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faculty or faculties by which he does thus judge; that is, by which he considers that right and wrong are the supreme and paramount distinctions of actions. That this is an important point we grant, or rather we proclaim, as the beginning of all Morality and we say that if Bentham accepts the fact in this way, he gives it no more than its just importance. We do not require that this Faculty or those Faculties by which man thus judges of right and wrong should be anything peculiar and ultimate, but only that the distinction should be a peculiar and ultimate one. And if Bentham, finding that men do so judge of actions, and perceiving that he could not, consistently with the state of their minds, analyse this their judgment into any perception of advantage and disadvantage, was willing to leave it as he found it, and to make the fact of such a judgment one of the bases of his system; so far he was right, and did not ascribe too much importance to this judgment,-to this public opinion. But then, if taking the moral judgments of mankind in this aspect, Bentham puts side by side with this element, the other advantages, say bodily pleasure or wealth, which certain actions may produce, we say that he makes an incongruous scheme, which cannot pass for Morality. If he say, for instance, "public opinion declares lying to be wrong, and I have nothing to say against that; for I cannot analyse this opinion of a thing being wrong into any thing else. But recollect, that though it be what they call wrong, it may be very pleasant and profitable, and therefore you may still have good reasons for lying; and you will have such, if the pleasure and profit which your lie produces, to you and other persons, outweighs that disagreeable thing, infamy, which public opinion inflicts upon the liar ;"-if he were to say this, he would hardly win any one to look upon him as a moralist. Yet this, as appears to me, is a rigorous deduction from the Benthamite doctrine, that the proper and ultimate ground

for our acting is the amount of pleasure and advantage which the action will produce, including popular approval as one among other advantages.

As I have said, the real importance of the great fact of the universal and perpetual judgments of mankind concerning actions, as being right and wrong, is, that such judgments are thus seen to be a universal property of human nature :— a constant and universal act, which man performs as being man. And it is because man does thus perpetually and universally form such judgments, that he is a moral creature, and that his actions are the subjects of morality; not because he is susceptible of pleasure and pain. And this is the reason why animals are not the subjects of morality;—they have no idea of right and wrong;—their acts are neither moral nor immoral. Animals may be indeed the objects of morality. We may treat them with kindness or with unkindness; and cruelty to animals is a vice, as well as cruelty to men. But cruelty to animals and cruelty to men stand upon a very different footing in morality. The pleasures of animals are elements of a very different order from the pleasures of men. We are bound to endeavour to augment the pleasures of men, not only because they are pleasures, but because they are human pleasures. We are bound to men by the universal tie of humanity, of human brotherhood. We have no such tie to animals. We are to be humane to them, because we are human, not because we and they alike feel animal pleasures. The Morality which depends upon the increase of pleasure alone would make it our duty to increase the pleasures of pigs or of geese rather than those of men, if we were sure that the pleasure we could give them were greater than the pleasures of men.

Such is the result of the doctrine which founds Morality upon the increase of pleasure. Such is a fair deduction from Bentham's principles. Do you think this an exaggerated

statement?- -an argument carried too far?—Not so. He has himself accepted this consequence of his system. Thus he says (Ch. XIX. § iv.) "Under the Gentoo and Mahometan religion the interests of the rest of the animal kingdom seem to have met with some attention. Why have they not, universally, with as much as those of human creatures, allowance made for the difference in point of sensibility? Because the laws that are, have been the work of mutual fear; a sentiment which the less rational animals have not had the same means as man has of turning to account. Why ought they not? No reason can be given....The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny....It may come one day to be recognized that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the caprice of a tormentor. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, a week, or even a month old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, can they reason? nor, can they speak? but, can they suffer?"

This appears to me a very remarkable passage, for the light which it throws upon Bentham's doctrine, as he found himself bound by the nature of his principle to accept it, when logically unfolded. When he had not only made pleasure his guide, but rejected all that especially made it human pleasure, allowing no differences but those of intensity and duration; he had, and could have, no reason for stopping at the pleasures of man. And thus his principle became, not the greatest amount of human happiness,—as

he had arbitrarily stated it, with a baseless limitation, which he here rejects;—but the greatest amount of animal gratification, including man among animals, with, it may be, peculiar forms of pleasure, but those forms having no peculiar value on account of their kind. But when the principle is thus stated, we are surely entitled to ask, why it is to be made our guide?-why utility for such an end is to be made the measure of the value of our actions?

For cer

tainly, that we are to regulate our actions so as to give the greatest pleasure to the whole animal creation, is not a selfevident principle. It is not only not our obvious, but to most persons not a tolerable doctrine, that we may sacrifice the happiness of men, provided we can in that way produce an overplus of pleasure to cats, dogs and hogs, not to say lice and fleas. Even those who, in the regions of Oriental superstition, have felt and enjoined the greatest tenderness towards animals, have done so, it would seem, in all cases, not because they considered that the pleasures of mere brutes were obviously as sacred as that of men, but because they imagined some mysterious community of nature between man and the animals which they wished to save from pain. That we are to increase human happiness where we can, may be asserted, with some truth, to be universally allowed, and in some measure self-evident: but that we are to make it an object equally important in kind, to increase the pleasures of animals, is not generally accepted as a rule of human conduct; still less as a basis of all rules. If we are asked to take this as the ground of our morality, we must at least require some reason why we should adopt such a foundation principle. No such answer is given: and thus, the whole Benthamite doctrine rests, it seems, on no visible foundation at all. It is, as we hold, false to make even human pleasure the source of all virtue. We think that we have other things to look at as our guides, not overlooking this. But in order

to estimate the value of this standard, we have begun by allowing it to be true; and by denying only that it is either applicable or independent. But when we are required to take the pleasures of all creatures, brute and human, into our account, and forbidden to take account of anything else, we cannot submit. Such a standard appears to us not only false, but false without any show of truth. We can see no reason for it, and Mr Bentham himself does not venture to offer us any. Why, then, are we to take his standard at all? He himself shows us what its true nature is; and so doing, shows, as I conceive, that it is absurd, as well as inapplicable and self-assuming.

I say nothing further of Mr Bentham's assumption in the above passage, that because a child cannot yet take care of itself, and cannot converse with us, its pleasures are therefore of no more import to the moralist than those of a kitten or a puppy. We hold that there is a tie which binds together all human beings, quite different from that which binds them to cats and dogs;—and that a man, at any stage of his being, is to be treated according to his human capacity, not according to his mere animal condition. It would be easy to show what strange results would follow from estimating the value of children in men's eyes by Mr Bentham's standard as here stated; but I shall not pursue the subject.

There is another remark which I wish to make on Mr Bentham's mode of proceeding, which is exemplified in this passage, among many other places. Mr Bentham finding in the common judgments and common language of men a recognition of a supreme distinction of right and wrong, which does not yield to his analysis, is exceedingly disposed to quarrel with the terms which imply this distinction; while at the same time he cannot really exclude this distinction from his own reasonings; (as no man can;) nor avoid using the terms which imply it, and which he so vehe