of a movement of this sort. He was born in 1748, but did not become a Radical till 1808. He was
painfully shy, and could not without great trepidation endure the company of strangers. He wrote
voluminously, but never bothered to publish; what was published under his name had been
benevolently purloined by his friends. His main interest was jurisprudence, in which he
recognized Helvétius and Beccaria as his most important predecessors. It was through the
theory of law that he became interested in ethics and politics.
He bases his whole philosophy on two principles, the "association principle," and the "greatest-
happiness principle." The association principle had been emphasised by Hartley in 1749; before
him, though association of ideas was recognized as occurring, it was regarded, for instance by
Locke, only as a source of trivial errors. Bentham, following Hartley, made it the basic principle
of psychology. He recognizes association of ideas and language, and also association of ideas and
ideas. By means of this principle he aims at a deterministic account of mental occurrences. In
essence the doctrine is the same as the more modern theory of the "conditioned reflex," based on
Pavlov's experiments. The only important difference is that Pavlov's conditioned reflex is
physiological, whereas the association of ideas was purely mental. Pavlov's work is therefore
capable of a materialistic explanation, such as is given to it by the behaviourists, whereas the
association of ideas led rather towards a psychology more or less independent of physiology.
There can be no doubt that, scientifically, the principle of the conditioned reflex is an advance on
the older principle. Pavlov's principle is this: Given a reflex according to which a stimulus B
produces a reaction C, and given that a certain animal has frequently experienced a stimulus A at
the same time as B, it often happens that in time the stimulus A will produce the reaction C even
when B is absent. To determine the circumstances under which this happens is a matter of
experiment. Clearly, if we substitute ideas for A, B, and C, Pavlov's principle becomes that of the
association of ideas.
Both principles, indubitably, are valid over a certain field; the only controversial question is as to
the extent of this field. Bentham and his followers exaggerated the extent of the field in the case of
Hartley's principle, as certain behaviourists have in the case of Pavlov's principle.
To Bentham, determinism in psychology was important, because