ABSTRACT
Jeremy Bentham has one service yet to perform for J students of the social sciences. He can help them to work free from that misconception of human nature which he helped their predecessors to formulate. In the social sciences one is suffering from a curious mental derangement. One has become aware that the orthodox doctrines of economics, politics, and law rest upon a tacit assumption that man's behavior is dominated by rational calculation. One can perform this psychoanalytic operation upon our own minds best by assembling in orderly sequence the pertinent passages scattered through Bentham's writings. Bentham's way of becoming the Newton of the moral world was to develop the "felicific calculus". There are several expositions of this calculus in his Works; but the first and most famous version remains the best to quote. The quintessence of Bentham's social science is the double role played by the felicific calculus.
