The Utilitarian school, therefore, judged by its name, and by its favourite shibboleth, has no distinctive character; and its chosen appellation merely shows an utter deficiency of the first principles of a scientific nomenclature. To say that morality consists in happiness, falls logically under the same category with the proposition that a cat is an animal--we {269} knew that; but what we wish to know is, by what differentiating marks a cat is distinguished from other animals, and specially from others of the feline family. Wherein does the special happiness of the creature called Man consist? Aristotle, to my thinking, answered that question with as much precision as it ever can be answered, and neither Hume nor Bentham added anything to his definition. So far as these spokesmen of modern ethics said that virtue consisted in acting according to reason, as necessarily involving the greatest happiness of the reasonable being called Man, they said what was quite true, but nothing that was new; they merely repeated the Stagirite, putting the element of εὐδαιμονία into the van, which he had wisely kept in the rear. So far as they went beyond this, they said what was neither new nor true, but only a refurbishment of the old doctrine of Epicurus, that for man, as for beast, pleasure is the only good, and there is no need of a distinctive phraseology for the happiness of creatures so essentially the same. What then is the distinctive character of Utilitarianism, if we fail to discover it in its name? for that the school, as a matter of fact, does stand on a very distinct basis, and in an attitude of very decided antagonism to other systems, is unquestioned. Between Paley, the model churchman of the eighteenth century, and Bentham, the stereotyped hater of all churchmen, churches, and creeds, there is no doubt a great gap; still there is a strong family likeness even between these two extremes of the school; and the point in which this likeness asserts itself we think may be best expressed by the phrase EXTERNALISM. From Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury {270} down to Alexander Bain of Aberdeen, the morality of the Utilitarians is a morality in which the moral virtue of the inner soul is as much as possible denied, and the moral virtue of outward institutional or other machinery as much as possible asserted. Look everywhere for the origin of right and wrong--only not in the soul. The kingdom of heaven, according to the prophets of this gospel, is not within you, but without. This, if I am not mistaken, is the keynote which gives a unity and a significance to all the variations of Utilitarianism from Bentham to Bain. Let us hear it in their own words: “What one expects to find in an ethical principle is something that points out some _external_ consideration as a means of warranting and guiding the internal sentiments of approbation and disapprobation:” so Bentham. “Conscience is moulded on _external_