ed ever be affected by the old fear. For
him there will always be fresh regions to conquer. Every discovery
suggests new problems; and though knowledge may be simplified and
codified, it will always supply a base for fresh explanations of the
indefinite regions beyond. Can that which is true of the physical
sciences be applied in any degree to the so-called moral sciences? To
Bentham, I believe, is ascribed the wish that he could fall asleep and
be waked at the end of successive centuries, to take note of the
victories achieved in the intervals by his utilitarianism. Tennyson, in
one of his youthful poems, played with the same thought. It would be
pleasant, as the story of the sleeping beauty suggested, to rise every
hundred years to mark the progress made in science and politics; and to
see the "Titanic forces" that would come to the birth in divers climes
and seasons; for we, he says--

For we are Ancients of the earth,
And in the morning of the times.

Tennyson, if this expressed his serious belief, seems to have lost his
illusions; and it is probable enough that Bentham's would have had some
unpleasant surprises could his wish have been granted. It is more than
a century since his doctrine was first revealed, and yet the world has
not become converted; and some people doubt whether it ever will be.
If, indeed, Bentham's speculations had been adopted; if we had all
become convinced that morality means aiming at the greatest happiness
of the greatest number; if we were agreed as to what is happiness, and
what is the best way of promoting it,--there would still have been a
vast step to take, no less than to persuade people to desire to follow
the lines of conduct which tend to minimise unhappiness. The mere
intellectual conviction that this or that will be useful is quite a
different thing from the desire. You no more teach men to be moral by
giving them a sound ethical theory, than you teach them to be good
shots by explaining the theory of projectiles. A religion implies a
philosophy, but a philosophy is not by itself a religion. The demand
that it should be is, I hold, founded upon a wrong view as to the
relation between the abstract theory and the art of conduct. To convert
the world you have not merely to prove your theories, but to stimulate
the imagination, to discipline the passions, to provide modes of
utterance for the emotions and symbols which may represent the
fundamental beliefs--briefly, to d