does what is morally right, whether his motive be duty or the hope of being paid for his trouble; he who betrays the friend that trusts him is guilty of a crime, even if his object be to serve another friend to whom he is under greater obligations.' I had objected to this statement, in a criticism which Mr. Mill does me the honour to notice, that we cannot help taking the motive into account, in estimating the rightness or wrongness of an action; and I had suggested more extreme alternative cases than Mr. Mill's, as that the life of the drowning man was saved in order that he might be tortured alive, and that the friend was betrayed with an eye to his own greater good. Mr. Mill replies, that by a common and venial oversight, I have confounded the very different ideas of motive and intention, the distinction between which utilitarian moralists (and Bentham pre-eminently) have taken great pains to illustrate. In the case of rescue which I have supposed, not only the motive, Mr. Mill says, but the act itself is different. The rescue is only the necessary first step of an act far more atrocious than leaving the man to drown would have been. True: but the same criticism appears to me to apply to Mr. Mill's own illustrations. What Mr. Mill,

in the passage quoted, calls motives, Bentham would rather have called intentions. Intention may regard, says Bentham, either the act or its consequences. The man who hoped to be paid for saving the other from drowning, intended, Bentham would have said, to make some money; his motive was desire of money, a thing neither good nor bad. The saving of life was right, because saving life is generally conducive to happiness. In the other case, what Mr. Mill calls the man's 'object'-meaning his motive would also be, more strictly, his 'intention.' To serve his friend is his intention, and the betrayal of the other friend's trust is 'a necessary first step of this act ;' his motive is that variety of benevolence which is called gratitude, --a motive which, according to Bentham, might just as easily prompt a wrong action as a right one. As regards this particular point, then, I venture to think that I have offended against accurate distinction neither more nor less than Mr. Mill himself. The question of importance is, how we are to give an action its full moral quality, when we separate it from the motives and disposition. To Bentham, I believe, this would have been a matter of indifference. him it is enough to call an action pernicious

To

without stamping it as wicked. He would have so far differed from Mr. Mill, I imagine, as to persist that in the case I suggested, the man in the mere saving of life was doing what ought to be called right, because generally beneficial, although in the particular case it was a step to a wrong action. Mr. Mill appears to be unwilling to call a bad man's act, done with a bad purpose, a good act. On the other hand, are we willing to say with him that a man who betrays a friend in order to serve another friend, to whom he is under greater obligations, 'is guilty of a crime,' no less than if the act were a wholly selfish one? The act, in the legal or Benthamite view, is a wrong one; it is an act for law to punish. But in pronouncing on the guilt of the doer, in considering the reflex character of the act, we can hardly help taking motives into account. Mill allows us indeed to do this, if we are estimating the worth of the agent. We may infer, he says, disposition from acts, and shall think well or ill of a man according to his disposition. Well, what I contend is, that this principle of estimating according to motives runs of necessity into our judgment of acts when we are determining their moral quality. Bentham himself says, 'It is an acknowledged thing that every

Mr.

kind of act whatever is apt to assume a different character, and be attended with different effects, according to the nature of the motives which give birth to it.' It is most natural, when we are thinking of moral responsibility, to regard an act as an expression of mind or feeling. And Christians will habitually and consistently so regard it. They will always look beyond the act to its motives. In their view, acts derive their morality from the actuating purpose or feeling. And they will judge of feeling as right and noble, or the opposite, not only by its tendency to produce beneficial results (although they will accept this as a safe criterion), but also as it is in harmony or not with what they have learnt to be the highest attributes of the Divine nature.

WEAK POINTS IN UTILITARIANISM

Of all moralists not distinctly professing to take the utilitarian side, probably no one has conceded so much to the utilitarian theory as Professor Grote. He distinguishes, indeed, between the older Epicurean doctrine concerning happiness as the object of action, and what he calls the neo-utilitarianism of Mr. J. S. Mill, and it is only to the latter that he is so friendly. He sees in it a philosophy differing much, and even in kind, from that of Bentham and Paley. But this ethical system of Mr. Mill is the utilitarianism which is before the world now, and in which we of this generation are chiefly interested; and Professor Grote, as a philosopher of a different school, has treated it with a generosity which should tell with equally advantageous effects both on utilitarians and on their oppo

1 The Contemporary Review, August 1870.

2 An Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy. By the late John Grote, B.D., Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Cambridge. Edited by J. B. Mayor, M.A. Cambridge : Deighton. Bell, & Co. 1870