t is, that he has applied this
principle more closely and literally; that he has brought all the
objections and arguments, more distinctly labelled and ticketted, under
this one head, and made a more constant and explicit reference to it at
every step of his progress, than any other writer. Perhaps the weak side
of his conclusions also is, that he has carried this single view of his
subject too far, and not made sufficient allowance for the varieties of
human nature, and the caprices and irregularities of the human will. "He
has not allowed for the _wind_." It is not that you can be said to see
his favourite doctrine of Utility glittering everywhere through his
system, like a vein of rich, shining ore (that is not the nature of the
material)--but it might be plausibly objected that he had struck the
whole mass of fancy, prejudice, passion, sense, whim, with his petrific,
leaden mace, that he had "bound volatile Hermes," and reduced the theory
and practice of human life to a _caput mortuum_ of reason, and dull,
plodding, technical calculation. The gentleman is himself a capital
logician; and he has been led by this circumstance to consider man as a
logical animal. We fear this view of the matter will hardly hold water.
If we attend to the _moral_ man, the constitution of his mind will
scarcely be found to be built up of pure reason and a regard to
consequences: if we consider the _criminal_ man (with whom the
legislator has chiefly to do) it will be found to be still less so.

Every pleasure, says Mr. Bentham, is equally a good, and is to be taken
into the account as such in a moral estimate, whether it be the pleasure
of sense or of conscience, whether it arise from the exercise of virtue
or the perpetration of crime. We are afraid the human mind does not
readily come into this doctrine, this _ultima ratio philosophorum_,
interpreted according to the letter. Our moral sentiments are made up of
sympathies and antipathies, of sense and imagination, of understanding
and prejudice. The soul, by reason of its weakness, is an aggregating
and an exclusive principle; it clings obstinately to some things, and
violently rejects others. And it must do so, in a great measure, or it
would act contrary to its own nature. It needs helps and stages in its
progress, and "all appliances and means to boot," which can raise it to
a partial conformity to truth and good (the utmost it is capable of) and
bring it into a tolerable harmony with