 Preliminary to the analysis of existing legal systems and the construction of the utilitarian pannomion, in 1776 Bentham began drafting “Preparatory Principles” (of censorial jurisprudence or what the law ought to be). In these over 600 pages of manuscript, now published in authoritative form in the Collected Works (2016b), he offered a series of disquisitions on the definitions, distinctions, axioms, and aphorisms intended as tools for demystifying the “fictions” of English law and legal practice, fictions which he found uncritically reiterated in Blackstone’s Commentaries. In these and other early writings we see Bentham striving to emulate in the moral world the great advances made in physical science. In the process he consciously allied himself with the more progressive elements of the Enlightenment and made plain the intellectual influences that shaped his thought, notably Bacon, Locke, Hume, and the French philosophes.