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Subject Area: Political Theory
Subject Area: Law

Bentham to Richard Carlisle. - 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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Bentham to Richard Carlisle.

“In consequence of your advertisement in the Traveller, of the 10th or 11th October, 1821, I write this to desire your acceptance of £ NA, as a contribution towards your support under persecution: and as a testimony of my respect for your persevering intrepidity and self-sacrifice, in the cause of what, in your eyes, is useful truth.

“At the same time, it is my desire, not to be understood as meaning to express any opinion for, any more than against, any of the opinions, whatever they may be, to which you have given expression in any of your works: whatever they may be, had they been opposite to what they are, my weak endeavours towards your support, under the oppression you are enduring, would not have been otherwise than they are. Your cause is, in my eyes, the cause of all dissenters of every denomination, from the corruptive and demoralizing, and stupifying tyranny of every established and persecuting church. Nor should I regard with less sympathy and indignation, any persecution for opinions directly opposite to mine in every point, than for opinions directly coincident with my own in every point: nor do I understand how any Christian dissenter, of any denomination or profession, can, with any pretension to consistency, complain of any hardship, which, in that character, it may happen to him to labour under, and at the same time regard, without still stronger emotion, those afflictions and hardships which have been heaped up upon you, under which you have been so long and so manfully standing up.

“These sentiments, which, as long as I can remember anything, have been always mine, it is no small satisfaction to find concurred in, as I have found in numerous instances, by men of distinguished piety, and whose belief in that system of opinions against which your writings are directed, has ever been unquestioned. One I will mention without difficulty, he having been for some time out of the reach of all injurious antipathies. It is the late Reverend Dr Lindsay. I know not, nor do I wish to know, whether the opinions which you advocate, are of that sort which denominate a man an atheist. If they are, you may number among these, in whose eyes any prosecution instituted against you on that account, would have been no less odious than they are in mine—that amiable and universally beloved divine. This part of his sentiments, is, I believe, in print, under his name. Be this as it may, that they were his, and that he made no secret of them, is what I am assured by the assurances given me by some of the most intimate of his friends. The philanthropy, in which is necessarily included the horror of intolerance on the score of opinion, forms a bond of union and sympathy, the strength of which is greater than that of any principle of disunion that can be produced by particular opinions however opposite, on points however important. It is to these I ascribe an effusion of sympathies, which that excellent man produced in a blank leaf of a richly bound volume of his sermons with which he presented me not long before his death.

“I mention atheism, as being the strongest case, and as affording to persecution its most plausible pretence. As prosecutions on this account, and every other endeavour to suppress or cramp the circulation of that or any other opinion, on a subject of such prime importance in religion, have experienced the most decided disapprobation from the men preëminent in piety, according to the Christian system—so among those who have taken the most furious and most conspicuous part in such prosecutions, have been those in whose instance atheism, professed in the most violent and offensive manner, has been notorious.

“In my eyes, not only is any such persecution an act of immorality in one of its most mischievous shapes, but a sort of confession or presumptive evidence of non-belief in the very opinions which the persecutor thus professes to support.

“No man is so lost to shame, as to maintain, that, in any other part of the field of thought and action, it can be subservient to justice, it can be otherwise than subversive of justice, to suppress any relevant argument on either side, while those on the other side are free; how that which is unfavourable to the establishment of truth for determining the conduct of a Jury, can be less unfavourable to the discovery of truth, for the purpose of determining the conduct of a Judge, or every other person, in matters of religion, is what I am unable to perceive.”

In 1821, I was engaged with Bentham in a controversy on the reëligibility of representatives. By the Spanish constitution of 1812, no deputy was reeligible. Bentham attacked this provision. “As soon as the man has learnt his trade,”—he argued—“You say he shall not carry it on.” But it appeared to me that the quantity of intellectual aptitude which he gained by experience was more than counterbalanced by the amount of moral aptitude which he lost by the possession of power. Bentham wished me to tell him some of the grounds of my opinions. I wrote to him from Madrid, December 9, 1821:—