Principles of Morals and

Principles of Morals and Legislation/215
taken from the same source; viz., from the consideration of the different
points, in respect whereof the interest of an individual is exposed to
suffer. By this uniformity, a considerable degree of light seems to be
thrown upon the whole system; particularly upon the offences that come
under the third class: objects which have never hitherto been brought
into any sort of order. With regard to the fourth class, in settling the
precedence between its several subordinate divisions,it seemed most
natural and satisfactory to place those first, the connection whereof with
the welfare of individuals seemed most obvious and immediate. The
mischievous effects of those offences, which tend in an immediate way
to deprive individuals of the protection provided for them against the
attacks of one another, and of those which tend to bring down upon
them the attacks of foreign assailants, seem alike obvious and palpable.
The mischievous quality of such as tend to weaken the force that is
provided to combat those attacks, but particularly the latter, though
evident enough, is one link farther off in the chain of causes and effects.
The ill effects of such offences as are of disservice only by diminishing
the particular fund from whence that force is to be extracted, such ef-
fects, I say, though indisputable, are still more distant and out of sight.
The same thing may be observed with regard to such as are mischievous
only by affecting the universal fund. Offences against the sovereignty in
general would not be mischievous, if offences of the several descrip-
tions preceding were not mischievous. Nor in a temporal view are of-
fences against religion mischievous, except in as far as, by removing, or
weakening, or misapplying one of the three great incentives to virtue,
and checks to vice, they tend to open the door to the several mischiefs,
which it is the nature of all those other offences to produce. As to the
fifth class, this, as hath already been observed, exhibits, at first view, an
irregularity, which however seems to be unavoidable. But this irregular-
ity is presently corrected, when the analysis returns back, as it does
after a step or two, into the path from which the tyranny of language had
forced it a while to deviate.
It was necessary that it should have two purposes in view: the one,
to exhibit, upon a scale more or less minute, a systematical enumeration
of the several possible modifications of delinquency, denominated or
undenominated; the other, to find places in the list for such names of
offences as were in current use: for the first purpose, nature was to set
the law; for the other, custom. Had the nature of the things themselves
been the only guide, every such difference in the manner of perpetration,

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216/Jeremy Bentham
and such only, should have served as a ground for a different denomina-
tion, as was attended with a difference inpoint of effect. This however of
itself would never have been sufficient; for as on one hand the new
language, which it would have been necessary to invent, would have
been uncouth, and in a manner unintelligible: so on the other hand the
names, which were before in current use, and which, in spite of all sys-
tems, good or bad, must have remained in current use, would have con-
tinued unexplained. To have adhered exclusively to the current language,
would have been as bad on the other side; for in that case the catalogue
of offences, when compared to that of the mischiefs that are capable of
being produced, would have been altogether broken and uncomplete.
To reconcile these two objects, in as far as they seemed to be recon-
cilable, the following course has therefore been pursued. The logical
whole, constituted by the sum total of possible offences, has been bi-
sected in as many different directions as were necessary, and the process
in each direction carried down to that stage at which the particular ideas
thus divided found names in current use in readiness to receive them. At
that period I have stopped; leaving any minuter distinctions to be enu-
merated in the body of the work, as so many species of the genus
characterised by such or such a name. If in the course of any such pro-
cess I came to a mode of conduct which, though it required to be taken
notice of, and perhaps had actually been taken notice of, under all laws,
in the character of an offence, had hitherto been expressed under differ-
ent laws, by different circumlocutions, without ever having received
any name capable of occupying the place of a substantive in a sentence,
I have frequently ventured so far as to fabricate a new name for it, such
an one as the idiom of the language, and the acquaintance I happened to
have with it, would admit of. These names consisting in most instances,
and that unavoidably, of two or three words brought together, in a lan-
guage too which admits not, like the German and the Greek, of their
being melted into one, can never be upon a par, in point of commodious-
ness, with those univocal appellatives which make part of the estab-
lished stock.
In the choice of names in current use, care has been taken to avoid
all such as have been grounded on local distinctions, ill founded perhaps
in the nation in which they received their birth, and at any rate not appli-
cable to the circumstances of other countries.
 The analysis, as far as it goes, is as applicable to the legal concerns
of one country as of another: and where, if it had descended into further

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