Born, in Houndsditch, 15 Feb. 1748. Precocious ability in early years. At Westminster School, 1755–60. To Queen’s Coll., Oxford, 28 June 1760; B.A., 1763; M.A., 1766. Visit to France, 1764. Called to Bar at Lincoln’s Inn, 1772. Devoted himself to literary work. Visit to his brother at Zadobras, in Russia, Aug. 1785. Removed from London to Ford Abbey, near Chard, 1814. Interest in political and national affairs. Provided funds for starting the “Westminster Review,” 1823. Abroad for health same year. Died, 6 June 1832. Left his body to be dissected. Skeleton preserved in University College. Works: Between 70 and 80 works by Bentham were published between 1775 and 1832. His “Collected Works” (11 vols.) were edited by Sir John Bowring, 1838–43. Some of the more important are: “A Fragment on Government” (anon.), 1776. “Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation,” 1780; “Panopticon,” 1791; “Plan of Parliamentary Reform,” 1817; “Codification and Public Instruction,” 1817. Several of Bentham’s works were translated into French by Dumont, in some cases from Bentham’s unpublished MSS. Life: by Bowring, in 1838 edn. of Works.

Personal

  Our last visit was to my old and most valuable friend Jeremy Bentham, at Ford Abbey, in the neighborhood of Chard; a house which he rents, and which once belonged to Prideaux, the Attorney General of the Commonwealth. I was not a little surprized to find in what a palace my friend was lodged. The grandeur and stateliness of the buildings form as strange a contrast to his philosophy, as the number and spaciousness of the apartments, the hall, the chapel, the corridors, and the cloisters, do to the modesty and scantiness of his domestic establishment. We found him passing his time, as he has always been passing it since I have known him, which is now more than thirty years, closely applying himself for six or eight hours a day in writing upon laws and legislation, and in composing his Civil and Criminal Codes; and spending the remaining hours of every day in reading, or taking exercise by way of fitting himself for his labours, or, to use his own strangely invented phraseology, taking his ante-jentacular and post-prandial walks, to prepare himself for his task of codification. There is something burlesque enough in this language; but it is impossible to know Bentham, and to have witnessed his benevolence, his disinterestedness, and the zeal with which he has devoted his whole life to the service of his fellow creatures, without admiring and revering him.

  Mr. Bentham is very much among philosophers what La Fontaine was among poets:—in general habits and in all but his professional pursuits, he is a mere child. He has lived for the last forty years in a house in Westminster, overlooking the Park, like an anchoret in his cell, reducing law to a system, and the mind of man to a machine. He scarcely ever goes out, and sees very little company. The favoured few, who have the privilege of the entrée, are always admitted one by one. He does not like to have witnesses to his conversation. He talks a great deal, and listens to nothing but facts. When any one calls upon him, he invites them to take a turn round his garden with him (Mr. Bentham is an economist of his time, and sets apart this portion of it to air and exercise)—and there you may see the lively old man, his mind still buoyant with thought and with the prospect of futurity, in eager conversation with some Opposition Member, some expatriated Patriot, or Transatlantic Adventurer, urging the extinction of Close Boroughs, or planning a code of laws for some “lone island in the watery waste,” his walk almost amounting to a run, his tongue keeping pace with it in shrill, cluttering accents, negligent of his person, his dress, and his manner, intent only on his grand theme of UTILITY—or pausing, perhaps, for want of breath and with lack-lustre eye to point out to the stranger a stone in the wall at the end of his garden (overarched by two beautiful cotton-trees) Inscribed to the Prince of Poets, which marks the house where Milton formerly lived.

  Mr. B. sleeps standing after dinner; fell once he says, and hurt himself on the elbows; the approaches of sleep are extremely delightful, he adds, being half asleep at the time. He sits up in bed in the morning to enjoy the approaches of sleep—not to sleep. And here it may not be amiss to describe the bed. The philosopher sleeps in a bag, and sometimes with his coat on; the bed not being made up for a month together…. He sleeps in his coat now—having ordered the flaps to be cut off, which are too warm for the night, and bring on the heat and itching of the skin, with which he is afflicted after dinner—the devil he calls it. Having drawn a line down each side of the middle-seam, with a bit of chalk, he has ordered a strip of the cloth to be cut out, and a cord to be left in, like the lacing of stays, to keep his back bone cool: D.—the mischievous dog he employed for this purpose having cut off the flaps of the coat and ripped it up in the back, now added the initials of the philosopher’s name, as if to provide against his going astray,—putting them in large white letters in the very middle of the back. When I mentioned it, saying—“If you escape now, sir, you will be brought home;” instead of being offended, he laughed, said it was a foolish joke, and made the secretary rub it off. Such a figure no mortal ever saw before out of a mad-house. I cannot think of it to this day without laughing. I can see him now, it is the fourteenth of June, thermometer 76°;—There he goes with a pair of thick leather gloves on, woollen stockings rolled up over his knees outside, his coat-tail shaved away like a sailor’s round-about, and stooping with his reverend rump, pushed out like that of a young chicken.

  Personally, Mr. Bentham was like so many other great men, all simplicity and playfulness. He had that thorough amiability which arises from the warmest benevolence. He was without guile—the very antipodes of a worldly man: he who could unfold all the secrets or jurisprudence and legislation, and lay down regulations for the accurate conduct of whole nations, and resolve society and human nature into their last elements, was as simple as a child, and lived in the center of a vast capital, as far removed from actual contact with the world as if he had seated himself on the Andes…. He died, it seems, as he would have gone to sleep—this was sure to be the case with the calmest, pleasantest, and most innocent body that ever partook of mortal frailties. His long life passed in perfect, though far from robust, health; he was never, in all his scores of years, guilty of an excess; his fame had never been stained, for a moment, with intemperance: the old man left his body as pure as that of a child.

  None who were present can ever forget that impressive scene. The room (the lecture-room of the Webb Street School of Anatomy) is small and circular, with no window but a central skylight, and capable of containing about three hundred persons. It was filled, with the exception of a class of medical students and some eminent members of that profession, by friends, disciples, and admirers of the deceased philosopher, comprising many men celebrated for literary talent, scientific research, and political activity. The corpse was on the table in the middle of the room, directly under the light, clothed in a night-dress, with only the head and hands exposed. There was no rigidity in the features, but an expression of placid dignity and benevolence. This was at times rendered almost vital by the reflection of the lightning playing over them; for a storm arose just as the lecturer commenced, and the profound silence in which he was listened to was broken and only broken by loud peals of thunder, which continued to roll at intervals throughout the delivery of his most appropriate and often affecting address. With the feelings which touch the heart in the contemplation of departed greatness, and in the presence of death, there mingled a sense of the power which that lifeless body seemed to be exercising in the conquest of prejudice for the public good, thus co-operating with the triumphs of the spirit by which it had been animated. It was a worthy close of the personal career of the great philanthropist and philosopher. Never did corpse of hero on the battle-field, “with his martial cloak around him,” or funeral obsequies chanted by stoled and mitred priests in Gothic aisles, excite such emotions as the stern simplicity of that hour in which the principle of utility triumphed over the imagination and the heart.

  The skeleton of Bentham, dressed in the clothes which he usually wore, and with a wax face, modelled by Dr. Talrych, enclosed in a mahogany case, with folding-doors, may now be seen in the Anatomical Museum of University College Hospital, Gower Street, London.

  I preserve a most agreeable recollection of that grand old face, beaming with benignity and intelligence, and occasionally with a touch of humor, which I did not expect. The portrait of him which is prefixed to the latter English editions of his “Morals and Legislation” is very like him, as I saw then, at the age of seventy-eight, six years before his death. I do not remember to have met any one of his age who seemed to have more complete possession of his faculties, bodily and mental; and this surprised me the more because I knew that, in his childhood, he had been a feeble-limbed, frail boy, precocious, indeed,—taking his degree of A. M. at eighteen,—but with little of that health of body which is sometimes spoken of as indispensable to health of mind.

  Bentham never in so many words publicly avowed himself as an atheist, but he was so in substance. His destructive criticisms of religious doctrine, in “Church-of-Englandism and its Cathechism examined,” and still more his anonymous book on Natural Religion, left no residue that could be of any value. As a legislator, he had to allow a place for Religion; but he made use of the Deity, as Napoleon wished to make use of the Pope, for sanctioning whatever he himself chose, in the name of Utility, to prescribe. John Austin followed on the same track but the course was too disingenuous to suit either of the Mills. It is quite certain, however, that the whole tone of conversation in Bentham’s more select circle, was atheistic.

  Yes, it is a gratifying memory to me now—as I accounted it a high privilege then—to have looked on that great man while in life, to have beheld that nobly-molded head, that most benevolent face, in which almost childlike simplicity contended with godlike intellect, both blended in universal sympathy, while his loose gray hair streamed over his shoulders and played in the wind as he pursued his evening walk of meditation, around the very garden wherein the poet-patriot John Milton was erst accustomed to think his mighty thoughts.

General

  Read Bentham’s “Panopticon” and first Appendix. All that respected the moral economy of his plan interested me greatly, but for want of plates I could not comprehend the mechanical structure. The book is (as all Bentham’s are) full of original and very valuable matter. But it would possibly have had more effect if it had contained fewer novelties in substance and in language. Men are prepared to oppose when novelty is ostentatiously announced.

  Mr. Bentham is long; Mr. Bentham is occasionally involved and obscure; Mr. Bentham invents new and alarming expressions; Mr. Bentham loves division and subdivision—and he loves method itself, more than its consequences. Those only, therefore, who know his originality, his knowledge, his vigour, and his boldness, will recur to the works themselves. The great mass of readers will not purchase improvement at so dear a rate; but will choose rather to become acquainted with Mr. Bentham through the medium of Reviews—after that eminent philosopher has been washed, trimmed, shaved, and forced into clean linen.

  His style is unpopular, not to say unintelligible. He writes a language of his own, that darkens knowledge. His works have been translated into French—they ought to be translated into English. People wonder that Mr. Bentham has not been prosecuted for the boldness and severity of some of his invectives. He might wrap up high treason in one of his inextricable periods, and it would never find its way into Westminster-Hall. He is a kind of Manuscript author—he writes a cipher-hand, which the vulgar have no key to. The construction of his sentences is a curious frame-work with pegs and hooks to hang his thoughts upon, for his own use and guidance, but almost out of the reach of everybody else. It is a barbarous philosophical jargon, with all the repetitions, parentheses, formalities, uncouth nomenclature and verbiage, of law-Latin; and what makes it worse, it is not mere verbiage, but has a great deal of acuteness and meaning in it, which you would be glad to pick out if you could. In short, Mr. Bentham writes as if he was allowed but a single sentence to express his whole view of a subject in, and as if, should he omit a single circumstance or step of the argument, it would be lost to the world forever, like an estate by a flaw in the title-deeds.

  Dr. Parr considered Jeremy Bentham as the wisest man of his time, whose powerful and penetrating mind had anticipated the improvements of coming ages, and who, on the all-important subject of Jurisprudence had discovered and collected knowledge, which will scarcely find its way to the great mass of human intellect, perhaps through the course of another century.

  One thing we see: the moral nature of man is deeper than his intellectual; things planted down into the former may grow as if for ever; the latter as a kind of drift mould produces only annuals. What is Jesus Christ’s significance? Altogether moral. What is Jeremy Bentham’s significance? Altogether intellectual, logical. I name him as the representative of a class important only for their numbers, intrinsically wearisome, almost pitiable and pitiful. Logic is their sole foundation, no other even recognised as possible; wherefore their system is a machine and cannot grow or endure; but after thrashing for a little (and doing good service that way) must thrash itself to pieces and be made fuel. Alas, poor England! stupid, purblind, pudding-eating England! Bentham with his Mills grinding thee out morality.

  It cannot be denied without injustice and ingratitude, that Mr. Bentham has done more than any other writer to rouse the spirit of juridical reformation which is now gradually examining every part of law; and when further progress is facilitated by digesting the present laws, will doubtless proceed to the improvement of all. Greater praise it is given to few to earn.

  That Jeremy Bentham is a most vigorous and original thinker cannot be denied. We do not pretend to be familiar with all, or even the greater part of his works, but we have seen enough of what he has done, to be satisfied, that, like Hobbes, he may justly boast of being very little indebted to his predecessors, either for the conclusions he comes to, or for his manner of deducing and illustrating them. Whether these conclusions be discoveries or not for other people, they are so for himself. Whether it be difficult or not to establish them, in the usual way of treating such subjects, it always costs him great pains to arrive at them. He has no idea of any intellectual labor-saving contrivance—he carefully eschews the shortest distance between any two points—he hates simplicity, as if it were not the great end of all philosophers to simplify. We have seen what a jargon is used at his fireside—he adopts a similar one in his ethical and juridical speculations. His nomenclature or terminology is a study of itself—as complicated, if not quite so systematic, as that of the chemists. This wrapping up of plain matters in the mysteries of artificial language, which Hobbes detested so much, is Jeremy’s great title to the admiration of the world. He is the Heracleitus of the age.

  Posterity will pronounce its calm and impartial decision, and that decision will, we firmly believe, place in the same rank with Galileo and with Locke the man who found jurisprudence a gibberish and left it a science…. He was, assuredly, at once a great logician and a great rhetorician. But the effect of his logic was injured by a vicious arrangement, and the effect of his rhetoric by a vicious style. His mind was vigorous, comprehensive, subtle, fertile of arguments, fertile of illustrations. But he spoke in an unknown tongue; and, that the congregation might be edified, it was necessary that some brother having the gift of interpretation should expound the invaluable jargon. His oracles were of high import, but they were traced on leaves and flung loose to the wind. So negligent was he of the arts of selection, distribution, and compression, that to persons who formed their judgment of him from his works in their undigested state, he seemed to be the least systematic of all philosophers. The truth is, that his opinions formed a system which, whether sound or unsound, is more exact, more entire, and more consistent with itself than any other.

  The age of law reform and the age of Jeremy Bentham are one and the same. He is the father of the most important of all the branches of Reform, the leading and ruling department of human improvement…. In thus assigning to Mr. Bentham, not merely the first place among Legal Philosophers, but the glory of having founded the Sect, and been the first who deserved the name, it cannot be intended to deny that other writers preceded him, who wisely and fearlessly exposed the defects of existing systems…. But he also excelled in the light works of fancy. An habitual despiser of eloquence, he was one of the most eloquent of men when it pleased him to write naturally, and before he had adopted that harsh style, full of involved periods and new-made words, which how accurately soever it conveyed his ideas, was almost as hard to learn as a foreign language.

  Bentham has been in this age and country the great questioner of things established. It is by the influence of the modes of thought with which his writings inoculated a considerable number of thinking men, that the yoke of authority has been broken, and innumerable opinions, formerly received on tradition as incontestable, are put upon their defence, and required to give an account of themselves…. The father of English innovation, both in doctrines and in institutions, is Bentham: he is the great subversive, or, in the language of continental philosophers, the great critical, thinker of his age and country…. His was an essentially practical mind. It was by practical abuses that his mind was first turned to speculation—by the abuses of the profession which was chosen for him, that of the law…. A place, therefore, must be assigned to Bentham among the masters of wisdom, the great teachers and permanent intellectual ornaments of the human race…. He was not a great philosopher, but he was a great reformer in philosophy…. Bentham failed in deriving light from other minds. His writings contain few traces of the accurate knowledge of any school of thinking but his own; and many proofs of his entire conviction that they could teach him nothing worth knowing. For some of the most illustrious of previous thinkers, his contempt was unmeasured.

  Seldom has a man exercised a more permanent influence on his race than Jeremy Bentham. His mind led the leading minds of his age. Of him, Madame de Staël said—“He will give his name to the era.” Happy, indeed, will it be for the world when his era is arrived—the era in which the greatest happiness principle shall be the ground-work of the laws, and the guide of the morals of mankind. Once conversing with Talleyrand, he thus expressed himself to me:—“I have known many great warriors—many great statesmen—many great authors—but only one great genius, and that genius is Jeremy Bentham.” Talleyrand induced Napoleon to read Bentham’s “Theory of Morals and Legislation.” The Emperor’s remark upon it was—“That is a book which will enlighten many libraries.” It was saying more than if he had said—It will instruct many Philosophers.

  Those who are acquainted with the chronology of Bentham’s works will find in their uniformity of opinion an external argument for their truth. As he wrote a large quantity of matter almost every day, and never recurred in any shape to anything that he had previously written, it often happened that he went twice or thrice over the same ground at distant intervals; yet when these MSS.—often with an interval of twenty or thirty years between them in the dates of their composition—are confronted together, they are generally found to be so much alike, not only in the conclusions arrived at, but in the steps by which they are reached, and the very nature of the phraseology employed, that the author might be justly compared to an inductive philosopher repeating the same experiments in natural history, and obtaining, as a matter of physical certainty, the same results.

  From 1820–1830 I believe the most wonderful period in our history, if we look merely at the importance of the people’s opinions. The writings of Bentham produced a silent revolution in the mode of treating all political and moral subjects. The habits of thought were entirely new, and the whole body of political writers, without (for the most part) knowing whence the inspiration came, were full of a new spirit, and submitted all acts to a new test.

  We cannot think that Bentham would have been more useful if, like Paley, he had adopted a notion about the will of God to help out the weakness of his Utilitarian motives. We rather consider it one of his chief merits that he utterly dispensed with any such aid; that he rejected a divine basis altogether for human society, or for the life of the individual man. That was the fair way of bringing the principle which he defended to a test; the only mode of ascertaining whether any society or any man has existed, does exist, or ever will exist without the confession of a Being who does not merely decree what men shall do under the terrors of punishment here or hereafter, but who is Righteous, who purposes to set Righteousness on the earth. The acknowledgment of such a Being lay, we believe, deep in the heart of Bentham as in the heart of Paley.

  In genius was certainly superior to Beccaria, and whose influence, though perhaps not so great, was also European.

  The relation, indeed, of Bentham’s ethical doctrines to Paley’s may be expressed by saying that Bentham is Paley minus a belief in hell-fire. But Bentham, in another sense, is Paley plus a profound faith in himself, and an equally profound respect for realities.

  His system is even an important element of our current political thought; hardly a decade—though an eventful one—has elapsed since it might almost have been called a predominant element.

  Bentham, at the close of the eighteenth century, was doing for jurisprudence what Adam Smith had already done for commerce. Bentham’s works, however, never enjoyed the popularity of Adam Smith’s, because the majority of them were not written in the clear style of the great Scotch philosopher. Bentham’s earlier essays, indeed, are models of exactness of language and purity of style; but, in his later works, in his efforts to be exact he is occasionally obscure…. The obscurity of some of Bentham’s later works probably accounts for the circumstance that, while the majority of mankind have long ago accepted most of his opinions, they have not given their originator the credit of them. Every one associates free trade with Adam Smith; but few people attribute the reform of the criminal code or the alteration of the Poor Laws to Bentham.

  The peculiarity of Bentham’s genius lies in the fact that he perceived that legislation was an art, and brought to the art of legislation that kind of inventive talent and resource which is generally applied to the prosecution of scientific discovery, or to the improvement of mechanical inventions…. If he is regarded as an inventor laboring in the field of legislation for the benefit of mankind, just as a man of science seeks after discoveries which may extend the field of human knowledge, Bentham will, we are convinced, be seen in his true light, and will be acknowledged as the teacher who, beyond all others since the time of Socrates, has conceived of life as an art, and has at least pointed to the way by which the principles of legislation ought to be investigated, and to the mode in which, by the scientific amelioration of law, the amount of human happiness may be increased.

  Bentham’s system has had the greatest influence upon the world since his time. It is sufficiently important to be considered a new departure in the world of thought; and, as such, it has received the allegiance of as devoted a band of disciples as ever surrounded any master in science or morals.

  The most hardy imagination could hardly connect Bentham, or any of his speculations, with religious thought. Great as he may have been in his own line as a legislative and legal reformer, Bentham cannot be called anything more than a sciolist in religion. He had but a feeble grasp of the subject either speculatively or historically.

  The subjects treated by Bentham are very varied. He sought to compass the whole field of ethics, jurisprudence, logic, and political economy, and to deal with points of detail as well as principles. To the last science his contributions are of small account. He did little more than apply, in his strictures on the usury laws, with courage and with happy illustrations, the principles of free trade which had been expounded by Adam Smith. His speculations on banking and currency illustrate the power these subjects have to lead astray even a singularly acute mind. To logic, though the subject of his inquiry for many years, he made no very valuable contributions; his ideas on that subject, which relate chiefly to exposition and method, will be found in his nephew’s work on logic, “Outlines of a New System of Logic.” His “Book on Fallacies” is a clever and brilliant refutation of popular political errors. His great work was in the field of jurisprudence and ethics, and his influence on these sciences can scarcely be overestimated. His most original and most durable works relate to law.

  In Bentham we reach, perhaps, the ideal—not certainly a very inviting one—of prosaic, and even acrid logic. Narrow in his conceptions, but inflexibly bold in their enunciation, with the force and vigour that come from absolute convictions, with the warmth—and that alone—which comes from hostility to what he believes to be erroneous or unsound, softened by no shadow of doubt, and illumined by no ray of imagination, Bentham yet commands respect even from those to whom his writings seem most barren of human interest. To him literary style was, so far as conscious effort went, a meaningless phrase; he is correct and lucid only from the clearness of his own views, and because he found the instrument of expression wrought to perfection by the habit of his age.

  Even in handling themes of general interest Bentham, it must be owned, is literary only by accident. He cannot pretend to the sparkling elegance of Montesquieu, the careless graces of Hume, or the rhetorical pomp of Burke. His highest merit is that he is simple and vigorous. He writes like a man who has fully considered his subject and who knows exactly what he wants to say. He writes without the least endeavour to be fine. He is too much engrossed with the task of communicating his thoughts to be desirous of calling attention to his eloquence. Thus, if he had no literary graces, he had no literary affectation. By dint of devotion to his subject he comes to have a style, not a great or a beautiful style, but a style eminently characteristic of the man, adequate to his ideas and stimulating to the earnest reader.

  Reminds one of a Hobbes without the literary genius.

  To Bentham’s political influence, which dates from the early years of the present century, full justice has probably never yet been done.

  A clear-sighted and scrupulously veracious philosopher, abettor of the age of reason, apostle of utility, god-father of the panopticon, and donor to the English dictionary of such unimpassioned vocables as “codification” and “international.” Bentham would have been glad to purify the language by purging it of those “affections of the soul” wherein Burke had found its highest glory. Yet in censuring the ordinary political usage of such a word as “innovation,” it was hardly prejudice in general that he attacked, but the particular and deep-seated prejudice against novelty. The surprising vivacity of many of his own figures,—although he had the courage of his convictions, and laboured, throughout the course of a long life, to desiccate his style,—bears witness to a natural skill in the use of loaded weapons. He will pack his text with grave argument on matters ecclesiastical, and indulge himself and literature, in the notes with a pleasant description of the flesh and the spirit playing leap-frog, now one up, now the other, around the holy precincts of the Church. Lapses like these show him far enough from his own ideal of a geometric fixity in the use of words.

  His whole system of ethics and politics was severely utilitarian. It may indeed be compared to an arch, which has as its key-stone this principle, serving to unite his theoretical and political speculations, and to interlock them in a dogmatic whole. The new creed was soon to prove itself subversive of modes of thought and of institutions which rested only on prescription and tradition. Utility was a crucial test when rigorously applied to the Gothic irregularities of the British constitution; and Bentham was nothing if not rigorous. Exact methods of thought and reasoning were to be the sole guide of the philosophic and political inquirer. Sentiment, devotion, chivalry, appeals to the continuity of national life, all were excluded from the argument; and man was treated as if he were merely a reasoning machine, solely intent on manufacturing enjoyment by logical processes. The archaic dogmatism of the divine right of kings, the newer but equally severe dogmatism of Rousseau and the framers of the rights of man, were alike swept aside, because they lacked all proof of their utility or reality. But, as generally happens with destroyers of dogma, Bentham cleared the way for a new and formidable dogmatism, when he insisted on the undisputed sway of the principle of utility in politics. Imbued with the very one-sided and almost self-cancelling theory that man was a reasoning creature engaged in a constant pursuit after happiness, Bentham arraigned the institutions of his country at the utilitarian judgment bar.