The Pursuit of Certainty

15. A Modest Utopian

CHAPTER 15 A Modest Utopian Yet for all his single-mindedness, Bentham cannot be summed up by any simple, uncompounded idea. He seems rather to be one of those divided natures which lend themselves to two quite opposite portraits. One shows a man, very much of the eighteenth century, of unusual benevolence and disinterestedness, morbidly sensitive to the variety and transience of all things human. His efforts were directed to reminding men how different were their characters and needs, and how difficult it was for an outsider to know them. In politics, he emphasized that no good was pure, that whatever benefits a government bestowed had to be weighed against attendant evils. He would not prescribe the specific laws that should govern any society or the ultimate ends that should inspire men's lives; he wished merely to teach men how to think about laws in order that they might avoid the greatest perils of political life: Were I to choose to what I would (most truly and readily) attribute these magnificent prerogatives of universality and immutability, it should rather be to certain grounds oflaw, than to the laws themselves; to the principles upon which they should be founded; to the subordinate reasons deducible from those principles and to the best plan upon which they can be put together; to the considerations by which it is expedient the legislator should suffer himself to be governed , rather than to any laws which it is expedient he should make for the government of those who stand committed to his care.1 But there is also another portrait-of the hermit of Queen Square Place, sitting on his platform in the dining room, dreaming of a world that had adopted his code and canonized him as High Codifier and Grand Benefactor 1. Ibid. vol. r, p. 193· A Modest Utopian 195 of all mankind. He wrote uninterruptedly, and every paragraph had its preordained place in a grand system. Whatever community adopted his constitutional code, he was confident, would have no further need of any of its former institutions, and whoever opposed the code was an enemy of the people. For the good produced would be pure from evil, and the government perfectly directed to the interests of the governed: Now for the first time is the invitation given to examine and discuss the most interesting of temporal subjects, on the ground of a set of determinate and throughout mutually connected, and it is hoped, consistent principles. Now for the first time is to the subject matter ... given the form and method of the matter of a distinctive branch of art and corresponding science.1 Neither portrait is false, and yet neither is wholly true. His concern with tolerance and liberty of taste was too central in his life and thought to allow the second portrait to represent him. And yet the whole of Bentham will not fit into the image of an eighteenth-century gentleman, certainly not one of those whom Shaftesbury called "lovers of Art and Ingenuity; such as have seen the world and have informed themselves of the Manners and Customs of the several Nations of Europe...." When Bentham travelled, he sent Shelburne plant and animal specimens, but rarely a word about the people, their land, their architecture or arts. Although he wrote to Arthur Young for information about the people and land, he asked questions like, "What may be regarded as the average annual value of the gross produce in the form of a per centage for every 100 pounds laid out in the improvement of land not yet in culture, upon an average of articles of culture, soils, situations, etc., and quantities ofcapital applied per acre, according to the usage ofthe present time, and in farms of the average size...."2 If Hume belongs pre-eminently to the eighteenth century, Bentham would seem to be excluded. All that was so important for Hume and for his contemporaries steeped in the traditions of their country-instinct, custom, and imagination-were nothing but the devil's work for Bentham. Whereas Hume's arguments were always directed against looking at institutions only by the light of reason, Bentham insisted that reason alone, in the narrowest sense of logical analysis, was relevant. He would never have written as complacently as Hume did about property law: "there are no doubt motives of public interest for most of the rules which 1. Ibid. vol. IX, p. 2. 2. Ibid. vol. x, p. 373· [3.21...