healthy instincts of human nature, the apostles of Christianity sanctioned with their authority when they talked of persons being “lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God;” and to the present hour “a man of pleasure” is a phrase familiarly used in the English language to express one of the most trifling, contemptible, and useless members of society. And the reason of this use of language is obvious. Pleasure and Good, so far from being of a kindred nature, are generally directly opposite; no doubt they both produce enjoyment, but the enjoyment in the one case is often passive, in the other always active; in the one case generally shunning difficulty, in the other rather provoking it; of the former the senses are the main organ, of the latter the reason; the sensuous enjoyment man has in common with a {326} pig, the rational only as a man. It was therefore a strange service that Bentham assumed himself to have done to moral philosophy by confounding the poles of moral distinction; and his conduct can only be palliated, not justified, by the tendency of every reaction to swing itself into an extreme. Any peculiar provocation in Bentham’s time calling upon him to reinstate the gospel of the flesh in the rights of which it had been deprived by St. Paul, one does not exactly see. Whatever faults he might have discovered in the morality of the clerical exclusives, purple doctors, and minute grammarians of Oxford, asceticism certainly was not one; feastings rather than fastings were the order of the day among the Dons; there remains, therefore, only the puerile delight of using a strong phrase, to palliate this gross confusion of the received terminology of moral science which he introduced. As for any other principles of morality that Bentham might have, they were merely what every other body had always professed. It did not require Hume, or any other sceptical solver of sceptical doubts, to teach mankind that Benevolence was naturally a good thing, and that no virtues were true virtues which did not tend to the public good. It happened therefore to Bentham, as it had happened to other promulgators of new gospels,--that what was most new in his system was least true, and what was most true was least new. The doctrine that Pleasure is the chief good, and that Epicurus was a better philosopher than Aristotle, will scarcely now, we apprehend, be seriously maintained; while, on the other hand, the maxim, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” has always been the war-cry by which the most generous politicians have {327} been roused, and the load-star by which the most far-seeing statesmen have been guided. It is not, indeed, in the kingdom of ethics, strictly so called, that Bentham’s merit is to be sought; specially rather in the outlying fields of jurisprudential and legislative economy, where that doctrine of consequences justly sways, which Paley erroneously sought to make regulative in the region of personal