Mr. Leslie Stephen combines the faculty of acute and searching
criticism with a style that is singularly clear, incisive, and exact.
His wide knowledge of English literature, and the close study which he
has given to the history of English opinions and controversies,
speculative, political, and economical, have enabled him to survey an
extensive field, to trace the lines of origin and development, to
disentangle complicated ideas, and to summarise conclusions in a
masterly manner. Nearly twenty-five years have passed since he
published his work on _English Thought in the Eighteenth Century_, and
his present book on the Utilitarians continues, and indeed brings down
to our own time, a similar investigation of the course of certain
views, principles, and doctrines which had taken their shape in
England and France during the period preceding the French Revolution,
and which profoundly influenced political discussion throughout the
first half of the nineteenth century. But on this occasion Mr.
Stephen's inquiry does not range over the whole area thus laid open,
though his subject compels him to make several excursions into the
general region of philosophical and political disputation. His main
purpose is to relate the history of a creed propagated by a group of
remarkable men, who took hold of some prominent theories and doctrines
generated by the rationalism of the preceding century, and endeavoured
to make them the basis and framework of a system for improving the
condition of the English people. Their immediate object was to abolish
intolerable abuses of power by the governing classes, and radically to
reform on scientific principles the haphazard blundering
administration which was assumed to be the source of all evil. Mr.
Stephen describes and explains, in short, the rise, progress, and
decay of Utilitarianism.
Such a system, by its nature and aims, is evidently practical;
it is directed towards a change of laws and an alteration of the
prevailing methods of government. To the philosophic minds of the
eighteenth-century reformers in England and France, it seemed evident,
that any general conclusions upon questions vitally concerning the
interests of mankind should be reached by convincing demonstration,
should start from axioms, and proceed by a connected chain of logical
argument. During the latter half of that century England and France,
so incessantly at war and so different in character and in their
governing institutions, were nevertheless in alliance intellectually.
They were then (with Holland) the only countries in the world where
public opinion had free play, and where discussion of philosophic
problems was actively carried on; and between them there was a
constant interchange of ideas. Now in all speculations, on things
human or divine, there have existed immemorially two schools or
tendencies of thought, two ways of approaching the subject,
corresponding, we may conjecture, to a radical difference of
intellectual predispositions. You may start by the high _a priori_
road, or you may feel your way gradually by induction from verifiable
experiences; and of these two main currents of speculative opinion
whichever is the stronger at any given period will affect every branch
of thought and action. Coleridge appealed to history as proving that
all epoch-making revolutions coincide with the rise or fall of
metaphysical systems, and he attributed the power of abstract theories
over revolutionary movements to the craving of man for higher guidance
than sensations. However this may be, it may be affirmed that the
rationalism of the eighteenth century in England and France found room
by replacing the decaying theologies and substituting reason for the
traditional authority. This was the period that produced in France the
philosophic conception of abstract humanity, everywhere the same
naturally, with a superficial distinction of circumstances, but
differentiated in the main by bad laws, artificial inequalities, and
social injustice. In France the method of deducing conclusions from
abstract principles concerning the rights of man and the social
compact gained predominance, until they were shaped by Rousseau and
others into the formal indictment of a corrupt society. It was the
point and impulse thus given to very real grievances and irritation
against privilege, that precipitated the French Revolution. Among the
English, on the other hand, their public spirit, the connection of
large classes with national affairs, and their habit of compromise,
had predisposed the leading minds towards cautious views in philosophy
and in politics; and at the century's end their inbred distrust of
abstract propositions as a basis for social reconstruction received
startling confirmation from the tremendous explosion in France.
The foregoing remarks give in bare outline the conditions and
circumstances, very carefully examined and skilfully analysed by Mr.
Leslie Stephen, that prepared and cleared the ground for the
Utilitarians. Their object was not to reconstruct, hardly to remodel,
existing forms of government; it was to remove abuses, and to devise
remedies for the evils of an unwieldy and complicated administrative
machine, clogged by stupidity and selfishness. And the plan of Mr.
Stephen's first volume is to describe the state of society at this
period, the condition of agriculture and the industries, the position
of the Church and the Universities, of the Army and Navy, the
intellectual tendencies indicated by the philosophic doctrines, and
generally to sketch the political and social aspects of England rather
more than a hundred years ago. He is writing, as he says, the history
of a sect; and in dealing with the tenets of that sect he lays
prominent stress upon what may be called the environment, upon the
various circumstances which may influence forms of belief, and
particularly upon the idiosyncrasies of the men who held and
propagated them. It is for this latter reason that he has given us
brief and interesting biographies of those whose influence was
greatest in shaping and directing the movement, illustrating his
narrative by portraits of them as they lived and acted. All these
things help us towards understanding how it comes to pass that
conclusions which seem clear as daylight to earnest thinkers in one
generation may be abandoned by succeeding generations as manifestly
erroneous. The inquiry also shows why, and to what extent, some of the
doctrines that were scientifically propounded by the Utilitarians did
initiate and lead up to an important reformation in the methods of
English government.
'It might be stated as a paradox' (Mr. Stephen observes) 'that,
whereas in France the most palpable evils arose from the excessive
power of the central government, and in England the most palpable
evils arose from the feebleness of the central government, the
French reformers demanded more government, and the English
reformers less government.... The solution seems to be easy. In
France, reformers such as Turgot and the economists were in favour
of an enlightened despotism, because ... it would suppress the
exclusive privileges of a class which, doing nothing in return, had
become a mere burthen, encumbering all social development. But in
England the privileged class was identical with the governing
class.'
The English aristocracy, in fact, were actually doing the country's
business, though they were doing it badly, and paid themselves much
too highly for very indifferent administration. Yet the English nation
acquiesced in the system, because the middle classes were growing rich
and prosperous, and the State interfered very little with their
private affairs. To this general statement of the case we agree; but
we may point out that in terming our aristocracy a privileged class
one material distinction has been passed over. For whereas the French
_noblesse_ constituted a caste partly exempted by birthright from the
general taxation, and vested with certain vexatious rights to which no
duties corresponded, the English aristocracy possessed legally no
privileges at all. It was not an exclusive order, but an upper class
that was constantly recruited, being open to all successful men; and
such a governing body is naturally indifferent to reforms, because it
is very little affected by administrative imperfections or abuses.
Pauperism and ignorance may fester long among the masses before
wealthy and prosperous rulers discover that the interests of their own
class are imperilled; the state of prisons does not concern them
personally; and so long as life and property are fairly secure, they
care little about an efficient police. The Englishman of whom a
Frenchman reported with amazement that he consoled himself for having
been robbed by the reflection that there were no policemen in his
country, must have belonged to this comfortable class. And the
inveterate conservation of abuses in the Church, the Law, and the Army
may be partially explained in a similar way. In France the Church and
the army were really privileged bodies: the vast ecclesiastical
revenues were protected from taxation, and the commissioned ranks of
the army were reserved for the _noblesse_; the French parliaments were
close magisterial corporations. In England these were all open
professions, with no special fiscal rights or social limitations; the
prizes were available for general competition, and as every one had a
chance of winning them by interest or even merit, there was no
formidable outcry against the system.
In politics, therefore, as well as in philosophy, the prevailing habit
of the English mind was more moderate, less thorough-going and
subversive, than in France. Mr. Stephen makes a keen and rapid
analysis of the common-sense psychology, as expounded by Reid and
Dugald Stewart, to show the correspondence at this period between
abstract reasoning and concrete political views, and to illustrate the
limitations which cautious Scotch professors endeavoured to place upon
the inexorable scepticism of Hume. The general spirit of their
teaching was empirical, but the logical consequence of taking
experience as the sole foundation of belief was evidently to cut off
the hidden springs of moral consciousness, and to support the
derivation of ethics from utility. In philosophy, as in politics,
there was a sympathetic recoil from extremes. So common sense was
brought in as capable of certain intuitive or original judgments which
were in themselves necessary, and which luckily coincided with some of
the firmest convictions among intelligent mankind. As Carlyle said
long afterwards, the Scottish philosophers started from the
mechanical premises suggested by Hume. 'They let loose instinct as an
indiscriminatory bandog to guard them against his conclusions; they
tugged lustily against the logical chain by which Hume was so coldly
towing them and the world into bottomless abysses of atheism and
fatalism.' To save themselves from materialism they invented
Intuitions, and thereby incurred the wrath of orthodox Utilitarianism,
which was rigidly empirical. They were, however, accepted in England,
where any haven was welcome, however uncertain might be the holding
ground, which sheltered the vessel from being blown by windy
speculation out into a shoreless sea.