hands Bentham's principal speculations, as interpreted to the Continent,
and indeed to all the world, by Dumont, in the _Traité de Législation_.
The reading of this book was an epoch in my life; one of the turning
points in my mental history.

My previous education had been, in a certain sense, already a course
of Benthamism. The Benthamic standard of "the greatest happiness" was
that which I had always been taught to apply; I was even familiar
with an abstract discussion of it, forming an episode in an
unpublished dialogue on Government, written by my father on the
Platonic model. Yet in the first pages of Bentham it burst upon me
with all the force of novelty. What thus impressed me was the chapter
in which Bentham passed judgment on the common modes of reasoning in
morals and legislation, deduced from phrases like "law of nature,"
"right reason," "the moral sense," "natural rectitude," and the like,
and characterized them as dogmatism in disguise, imposing its
sentiments upon others under cover of sounding expressions which
convey no reason for the sentiment, but set up the sentiment as its
own reason. It had not struck me before, that Bentham's principle put
an end to all this. The feeling rushed upon me, that all previous
moralists were superseded, and that here indeed was the commencement
of a new era in thought. This impression was strengthened by the
manner in which Bentham put into scientific form the application of
the happiness principle to the morality of actions, by analysing the
various classes and orders of their consequences. But what struck me
at that time most of all, was the Classification of Offences, which is
much more clear, compact, and imposing in Dumont's _rédaction_ than in
the original work of Bentham from which it was taken. Logic and the
dialectics of Plato, which had formed so large a part of my previous
training, had given me a strong relish for accurate classification.