free thought, and the abandonment of prejudice. Besides Locke, he mentions Hume, Montesquieu, Helvétius, Beccaria, and Barrington. Helvétius especially did much to suggest to him his leading principle, and upon country trips which he took with his father and step-mother, he used to lag behind studying Helvétius' De l'Esprit.[216] Locke, he says in an early note (1773-1774), should give the principles, Helvétius the matter, of a complete digest of the law. He mentions with especial interest the third volume of Hume's Treatise on Human Nature for its ethical views: 'he felt as if scales fell from his eyes' when he read it.[217] Daines Barrington's Observations on the Statutes (1766) interested him by miscellaneous suggestions. The book, he says,[218] was a 'great treasure.' 'It is everything, à propos of everything; I wrote volumes upon this volume.' Beccaria's treatise upon crimes and punishments had appeared in 1764, and had excited the applause of Europe. The world was clearly ready for a fundamental reconstruction of legislative theories. Under the influence of such studies Bentham formulated his famous principle—a principle which to some seemed a barren truism, to others a mere epigram, and to some a dangerous falsehood. Bentham accepted it not only as true, but as expressing a truth of extraordinary fecundity, capable of guiding him through the whole labyrinth of political and legislative speculation. His 'fundamental axiom' is that 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the measure of right and wrong.'[219] Bentham himself[220] attributes the authorship of the phrase to Beccaria or Priestley. The general order of thought to which this theory belongs was of course not the property of any special writer or any particular period. Here I need only observe that this embodiment of the general doctrine of utility or morality had been struck out by Hutcheson in the attempt (as his title says) 'to introduce a mathematical calculation on subjects of morality.' This defines the exact reason which made it acceptable to Bentham. For the vague reference to utility which appears in Hume and other writers of his school, he substituted a formula, the terms of which suggest the possibility of an accurate quantitative comparison of different sums of happiness. In Bentham's mind the difference between this and the more general formula was like the difference between the statement that the planets gravitate towards the sun, and the more precise statement that the law of gravitation varies inversely as the square of the distance. Bentham hoped for no less an achievement than to become the Newton of the moral world.
Bentham, after leaving Oxford, took chambers in Lincoln's Inn. His father on his second marriage had settled some property upon him, which brought in some £90 a year. He had to live like a gentleman upon this, and to give four guineas a year to the laundress, four to his barber, and two to his shoeblack. In spite of Jeremy's deviation from the path of preferment, the two were on friendly terms, and when the hopes of the son's professional success grew faint, the father showed sympathy with his literary undertakings. Jeremy visited Paris in 1770, but made few acquaintances, though he was already regarded as a 'philosopher.' In 1778 he was in correspondence with d'Alembert, the abbé Morellet, and other philanthropic philosophers, but it does not appear at what time this connection began.[221] He translated Voltaire's Taureau Blanc[222]—a story which used to 'convulse him with laughter.' A reference to it will show that Bentham by this time took the Voltairean view of the Old Testament. Bentham, however, was still on the side of the Tories. His first publication was a defence of Lord Mansfield in 1770 against attacks arising out of the prosecution of Woodfall for publishing Junius's letter to the king. This defence, contained in two letters, signed Irenæus, was published in the Gazetteer. Bentham's next performance was remarkable in the same sense. Among the few friends who drifted to his chambers was John Lind (1737-1781), who had been a clergyman, and after acting as tutor to a prince in Poland, had returned to London and become a writer for the press. He had business relations with the elder Bentham, and the younger Bentham was to some extent his collaborator in a pamphlet[223] which defended the conduct of ministers to the American colonies. Bentham observes that he was prejudiced against the Americans by the badness of their arguments, and thought from the first, as he continued to think, that the Declaration of Independence was a hodge-podge of confusion and absurdity, in which the thing to be proved is all along taken for granted.[224] Two other friendships were formed by Bentham about this time: one with James Trail, an unsuccessful barrister, who owed a seat in Parliament and some minor offices to Lord Hertford, and is said by Romilly to have been a man of great talent; and one with George Wilson, afterwards a leader of the Norfolk circuit, who had become known to him through a common interest in Dr. Fordyce's lectures upon chemistry. Wilson became a bosom friend, and was one of Bentham's first disciples, though they were ultimately alienated.[225]
At this time, Bentham says, that his was 'truly a miserable life.'[226] Yet he was getting to work upon his grand project. He tells his father on 1st October 1776 that he is writing his Critical Elements of Jurisprudence, the book of which a part was afterwards published as the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.[227] In the same year he published his first important work, the Fragment on Government. The year was in many ways memorable. The Declaration of Independence marked the opening of a new political era. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and Gibbon's Decline and Fall formed landmarks in speculation and in history; and Bentham's volume, though it made no such impression, announced a serious attempt to apply scientific methods to problems of legislation. The preface contained the first declaration of his famous formula which was applied to the confutation of Blackstone. Bentham was apparently roused to this effort by recollections of the Oxford lectures. The Commentaries contained a certain quantity of philosophical rhetoric; and as Blackstone was much greater in a literary than in a philosophical sense, the result was naturally unsatisfactory from a scientific point of view. He had vaguely appealed to the sound Whig doctrine of social compact, and while disavowing any strict historical basis had not inquired too curiously what was left of his supposed foundation. Bentham pounced upon the unfortunate bit of verbiage; insisted upon asking for a meaning when there was nothing but a rhetorical flourish, and tore the whole flimsy fabric to rags and tatters. A more bitter attack upon Blackstone, chiefly, as Bowring says, upon his defence of the Jewish law, was suppressed for fear of the law of libel.[228] The Fragment was published anonymously, but Bentham had confided the secret to his father by way of suggesting some slight set-off against his apparent unwillingness to emerge from obscurity. The book was at first attributed to Lord Mansfield, Lord Camden, and to Dunning. It was pirated in Dublin; and most of the five hundred copies printed appear to have been sold, though without profit to the author. The father's indiscretion let out the secret; and the sale, when the book was known to be written by a nobody, fell off at once, or so Bentham believed. The anonymous writer, however, was denounced and accused of being the author of much ribaldry, and among other accusations was said to be not only the translator but the writer of the White Bull.[229]
Bentham had fancied that all manner of 'torches from the highest regions' would come to light themselves at his 'farthing candle.' None of them came, and he was left for some years in obscurity, though still labouring at the great work which was one day to enlighten the world. At last, however, partial recognition came to him in a shape which greatly influenced his career. Lord Shelburne, afterwards marquis of Lansdowne, had been impressed by the Fragment, and in 1781 sought out Bentham at his chambers. Shelburne's career was to culminate in the following year with his brief tenure of the premiership (3rd July 1782 to 24th February 1783). Rightly or wrongly his contemporaries felt the distrust indicated by his nickname 'Malagrida,' which appears to have been partly suggested by a habit of overstrained compliment. He incurred the dislike not unfrequently excited by men who claim superiority of intellect without possessing the force of character which gives a corresponding weight in political affairs. Although his education had been bad, he had something of that cosmopolitan training which enabled many members of the aristocracy to look beyond the narrow middle-class prejudices and share in some degree the wider philosophical movements of the day. He had enjoyed the friendship of Franklin, and had been the patron of Priestley, who made some of his chemical discoveries at Bowood, and to whom he allowed an annuity. He belonged to that section of the Whigs which had most sympathy with the revolutionary movement. His chief political lieutenants were Dunning and Barré, who at the time sat for his borough Calne. He now rapidly formed an intimacy with Bentham, who went to stay at Bowood in the autumn of 1781. Bentham now and then in later years made some rather disparaging remarks upon Shelburne, whom he apparently considered to be rather an amateur than a serious philosopher, and who in the House of Lords talked 'vague generalities'—the sacred phrase by which the Utilitarians denounced all preaching but their own—in a way to impose upon the thoughtless. He respected Shelburne, however, as one who trusted the people, and was distrusted by the Whig aristocracy. He felt, too, a real affection and gratitude for the patron to whom he owed so much. Shelburne had done him a great service.[230] 'He raised me from the bottomless pit of humiliation. He made me feel I was something.' The elder Bentham was impressed by his son's acquaintance with a man in so eminent a position, and hoped that it might lead by a different path to the success which had been missed at the bar. At Bowood Bentham stayed over a month upon his first visit, and was treated in the manner appropriate to a philosopher. The men showed him friendliness, dashed with occasional contempt, and the ladies petted him. He met Lord Camden and Dunning and young William Pitt, and some minor adherents of the great man. Pitt was 'very good-natured and a little raw.' I was monstrously 'frightened at him,' but, when I came to talk with him, he seemed 'frightened at me.'[231] Bentham, however, did not see what ideas they were likely to have in common. In fact there was the usual gulf between the speculative thinker and the practical man. 'All the statesmen,' so thought the philosopher, 'were wanting in the great elements of statesmanship': they were always talking about 'what was' and seldom or never about 'what ought to be.'[232] Occasionally, it would seem, they descended lower, and made a little fun of the shy and over-sensitive intruder.[233] The ladies, however, made it up to him. Shelburne made him read his 'dry metaphysics' to them,[234] and they received it with feminine docility. Lord Shelburne had lately (1779) married his second wife, Louisa, daughter of the first earl of Upper Ossory. Her sister, Lady Mary Fitz-Patrick, married in 1766 to Stephen Fox, afterwards Lord Holland, was the mother of the Lord Holland of later days and of Miss Caroline Fox, who survived till 1845, and was at this time a pleasant girl of thirteen or fourteen. Lady Shelburne had also two half-sisters, daughters of her mother's second marriage to Richard Vernon. Lady Shelburne took a fancy to Bentham, and gave him the 'prodigious privilege' of admission to her dressing-room. Though haughty in manner, she was mild in reality, and after a time she and her sister indulged in 'innocent gambols.' In her last illness, Bentham was one of the only two men whom she would see, and upon her death in 1789, he was the only male friend to whom her husband turned for consolation. Miss Fox seems to have been the only woman who inspired Bentham with a sentiment approaching to passion. He wrote occasional letters to the ladies in the tone of elephantine pleasantry natural to one who was all his life both a philosopher and a child.[235] He made an offer of marriage to Miss Fox in 1805, when he was nearer sixty than fifty, and when they had not met for sixteen years. The immediate occasion was presumably the death of Lord Lansdowne. She replied in a friendly letter, regretting the pain which her refusal would inflict. In 1827 Bentham, then in his eightieth year, wrote once more, speaking of the flower she had given him 'in the green lane,' and asking for a kind answer. He was 'indescribably hurt and disappointed' by a cold and distant reply. The tears would come into the old man's eyes as he dealt upon the cherished memories of Bowood.[236] It is pleasant to know that Bentham was once in love; though his love seems to have been chiefly for a memory associated with what he called the happiest time of his life.
Shelburne had a project for a marriage between Bentham and the widow of Lord Ashburton (Dunning), who died in 1783.[237] He also made some overtures of patronage. 'He asked me,' says Bentham,[238] 'what he could do for me? I told him, nothing,' and this conduct—so different from that of others, 'endeared me to him.' Bentham declined one offer in 1788; but in 1790 he suddenly took it into his head that Lansdowne had promised him a seat in parliament; and immediately set forth his claims in a vast argumentative letter of sixty-one pages.[239] Lansdowne replied conclusively that he had not made the supposed promise, and had had every reason to suppose that Bentham preferred retirement to politics. Bentham accepted the statement frankly, though a short coolness apparently followed. The claim, in fact, only represented one of those passing moods to which Bentham was always giving way at odd moments.
Bentham's intimacy at Bowood led to more important results. In 1788 he met Romilly and Dumont at Lord Lansdowne's table.[240] He had already met Romilly in 1784 through Wilson, but after this the intimacy became close. Romilly had fallen in love with the Fragment, and in later life he became Bentham's adviser in practical matters, and the chief if not the sole expounder of Bentham's theories in parliament.[241] The alliance with Dumont was of even greater importance. Dumont, born at Geneva in 1759, had become a Protestant minister; he was afterwards tutor to Shelburne's son, and in 1788 visited Paris with Romilly and made acquaintance with Mirabeau. Romilly showed Dumont some of Bentham's papers written in French. Dumont offered to rewrite and to superintend their publication. He afterwards received other papers from Bentham himself, with whom he became personally acquainted after his return from Paris.[242] Dumont became Bentham's most devoted disciple, and laboured unweariedly upon the translation and condensation of his master's treatise. One result is odd enough. Dumont, it is said, provided materials for some of Mirabeau's 'most splendid' speeches; and some of these materials came from Bentham.[243] One would like to see how Bentham's prose was transmuted into an oratory by Mirabeau. In any case, Dumont's services to Bentham were invaluable. It is painful to add that according to Bowring the two became so much alienated in the end, that in 1827 Bentham refused to see Dumont, and declared that his chief interpreter did 'not understand a word of his meaning.' Bowring attributes this separation to a remark made by Dumont about the shabbiness of Bentham's dinners as compared with those at Lansdowne House—a comparison which he calls 'offensive, uncalled-for, and groundless.'[244] Bentham apparently argued that a man who did not like his dinners could not appreciate his theories: a fallacy excusable only by the pettishness of old age. Bowring, however, had a natural dulness which distorted many anecdotes transmitted through him; and we may hope that in this case there was some exaggeration.