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Bentham

noun
1.
English philosopher and jurist; founder of utilitarianism (1748-1831).  Synonym: Jeremy Bentham.






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"Bentham" Quotes from Famous Books



... its branches, it has no other mode of being paid by society. The severely scientific, the highly imaginative, the profoundly legislative authors, do not produce promptly marketable, though they produce priceless, works. La Place, Wordsworth, Bentham, could not have existed had they depended on the first product of their works; they would have perished before an acknowledging world could have given them bread.' They say, further, that 'the humblest literary man works for something more than hire, and produces something ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various

... ignorance or stupidity, overlooks the fact that there are bodies of men, more or less numerous, attached by every selfish interest they have to the maintenance of these abusive customs. 'A plan,' says Bentham, 'may be said to be too good to be practicable, where, without adequate inducement in the shape of personal interest, it requires for its accomplishment that some individual or class of individuals shall have made a sacrifice of his or their personal interest to the interest of the whole. When ...
— On Compromise • John Morley

... Jeremy Bentham's logic, by which he proved that he couldn't possibly see a ghost is all very well-in the day-time. All the reason in the world will never get those impressions of childhood, created by just such circumstances as I have been telling, out of a man's head. That is the only ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... grey sky that photograph themselves for ever on the lasting tablets of the human memory. John Stuart Mill in his Autobiography dwells lovingly, I remember, on the profound effect produced on himself by his childish visits to Jeremy Bentham at Ford Abbey in Dorsetshire, on the delightful sense of space and freedom and generous expansion given to his mind by the mere act of living and moving in those stately halls and wide airy gardens. Every university man must look back with pleasure of somewhat the ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... thinker, and thinkers are so rarely found that the world must take note of them. John Stuart Mill, writing in Eighteen Hundred Forty, assigned first place among English philosophers to Jeremy Bentham, incidentally mentioning that Samuel Taylor ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard

... supposing that I came to do him no good, having with me two or three officers and an arm'd boats crew. When I landed I met with a face that put me in mind of Hyde Park, Balls, Parties, Almacks, &c. This was no one more or less than Col. Leicester Stanhope come out with Jeremy Bentham under his arm to give the Greeks ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury

... letter to Rev. James Brown (1763) inclosing a drawing, in reference to a small ruined chapel at York Minster; and a letter (about 1765) to Jas. Bentham, Prebendary of Ely whose "Essay on Gothic Architecture" has been wrongly ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... as is well known, Burke and Bentham, and later Taine, Les origines de la France contemporaine: La revolution, I, pp. 273 et seq.; Oncken, Das Zeitalter der Revolution, des Kaiserreiches und der Befreiungskriege, I, pp. 229 et seq.; and Weiss, Geschichte ...
— The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens • Georg Jellinek

... Mr. Bentham, in his "History of Ely Cathedral," says, that one of the earliest spires of which we have any account, "is that of old St. Paul's, finished in the year 1222." This spire was of timber covered with lead; "but, not long after, they began to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various

... they are not educated. Of course I use the term evidence in a wider sense than the testimony in crimes and contracts, and the other business of courts of law. Questions of evidence are rising at every hour of the day. As Bentham says, it is a question of evidence with the cook whether the joint of meat is roasted enough. It has been excellently said that the principal and most characteristic difference between one human intellect and another consists in their ability ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 1: On Popular Culture • John Morley

... opportunities they enjoy may naturally be expected to become the leaders of the nation's thought and practice.... Difficult as it is to measure the forces ... it is hardly to be denied that the power exercised by Bentham and the utilitarian school has, for better or for worse, passed into the hands of the idealists.... "The Rhine has flowed into the Thames" is the warning note rung out by Mr. Hobhouse. Carlyle introduced it, bringing it as far as Chelsea. Then Jowett and Thomas Hill Green, and William ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James

... volume of the work contains an account of the life and writings of St Simon, Fourier, and Owen. The second is very miscellaneous. We encounter, to our surprise, the name of Jeremy Bentham in the category of socialists, and are still more startled to learn that the Utilitarians derive their origin from Robert Owen! It is a jumble of all sects, religious and political, in which even our Quakers are included ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various

... includes many more genera with sleeping species than all the other families put together. The number of the tribes to which each genus belongs, according to Bentham and Hooker's arrangement, has ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin

... of Mr. Bentham ("Hist. Notes Cult. Plants"), "as the result of all the most reliable evidence that none of the Ceralia—wheat, rye, barley, and oats—exist or have existed truly wild in their present state." In the Stone Age of Europe five varieties of wheat and three of barley were cultivated. ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... doing could be referred. The truth was driven home upon him that political science is a science of human relationship with the human beings left out. So he writes that "the thinkers of the past, from Plato to Bentham and Mill, had each his own view of human nature, and they made these views the basis of their speculations on government." But to-day "nearly all students of politics analyze institutions and avoid the analysis of man." Whoever has read the typical book on politics by a professor or a reformer ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann

... friend," said Judge Frank, in a tone of vexation, "it is not worth while reading aloud to you if you keep yawning incessantly, and looking about, first to the right and then to the left;" and with these words he laid down a treatise of Jeremy Bentham, which he had been reading, and rose ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer

... besides those of social betterment. Much of the machinery in the mills was worn and becoming obsolete. To replace this he borrowed a hundred thousand dollars. Then he reorganized his business as a stock company and sold shares to several London merchants with whom he dealt. He interested Jeremy Bentham, the great jurist and humanitarian, and Bentham proved his faith by buying stock in the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard

... Observe, for example, the indefatigable, inevitable English utilitarians: how ponderously and respectably they stalk on, stalk along (a Homeric metaphor expresses it better) in the footsteps of Bentham, just as he had already stalked in the footsteps of the respectable Helvetius! (no, he was not a dangerous man, Helvetius, CE SENATEUR POCOCURANTE, to use an expression of Galiani). No new thought, nothing of the nature of a finer ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... so named by Leichhardt's black-boys (described in Bentham's 'Flora Australiensis'), is very abundant north of the Einasleih, which is possibly the extreme latitude of its zone south. It formed an important accession to the food of the party, and it is highly probable that their good health may be attributable to the quantity of fruit, of which ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine

... Bentham and Hooker, 'Genera Plantarum.' Australia is the metropolis of the genus, forty-one species having been described from this country, as Prof. Oliver ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin

... that his use of the term "was the first time that any one had taken the title of Utilitarian"; and Galt, who represents his annalist as writing of the year 1794, is historically justified. Writing in 1781 Bentham uses the word 'utilitarian,' and again in 1802 he definitely asserts that it is the only name of his creed ('Works,' x. 92, 392). M. Halevy ('L'evolution de la doctrine utilitaire,' p. 300) draws attention to the presence of ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley

... to crush the revolutionary hydra; that, on the contrary, "in our opinion the danger lies not in that fantastic revolutionary hydra, but in the obstinacy of traditionalism clogging progress," etc., etc. He read another article, too, a financial one, which alluded to Bentham and Mill, and dropped some innuendoes reflecting on the ministry. With his characteristic quickwittedness he caught the drift of each innuendo, divined whence it came, at whom and on what ground it was aimed, and that afforded him, ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy

... critic that those of whom he has undertaken to treat stand irreversibly judged in his pages. He is generous toward Campbell and Moore, who were both personally hostile to him; he is scrupulously honest toward Bentham, with whose system he had no sympathy. The concluding pages of his sketch of Southey, in view of that poet's rancor against him, are almost defiant in their magnanimity. His adverse judgments, moreover, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... resistance to Charles I, it also proclaimed a doctrine of the natural rights of the individual fatal to all types of government. Similarly the political theory of Adam Smith and the laissez-faire economists, together with that of their contemporaries, Bentham and the utilitarian philosophers, not only attacked the restrictive regulations of the Whig oligarchy, but showed on general principles the strongest dislike of what it called "State interference" in all circumstances. So, too, Herbert Spencer and the nineteenth century school ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw

... collection of the plants of his last expedition, presented to the British Museum by Sir Thomas Mitchell, there is a plant which seems to belong to the genus Pentadynamis, which is probably, therefore, one of the species of Vigna, described by Mr. Bentham. ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt

... arguing that prisons ought to be made uncomfortable, because nobody need go there unless he chose, should have been furiously wroth with poor Mr. Justice Best for suggesting much the same thing of spring-guns. The greatest political triumph of his manner is to be found no doubt in the article "Bentham on Fallacies," in which the unreadable diatribes of the apostle of utilitarianism are somehow spirited and crisped up into a series of brilliant arguments, and the whole is crowned by the famous "Noodle's Oration," the summary and storehouse of all that ever has been or can be said on the Liberal ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... the like, he would find himself mistaken, for I was now in a position to pick and choose my cases, and a case of pickles did not allure me. 'Beware of imitations,' said the advertisement; 'none genuine without a facsimile of the signature of Bentham Gibbes.' Ah, well, not for me were either the pickles or the tracking of imitators. A forged cheque! yes, if you like, but the forged signature of Mr. Gibbes on a pickle bottle was out of my line. Nevertheless, I said ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr

... history of the turning-lathe Imperfection of tools about the middle of last century The hand-lathe Great advantages of the slide rest First extensively used in constructing Brunel's Block Machinery Memoir of Brunel Manufacture of ships' blocks Sir S. Bentham's specifications Introduction of Brunel to Maudslay The block-machinery made, and its success Increased operations of the firm Improvements in the steam-engine Invention of the punching-machine Further improvements in the slide-lathe Screw-cutting machine Maudslay a dexterous ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles

... the Peanut. The absence of any mention of the plant by early Egyptian and Arabic writers, and the fact that there is no name for it in Sanscrit and Bengalese, are regarded as telling against its Oriental origin. Moreover, there are six other species of Arachis, natives of Brazil, and Bentham and Hooker, in their Genera Plantarum, ask if the plant so generally grown in warm countries may not be a cultivated form of ...
— The Peanut Plant - Its Cultivation And Uses • B. W. Jones

... "Onyx Ring," Walsingham, the poet, takes down a volume from Sir Charles Harcourt's library, and reads a charming romance, apparently from its pages. A lady of the company afterwards turned to the same book, which proved to be a work of Jeremy Bentham's, and searched in vain for the graceful narrative. Walsingham smiled at her perplexity, and said, "Those only find ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various

... really very great indeed. Well, his book has just been reviewed in the last Edinburgh Review (of which some copies have been in town about a week). This service has been done him, I suppose, through some of his political friends—(for he is connected with Brougham, Lord Lansdowne, old Bentham, etc.),—but I understand by Mr. Jeffrey. Mr. Hill, in common with multitudes in this Babylon—who will not put their trust in Blackwood as in God (which, you know, he ought to do)—yet privately adores him as the Devil; and indeed ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... Assembly (August 26, 1792) conferred the title of "French Citizen" on "Priestley, Payne, Bentham, Wilberforce, Clarkson, Mackintosh, Campe, Cormelle, Paw, David Williams, Gorani, Anacharsis Clootz, Pestalozzi, Washington, Hamilton, Madison, Klopstoc, Kosciusko, Gilleers."—Editor.. ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... in the lapse of forty years many improvements have taken place in the college and in the university. I am not unwilling to believe, that some tutors might have been found more active than Dr. Waldgrave, and less contemptible than Dr.****. About the same time, and in the same walk, a Bentham was still treading in the footsteps of a Burton, whose maxims he had adopted, and whose life he had published. The biographer indeed preferred the school-logic to the new philosophy, Burgursdicius to Locke; and the hero appears, in his own writings, a stiff and conceited pedant. ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon

... the Shriek of Kowfat in proclaiming a Jehad against us is one that amply justifies all that we have said editorially since Jeremy Bentham died. We have always held that the only way to deal with a Mohammedan potentate like the Shriek is to treat him like a Christian. The Khalifate of Kowfat at present buys its whole supply of cotton piece goods in our market and pays cash. The Shriek, who is a man of enlightenment, has consistently ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock

... Gentes." The Chancellor D'Aguesseau, probably without knowing the work of Zouch, suggested that this law should be called, "Droit entre les Gens," (Oeuvres, tom. ii. p. 337.) in which he has been followed by a late ingenious writer, Mr. Bentham, Princ. of Morals and Pol. p. 324. Perhaps these learned writers do employ a phrase which expresses the subject of this law with more accuracy than our common language; but I doubt whether innovations in the terms of science always repay us by their superior precision for the uncertainty and ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh

... classes of public officials should have the opportunity of learning whatever can be known of economics and politics taught on modern lines. Our old Universities provided lectures on political science as it was understood by Plato and Aristotle, by Hobbes and Bentham: they did not then—and indeed they do not now—teach how New Zealand deals with strikes, how America legislates about trusts, how municipalities all over ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease

... plants, to ulcers, boils, &c.It might do great good if the tumours were unbroken, but is awfully dangerous. So is Peucedanum officinale. My Latin names are those of Smith: English Flora. Babington has re-named them, and Bentham again altered them. Ilike my mumpsimus better ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various

... the 23rd [at the] Club) I shall much like to hear whether this strikes you as sound. I feel all the time on the borders of a circle of truism. Of course I could not think of such a request, but you might possibly:—if Bentham does not think the whole subject rubbish, ask him some time to pick out the dozen most anomalous genera in the Leguminosae, or any great order of which there is a monograph by which I could calculate the ordinary percentage of species to genera. I am the more anxious, as the more I enquire, the ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... But Bentham has said: Every time that punishment is inflicted it proves its inefficacy, for it did not prevent the committal of that crime. Therefore, this remedy is worthless. And a deeper study of the cause of crime ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri

... afforded to Eckermann by his daily intercourse with Goethe? The breadth of culture and the perfection of training exhibited by John Stuart Mill need not surprise us when we recollect that his earlier days were spent in the society of James Mill and Jeremy Bentham. And the remarkable extent of view, the command of facts, and the astonishing productiveness of such modern Frenchmen as Sainte-Beuve and Littre become explicable when we reflect upon the circumstance that so many ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... a man. When you write 'He was made the recipient of a silver teapot,' you write jargon. But at the beginning set even higher store on the concrete noun. Somebody—I think it was FitzGerald—once posited the question 'What would have become of Christianity if Jeremy Bentham had had the writing of the Parables?' Without pursuing that dreadful enquiry I ask you to note how carefully the Parables—those exquisite short stories—speak only of 'things which you can touch and see'—'A sower went forth to sow,' 'The kingdom of heaven ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... Nature"; economists from Adam Smith to Malthus worked out the laws of man's dependence upon the material world; poets and idealists from Rousseau to Wordsworth discovered in a life "according to nature" the ideal for man; sociologists from Hume to Bentham, and from Burke to Coleridge, applied to human society conceptions derived from physics or from biology, and emphasised all that connects it with the mechanical aggregate of atoms, ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford

... Bentham, which Mr. Mill cites to prove the worthlessness of the religious sanction—viz., the almost universal breach of oaths where not enforced by law, and the prevalence of male unchastity and the practice of dueling among Christian communities—have no pertinency whatever to his argument, since they ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various

... true character of such laws, an experimentum crucis, of which, in general, they cannot bear the application. Legislation, which requires or which will pay to be bored or bought, is unequal legislation; and therefore unwise and unjust. Bentham's rule, though false as the standard of right and wrong, is in general the true rule of practical legislation, the greatest good of the greatest number. It is expressed with the most force and accuracy by that ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood

... firmly established on a theocratic basis, a country in which the Koran and the Multeka are the law of the land, into a Western democracy based on the secular speculations of Rousseau, Montesquieu, Bentham, Mill, and Spencer was ridiculous. The revolution effected only an outward change. It introduced some Western innovations, but altered neither the character of the Government nor that of the people. Turkish Parliamentarism became a sham and a make-believe. The cruel absolutism ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... (1759-1829). A great publicist; born in Geneva, and principally known in England by his association with Bentham, to whom he acted as an editor and interpreter. Lived much in Paris, St. Petersburg, and, above all, in London, where he knew Fox, Sheridan, and other famous men, and taught the children of Lord Shelburne. Dumont's Sophismes ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter

... exposition appeared, Barnes and the young actress were seated in the law office of Marks and Culver, a room overlooking a court-yard, brightened by statues and urns of flowers. A plaster bust of Justinian gazed benignly through the window at a fountain; a steel engraving of Jeremy Bentham watched the butterflies, and Hobbes and John Austin, austere in portraiture, frowned darkly down upon the flowering garden. While the manager and Constance waited for the attorney to appear, they were discussing, not for the first time, the proviso ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham

... themselves the whole system. It is real in them and they in it. They are real only because they are social. The notion that the individual is the highest form of reality, and that the relationship of individuals is one of mere contract, the notion of Hobbes and of Bentham and of Austin, turns out to be quite inadequate. Even of an everyday contract, that of marriage, it has been well said that it is a contract to pass out of the sphere of contract, and that it is possible only because ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... same lesson repeated in England. It had its Utilitarians, its Christian Socialists, its Fabians (still extant): it had Bentham, Mill, Dickens, Ruskin, Carlyle, Butler, Henry George, and Morris. And the end of all their efforts is the Chicago described by Mr Upton Sinclair, and the London in which the people who pay to be ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw

... have been two Jeremys. The one wrote a Jeremiad about usury, and was called Jeremy Bentham. He has been much admired by Mr. John Neal, and was a great man in a small way. The other gave name to the most important of the Exact Sciences, and was a great man in a great way—I may say, indeed, in the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... the nineteenth century, some would find a guiding thread in the progress of the Utilitarian School, which based its teaching on the idea of pursuing the greatest happiness of the greatest number, the school which produced philosophers like Bentham and J. S. Mill, and politicians like Cobden and Morley. It was congenial to the English mind to follow a line which seemed to lead with certainty to practical results; and the industrial revolutions caused ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore



Words linked to "Bentham" :   jurist, philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, legal expert



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