The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits | Page 3

serviceable for facilitating the
acquisition of knowledge, and are constantly liable to be superseded
and to grow out of fashion with its progress, as the scaffolding is

thrown down as soon as the building is completed. Mr. Bentham is not
the first writer (by a great many) who has assumed the principle of
UTILITY as the foundation of just laws, and of all moral and political
reasoning:--his merit is, that he has applied this principle more closely
and literally; that he has brought all the objections and arguments, more
distinctly labelled and ticketted, under this one head, and made a more
constant and explicit reference to it at every step of his progress, than
any other writer. Perhaps the weak side of his conclusions also is, that
he has carried this single view of his subject too far, and not made
sufficient allowance for the varieties of human nature, and the caprices
and irregularities of the human will. "He has not allowed for the wind."
It is not that you can be said to see his favourite doctrine of Utility
glittering everywhere through his system, like a vein of rich, shining
ore (that is not the nature of the material)--but it might be plausibly
objected that he had struck the whole mass of fancy, prejudice, passion,
sense, whim, with his petrific, leaden mace, that he had "bound volatile
Hermes," and reduced the theory and practice of human life to a caput
mortuum of reason, and dull, plodding, technical calculation. The
gentleman is himself a capital logician; and he has been led by this
circumstance to consider man as a logical animal. We fear this view of
the matter will hardly hold water. If we attend to the moral man, the
constitution of his mind will scarcely be found to be built up of pure
reason and a regard to consequences: if we consider the criminal man
(with whom the legislator has chiefly to do) it will be found to be still
less so.
Every pleasure, says Mr. Bentham, is equally a good, and is to be taken
into the account as such in a moral estimate, whether it be the pleasure
of sense or of conscience, whether it arise from the exercise of virtue or
the perpetration of crime. We are afraid the human mind does not
readily come into this doctrine, this ultima ratio philosophorum,
interpreted according to the letter. Our moral sentiments are made up of
sympathies and antipathies, of sense and imagination, of understanding
and prejudice. The soul, by reason of its weakness, is an aggregating
and an exclusive principle; it clings obstinately to some things, and
violently rejects others. And it must do so, in a great measure, or it
would act contrary to its own nature. It needs helps and stages in its
progress, and "all appliances and means to boot," which can raise it to a

partial conformity to truth and good (the utmost it is capable of) and
bring it into a tolerable harmony with the universe. By aiming at too
much, by dismissing collateral aids, by extending itself to the farthest
verge of the conceivable and possible, it loses its elasticity and vigour,
its impulse and its direction. The moralist can no more do without the
intermediate use of rules and principles, without the 'vantage ground of
habit, without the levers of the understanding, than the mechanist can
discard the use of wheels and pulleys, and perform every thing by
simple motion. If the mind of man were competent to comprehend the
whole of truth and good, and act upon it at once, and independently of
all other considerations, Mr. Bentham's plan would be a feasible one,
and _the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth_ would be the
best possible ground to place morality upon. But it is not so. In
ascertaining the rules of moral conduct, we must have regard not
merely to the nature of the object, but to the capacity of the agent, and
to his fitness for apprehending or attaining it. Pleasure is that which is
so in itself: good is that which approves itself as such on reflection, or
the idea of which is a source of satisfaction. All pleasure is not,
therefore (morally speaking) equally a good; for all pleasure does not
equally bear reflecting on. There are some tastes that are sweet in the
mouth and bitter in the belly; and there is a similar contradiction and
anomaly in the mind and heart of man. Again, what would become of
the Posthaec meminisse juvabit of the poet, if a principle of fluctuation
and reaction is not inherent in the very constitution of our nature, or if
all moral truth is a mere literal truism? We are not, then, so much to
inquire what certain