In other words, the ethical system of both is a utilitarianism which is narrow and personal in its motive (the private happiness of the individual in another world), but broad and catholic in its end (the general happiness of human beings in the present world). It is as if God induced us to promote other people’s happiness now, by telling us that He would in return promote our own by-and-by. There are signs that Malthus took a larger view, and thought rather of the development of the human faculties[761] than of mere satisfaction of desires, both in this world and in the next; but he nowhere distinctly breaks with Paley, and his division of passions into self-love (or prudence) and benevolence is taken straight from that theologian.[762] By the vagueness of their phraseology when they spoke of the general sum of happiness, the older utilitarians avoided some of the difficulties that encounter their successors. Apart from the hardness of defining happiness and a sum of happiness,[763] there is a difficulty in fixing the precise extent of the generality. The tendency of utilitarianism in the hands of Bentham was towards equality and the removal of privilege; every one to count as one, no one as more than one. But both with him and with the older members it may be doubted whether the doctrine did not tend to benefit the majority at the expense of the minority. We find Malthus thinking[764] that, had the Poor Laws never existed, there “might have been a few more instances of very severe distress,” but “the aggregate mass of happiness among the common people would have been much greater than it is at present.” In other words, what he wanted was the “greatest amount of happiness” on the whole, whatever an “amount” of happiness may mean. Malthus would probably have refused to use the formula of Bentham, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”; he would have counted the first item, the happiness, out of all proportion more important than the second.[765] He had refused something like it at the hands of Paley. “I cannot agree with Archdeacon Paley, who says that the quantity of happiness in any country is best measured by the number of its people. Increasing population is the most certain possible sign of the happiness and prosperity of a state; but the actual population may be only a sign of the happiness that is past.”[766] Malthus would not, for example, have wished to see the highlands of Scotland brought back to their ancient condition, in which they had greater numbers than now living in rude comfort, but also greater numbers exposed to precarious indigence.[767]