The utilitarians
were at least intent on existence and on the course of events; they wished
to transform institutions to fit human nature better, and to educate human
nature by those new institutions so that it might better realise its
latent capacities. These are matters which a man may modify by his acts
and they are therefore the proper concern of the moralist. Were they much
to blame if they neglected to define pleasure or happiness and used
catch-words, dialectically vague, to indicate a direction of effort
politically quite unmistakable? Doubtless their political action, like
their philosophical nomenclature, was revolutionary and relied too much on
wayward feelings ignorant of their own causes. Revolution, no less than
tradition, is but a casual and clumsy expression of human nature in
contact with circumstances; yet pain and pleasure and spontaneous hopes,
however foolish, are direct expressions of that contact, and speak for the
soul; whereas a man's station and its duties are purely conventional, and
may altogether misrepresent his native capacities. The protest of human
nature against the world and its oppressions is the strong side of every
rebellion; it was the _moral_ side of utilitarianism, of the rebellion
against irrational morality.
Unfortunately the English reformers were themselves idealists of a sort,
entangled in the vehicles of perception, and talking about sensations and
ideas, pleasures and pains, as if these had been the elements of human
nature, or even of nature at large: and only the most meagre of verbal
systems, and the most artificial, can be constructed out of such
materials.
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