Pith

Thomas Carlyle was in many ways a nasty piece of work. (For an eye-full, see Levy and Peart's How the Dismal Science Got Its Name.) He sure knew how to turn a phrase, though. "Benthamee utility," he says, reduces

"the infinite celestial soul of Man to a kind of Hay-balance for weighing hay and thistles on, pleasure and pain."

A Hay-balance, indeed!