★ Keep up to date with the latest news - subscribe to the Transcribe Bentham newsletter; Find a new page to transcribe in our list of Untranscribed Manuscripts
C
1
Of Preventive Institutions.
Mens expectations
on this head apt
to be too Sanguine
Before this define Indirect
Legislation
It will be found, I believe, that on this subject
the ideas of men in general are apt to be rather
vague and that their expectations of what is to be done
in this way are commonly rather too more than reasonably sanguine sanguine and chimerical.
It may be of use therefore to endeavour to fix our notions
relative to this subject, and to take a slight survey
of the several possible expedients which the nature
of things appears to afford for the compassing this defineable end.
As every object is magnified by obscurity we are apt
to entertain magnificent ideas of the sovereign efficacy of I
know not what latent nostrum which the powers of political
ingenuity are supposed to have in store for the favoured
mortal to whom this discovery is reserved. The
object itself is sublime and flattering to the imagination.
These qualities in the object are by the confused workings
of the imagination naturally transferred from the object
itself to the means, whatever they may prove, by which one
conceives it may be attained. What the philosopher's Stone
is to the Chymist, what the universal panacea is to the
Physician, the idea of I know not what brilliant institution
by which crimes of all sorts are to be prevented is to the
imagination and the wishes of the benevolent moralist
and Politician. They seem to suppose that in some odd
corner
|
Identifier: | JB/087/012/001 "JB/" can not be assigned to a declared number type with value 87.
|
|||
|---|---|---|---|
|
087 |
indirect legislation |
||
|
012 |
of preventive institutions |
||
|
001 |
|||
|
copy/fair copy sheet |
4 |
||
|
recto |
f1 / f2 / f3 / f4 |
||
|
[[watermarks::[gr with crown] propatria [britannia with lion motif]]] |
|||
|
27537 |
|||