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 the distance, I
am deeply free to walk as I will. The choice of pleasure for a principle
of morals was particularly unfortunate in the British utilitarians; it
lent them an air of frivolity absurdly contrary to their true character.
Pleasure might have been a fit enough word in the mouth of Aristippus, a