After pointing out how much better we are entitled to judge now that we have got rid of so many superstitions,and have learned to read and write,he replies to the question,'Would you have us speak and act as if we never had any ancestors?''By no means,'he replies;'though their opinions were of little value,their practice is worth attending to;but chiefly because it shows the bad consequences of their opinions.''From foolish opinion comes foolish conduct;from foolish conduct the severest disaster;and from the severest disaster the most useful warning.It is from the folly,not from the wisdom,of our ancestors that we have so much to learn.'(102)Bentham has become an 'ancestor,'and may teach us by his errors.Pointed and vigorous as is his exposure of many of the sophistries by which Conservatives defended gross abuses and twisted the existence of any institution into an argument for its value,we get some measure from this of Bentham's view of history.
In attacking an abuse,he says,we have a right to inquire into the utility of any and every arrangement.The purpose of a court of justice is to decide litigation;it has to ascertain facts and apply rules:does it then ascertain facts by the methods most conducive to the discovery of truth?Are the rules needlessly complex,ambiguous,calculated to give a chance to knaves,or to the longest purse?If so,undoubtedly they are mischievous.Bentham had done inestimable service in stripping away all the disguises and technical phrases which had evaded the plain issue,and therefore made of the laws an unintelligible labyrinth.He proceeded to treat in the same way of government generally.Does it work efficiently for its professed ends?Is it worked in the interests of the nation,or of a special class,whose interests conflict with those of the nation?He treated,that is,of government as a man of business might investigate a commercial undertaking.If he found that clerks were lazy,ignorant,making money for themselves,or bullying and cheating the customers,he would condemn the management.Bentham found the 'matchless constitution'precisely in this state.He condemned political institutions worked for the benefit of a class,and leading,especially in legal matters,to endless abuses and chicanery.The abuses everywhere imply 'inequality'in some sense;for they arise from monopoly.The man who holds a sinecure,or enjoys a privilege,uses it for his own private interest.The 'matter of corruption,'as Bentham called it,was provided by the privilege and the sinecure.The Jacobin might denounce privileges simply as privileges,and Bentham denounce them because they were used by the privileged class for corrupt purposes.So far,Bentham and the Jacobins were quite at one.It mattered little to the result which argument they preferred to use,and without doubt they had a very strong case,and did in fact express a demand for justice and for a redress of palpable evils.The difference seems to be that in one case the appeal is made in the name of justice and equality;in the other case,in the name of benevolence and utility.
The important point here,however,is to understand Bentham's implicit assumptions.J.S.Mill,in criticising his master,points out very forcibly the defects arising from Bentham's attitude to history.He simply continued,as Mill thinks,the hostility with which the critical or destructive school of the eighteenth century regarded their ancestors.To the revolutionary party history was a record of crimes and follies and of little else.The question will meet us again;and here it is enough to ask what is the reason of his tacit implication of Bentham's position.Bentham.s whole aim,as I have tried to show,was to be described as the construction of a science of legislation.The science,again,was to be purely empirical.It was to rest throughout upon the observation of facts.That aim --an admirable aim --runs through his whole work and that of his successors.I have noticed,indeed,how easily Bentham took for granted that his makeshift classification of common motives amounted to a scientific psychology.A similar assumption that a rough sketch of a science is the same thing as its definite constitution is characteristic of the Utilitarians in general.A scientific spirit is most desirable;but the Utilitarians took a very short cut to scientific certainty.Though appealing to experience,they reach formula as absolute as any 'intuitionist'could desire.What is the logical process implied?