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Updated: May 13, 2025
Bentham even endeavoured in 1822-23 to administer some sound advice to the government of Tripoli, but his suggestions for 'remedies against misrule' seem never to have been communicated.
It has been well suggested that although not the ultimate motive of virtue, utility may be the test of morals. It was, in a measure, Helvetius that inspired Bentham. Helvetius had endeavored to carry the doctrines of the French followers of Locke to their last logical conclusions, but the successful accomplishment of that task was reserved for a stronger and steadier hand than his.
Knowing Jeffrey's 'dislike of praise, he tried to be on his guard, and to insinuate his master's doctrine without openly expressing his enthusiasm. Jeffrey, however, sadly mangled the review, struck out every mention but one of Bentham, and there substituted words of his own for Mill's. Even as it was, Brougham pronounced the praise of Bentham to be excessive.
Fortunately, however, the representative system may be made perfectly effective. This follows easily. It would, as he has said, be a 'contradiction in terms' to suppose that the community at large can 'have an interest opposite to its interest, In the Bentham formula, it can have 'no sinister interest. It cannot desire its own misery.
The two great practical philosophers of latest date, Bentham and Godwin, are, especially the latter, almost exclusively the property of the proletariat; for though Bentham has a school within the Radical bourgeoisie, it is only the proletariat and the Socialists who have succeeded in developing his teachings a step forward.
The springs of active conduct which Byron knew from experience were to Bentham nothing more than names in a careful classification.
This mode of reasoning, by which a bad generalization is made to overrule all facts which contradict it, is Petitio Principii in one of its most palpable forms. None of the modes of assuming what should be proved are in more frequent use than what are termed by Bentham “question-begging appellatives;” names which beg the question under the disguise of stating it.
On the contrary, we think his explanation true or at least, true in part; and we heartily thank him for lending us his assistance to demolish the essay of his follower. His wit and his sarcasm are sport to us; but they are death to his unhappy disciple. Mr Bentham seems to imagine that we have said something implying an opinion favourable to despotism.
His criticism of Bentham gives him an opportunity of remarking on the modes of carrying into effect the principle of Utility as the Standard. He repeats his favourite doctrine of the inherent pleasures of a virtuous disposition, as the grand circumstance rendering virtue profitable and vice unprofitable. He even uses the Platonic figure, and compares vice to mental distemper.
Of that teacher, and of others like him, Arnold wrote in later years: "If the matter were not so serious one could hardly help smiling at the chagrin and manifest perplexity of such of one's friends as happen to be philosophical radicals and secularists, at having to reckon with religion again when they thought its day was quite gone by, and that they need not study it any more or take account of it any more; that it was passing out, and a kind of new gospel, half Bentham, half Cobden, in which they were themselves particularly strong, was coming in.
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