to ourselves; a distinction upon which the whole of morality depends. In the second place, it forgets that an action, to be a subject of moral judgment, implies not only an external event, but a design to produce that event, and certain feelings or motives impelling to the formation and execution of that design. It is very true, that whether an action shall be esteemed praiseworthy or not, considered generally, and without reference to the motives of the actor, depends upon its utility, or supposed utility, to persons other than the actor, and the degree of that utility; but whether or not any particular action shall be pronounced virtuous, the use of which appellation includes a reference to the actor, -depends upon the actor's motives and intentions. It is not enough, that an action be, in fact, useful to others; in order to make it virtuous, that utility to others must have been perceived and intended; nay, more, it must have been a leading object in the performance of the action.*

* The Theory of Utility was first suggested in Hume's Treatise upon Morals, in which he shows that all actions and qualities called virtuous, are useful, or agreeable, words which have subsequently been used as synonymous, either to others or to ourselves. Towards the conclusion of the same treatise, he also suggests the ideas, more fully developed by Helvetius, and known as the doctrine of Interest well understood.

It is Bentham, however, who has expanded the theory of utility, and given it celebrity. He sets out with the assumption, that it is utility to ourselves, (substantially the doctrine of interest well understood, the doctrine of Hobbes, and of the Epicureans,) which is the test of right and wrong actions; that is, he assumes the funda mental principle of the selfish theory. But in his system of practical morals, what he actually makes the test of right and wrong is, not particular or individual utility, utility to self, but general utility,

42. But here we are met by a very serious objection. All the partisans of the Selfish theory of morals, whether Stoics, Epicureans, semi-Stoics, semi-Epicureans, Mystics, or Utilitarians, unite to assure us, that the only conceivable motive to act, which a man can have, is the promotion of his own happiness. Whence it is argued, that mere utility to others never can be the primary motive to the performance of any action. This doctrine, as to the origin of human action, lies at the bottom of the Selfish theory, in all its forms; and, indeed, first produced that theory, the rise and progress of which we proceed to trace.

A very cursory observation of mankind, and a very slight degree of attention to the motives of our own conduct, are sufficient to lead to the discovery, that human action consists in the pursuit of pleasures and the avoidance of pains. This pursuit of pleas

which differs only by an infinitesimal quantity, from utility to others; private or personal utility forming but an imperceptible element of general utility. He assumes that the greatest happiness of the greatest number will always be coincident with individual happiness; which is, in point of fact, the same assumption made by the semiStoics, and the semi-Epicureans, when they tell us that virtue and happiness are identical; an assumption which all human experience contradicts.

Notwithstanding these defects in his theory, no man has contributed more than Bentham to advance the science of morals, of which, as will subsequently appear, the science of Utility is a most important branch. His Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation contains a complete and beautiful development of that science. See, also, for a more easy and agreeable explanation of the doctrines of Bentham, Traités de Législation, compiled from Bentham's publications and manuscripts, by Dumont, the two first volumes of which have been translated into English, by the author of this treatise, and published under the title of Theory of Legislation.

ures, and avoidance of pains, have been jumbled together under the single phrase of the pursuit of happiness. The impulse, whence this pursuit of happiness has been supposed to arise, has been hastily imagined to be a single impulse, and has been denominated Self-interest or Selfishness.

Now, as in human contrivances, we determine, in general, the end intended to be accomplished, by what actually is accomplished; determining, for instance, that a watch is intended to measure time because it does measure time; so the same reasoning has been analogically applied to natural objects; and it has been concluded that man was intended to pursue his own happiness because he does pursue his own happiness. Thus it came to be laid down by most of the Greek philosophers, as a fundamental principle, that the pursuit of happiness is the great end of human existence. It must be right, it was argued, and coincident with morality, for man to fulfil the end of his being. But as the end of human existence is happiness, and as all acknowledge that men ought to live virtuously, and as virtue is essential to the welfare of society, therefore virtue and happiness must be identical.

43. The mystics, who regard the universe as the handiwork of a personal deity, which deity they frame for themselves after their own image, have for the most part applied these same notions as to the motives of human action, to explain the conduct of the deity. It is absurd, they say, to suppose the deity to act from any other motive than the promotion of his own happiness. He has made all things,

and all things exist only by his will. Of course they must exist only for his pleasure.

44. The mystics are thus led to a conclusion very different from that of the forensic philosophy. So far from holding that the chief end of man is the promotion of his own happiness, they hold that man's wd sole end is to please God. In this way, human hap

piness, in the estimation of most mystical schools, becomes a thing of too little value to be taken into account; and if God's pleasure, according to their idea of it, be promoted thereby, they look upon the damnation of endless millions with unruffled composure. The most consistent and unflinching hold, indeed, that to please God we ought joyfully to consent to our own damnation.

45. But as this is a pitch of self-devotion from which human nature recoils, and to which none but the most ecstatic can attain, an alliance has been struck up with forensic philosophy, whence have originated various schools of semi-mystics, who have laboriously endeavoured to reconcile the two ends of the pleasure of God and the happiness of man. This object they endeavour to accomplish by insisting, that as men universally pursue their own happiness, the deity, their creator, must have intended them to pursue it; and that, in pursuing it, they do his will and please him. In this way some of them, such as Paley, have slided imperceptibly into almost a pure Epicureanism; while others, like Cudworth, and, in our day, Kant and Cousin-if indeed their mysticism be any thing more than verbal alarmed at this approach toward Epicureanism, have receded almost to

a pure Platonism; setting up virtue as something superior to God, a relation, an idea, which he did not create, and cannot control, but which exists independently of him, and controls him; thus, in fact, abandoning the fundamental doctrine of mysticism, which explains every thing as the act or work of a personal deity.

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46. Assuming that the pursuit of happiness is the only impulse of human action; supposing that impulse to be single and uncompounded; and giving to it the name of Self-love, Self-interest, or Selfishness; it certainly follows logically enough, as the ancient Epicureans contended, and as Hobbes maintained, that Self-interest is the only possible motive of human action; and that to suppose actions to originate in a mere desire to promote the pleasure of othersa characteristic which we have pointed out as essential to virtuous actions-is to suppose what is incompatible with human nature.

Investigation, however, will show that this conclusion, though logically right, is scientifically false; the assumed premises upon which it is founded not corresponding with the facts of human action; and the term Self-love, or Selfishness, being frequently used in a double sense, which produces a sad confusion of ideas.

47. When we come to look narrowly into the springs of human action, we shall find, as Locke did, that all human actions originate in pains.* Pains

* See the Essay on the Human Understanding, Book II. Chap. xxi. Sect. 31 et seq. No part of that celebrated work exhibits a keener spirit of observation. The leading ideas, as is usual with Locke, had been partially anticipated by Hobbes. See the Leviathan, Part I. ch. 6.