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what horror he witnessed, at Oxford, the expulsion of five Methodist students for heresy, and with what horror he found himself compelled to adhere outwardly to what he did not inwardly accept; the agony he experienced that day he compared -in his curiously hyperbolical manner-to that of Jesus crucified.1 Later he bitterly remarked that the certain results of an English university education were mendacity and insincerity. In 1763 he took his B.A. It is related that though he had by now grown considerably, he was yet so weak that it was painful to him to drag himself upstairs; and owing to the extreme feebleness of his knees, attempts to teach him dancing had to be abandoned. In November 1763 he began to eat his dinners at Lincoln's Inn; and he paid visits to the Court of King's Bench, where his father had obtained for him one of the students' seats. Thus, he was present in February 1764 at Wilkes' trial and condemnation, and four years later he also heard it reversed in the same court by Lord Mansfield, whose graceful and fascinating eloquence had for the time being captivated him. He afterwards said that he, like others, had been perfectly bewitched by that eminent judge's "grimgibber," that is, taken in by his pompous verbiage.3 In December 1763 he had attended the lectures of Blackstone at Oxford. "I, too, heard the lectures, age sixteen," he observed in 1822, "and even then no small part of them with rebel ears.” He claimed that even at that age he at once detected the fallacy as regards natural rights, and deemed the reasoning as to the descent of the hæreditas to be illogical and futile. He described the Vinerian professor as formal, precise, wary, and affected; though he admitted that the lectures were rather popular, attracting numbers of auditors varying from thirty to fifty. A few years after he had heard Blackstone, he wrote in his commonplace book that the author of the Commentaries had imported the disingenuous character of the hireling advocate into the chair of the professor: "He is the dupe of every prejudice and the abettor of every abuse. No sound principles can be expected from that writer whose first object is to defend a system."

In 1765 his father married a second time, much to Jeremy's vexation, and settled on the son some property, which brought in about ninety pounds a year. The lady was Mrs. Abbot, widow

1 Cf. Not Paul but Jesus, Introduction;
• Church of Englandism, xxi.
• Works, vol. x, p. 45.

Works, vol. x, p. 37.

4 Ibid., p. 141,

of a fellow of Balliol, and the mother of two sons, of whom the younger, Charles Abbot,1 eventually became the author of some important administrative reforms, the Speaker of the House of Commons and the first Lord Colchester.

In 1766 Bentham took his M.A. degree; his comment was that he now strutted in his new gown "like a crow in a gutter." The following year he left Oxford for London, to begin, as was his father's cherished hope, his progress towards the woolsack. He was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn (of which he became a bencher exactly half a century later). The methods and requirements of the legal profession could scarcely suit one of his proclivities and point of view; it is not surprising, therefore, that his ambitious father's expectations were very soon grievously frustrated. The paternally destined Lord Chancellor did not even seek success at the bar. Indeed, when he got his first brief in a suit involving a claim of some fifty pounds, he advised that the case should be dropped and the costs saved. In his commonplace book (1773-1776) we find such entries as the following: "It is impossible for a lawyer to wish men out of litigation, as for a physician to wish them in health." "Barristers are so called (a man of spleen might say) à Barrando from barring against reformation the entrances of the law." "Oh, Britain! oh, my country! the object of my waking and my sleeping thoughts! whose love is my first labour and my greatest joy-passing the love of woman-thou shalt bear me witness against these misleading men. I cannot buy, nor will I ever sell my countrymen. My pretensions to their favour are founded not on promises, but on past endeavours-not on having defended the popular side of a question for fat fees, but on the sacrifice of years of the prime of life—from the first dawnings of reflection to the present hour-to the neglect of the graces which adorn a private station; deaf to the calls of present interest, and to all the temptations of a lucrative profession." As early as 1759 he read the Memoirs of Teresa Constantia Philips, in which there is a narrative of vexatious legal proceedings regarding the heroine's marriage;' and the book must have made a deep impression on the youthful mind. He afterwards said in reference to such abuses: "The Demon of Chicane appeared to me in all his hideousness. I vowed war against him. My vow has been accomplished." "

His father's discomfiture was completed when the son practi• Ibid., p. 72.

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1 1757-1829.

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* Works, vol. x, pp. 35, 37.

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cally abandoned his profession, saying, in regard to the books necessary for legal study, that he could not bear to read "the old trash of the seventeenth century "; instead, he began to dabble in chemistry and to study physical science. The disappointment and lamentations of Jeremiah may well be imagined; the hope of the family was looked upon as a "lost child." There was, in truth, no real compatibility between him and his erring son. "The elder Bentham," says a writer in the Edinburgh Review, "was authoritative, restless, aspiring, and shabby; lucky in his purchases, but remarkably unlucky, even among fathers, in misunderstanding and mismanaging his sons-a talent he had the cruelty to live to exercise for upwards of forty years. It was most unfortunate for all parties, that two sons, such as Jeremy and his brother Samuel, should have been born in such a house. With geniuses of the highest order-the one in legislation, the other in mechanics-they do not appear to have had a pennyworth of common sense, for common life, between them. They might have made the happiness of the home of a Plato and an Archimedes; but what could they do with an ambitious attorney, or he with them? The instinct of genius took them away betimes from gainful arts to ingenious speculations." This description is, of course, overcharged, but it certainly contains much truth. Jeremy himself referred to his father's "hectoring" and "selfobstination"; and his dislike of his stepmother helped considerably to widen the distance between them. Notwithstanding these circumstances, the relations between the two were not altogether unfriendly; and the father even took some interest later in the son's literary projects.

However, a more lasting glory than that derived from the dignity of an ordinary Lord Chancellor was in store for Bentham. For he now began his settled study of politics, administration, and jurisprudence which became the absorbing occupation of his whole life; and he was destined to produce an enormous body of criticisms, suggestions, speculations, schemes for modifying or entirely reconstructing most of the existing institutions. On the whole, this work, despite its errors, defects, and certain infelicitous attributes, constitutes him the greatest law reformer the world has ever seen. "Though lost to the bar," as a sympathetic critic of utilitarianism says, "he had really found himself. He had taken the line prescribed by his idiosyncrasy. His father's 1 Edinburgh Review, vol. 78 (Oct. 1843), PP. 464, 465.

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injudicious forcing had increased his shyness at the bar, and he was like an owl in daylight." But in his literary work no one could be less diffident. And so he "shrank from the world in which he was easily browbeaten to the study in which he could reign supreme." 2

We have already seen that the intellectual fare that was provided at Westminster and at Oxford failed to satisfy Bentham. Accordingly he took up what was considered to be the more enlightened philosophy-that represented by the school of Locke -which was antagonistic to prejudice and a priori methods of investigation, and in favour of reason, liberty of thought, and the fundamental principle that knowledge depends on actual experience. In addition to Locke he studied Hume and Barrington, Montesquieu, Helvétius, and Beccaria. A good deal of Voltaire he had already read. When he came across the ethical doctrines expounded by Hume, that is, the utilitarian system, he "felt as if scales fell from his eyes." Barrington's Observations on the Statutes (1766) he esteemed a "real treasure.” “I wrote volumes upon this volume," he afterwards observed. For Montesquieu he does not seem to have cared much. Beccaria's Dei Delitti, as we have seen in the previous essay, appeared anonymously in 1764, and at once made a great impression in every part of Europe. It presented an apotheosis of the principles of necessity, utility, the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Bentham afterwards apostrophised the Italian writer as his master, who had so greatly helped to make the way clear for the diffusion of reason and light. The De l'Esprit of Helvétius, to whom Beccaria himself was so much indebted, exercised a profound influence on the philosophical revolt. It emphasised a moral determinism as against the geographical determinism of Montesquieu. The work was studied far and wide. Bentham tells later on how delighted he was to meet in Bucharest a young man reading it. Helvétius regarded himself as a disciple of Hume, \ and so he was especially welcomed in England where his ideas were considered to be little more than her own indigenous production. The greatest happiness principle, which Bentham met with in Beccaria, he came across again, about 1768, in Priestley's Essay on Government. He says that at the sight of the formula, he cried out, like Archimedes, as it were in an inward ecstasy,

1 Sir L. Stephen, The English Utilitarians (London, 1900), vol. i, p. 175.
Ibid.
Works, vol. i, p. 268 note.
Vol. x, p. 56.

"Eureka." About 1770 he read also Maupertuis' Essai sur la philosophie morale, and not long afterwards the De la félicité publique (1772) of Chastellux, who borrowed from Priestley and Helvétius. With Chastellux he entered into communication. Of all these writers Bentham afterwards singled out Helvétius, as constituting a distinctive point of departure in his career. For after reading the De l'Esprit in 1769, he immediately discovered his true vocation. In his childhood he had once been asked to give the meaning of "genius"; in Helvétius he finds the etymological signification-"gigno," implying production, invention, creation. What, then, he asks himself, is his genius? Besides, which form of genius is the most useful? Helvétius replies for him: the genius of legislation. But has he the genius for legislation? With a trembling voice, he answers "yes" to himself.1 A few years later, at the beginning of one of his manuscript works (in a fragment entitled Civil Preface), he proclaims his essential philosophical point of view, and avows his ambition: "The present work, as well as any other work of mine that has been or will be published on the subject of legislation or any other branch of moral science, is an attempt to extend the experimental method of reasoning from the physical branch to the moral. The moral world has therefore had its Bacon, but its Newton is yet to come." As a result of these studies, Bentham formulated his well-known greatest happiness principle which, as Stephen says, "to some seemed a barren truism, to others a mere epigram, and to some a dangerous falsehood." To Bentham, however, it appeared as an irrefutable truth possessing great potentialities, and capable of illuminating the recesses and ramifications of the entire legislative and administrative system, as well as the political and economic structures.

In 1770 he visited Paris, and made but one or two acquaintances, though he was already styled a "philosopher." In the same year his first publication appeared. It consisted of two letters signed "Irenæus," and printed in the Gazetteer, setting forth a defence of Lord Mansfield against attacks arising out of the prosecution of Woodfall, the publisher of Junius' letter to the king. Some four years later he translated Voltaire's Taureau blanc, a story which, he says, used "to convulse him with laughter." It appears that by this time he shared the French writer's view of the Old Testament. In 1775 he collaborated with John Lind, 1 Cf. Works, vol. x, p. 27.. Op. cit., vol. i, p. 275.

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