The elements of social justice / by L.T. Hobhouse.

  • Hobhouse, L. T. (Leonard Trelawny), 1864-1929.
Date:
[1922]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The elements of social justice / by L.T. Hobhouse. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    so entangled in questions of ends and means that their theory could be represented in the last resort as one of pure egoism. For when they faced the question of the motive appealing to the individual, they felt con¬ strained to maintain that as happiness was the only good his own happiness must in the last resort be the good and the operating motive to the individual, the happiness of others being for him only a means thereto, or perhaps something incorporated with his own happiness by a process of association.1 J S. Mill made 1 Any inconsistencies there may be in Bent ham's various refer¬ ences to this question arc amply explained by his autobiographical statement (Works, vol. x, p. 79-82), which to any one who can enter into the spirit of it, is a pathetic story of a philanthropist's disillusionment. The gist of it—-it is, unfortunately, too long to quote—is that the “ passion for improvement which must be evident to every reader of his early Fragment on Government, is not likely to be extinguished but with life. Its first embers ” were kindled at the age of seven. <f By an early pamphlet of Priestley . . . light was added to the warmth. In the phrase * the greatest happiness of the greatest number * I then saw delineated for the first time a plan as well as a true standard for whatever is right or wrong, the useful, useless or mischievous in human conduct.3’ Touchingly Bentham records his simple-minded certainty that he had only to publish what he had discovered and all the great and wise would fall in with it. No sooner had my farthing candle been taken out of the bushel than I looked for the descent of torches to it from the highest regions ”—-those regions where as everyone assured him there dwelt nothing but goodwill. “ Nothing could be more opposite to the truth. Instead of the universal sympathy, of which I had expected to see these graspmgs after improvement productive in those higher regions, universal antipathy—antipathy on the part of all parties—was the result.” There was sympathy ” only with his abilities based on the hope that they might be per¬ verted. Bentham brooded, he tells us, till he was sixty on the cause of these things, and not till that age did he discover the selfish¬ ness of mankind. “ Now for some years past all inconsistencies, all surprises have vanished. ... A clue to the interior of the labyrinth has been found ; it is the principle of self-preference. ” Once found by this lovable, great, absurd, childlike nature it was, like all new—and embittering—discoveries, exaggerated. 'Man from the very constitution of his nature prefers his own happiness to that of all other sensitive beings put together: but for this self-preference the species could not have had existence, . . .