ions.' Such systems must accept human nature
as a fact, and as the basis of a scientific theory. They do not aim at
creating angels but at developing the existing constitution of mankind.
So far as an action springs from one of the primitive or essential
instincts of mankind, it simply proves the agent to be human, not to be
vicious or virtuous, and therefore is no ground for any moral judgment.
If Bentham's analysis could be accepted, this would be true of his
'springs of action.' The natural appetites have not in themselves a
moral quality: they are simply necessary and original data in the
problem. The perplexity is introduced by Bentham's assumption that
conduct can be analysed so that the 'motive' is a separate entity which
can be regarded as the sole cause of a corresponding action. That
involves an irrelevant abstraction. There is no such thing as a single
'motive.' One of his cases is a mother who lets her child die for love
of 'ease.' We do not condemn her because she loves ease, which is a
motive common to all men and therefore unmoral, not immoral. But neither
do we condemn her merely for the bad consequences of a particular
action. We condemn her because she loves ease better than she loves her
child: that is, because her whole character is 'unnatural' or
ill-balanced, not on account of a particular element taken by itself.
Morality is concerned with concrete human beings, and not with 'motives'
running about by themselves. Bentham's meaning, if we make the necessary
correction, would thus be expressed by saying that we don't blame a man
because he has the 'natural' passions, but because they are somehow
wrongly proportioned or the man himself wrongly constituted. Passions
which may make a man vicious may also be essential to the highest
virtue. That is quite true; but the passion is not a separate agent,
only one constituent of the character.

Bentham admits this in his own fashion. If 'motives' cannot be properly
called good or bad, is there, he asks, nothing good or bad in the man
who on a given occasion obeys a certain motive? 'Yes, certainly,' he
replies, 'his disposition.'[400] The disposition, he adds, is a
'fictitious entity, and designed for the convenience of discourse in
order to express what there is supposed to be permanent in a man's frame
of mind.' By 'fictitious,' as we have seen, he means not 'unreal' but
simply not tangible, weighable, or measurable--like sticks and stones,
or like pains an