Volume 183302
England and the English / by Edward Lytton Bulwer.
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton
- Date:
- 1833
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: England and the English / by Edward Lytton Bulwer. Source: Wellcome Collection.
357/370 page 341
![MR, MILL. 34] cess. Had it been published sixty years ago— or perhaps sixty years hence, it would perhaps have placed the reputation of its author beyond any of his previous writings. There is nothing similar to these inquiries in the writings of Mr. Bentham. This indicates one principal difference between the two men. Mr. Mill is eminently a metaphysician; Bent- ham as little of a metaphysician as any one can be who ever attained to equal success in the science of philosophy.~ Every moral or politi- cal system must be indeed a corollary from some general view of human nature. But Bent- ham, though punctilious and precise in the premises he advances, confines himself, in that very preciseness, to a few simple and general principles. He seldom analyses—he studies the human mind rather after the method of natural history than of philosophy. He enumerates—he classifies the facts—but he does not account for them. You read in his works an enumeration of pains and pleasures—an enumeration of mo- tives—an enumeration of the properties which constitute the value of a pleasure or a pain. But Bentham does not even attempt to explain any of the feelings or impulses enumerated—he does not attempt to show that they are subject to the laws of any more elementary phenomena of human nature. Of human nature indeed in its rarer or more hidden parts, Bentham knew but little—wherever he’attained to valuable results, which his predecessors had missed, it was by estimating more justly than they the action of some outward circumstance upon the more ob- vious and vulgar elements of oye =r vulgar, Where but a moderate knowledg : Q3](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b33029362_0002_0357.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
