 Bentham was called to the Bar in 1769, but his legal career lasted only one brief. In that year he discovered the utility principle and related ideas in the writings of Hume, Helvétius and Beccaria and chose instead a career dedicated to analytic jurisprudence, law reform, and social and political improvement. Unaware of Hutcheson’s version of the utilitarian formula in An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1729), Bentham was occasionally deceived by faulty memory into thinking he had discovered it in Priestley’s Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768). More plausible, however, are his claims to have found it in Beccaria’s Dei Delitti e delle Pene (1764), where the Italian law reformer announced that the only valid criterion for evaluating the merits of a law is “la messima felicità divisa nel maggior numero”—the greatest happiness of the greatest number. In reading Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40)—which declared that all social inquiry should be based on the “experimental Method of Reasoning”—Bentham found virtue equated with utility, at which he “felt as if scales had fallen from my eyes” (1776 [1977, 440n]). Having borrowed the nomenclature of utility from Hume, Bentham then turned to De l’esprit (1758), in which Helvétius delineated the potential for utility to act as a guide to human conduct by making a connection “between the idea attached to the word … ‘happiness’ … and the ideas attached to the words ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’”. This meant, as he recalled in the “Article on Utilitarianism” (1829), that “attached to the words ‘utility’ and ‘principle of utility’ were now ideas in abundance”, from which “a commencement was made of the application of the principle of utility to practical uses” (1983a, 290).