er 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 hi