learness, the most
inspiring prospects of practical improvement in human affairs. To
Bentham's general view of the construction of a body of law I was not
altogether a stranger, having read with attention that admirable
compendium, my father's article on Jurisprudence: but I had read it
with little profit, and scarcely any interest, no doubt from its
extremely general and abstract character, and also because it
concerned the form more than the substance of the _corpus juris_, the
logic rather than the ethics of law. But Bentham's subject was
Legislation, of which Jurisprudence is only the formal part: and at
every page he seemed to open a clearer and broader conception of what
human opinions and institutions ought to be, how they might be made
what they ought to be, and how far removed from it they now are. When
I laid down the last volume of the _Traite_, I had become a different
being. The "principle of utility," understood as Bentham understood
it, and applied in the manner in which he applied it through these
three volumes, fell exactly into its place as the keystone which held
together the detached and fragmentary component parts of my knowledge
and beliefs. It gave unity to my conceptions of things. I now had
opinions; a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy; in one among the best
senses of the word, a religion; the inculcation and diffusion of which
could be made the principal outward purpose of a life. And I had a
grand conception laid before me of changes to be effected in the
condition of mankind through that doctrine. The _Traite de Legislation_
wound up with what was to me a most impressive picture of human life as
it would be made by such opinions and such laws as were recommended in
the treatise. The anticipations of practicable improvement were
studiously moderate, deprecating and discountenancing as reveries of
vague enthusiasm many things which will one day seem so natural to human
beings, that injustice will probably be done to those who once thought
them chimerical. But, in my state of mind, this appearance of superiority
to illusion added to the effect which Bentham's doctrines produced on me,
by heightening the impression of mental power, and the vista of improvement
which he did open was sufficiently large and brilliant to light up my life,
as well as to give a definite shape to my aspirations.

After this I read, from time to time, the most important of the other
works of Bentham which had then seen the