A RUMINATION UPON THE GREATEST HAPPINESS PRINCIPLE, AND OTHER MATTERS. JUNE rises upon us like a sweet star on the troubled night, before which the dark clouds drift, the mists vanish, and a serene light spreads over the world. The trees throw out their buds and blossoms in the sun; the fresh and verdant earth rejoices in fertility; and flowers, no longer growing in pain, and against the cutting winds and nipping frost, laugh out of the soil like the radiant faces of young holyday groups. What merry pranks used to be played in June—what jousts used to throng the fields-what love-dramas used to be enacted in the green lanes and lonely woods, and by the fresh sparkling streams-what poetry used to grow upon the season as truly and as healthfully as acorns upon the oak. The good old times! when we had our own Arcadia, and when the visions of Sydney were embodied in the daylight homesteads of England. The world is out of tune. Her old instrument has been so long in use that its music seems to have died upon its strings, and, as grubbing upholsterers sometimes convert superannuated pianos into work-tables and sideboards, people seem to have changed the world into a mere piece of useful mechanism. All the fine imagination that was wont to infuse such rapture into life appears to be worn out, and we have nothing left but the sea-shell without its Naiad-voices! the grounds and across the park, and of his venerable and cheerful look, suggests a very different notion of the philosopher from that which we cannot help forming from his crude and laborious treatises, in which, whatever was excellent in design, was obscured by the phraseology. But the whole theory of Benthamite utility is false in the view which it takes of society; and no fashion of words or equivocation of sophistry can rectify the grand error on which it is based. Its exposition of utility is the utility of the hands, of the grosser appetites, of supply and demand, of equitable distribution of poperty, and of legal guarantees; all of which are very admirable in their kind, but all of which added together will not compensate for the absence of the one utility of the beautiful which more ennobles life, and to which more of human happiness is to be attributed, than to the wisest articles of legislation. There is nothing in Jeremy Bentham's philosophy about that sense of pleasure which refines and purifies, which makes men wiser by making them better, and happier by elevating them above grovelling desires. Provided the hands be employed, and the head occupied, and the whole community be kept going at a certain ratio per man, the demands of the philosopher are satisfied, nothing more is required to complete the Utopia of practical utility. There is no room for the play of invention-no excuse for letting in a ray of joy upon the scene— every thing is to be real, literal, and fitted into its place, more compact than the parallelograms of Owen, and as uniform as multiplied counterparts: not one head must break out of the line, nobody must be pleased at his own pleasure, but at the pleasures of every body else, the being pleased consisting, not in one's own sensations, but in a calculation of the sensations of the majority. According to this plan of social regeneration, the whole machinery of the world's contentment would be regulated by a species of Joint-Stock Happiness Company. Utility has set in. The greatest happiness of the greatest number has made the majority of mankind miserable. The search after happiness upon a numerical scale has quenched individual enthusiasm, and nobody is now allowed to be happy unless he be happy according to the regulation. Jeremy Bentham had not a particle of true sympathy in his nature, notwithstanding that he wanted to make a code of laws for Russia, and to reform the contentious democracies of America. The only facts we ever heard of Jeremy Bentham that redeemed him from the chilly ideal of a mere formalist, were his silver hair, and his love of his garden at the back of Queen-square, and looking upon St. James's Park. Captain Parry's account of We ask no man to define in what his his morning interview with the old man, happiness consists; but there can be no of the delight with which he ran through difficulty in ascertaining in what it does VOL. X.-NO. VI.-JUNE, 1837. K K |