of private sentiments.  “Civil liberty,” says Priestley, “has been greatly impaired by an abuse of the maxim that the joint understanding of all the members of a State, properly collected, must be preferable to that of individuals; and consequently that the more the cases are in which mankind are governed by this united reason of the whole community, so much the better; whereas, in truth, the greater part of human actions are of such a nature, that more inconvenience would follow from their being fixed by laws than from their being left to every man’s arbitrary will.”  If my neighbor assaults me, he suggests, I may usefully call in the police; but where the object is the discovery of truth, the means of education, the method of religious belief, individual initiative is superior to State action.  The latter produces an uniform result “incompatible with the spirit of discovery.”  Nor is such attempt at uniform conditions just to posterity; men have no natural right to judge for the future.  Men are too ignorant to fix their own ideas as the basis of all action.

Priestley could not escape entirely the bondage of past tradition; and the metaphysics which Bentham abhorred are scattered broadcast over his pages.  Nevertheless the basis upon which he defended his ideas was a utilitarianism hardly less complete than that which Bentham made the instrument of revolution.  “Regard to the general good,” he says, “is the main method by which natural rights are to be defended.”  “The good and happiness of the members, that is, the majority of the members of any State, is the great standard by which everything relating to that state must finally be determined.”  In substance, that is to say, if not completely in theory, we pass with Priestley from arguments of right to those of expediency.  His chief attack upon religious legislation is similarly based upon considerations of policy.  His view of the individual as a never-ending source of fruitful innovation anticipates all the later Benthamite arguments about the well-spring of individual energy.  Interference and stagnation are equated in exactly similar fashion to Adam Smith and his followers.  Priestley, of course, was inconsistent in urging at the outset that government is the chief instrument of progress; but what he seems to mean is less that government has the future in its hands than that government action may well be decisive for good or evil.  Typical, too, of the later Benthamism is his glorification of reason as the great key which is to unlock all doors.  That is, of course, natural in a scientist who had himself made discoveries of vital import; but it was characteristic also of a school which scanned a limitless horizon with serene confidence in a future of unbounded good.  Even if it be said that Priestley has all the vices of that rationalism which, as with Bentham, oversimplifies every problem it encounters, it is yet adequate to retort that a confidence in the energies of men was better than the complacent stagnation of the previous age.