OF THE GOOD. 



141 



glaring abuses and inconsistencies which existed in 

 English law, and by doing so have greatly influenced the 

 legislation of the country ever since. " Who," says 

 John Stuart Mill,^ " before Bentham, dared to speak 

 disrespectfully in express terms of the British Con- 

 stitution or the English Law ? He did so ; and his 

 arguments and his example together encouraged others. 

 We do not mean that his writings caused the Eeform 

 Bill, or that the Appropriation Clause owns him as 

 its parent : the changes which have been made, and 

 the greater changes which will be made, in our in- 

 stitutions, are not the work of philosophers,'^ but of 

 the interests and instincts of large portions of society 

 recently grown into strength. But Bentham gave voice 

 to those interests and instincts ; until he spoke out, 

 those who found our institutions unsuited to them did 

 not dare to say so, did not dare consciously to think 

 so ; they had never heard the excellence of those in- 



^ J. S. Mill, ' Dissertations and 

 Discussions,' vol. i. p. 332. 



- And yet Mill says in the same 

 essay of Bentham and Coleridge, 

 whom he considers as " the two 

 great seminal minds of England in 

 their age ; they were destined to 

 renew a lesson given to mankind 

 by every age, and always disre- 

 garded — to show that speculative 

 philosophy, which to the superficial 

 appears a thing so remote from the 

 business of life and the outward 

 interests of men, is in reality the 

 thing on earth which most influ- 

 ences them, and in the long run 

 overbears every other influence save 

 those which it must itself obey. 

 The writers of whom we speak 

 have never been read by the mul- 

 titude ; except for the more slight 

 of their works, their readers have 



been few : but they have been the 

 teachers of the teachers" (p. 330). 

 A similar reflection is contained in 

 Kant's closing words in the second 

 'Critique': "Science (critically 

 sought and methodically intro- 

 duced) is the strait gate which 

 leads to the theory of wisdom ; if 

 by this is not only meant what 

 one ought to do but what ought 

 to furnish an indication to teachers 

 how to mark, well and distinctly, 

 that road to wisdom which everj^ 

 one should take and to guard others 

 from wrong ways ; a science of 

 which philosophy must alwaj's be 

 the custodian, in the subtler re- 

 searches of which the public has 

 no part, but only in its doctrines 

 thus cleared up" (' Werke,' vol. 

 viii. p. 315). 



