The philosophical radicals differed from men like Helvétius and Condorcet in many ways.
Temperamentally, they were patient and fond of working out their theories in practical detail.
They attached great importance to economics, which they believed themselves to have developed
as a science. Tendencies to enthusiasm, which existed in Bentham and John Stuart Mill, but not in
Malthus or James Mill, were severely held in check by this "science," and particularly by
Malthus's gloomy version of the theory of population, according to which most wage-earners must
always, except just after a pestilence, earn the smallest amount that will keep them and their
families alive. Another great difference between the Benthamites and their French predecessors
was that in industrial England there was violent conflict between employers and wage-earners,
which gave rise to tradeunionism and socialism. In this conflict the Benthamites, broadly
speaking, sided with the employers against the working class. Their last representative, John
Stuart Mill, however, gradually ceased to give adherence to his father's stern tenets, and became,
as he grew older, less and less hostile to socialism, and less and less convinced of the eternal truth
of classical economics. According to his autobiography, this softening process was begun by the
reading of the romantic poets.
The Benthamites, though at first revolutionary in a rather mild way, gradually ceased to be so,
partly through success in converting the British government to some of their views, partly through
opposition to the growing strength of socialism and trade-unionism. Men who were in revolt
against tradition, as already mentioned, were of two kinds, rationalistic and romantic, though in
men like Condorcet both elements were combined. The Benthamites were almost wholly
rationalistic, and so were the Socialists who rebelled against them as well as against the existing
economic order. This movement does not acquire a complete philosophy until we come to Marx,
who will be considered in a later chapter.
The romantic form of revolt is very different from the rationalist form, though both are derived
from the French Revolution and the philosophers who immediately preceded it. The romantic
form is to be seen in Byron in an unphilosophical dress, but in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche it has
learnt the language of philosophy. It tends to emphasize the will at the expense of the intellect, to
be impatient of