Four Phases of Morals: Socrates, Aristotle, Christianity, Utilitarianism
Socrates · en
purpose, pure motive, and noble deed; and for his services in applying
his favourite maxim to various departments of political, juridical,
and social reform, the world can scarcely be sufficiently grateful It
is not often that so pure a philanthropist enters with victorious axe
and mattock into domains bristling so rankly with all sorts of
professional prejudice and professional selfishness. In this domain
let him be loved as a man, reverenced as a patriarch, and even
worshipped as a saint--(he was a saint in his own peculiar way
unquestionably); but let him not be lifted into Christian pulpits or
academic chairs to indoctrinate the ingenuous youth of this country in
a curious moral arithmetic how to maximize pleasure and to minimize
pain. Not by such teaching, certainly, were heroes wont to be made in
Sparta, in Athens, or in Rome.
With Bentham the edifice of Utilitarianism is complete, and there is
little more to say about the matter. Those who came afterwards were
expositors, not founders; they employed themselves in explaining the
doctrines of their master, sometimes also in explaining them away;
for, while bound to maintain the honour of the sect, they were
sometimes dimly conscious and more than half ashamed of the base
element out of which it sprang. One {328} of their foremost spokesmen
was JAMES MILL, the father of the present distinguished logician and
politician, John Stuart Mill. This gentleman, who is much respected by
the school to which he belongs, in the year 1829 published a work
entitled _An Analysis of the Human Mind_. This treatise I have read
carefully, and am constrained to say that it appears to me an
extremely meagre production; somewhat as if the mind of the author had
been blasted and frosted by the arid and sharp east wind in the face
of which--near Montrose--he was born. From his life it would appear
that he studied at the University of Edinburgh in the days of the
great metaphysical school there, and that he devoted considerable
attention to Plato. I have not the slightest reason to believe that
the great idealist was much known even to the best thinkers in our
Scottish metropolis at that time; but if Mill did study Plato
thoroughly, it must have been, as Grote has done in our time, for the
purpose of not understanding him. Certainly in his book I have found
nothing but the materialistic side of Locke and Hartley worked out
into a monstrosity; a cold thin horror of all spiritual mystery, and
the shallow conceit that the primary divine force, which we call
MIND, can be explained by a laboriously minute dissection of a
merely physical machinery. Whatever that great juggler Association can
be made to do in order to explain knowledge out of sensation, mind out
of matter, and unity generally out of multiplicity, has been done in
this book. For the special ethics of Utilitarianism there is nothing
in James Mill that the student of Hume and Bentham will be likely to
think worth remembering.
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