Bentham

https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/mill1838.pdf

• Jeremy Bentham and Samuel Taylor Coleridge—the two great seminal minds of England in their age. Bentham was a Progressive philosopher, Coleridge a Conservative one

• Bentham’s school: the assault on ancient institutions.
• All movements, except directly revolutionary ones, are headed not by •those who originate them but by •those who know best how to compromise between the old opinions and the new.

• He was not a great philosopher, but was a great reformer in philosophy. It was not his opinions but his method that constituted the novelty and the value of what he did; Bentham’s method may be described as the method of detail—treating:

  • wholes by separating them into their parts,
  • abstractions by resolving them into Things,
  • classes and generalities by distinguishing them into the individuals of which they are made up,

  and breaking every question into pieces before trying to answer it.

The Bentham Horizon

• In all ages of philosophy one of its schools has been utilitarian—not only from the time of Epicurus, but long before. It was by mere accident that this opinion became connected in Bentham with his peculiar method.
• He has thus (it is not too much to say) for the first time introduced precision of thought into moral and political philosophy. Instead of taking up their opinions by intuition or by reasoning from premises adopted on a mere rough view and stated so vaguely that it is impossible to say exactly whether they are true or false, philosophers are now forced to understand one another to break down the generality of their propositions, and in every dispute to come to grips over something precise. This is nothing less than a revolution in philosophy.
• A man with clear ideas errs grievously if he imagines that whatever is seen confusedly does not exist; Bentham’s contempt for all other schools of thinkers—his determination to create a philosophy wholly out of the materials provided by his own mind and by minds like it—was his first disqualification as a philosopher.

• He was a man of remarkable endowments for philosophy, and of remarkable deficiencies for it; fitted, beyond almost any man, for drawing from his premises conclusions that are not only correct but sufficiently precise and specific to be practical; but whose general conception of human nature and life provided him with an unusually thin stock of premises. He could, with close and accurate logic, track half-truths to their consequences and practical applications, on a scale of greatness and of minuteness not previously exemplified; and this is what posterity will probably think about Bentham.
• We have a large tolerance for one-eyed men if their one eye is a penetrating one; if they saw more, they would probably not see so keenly or pursue so eagerly one course of inquiry. Almost all rich veins of original speculation have been opened by systematic half-thinkers;
• Don’t regard his achievement as unimportant because its province was limited: man has to choose between going a little way in many paths or a great distance along only one. The field of Bentham’s labours was like the space between two parallel lines; narrow to excess in one direction, in another it reached to infinity. He found the philosophy of law a chaos, he left it a science; he found the practice of the law an Augean stable, and subjected it to a river which is mining and sweeping away mound after mound of its rubbish.
• In the English law, as in Roman law before it, the adaptations of barbarous laws to the growth of civilised society were chiefly made by stealth. They were generally made by the courts of justice, who could not help reading the new wants of mankind in the cases between individual men that came before them; but who, having no authority to make new laws for those new wants, were obliged to do the work covertly, evading the jealousy and opposition of an ignorant, prejudiced, and mostly brutal and tyrannical legislature.
• I cannot go into the particulars of what Bentham has done. To sum up my estimate under a few heads. (i) He has expelled mysticism from the philosophy of law, and set the example of viewing laws in a practical light, as means to certain definite and precise ends (ii) He demonstrated the necessity and practicability of codification—the conversion of all law into a written and systematically arranged code; (iii) He has taken a systematic view of the needs of society that the civil code is intended to meet, and of the principles of human nature by which its provisions are to be tested; (iv) He found the philosophy of judicial procedure, including that of judicial establishments and of evidence, in an even more wretched state than other parts of the philosophy of law; he carried it at once almost to perfection. He left it with every one of its principles established, and little remaining to be done even in the suggestion of practical arrangements.
• All countries that have long continued progressive, or been durably great, have been so because there has been an organised opposition to the ruling power—plebeians to patricians, clergy to kings, freethinkers to clergy, kings to barons, commons to king and aristocracy.
• As mankind are much more nearly of one •nature than of one opinion about their own nature, they are more easily brought to agree in their intermediate principles. . . .than in their first principles;