topia,
except as a remote ideal, and an ideal of unimaginative minds. The
Utopia was constructed on 'individualist' principles, because common
sense naturally approves individualism. The whole social and political
order is clearly the sum of the individuals, who combine to form an
aggregate; and theories about social bonds take one to the mystical and
sentimental. The absolute tendency is common to Bentham and the
Jacobins. Whether the individual be taken as a unit of constant
properties, or as the subject of absolute rights, we reach equally
absolute conclusions. When all the social and political regulations are
regarded as indefinitely modifiable, the ultimate laws come to depend
upon the absolute framework of unalterable fact. This, again, is often
the right point of view for immediate questions in which we may take for
granted that the average individual is in fact constant; and, as I have
said in regard to Bentham's legislative process, leads to very relevant
and important, though not ultimate, questions. But there are certain
other results which require to be noticed. 'Individualism,' like other
words that have become watchwords of controversy, has various shades of
meaning, and requires a little more definition.

NOTES:

[434] _Works_, v. 97, etc.

[435] See preface to _Constitutional Code_ in vol. ix.

[436] Bentham's nephew, George, who died when approaching his
eighty-fourth birthday, devoted the last twenty-five years of his life
with equal assiduity to his _Genera Plantarum_. See a curious anecdote
of his persistence in the _Dictionary of National Biography_.

[437] _Works_, iii. 573.

[438] _Works_, ix. 5, 8.

[439] The theory, as Mill reminds us, had been very pointedly
anticipated by Helvetius. Bentham's practical experience, however, had
forced it upon his attention.

[440] _Works_, ix. 141. The general principle, however, is confirmed by
the case of George III.

[441] _Ibid._ ix. 45.

[442] _Ibid._ ix. 98.

[443] _Works_, ix. 98.

[444] e.g. _Ibid._ ix. 38, 50, 63, 99, etc.

[445] _Ibid._ ('Plan of Parliamentary Reform,') iii. 463.

[446] _Works_, ix. 594.

[447] _Ibid._ ix. 62.

[448] _Ibid._ ix. 24.

[449] _Ibid._ ix. 48.

[450] _Dissertations_, i. 377.

[451] _Works_, ii. 497.

[452] _Ibid._ ii. 501.

[453] _Ibid._ ii. 503.

[454] _Justice_, p. 264; so Price, in his _Observations on Liberty_,
lays it down that government is never to entrench upon private liberty,
'exc