the inherited results of thought, so much as from some point of local or {266} sectional prominence; our petty systems are of the nature of a reaction rather than an architecture, and like all reactions are one-sided in their direction and extravagant in their estimate of their own importance. If scholars sometimes make their learning useless by their ignorance of the present, the men of the present are not less apt to make their intellectual position ridiculous by ignoring, misunderstanding, or misrepresenting their relation to the past;--for a large appreciation of what has been achieved by our predecessors alone can guarantee a just estimate of the true value of our own labours. All judgments are comparative; and as Primrose Hill is a mighty mountain to the boy born within the chime of the Bow Bells, so Locke and Hume and Bentham may be taken for the greatest captains of thinking by men to whom Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are unknown. The first thing that strikes us in attempting a critical estimate of Utilitarianism is its name. Names are sometimes attached to systems accidentally, and in that case need not be curiously analysed; but when they are deliberately chosen by the propounder of a new theory, they are significant, and provoke question. “WHY UTILITY PLEASES” is the heading of one of Hume’s chapters; and the answer to it simply is, that as Utility consists in the adaptation of means to ends, and as the recognition of such adaptation is a peculiar function of reason, it cannot but be that reasonable creatures should receive pleasure from being affected in a manner so suitable to their nature. The eyes, as Plotinus says, are susceptible of pleasure from light, because an impressibility to light is of the essence of their quality and {267} the idea of their structure;[267.1] so reason is necessarily pleased with what is reasonable, and utility must please a creature whose whole energy, when he acts according to his best nature, is expended in discovering and applying means which shall be useful to secure certain ends. But the answering of this question does not advance us one step in moral philosophy; moral philosophy is a science of ends, not of means--a science of what Aristotle calls the ἀρχιτεκτονικόν, or supreme τέλος--the ultimate aim. So our new philosophy has taken as a watchword a term that means nothing by itself, any more than the terms _plus_ and _minus_ in algebra. To give the term a meaning, the further question must be put, _Useful for what?_ and then the old commonplace comes out--Useful for what all men desire, Happiness, of course; for “all men desire Happiness, that’s past doubt,” says Locke,[267.2] and Aristotle also, for that matter; but we do not consult philosophers to hear such truisms. What then comes next? The truism is put into an antithetic shape, and we are told as the grand result of the profoundest modern thought that _the greatest happiness of the greatest number_ is the ultimate