"The greatest happiness of all those whose interest is in question is the right and proper, and the only right and proper and _universally desirable_ end of human action." Mill says, "To do as you would be done by, and to love your neighbor as yourself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality." And again: "The happiness which is the Utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct is not the agent's own happiness, but that of all concerned; as between his own happiness and that of others, Utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator." So Sidgwick (_Methods of Ethics_, p. 379): "By Utilitarianism is here meant the ethical theory, first distinctly formulated by Bentham, that the conduct which under any given circumstances is externally or objectively right is that which produces the greatest amount of happiness _on the whole_; that is taking into account all whose happiness is affected by the conduct. It would tend to clearness if we might call this principle, and the method based upon it, by some such name as Universalistic hedonism." And finally, Bain (_Emotions and Will_, p. 303): "Utility is opposed to the selfish principle, for, as propounded, it always implies the good of society generally and the subordination of individual interests to the general good." =Social Purpose of Utilitarianism.=--Its aim, then, was the "greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number," a democratic, fraternal aim. In the computation of the elements of this aim, it insisted upon the principle of social and moral equality: "every one to count for one, and only for one." The standard was the well-being of the community conceived as a community of individuals, all of whom had equal rights and none of whom had special privileges or exclusive avenues of access to happiness. In a period in which the democratic spirit in England was asserting itself against vested interests and class-distinctions, against legalized inequalities of all sorts, the utilitarian philosophy became the natural and perhaps indispensable adjunct of the liberal and reforming spirit in law, education, and politics. Every custom, every institution, was cross-questioned; it was not allowed to plead precedent and prior existence as a basis for continued existence. It had to prove that it conduced to the happiness of the community as a whole, or be legislated out of existence or into reform. Bentham's fundamental objection to other types of moral theories than his own was not so much philosophic or theoretic as it was practical. He felt that every intuitional theory tended to dignify prejudice, convention, and fixed customs, and so to consecrate vested interests and inequitable institutions.