| | 1 | Author: | Mill, John Stuart, 1806-1873 | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Bentham  | | | | Published: | 2001 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | There are two men, recently deceased, to whom their country
is indebted not only for the greater part of the important ideas
which have been thrown into circulation among its thinking men in
their time, but for a revolution in its general modes of thought
and investigation. These men, dissimilar in almost all else,
agreed in being closet-students -- secluded in a peculiar degree,
by circumstances and character, from the business and intercourse
of the world: and both were, through a large portion of their
lives, regarded by those who took the lead in opinion (when they
happened to hear of them) with feelings akin to contempt. But
they were destined to renew a lesson given to mankind by every
age, and always disregarded -- to show that speculative
philosophy, which to the superficial appears a thing so remote
from the business of life and the outward interests of men, is in
reality the thing on earth which most influences them, and in the
long run overbears every other influence save those which it must
itself obey. The writers of whom we speak have never been read by
the multitude; except for the more slight of their works, their
readers have been few.. but they have been the teachers of the
teachers; there is hardly to be found in England an individual of
any importance in the world of mind, who (whatever opinions he
may have afterwards adopted) did not first learn to think from
one of these two; and though their influences have but begun to
diffuse themselves through these intermediate channels over
society at large, there is already scarcely a publication of any
consequence addressed to the educated classes, which, if these
persons had not existed, would not have been different from what
it is. These men are, Jeremy Bentham and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
-- the two great seminal minds of England in their age. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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