those who are themselves impelled by nobler principles of action, I do
not believe that any one of the survivors of the Benthamites or
Utilitarians of that day now relies mainly upon it for the general
amendment of human conduct.

From this neglect both in theory and in practice of the cultivation of
feeling, naturally resulted, among other things, an undervaluing of
poetry, and of Imagination generally, as an element of human nature. It
is, or was, part of the popular notion of Benthamites, that they are
enemies of poetry: this was partly true of Bentham himself; he used to
say that "all poetry is misrepresentation": but in the sense in which he
said it, the same might have been said of all impressive speech; of all
representation or inculcation more oratorical in its character than a
sum in arithmetic. An article of Bingham's in the first number of the
_Westminster Review_, in which he offered as an explanation of something
which he disliked in Moore, that "Mr. Moore _is_ a poet, and therefore
is _not_ a reasoner," did a good deal to attach the notion of hating
poetry to the writers in the _Review_. But the truth was that many of us
were great readers of poetry; Bingham himself had been a writer of it,
while as regards me (and the same thing might be said of my father), the
correct statement would be, not that I disliked poetry, but that I was
theoretically indifferent to it. I disliked any sentiments in poetry
which I should have disliked in prose; and that included a great deal.
And I was wholly blind to its place in human culture, as a means of
educating the feelings. But I was always personally very susceptible to
some kinds of it. In the most sectarian period of my Benthamism, I
happened to look into Pope's _Essay on Man_, and, though every opinion
in it was contrary to mine, I well remember how powerfully it acted on
my imagination. Perhaps at that time poetical composition of any higher
type than eloquent discussion in verse, might not have produced a