heory of Punishments and Rewards_; 1787, _Letters on
Usury_; 1789, _Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation_; 1813, _Treatise on Evidence_; and 1824, _Fallacies_.

The central pillar and hinge of all Bentham's doctrines in politics,
morals, and law is the famous principle of Utility, or to use the cant
phrase which he borrowed from Priestley, "the greatest happiness of the
greatest number." What the greatest number is--for instance whether in a
convict settlement of forty thieves and ten honest men, the thieves are
to be consulted--and what happiness means, what is utility, what things
have brought existing arrangements about, and what the loss of altering
them might be, as well as a vast number of other points, Bentham never
deigned to consider. Starting from a few crude phrases such as this, he
raised a system remarkable for a sort of apparent consistency and
thoroughness, and having the luck or the merit to hit off in parts not a
few of the popular desires and fads of the age of the French Revolution
and its sequel. But he was a political theorist rather than a political
philosopher, his neglect of all the nobler elements of thought and
feeling was complete, and latterly at least he wrote atrocious English,
clumsy in composition and crammed with technical jargon. The brilliant
fashion in which Sydney Smith has compressed and spirited his
_Fallacies_ into the famous "Noodle's Oration" is an example of the kind
of treatment which Bentham requires in order to be made tolerable in
form; and even then he remains one-sided in fact.

Sir James Mackintosh has been mentioned before, and is less of a
philosopher pure and simple than any person included in this
list--indeed his philosophical reputation rests almost wholly upon his
brilliant, though rather slight, _Dissertation on Ethics_ for the
_Encyclopaedia Britannica_. The greater part by far of his by no means
short life (1765-1832) was occupied in practising medicine and law, in
defending the French Revolution against Burke (_Vindiciae Gallicae_,
1791); in defending the French Royalists in the person of Peltier
against Bonaparte, 1803; in acting as Recorder and Judge in India,
1804-1811; and in political and literary work at home for the last
twenty years, his literature being chiefly history, and contributions to
the _Edinburgh Review_. But there has been a certain tendency, both in
his own time and since, to regard Mackintosh as a sort of philosopher
t