that he was indebted to Shaftesbury. Indeed, there is much of the sturdy
commonsense of the Scottish school about him, particularly perhaps in
that interweaving of ethics, politics and economics, which is
characteristic of the school from Hutcheson in the middle seventeenth
century, to the able, if neglected, Lorimer in the nineteenth.[17] He is
entitled to be considered the real founder of utilitarianism. He first
showed how difficult it is in politics to draw a distinction between
ethical right and men's opinion of what ought to be. He brings to an end
what Coleridge happily called the "metapolitical school." After him we
are done with the abuse of history to bolster up Divine Right and social
contract; for there is clearly present in his use of facts a true sense
of historical method. He put an end also to the confusion which resulted
from the effort of thinkers to erect standards of right and wrong
independent of all positive law. He took the facts as phenomena to be
explained rather than as illustrations of some favorite thesis to be
maintained in part defiance of them. Conventional Whiggism has no
foothold after he has done with its analysis. His utilitarianism was the
first efficient substitute for the labored metaphysics of the contract
school; and even if he was not the first to see through its
pretensions--that is perhaps the claim of Shaftesbury--he was the first
to show the grounds of their uselessness. He saw that history and
psychology together provide the materials for a political philosophy.
So that even if he could not himself construct it the hints at least
were there.

[Footnote 17: There are few books which show so clearly as Lorimer's
_Institutes of Nations_ (1872) how fully the Scottish school was in the
midstream of European thought.]

His suggestiveness, indeed, may be measured in another fashion. The