n who
had read Rousseau found in his works the dialect most fitted to express
the growing indignation. Rousseau's genius had devised the appropriate
formula; for Rousseau's sensibility had made him prescient of the rising
storm. What might be a mere commonplace for speculative students
suddenly became the warcry in a social upheaval. In England, as I have
tried to show, there was no such popular sentiment behind the political
theories: and reformers were content with measures which required no
appeal to absolute rights and general principles. Bentham was no
Rousseau; and the last of men to raise a warcry. Passion and
sentimentalism were to him a nuisance. His theories were neither
suggested nor modified by the revolution. He looked on with curious
calmness, as though the revolutionary disturbances were rather a
transitory interruption to the progress of reform than indicative of a
general convulsion. His own position was isolated. He had no strong
reforming party behind him. The Whigs, his main friends, were powerless,
discredited, and themselves really afraid to support any vigorous
policy. They had in the main to content themselves with criticising the
warlike policy which, for the time, represented the main current of
national sentiment. Bentham shared many of their sympathies. He hated
the abstract 'rights of man' theory as heartily as Burke. It was to him
a 'hodge-podge' of fallacies. On the other hand, he was absolutely
indifferent to the apotheosis of the British Constitution constructed by
Burke's imagination. He cared nothing for history in general, or
regarded it, from a Voltairean point of view, as a record of the follies
and crimes of mankind. He wished to deal with political, and especially
with legal, questions in a scientific spirit--but 'scientific' would
mean not pure mathematics but pure empiricism. He was quite as far from
Paine's abstract methods as from Burke's romantic methods. Both of
them, according to him, were sophists: though one might prefer logical
and the other sentimental sophistries. Dumont, when he published (1802)
his versions of Bentham, insisted upon this point. Nothing, he says, was
more opposed to the trenchant dogmatism of the abstract theorists about
'rights of man' and 'equality' than Bentham's thoroughly scientific
procedure (_Discours Preliminaire_). Bentham's intellectual position in
this respect will require further consideration hereafter. All his
prejudices and sympathies we