We have now finished our notice of those who are entitled to be called the founders of the Utilitarian school; those who follow, as the mere inheritors of principles already largely discussed, need not detain us long. Of these by far the most distinguished unquestionably is Bentham; so distinguished indeed, as in popular estimate to be accounted, the founder of the school. But there is need of a distinction here. Those men found a school in the proper sense who teach the principles which it acknowledges; but in another sense he founds it who applies those principles to practice. In the first sense, the founders of the ethical doctrine which we are considering were Locke, Hartley, and Hume; in the other sense, Bentham. His glory lies not so much in expounding as in applying principles; he is a lawyer and a politician rather than a philosopher. Not however that he did not give himself the airs of a philosopher; this he did with observation, and was accepted by his disciples accordingly. Therein lay the mistake. It is not every man, not even every great man, who knows how to recognise the limits which nature has laid down to the exercise of his faculty. Napoleon the Great, in the pride of imperial command, overlooked the moral forces that {321} lay slumbering in the heart of the people, and was punished by a three days’ cannonade at Leipzig, the prelude to his final chastisement at Waterloo. Jeremy Bentham, because he could tabulate Acts of Parliament with the astuteness of a barrister, the purity of a philanthropist, and the comprehensiveness of a statesman, conceited himself throned on a moral eminence from which he might look down with contempt on Plato and Socrates, and all the great moral teachers of the past. In the third chapter of the first volume of _Deontology_, or _Doctrine of Duty_, we read, “While Xenophon was writing history, and Euclid giving instruction in geometry, Socrates and Plato were talking nonsense under pretence of teaching wisdom. This morality of theirs consisted in words,--this wisdom of theirs was the denial of matters known to every man’s experience, and the assertion of other matters opposed to every man’s experience. And exactly in the proportion in which their notions on this subject differed from those of the mass of mankind, exactly in that proportion were they below the level of mankind.” Such an exhibition of ignorance, insolence, and impertinence as this in a man of undoubted genius, were truly inexplicable, did we not bear in mind that genius even of the very highest kind is often accompanied by a very decided one-sidedness; and more than that, there were in the circumstances of Bentham’s life not a few things that tended to raise to a maximum the dogmatism with which he was naturally endowed. He is by no means a solitary example of a great man, the sublime of whose excellence has been turned into the ridiculous for lack of a little Christian humility. {322} “Who