140 
of all members of tills Institute. As he has told us, Mr. Mill is not 
the first Utilitarian. The Utilitarian theory was known long before his 
time. In fact, the first Utilitarians arose at Athens, and were called 
Sophists. They were persons who, seeing doubt and difficulty pervading 
men’s minds as to right and wrong, laid down this easy and intelligible rule, 
that what appeared right was right, what appeared pleasant was pleasant, 
and what a man would like to do he was bound to do and ought to do. 
Against this pernicious doctrine the great man of his age, Socrates, set 
himself most decidedly. In his disputations (those disputations which 
have gained him the name of “ the Prince of Bores ” ! ) he maintained 
that good was not what appeared to a man to be good, or rather 
could not be tested by each individual man’s opinion of it ; but that the 
chief good must contain three elements : — 1. Intellectual truth ; 2. Moral 
excellence ; and 3. An element commending it to the feelings of those who 
possessed it, by means of what (for want of a better word) he called pleasure. 
Socrates was followed by disciples having minds differing from his and 
from one another’s, each of whom caught hold of some one of those elements 
of good and maintained it exclusively. With those who maintained moral 
excellence to be the chief good, who were the Cynics, and afterwards the 
Stoics, we have nothing to do ; nor with those who, with Plato, considered a 
highly-trained and developed intellect to be the chief good. Then we have 
the third school of Aristippus ; and he maintained that what was pleasant 
was good, and what was not pleasant was not good. He was a Utilitarian 
very different to the Sophists, but he was one still : he did not perceive 
the logical fault he was committing in making pleasure and good coexten- 
sive with one another. Socrates had said there were three elements 
required in good. He required only one, and fell into the same error 
which the Sophists had committed ; so that, though professing to be 
a follower of Socrates, he came to the same conclusion as those whom 
Socrates combated. His fallacy was this : laying down that “All that is 
good is pleasant”— which is true, — he simply converted the proposition, 
and said “ All that is pleasant is good,” which of course every logician 
knows to be incorrect. The fact is, that the pleasure is a test of the 
presence of good, but the goodness does not depend on the pleasantness. 
Granted that a certain thing is good, there must be a certain pleasure ; but you 
must not therefore argue, because pleasure attends a course of action, that 
course is necessarily good. It would be a fallacy, and it is that fallacy which 
the Utilitarians fall into now, when they say the test of the goodness of an 
action is its producing pleasure, or freedom from pain, amongst the greatest 
number. Now this question is a very important one, because it leads to 
still further considerations, to what I may call the boundless realm of moral 
obligations and moral sanctions. (Hear, hear.) Why are we bound to act in 
a certain way, and not to act in another certain way ? Why has there been 
a certain stamp fixed upon a certain course of actions by which the Deity 
says, This shall not be done ; That course shall be adopted 1 The whole 
question is one of difficulty ; but the Utilitarians, it seems to me, appear to 
