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He discovered truths; all that THEY have done has been to make those truths unpopular. He investigated the philosophy of law; he could teach them only to snarl at lawyers. We entertain no apprehensions of danger to the institutions of this country from the Utilitarians. Our fears are of a different kind. We dread the odium and discredit of their alliance.
Those Dandiacal Manicheans, with the host of Dandyizing Christians, will form one body: the Drudges, gathering round them whosoever is Drudgical, be he Christian or Infidel Pagan; sweeping up likewise all manner of Utilitarians, Radicals, refractory Pot-wallopers, and so forth, into their general mass, will form another.
The Intuitionists maintained to put the matter briefly that the moral consciousness of man could not be entirely accounted for by experiences of the kind laid stress on by the Utilitarians. They maintained that moral ideas were in their origin spiritual, although they might be called into definite consciousness by the experience of the facts to which they could be applied.
A principal reason why the Monarchy so well consecrates our whole state is to be sought in the peculiarity many Americans and many utilitarians smile at. They laugh at this "extra," as the Yankee called it, at the solitary transcendent element.
The Socialistic movement appeared for the present to be confined to a few dreamers and demagogues. The Utilitarians might approve the spirit of the Owenites, but held their schemes to be chimerical.
I must try to point out certain results which had a material effect upon English opinion in general and, in particular, upon the Utilitarians. Hist. xxv. 472. The country-gentlemen, said Wilberforce in 1800, are the 'very nerves and ligatures of the body politic. Correspondence, i. 219.
To add to the confusion, Sir Francis Burdett, who had contributed a thousand pounds, had taken it into his head that Place was a government spy. The Association, as is hardly surprising, ceased to exist in 1816, after keeping up a school of less than three hundred children, and ended in hopeless failure. The Utilitarians had higher hopes from a scheme of their own.
Common sense, of course, condemns extremes: and if logic seems to be pushing a man towards scepticism in philosophy or revolution in practice, he can always protest by the convenient device of intuitions. I have gone so far in order to illustrate the nature of the system which the Utilitarians took to be the antithesis of their own.
Hence the opponents of utility consider themselves entitled to infer that happiness is not the standard of moral approbation and disapprobation. But the utilitarians do not deny that virtue is a thing to be desired. The very reverse. They maintain that it is to be desired, and that for itself.
The bearing of the doctrine upon the political as well as upon the economical views of the Utilitarians is of conspicuous importance. Malthus's starting-point, as we have seen, was the opposition to the doctrine of 'perfectibility. Hard facts, which Godwin and Condorcet had neglected, were fatal to their dreams.
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