He acknowledged, somewhat superciliously, that their hearts were in the right place; yet, if we are to have ethics at all, were not their thoughts in the right place also?  They were concerned not with analysis of the moral consciousness but with the conduct of affairs and the reform of institutions.  The spectacle of human wretchedness profoundly moved them; their minds were bent on transforming society, so that a man’s station and its duties might cease to be what a decayed feudal organisation and an inhuman industrialism had made of them.  They revolted against the miserable condition of the masses of mankind, and against the miserable consolations which official religion, or a philosophy like Bradley’s, offered them in their misery.  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.  Moreover, they spoke much of pleasure and happiness, and hardly at all of misery and pain:  whereas it would have been wiser, and truer to their real inspiration, to have laid all the emphasis on evils to be abated, leaving the good to shape itself in freedom.  Suffering is the instant and obvious sign of some outrage done to human nature; without this natural recoil, actual or imminent, no morality would have any sanction, and no precept could be imperative.  What silliness to command me to pursue pleasure or to avoid it, if in any case everything would be well!  Save for some shadow of dire repentance looming in