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Subject Area: Political Theory
Subject Area: Law

(Translation.) - Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 11 (Memoirs of Bentham Part II and Analytical Index) [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. 11.

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

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(Translation.)

“To dine with Bentham; to dine alone with Bentham;—that is a pleasure which tempts me to break an engagement I have been under for several days. To-morrow (Thursday) I shall come to him: he will tell me the hour. I shall be punctual.”

“Talleyrand,” said Bentham, “was introduced to me by Dumont in 1792, at Queen’s Square Place, in the room now my library. He asked me to superintend the building of a Panopticon in Paris; for which, he said, the municipality, headed by the Duke de la Rochefoucauld, were willing to furnish funds: and the Duke’s house was offered to me for a residence of six months. When the Duke was murdered, the plan fell through.”

Talleyrand had the highest admiration of Bentham. He once said to me, that he was preëminently a genius—more entitled to the name than any man he had ever known. I once remarked to him, that of all modern writers, Bentham was the one from whom most had been stolen—and stolen without acknowledgment. “True,” he said, “et pillé de tout le monde, il est toujours riche.” And robbed by everybody, he is always rich. A higher compliment could scarcely be paid from one illustrious man to another; and from Talleyrand, whose mind rather led him to censure than to applaud, the praise has a double value.

The writer who adopted the name of Junius Redivivus having written to Bentham, giving to him the credit of having first taught that author “to think and look beneath the surface of human transactions,” Bentham requested him to throw off the mask, and to visit him. The anonymous writer thought, however, that he should best forward his objects by keeping himself sheltered from personal observation.

For some months before his death, Bentham had been anticipating the event. The loss of many of his faculties, particularly of his memory, was very obvious to him, and he frequently expressed his conviction, that mind and body were giving way together. I was absent from England a month or two before he died. So anxious was he to save me from the distress which the knowledge of his situation would have caused, that he directed certain letters of his to be sent to me, only in case of his recovery or death, lest their contents, by evidencing the state of his health, might be the cause of suffering to me. One passage is as follows:—