GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

518
POLITICS
the mass mind is reached and moulded, these in the twentieth
century being the press, the radio, advertisement, and
the cinema." In the early nineteenth century the ostensible
avenues through which the mind of the people could be
reached were, presumably, the pulpit and the press. To
these Bentham added certain vaguer influences less easily
discerned. Those who form the moral code of a community ;
those who determine the nature of the punishments to
be inflicted upon transgressors of the code; those who
prescribe the penalties for offences against the law; those
who are responsible for the formulatioit of beliefs; those
who set the standards of taste; those, in a word, who make
the mental and spiritual environment in which the minds
of the masses of men move and have their being all
these he tended to regard as benevolent dictators, deter-
mining the ways
in which the mob should exercise its
sovereignty in die interests of its own greatest happiness.
But if we accept the full implication of these suggestions,
it is surely with the benevolent dictators of public opinion
and not with the majority that Sovereignty rests.
Mill's Development of Bentham. It was this aspect
of Bentham's thought that his disciple John Stuart Mill
chiefly developed. I have already indicated the modifications
which Mill, nurtured by his father in the strict doctrines
of Benthamite Utilitarianism, introduced into the ethical
doctrines which he had inherited. 1 Of these one of the
most important was the distinction between qualities of
pleasure. Bentham, it will be remembered, declared that
quantity of pleasure was the sole standard of value; Mill
maintained the superiority of a small quantity of high
quality pleasure over a large quantity of low quality
pleasure. High quality pleasure for Mill consisted broadly
in the pleasures of the intellect.
Mill introduced a similar modification into Bentham's
political theory, a modification which transformed the
theory into which it was introduced even more radically
1 See Chapter IX, pp. 306-334.