[Sidenote: (_a_) in its first meaning,] [Sidenote: (_b_)in its second meaning:] [Sidenote: private ethics and legislation,] [Sidenote: (_c_) in its third meaning.] It is scarcely necessary to discuss the first alternative (_a_), as no psychologist would seriously maintain it. A society composed of men constituted in the way it supposes men to be constituted, would be a collection of rational egoists, omniscient in all that concerned the results of action, and each adopting unerringly at every moment the course of conduct which would increase his own pleasure the most. The conduct of any member of such a society could only be modified when--and would always be modified when--the modified conduct actually brought pleasurable results to the agent: never so as to make him prefer the public good to his own. The second alternative (_b_) admits of such modification taking place only when it seems to the individual that this modified action will produce a greater balance of pleasure or smaller balance of pain than any other course of action. Under this theory an individual might indeed prefer the public good or another man's good to his own, but only through his being deceived as to the actual results of his course of action. Ethics as determining an end for conduct is put out of court; though the statesman or the educator may modify the actions of others by providing appropriate motives. If the "two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure," "determine what we shall do," it is hardly necessary for them also "to point out what we ought to do."[22] The end is already given in the nature of action, though an enlightened understanding will teach men how the greatest balance of pleasure may be obtained. We can only get at a rule prescribing an end by changing our point of view from the individual to the state. It is best for the state that each individual should aim at the common happiness; but, when we talk of this as a moral duty for the individual, all we can mean is that the state will punish a breach of it. In the words of Helvétius,[23] "pain and pleasure are the bonds by which we can always unite personal interest to the interest of the nation.... The sciences of morals and legislation can be only deductions from this simple principle." According to Bentham's psychology, a man is necessitated by his mental and physical nature to pursue at every moment, not the greatest happiness of the greatest number, but what seems to him his own greatest happiness. And what the legislator has to do is, by judiciously imposed rewards and punishments, especially the latter, to make it for the greatest happiness of each to pursue the greatest happiness of all.[24] As distinguished from this "art of legislation," "private ethics" consists only of prudential rules prescribing the best means to an end predetermined by nature as the only possible end of human action: it "teaches how each man may dispose himself to pursue the course