Nietzsche because he likes the contemplation of pain, because he erects conceit into a duty,
because the men whom he most admires are conquerors, whose glory is cleverness in causing
men to die. But I think the ultimate argument against his philosophy, as against any unpleasant
but internally self-consistent ethic, lies not in an appeal to facts, but in an appeal to the
emotions. Nietzsche despises universal love; I feel it the motive power to all that I desire as
regards the world. His followers have had their innings, but we may hope that it is coming
rapidly to an end.
CHAPTER XXVI The Utilitarians *THROUGHOUT the period from Kant to Nietzsche, professional philosophers in Great Britain
remained almost completely unaffected by their German contemporaries, with the sole
exception of Sir William Hamilton, who had little influence. Coleridge and Carlyle, it is true,
were profoundly affected by Kant, Fichte, and the German Romantics, but they were not
philosophers in the technical sense. Somebody seems to have once mentioned Kant to James
Mill, who, after a cursory inspection, remarked: "I see well enough what poor Kant would be
at." But this degree of recognition is exceptional; in general, there is complete silence about the
Germans. Bentham and his school derived their philosophy, in all its main outlines, from
Locke, Hartley, and Helvétius; their importance is not so much philosophical as political, as
the leaders of British radicalism, and as the men who unintentionally prepared the way for the
doctrines of socialism.
Jeremy Bentham, who was the recognized head of the "Philosophical Radicals," was not the
sort of man one expects to find at the head
For a fuller treatment of this subject, as also of Marx, see Part II of my Freedom and
Organization, 1814-1914.