The Spirit of the Age Bentham (1748–1832) was an English philosopher, jurist, and social and legislative reformer. He was a major proponent of Utilitarianism, based on the idea of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number", which he was the first to systematise, introducing it as the "principle of utility". Hazlitt's link with Bentham was unusual, as Bentham was his landlord and lived close by. Bentham would sometimes take his exercise in his garden, which was visible from Hazlitt's window. The two were not personally acquainted, yet what Hazlitt observed enabled him to interweave personal observations into his account of the older man. Bentham was
Jeremy Bentham happiness, will be noticed and marked down". He considered both surveillance and transparency to be useful ways of generating understanding and improvements for people's lives. Bentham distinguished among fictional entities what he called "fabulous entities" like Prince Hamlet or a centaur, from what he termed "fictitious entities", or necessary objects of discourse, similar to Kant's categories, such as nature, custom, or the social contract. Bentham is widely associated with the foundation in 1826 of London University (the institution that, in 1836, became University College London), though he was 78 years old when the University opened and played only an indirect