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Subject Area: Political Theory
Subject Area: Law

James Mill to Bentham. - Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 10 (Memoirs Part I and Correspondence) [1843]

Edition used:

The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838-1843). 11 vols. Vol. 10.

Part of: The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 11 vols.

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James Mill to Bentham.

“Forcibly did the reading of that last letter strike me with the truth of an observation, which you yourself have somewhere made,—that the man who has anything of great importance for the good of mankind to propose, must be dead before his beneficent proposals have any tolerable chance for a favourable reception, or so much as a fair consideration. The man who gets the start too much of his contemporaries, I see must be an object of jealousy; and while he lives, must have eyes and ears purposely shut against him. I own, in the present quarter, I am disappointed and grieved. One of the most liberal-minded, and enlightened, and one of the most amiable men I know,—and yet, such is the letter he writes to me! Let us not, however, be discouraged—let us go on cheering one another; and as I shall find nobody when you are gone: why you must, just for that reason, live for ever.

“When you have sufficiently perused the said notes, have the goodness to let me have them again.

“I have made a sort of discovery. In a piece of Voltaire’s, the title of which caught my eye the other day, ‘Essai sur les probabilités en fait de justice,’ he makes use of figures (numerals) for expressing the different degrees of probative force in different articles of evidence. He applies it merely as an instrument for a particular purpose, and in a particular case; and seems to have had no idea of a scale for general use. But it may be useful for you to see it, and to say when and how you have seen it; as the fashion seems to be to impute plagiarisms where the imputation is not shut out by bolts and bars, and a guard of soldiers. The vol. is the 30th in my edition, and it is the second of those entitled Politique et Legislation. If you have it not, I will send it you per first conveyance.”