and to force the nations to submit to his laws."[117]

[117] _Ib._ ii. 6.

The principle of public utility is invariable, though it is pliable in
its application to all the different positions in which, in their
succession, a nation may find itself.[118]

[118] _Disc._ ii. 17.

The public interest is that of the greatest number, and this is the
foundation on which the principles of sound morality ought invariably to
rest.[119]

[119] _Ib._ ii. chap. xxiii.

These extracts, and extracts in the same sense might easily be
multiplied, show us the basis on which Helvetius believed himself to be
building. Why did Bentham raise upon it a fabric of such value to
mankind, while Helvetius covered it with useless paradox? The answer is
that Bentham approached the subject from the side of a practical lawyer,
and proceeded to map out the motives and the actions of men in a
systematic and objective classification, to which the principle of
utility gave him the key. Helvetius, on the other hand, instead of
working out the principle, that actions are good or bad according as
they do or do not serve the public interest of the greatest number,
contented himself with reiterating in as many ways as possible the
proposition that self-love fixes our measure of virtue. The next thing
to do, after settling utility as the standard of virtue, and defining
interest as a term applied to whatever can procure us pleasures and
deliver us from pains,[120] was clearly to do what Bentham did,--to
marshal pleasures and pains in logical array. Instead of this,
Helvetius, starting from the proposition that "to judge is to feel,"
launched out into a complete theory of human character, which laboured
under at least two fatal defects. First, it had no root in a
contemplation of the march of collective humanity, and second, it
considered only the purely egoistic impulses, to the exclusion of the
opposite half of human tendencies. Apart from these radical
deficiencies, Helvetius fell headlong into a fallacy which has been
common enough among the assailants of the principle of utility; namely,
of confounding the standard of conduct with its motive, and insisting
that because utility is the test of virtue, therefore the prospect of
self-gratification is the only inducement that makes men prefer virtue
to vice.

[120] _Ib._ ii. 1, _note_ (_b_).

This was what Madame du Deffand called telling everybody's secret. We
approve conduct in prop