'perfection of wisdom.' Bentham's reply was virtually that although he,
like Burke, appealed to experience, he appealed to experience
scientifically organised, whereas Burke appealed to mere blind
tradition. Bentham is to be the founder of a new science, founded like
chemistry on experiment, and his methods are to be as superior to those
of Burke as those of modern chemists to those of the alchemists who also
invoked experience. The true plan was not to throw experience aside
because it was alleged by the ignorant and the prejudiced, but to
interrogate experience systematically, and so to become the Bacon or the
Newton of legislation, instead of wandering off into the _a priori_
constructions of a Descartes or a Leibniz.

Bentham thus professes to use an 'inductive' instead of the deductive
method of the Jacobins; but reaches the same practical conclusions from
the other end. The process is instructive. He objected to the existing
inequalities, not as inequalities simply, but as mischievous
inequalities. He, as well as the Jacobins, would admit that inequality
required justification; and he agreed with them that, in this case,
there was no justification. The existing privileges did not promote the
'greatest happiness of the greatest number.' The attack upon the
'Anarchical Fallacies' must be taken with the _Book of Fallacies_, and
the _Book of Fallacies_ is a sustained and vigorous, though a curiously
cumbrous, assault upon the Conservative arguments. Its pith may be found
in Sydney Smith's _Noodle's Oration_; but it is itself well worth
reading by any one who can recognise really admirable dialectical power,
and forgive a little crabbedness of style in consideration of genuine
intellectual vigour. I only notice Bentham's assault upon the 'wisdom of
our ancestors.' After pointing out how much better we are entitled to
judge now that we have got rid of so many superstitions, and have
learned to read and write, he replies to the question, 'Would you have
us speak and act as if we never had any ancestors?' 'By no means,' he
replies; 'though their opinions were of little value, their practice is
worth attending to; but chiefly because it shows the bad consequences of
their opinions.' 'From foolish opinion comes foolish conduct; from
foolish conduct the severest disaster; and from the severest disaster
the most useful warning. It is from the folly, not from the wisdom, of
our ancestors that we have so much to learn.'[456] Ben