WORKS OF JEREMY BENTHAM

(From the True Tablet.)
The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Part XIX., containing Memoirs of Jeremy Bentham, by John Bowring; including Autobiographical Conversations and Correspondence. Edinburgh, Tait. 1842.
So here we have at last the veritable inward man of the "philosopher," par excellence—Jeremy Bentham, depicted by his own hand; his likeness drawn by himself, in his familiar letters in sketches taken from his other works, and in conversations noted down, and, as we gather, formally dictated for publication to his faithful friend, executor, and posthumous editor, Dr. Bowring. And a right curious book the pair of philosophers have made of it; curious, and not a little entertaining and instructive also. For, indeed, Jeremy Bentham is one of those names which so long as the world lasts, and the records of European history are preserved, must last and preserve its meaning and significance.
Some years go, when the belief of our disorganised social condition was nearly at its height, and when there was a more general and implicit conviction than it is now fashionable to profess in the omnipotence of mechanical: arrangements for the redress of every social distemper, there was a large and an increasing class of logical heads, with whom Bentham and the Utilitarian philosophy were all in all. It was not so much a new political philosophy as a new gospel. From the house in Queen-square, in which had lived the author of " Paradise Lost," had also issued a new redemption of man. The new creed was summed up very briefly in this formula ; " There is but one God, Jeremy Bentham, and James Mill is his prophet." The "greatest happiness principle," and a tolerably accurate calculation of utilities, were to root out all evil passions, or temper and restrain them within the limits of benevolence. Pain was to be scouted from the creation. Increased food; improved digestion ; a general diffusion of a taste for botany; law purged from the "unintelligibility" of the old traditional systems, and rendered level to the meanest capacity by a phraseology so logically accurate as to be utterly incomprehensible to any but the most disciplined understandings; chapters in this code read in churches instead of chapters of the bible, the more effectually to deter people from crime ; and the reformation by panopticon penitentiaries of all those persons whose arithmetical calculations as to vice and virtue should after all appear to be a little faulty —the said criminals to be worked off out of vice into virtue by contract, and at stated periods; on such a basis as this the world was to turn over a new leaf, commence running a new score, and have all the old debts duly and for ever cancelled. These hopes were once very widely entertained; and so growing and formidable did the evil seem about fourteen years ago, that the Whig review felt bound to step forward, and in three or four most truculent articles, to administer a severe corrective to the disciples of the new school, and thus disencumber the respectable Whig party of the odium of this blot upon the liberal escutcheon. For, of course, as the popularity of the school increased in one direction, so did the fear and hatred of it increase most formidably in another. About fourteen years, we believe, have now elapsed since the commencement of that memorable dispute between the Whig and the Radical reviews ; about twelve years have passed away since its termination. What a change since that time! Who would now think of writing a furious political tirade against the Utilitarian theory of morals? The very review which then battled for the gospel according to, Bentham, and in which was worshipped his effigy, has itself gone over to the enemy ; and instead of being the advocate of pure Benthamism, the Westminster Review is now the representative of an indefinite radicalism, half economical, and half sentimental; very vague, very barren, and very insignificant. At the present moment this famed periodical, founded by Bentham to trumpet forth his regenerating principles, has lost all its old sap and life, and exhibits no power either of destruction or creation. It has lost its faith in the propriety of a general pulling down, along with its confidence in its own capacity to superintend a general building up on the ruins. It has no longer a distinct and separate cause to advocate; it can now do little else than preach a more Radical Whiggism, Liberalism less hampered by party ties, political economy more pure and undefiled.
But though the name and cause of Bentham are thus miserably tarnished, and his disciples scattered to the winds, there is so much of real practical value in the writings of the old philosopher, and so touch real fertility of mind about their author, that he must always remain a name of note, and even of some degree of authority. His moral speculations are the shallowest of the shallow, and are ludicrously valueless; but his speculations on legislation, and they extend over a very great portion of the subject, are in the highest degree distinguished by their practical sagacity, comprehensiveness, and acuteness. His conclusions, indeed, and his reasonings, are never to be trusted. Even if his unresting, fidgetty, and analytical style would allow the reader to dream along his pages, it would never be morally prudent to do so. His books present us with one half of the subject—all that portion of it which is concerned only with worldly prudence and human benevolence—brought together with an unexampled prodigality of arrangement, profuseness of illustration, and an exhaustless store of arguments. But it is one half of the subject only. That half, indeed, he strips completely bare, and leaves little for any subsequent speculator but to vary his form and manner of treating it. But it is only a half after all ; the reader finds, on a little consideration, that the higher portion of the subject has been omitted altogether, and that very many of his arguments, and very many of his conclusions, need various important modifications, which deprive them of their chief value. Luckily, Bentham's writings are not vary inviting to ordinary readers, nor are they calculated to fasten very powerfully upon the imaginations of any class of readers. They are logical, abstract, and disputative, not imaginative or rhetorical. Unlike the writings of Rousseau, they possess little power to pervert by spreading a subtle poison through the public mind. Those who believe in Bentham, may, have their wits sharpened, and their logical powers augmented, and their errors rendered more systematic and complete by reading his works; but at any rate he seduces no one; his votaries approach his altar with their eyes open, and have a cool and deliberate reason to assign for every step they take in his company. So that on the whole his works, abounding with false reasonings and unsound conclusions, yet form an inexhaustible and most valuable repertory of suggestions and argumentations on all matters of legislation, and have too little of seduction or attraction about them to make them very dangerous instruments for the propagation of error.
The permanence of Bentham's reputation depends also on his being the most perfect type of that spiritual aspect of the last century, which consisted in a mechanical scepticism, an unbelief which left man no guidance for his steps, but a balance of worldly enjoyments and advantages. Bentham, indeed, was no orator, or poet, or party pamphleteer, or romance writer; and therefore his name has never been popular with the vulgar. But he is unquestionably the greatest of all those reasoners and speculators of the last two centuries with whom natural wisdom, the things of sense, and an earthly prudence, constitute the be-all and end-all of our existence. Hobbes, Locke, Condillac, Helvetius, Godwin, are all poor and barren compared with him. Their speculations, being for the most part purely abstract and false, are of little value except as matters of curiosity. His speculations, just as false in their abstract basis, busy themselves about practical matters, in which considerations of prudence and utility have, and will have to the end of time, a large and acknowledged place ; and in this sense it may be said that his writings will never be obsolete, and will always be of great practical value. His rationale of evidence, his penal code, his treatises on legislation, even his constitutional code, must always keep their ground as armouries, out of which particular opinions and doctrines can he most readily and forcibly attacked and defended.
But we are keeping our readers too long from the first portion of the life of the man whose writings occupy the place which we have thus imperfectly described. Though Bentham's writings are to the general reader dry and obscure enough, by reason of their subject matter, these letters, and these autobiographical sketches, are the very reverse. They are valuable in the highest degree for their sincerity. In these letters and reminiscences, moreover, we may rely upon it that Bentham gives us as true a picture as he could, both of himself and the persons by whom he was surrounded. Without either affectation or concealment he has here poured out before us his whole heart.
The volume we are now reviewing gives us about one half of his life, extending from the time of his birth in Red Lion-street, Houndsditch, in the year 1748, to the year 1794, when he was of the age of forty-six, had of course pretty well matured his leading systems and theories, both of morals and legislation, and had even published some of his most famous works. Dr. Bowring has taken down from his own lips a very full account of his child. hood. A timid, sensitive, sickly boy, passionately fond of reading, taking delight in Rapin's History when little more than three years old, writing Latin a couple of years later, extremely sensitive both to pain and pleasure, haunted by a dread of ghosts and supernatural visitations, flattered and praised, but misdirected from his earliest days, without companions of his own age, and with no fit guides of a more mature standing—his character developed itself in silence amidst contradictions of all kinds. His father, an attorney, an arbitrary, pedantic humourist, and a vulgarly ambitious man, formed great hopes from his sons precocious genius, saw in him a successful candidate for the woolsack, and was continually urging him to " push on," and to " make his way in the world." With his father he seems to have had little sympathy, nor did he speak of him in after life with much respect or affection and he used to justify the freedom of his censures by the characteristic saying, " why should a Latin or an English proverb screen the character of our ancestors from investigation ?" Young Jeremy was a perfect cormorant of books, and read without guidance of any kind books very far above his years. " Telemachus" was his favourite at six years old, and the perusal of it made him even then a Utilitarian, and he thought himself capable of correcting even the wisdom of Minerva. Fairy tales he read with inexpressible delight; Voltaire's " Candide," and " General History," the " Lettres Juives," Pope's " Homer," Cave's " Lives of the Apostles," various histories, Richardson's novels, Sterne, and " Robinson Crusoe." Moliere's plays confused him; he wanted facts. The " Paradise Lost" frightened him. " The book looked like something between true and false; and I did not know how much might be true." Johnson he disliked for his asceticism. " He brought nothing new to me ; no facts, no chemistry, no electricity; all was gloomy and tasteless." Gay's "Fables" he did not believe; in fact, he knew that " his stories of cocks and bulls were not true."
We cannot, of course, follow the young philosopher through the remainder of his career; his stay at Westminster school, which "was his hell," his early removal to Oxford, and his uncongenial contemporaries, by whose vile insincerity every feeling of respect for religion in the ardent mind of the young seeker after truth was eradicated. Still less can we follow him in his maturer years; his early renunciation of his profession from a principle of honesty, his intimacy with the Earl of Shelburne, so honourable to both parties, and which led him into a sort of attachment, apparently very sincere and real, for, one of the ladies of that house, a cold, aristocratic, and decorous but not ill-natured blue; his stay in South Russia; his early publications, or his correspondence with the French revolutionists.
. . The following character of the celebrated Earl of Shelburne, by one who knew him so intimately as Bentham did, will be read with interest:—
Lord Lansdowne had a way of talking in fits and starts. His mind seemed always in a state of agitation with the passion of ambition and the desire of splendour. He was never much at ease, for he always outran the constable, and involved himself monstrously in debt. He showed me his rent-roll. There was an enormous sum which I did not understand: it was so much due to his creditors. He had had a most wretched education, and a foolish father and mother, of whose management of him he always talked with horror. When I once spoke to him of the family mausoleum, he refused to show it to me; for be said it was associated with such disgraceful reflections. His father gave all the property he could to a younger brother, Fitzmaurice, amounting to £10,000 a year. The Pettys had been barons of some place (whose name I forget) for four-and-twenty generations. They were among the first conquerors of Ireland. He did not, however, talk in the pride of ancestry. What endears his memory to me is that, though ambitious of rising, he was desirous of rising by means of the people. He was really radically disposed ; and he witnessed the French Revolution with sincere delight. He had quarrelled with the Whig aristocracy, who did not do him justice; so he had a horror of the clan, and looked towards them with great bitterness of feeling. That bitterness did not break out in words, though of him they spoke most bitterly. There was artifice in him, but also genuine good feelings. His head was not clear. He felt the want of clearness. He spoke in the house with grace and dignity, yet he uttered nothing but vague generalities.
The letters are written much better than we should have expected. They are lively, earnest, pleasant, and unaffected, and are not marked with the offensive peculiarities of his later style; they are full of personal gossip, fun, good humour, and acute observation.

 Australasian Chronicle 4 October 1842,