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Mill as Sage: The Essay on Bentham

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Eugene R. August
Eugene R. August*
Affiliation:
University of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio
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Abstract

Although regarded as a philosopher rather than an artist, John Stuart Mill employs artistry as well as rational argument to enlighten his reader. Mill's “Bentham,” for example, demonstrates how Mill operates as a sage using both logic and art to awaken the reader to a new perception of reality. In “Bentham” Mill creates a sense of disappointment arising from Bentham's great promise and limited performance, both as thinker and as man. Constructing an image of himself as a whole thinker, Mill thereby underscores Bentham's position as half-thinker. Mill also creates an elaborate portrait of Bentham as a great father-teacher-hero-God figure, only to reveal Bentham's inability to perform these roles adequately. By heavy use of negatives, Mill suggests that Bentham's thought has little positive value. And, finally, the essay's structure undermines all of Bentham's philosophical contributions. Deriving from Carlyle's “Boswell's Life of Johnson,” Mill's earlier writings on Bentham show him refashioning Carlyle's language and developing the ironic techniques used in “Bentham.” Like other Victorian sages, Mill has no clear-cut theory of prose artistry; he often regards poetry and prose as antithetical media. Nevertheless, in practice he writes as a complex logician-artist, using prose as an imaginative medium.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 89 , Issue 1 , January 1974 , pp. 142 - 153
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974

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References

Note 1 in page 153 Mill: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. J. B. Schneewind (Garden City, ?. Y.: Doubleday, 1968), p. ix.

Note 2 in page 153 See The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (1953; rpt. New York: Norton, 1965) and The Art of Victorian Prose, ed. George Levine and William Madden (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968).

Note 3 in page 153 Noel Annan, “John Stuart Mill,” The English Mind, ed. Hugh Sykes Davies (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1964); rpt. in Mill: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 36, and William E. Buckler, “Introduction,” Prose of the Victorian Period (Boston: Houghton, 1958), p. xx.

Note 4 in page 153 Introd., John Stuart Mill, On Bentham and Coleridge (1950; rpt. New York: Harper, 1962), p. 38. Hereafter cited in text as Leavis.

Note 5 in page 153 John Stuart Mill, “Bentham,” Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1969), pp. 77–115. All references to “Bentham” are from this edition and are cited in the text.

Note 6 in page 153 Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (1958; rpt. New York: Harper, 1966), p. 49.

Note 7 in page 153 “Jeremy Bentham: An Odyssey of Ideas (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963), p. 2.

Note 8 in page 153 See ?. N. Feltes, “‘Bentham’ and ‘Coleridge’: Mill's ‘Completing Counterparts,‘ ” Mill News Letter, 2 (Spring 1967), 2–7. I cannot agree that the organic and agricultural metaphors are “deeply submerged” and are “used with hardly a vestige of their primary meanings” (p. 4). The agricultural metaphors alone are more numerous than the architectural metaphors that Feltes regards as more important to the essay. Omitting other organic metaphors, I count at least 7 examples of agricultural metaphors and only 3 (possibly 4) examples of architectural metaphors.

Note 9 in page 153 The Imperial Intellect: A Study of Newman's Educational Ideal (1955; rpt. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), p. 239.

Note 10 in page 153 John Stuart Mill, Literary Essays, ed. Edward Alexander (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), p. 188.

Note 11 in page 153 The Works of Thomas Carlyle, ed. H. D. Traill, Centenary Edition (1896–1901; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1969), XXVIII, 62–135.

Note 12 in page 153 The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill, 1812–1848, ed. Francis E. Mineka (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1963), i, 104.

Note 13 in page 153 Examiner, No. 1271 (10 June 1832), 371–72.

Note 14 in page 153 Southwood Smith, A Lecture Delivered over the Remains of Jeremy Bentham, Esq., in the Webb-Street School of Anatomy & Medicine, on the 9th of June, 1832 (London : Effingham Wilson, 1832).

Note 15 in page 153 “John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, with Some Observations on James Mill,” Essays in English Literature from the Renaissance to the Victorian Age Presented to A. S. P. Woodhouse, ed. Millar MacLure and F. W. Watt (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1964), p. 259, n. 50, and p. 265.

Note 16 in page 153 The text used in this article is that in Mill, Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, pp. 5–18.

Note 17 in page 153 The text used here is again that in Mill, Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, pp. 499–502.

Note 18 in page 153 In the 1859 revision of “Bentham” Mill toned down a few of the harsher statements: e.g., he omitted the reference to Bentham as a half-man as well as two passages heavy with negatives. Still, it is difficult to agree that these changes indicate that Mill had “returned again to his early enthusiasm for Bentham” (Robson, p. 266). Surely Mill was aware that the revised essay continued to be a revelation of Bentham's great unfulfilled potential.

Note 19 in page 153 Autobiography and Other Writings, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton, 1969), pp. 91–92.

Note 20 in page 153 I would like to express my appreciation to the Univ. of Dayton Research Council for a grant which enabled me to complete this article.