Some will try to make the argument with reference to the symbiosis between the humanities and the creative industries, which have been the success story of the British economy during the years when manufacturing and engineering have been in decline. But a more powerful defence would be one that refuses to begin and end with the accountant's bottom line. One of the principal values of the humanities is that they teach us that all controversies have historical precedents — the lessons of which we are very good at ignoring. The debate between those who look for the "economic impact" of universities through the prioritisation of science and engineering, collaboration with business, the development of spin-out companies and so forth, and those who appeal to the pursuit of knowledge as a civilising virtue in itself replicates a dichotomy identified by John Stuart Mill in the early Victorian era, in his pair of essays on Jeremy Bentham (written in 1838) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1840). Mill contended that Bentham and Coleridge were the two "great seminal minds" of the age. Britain, he proposed, was indebted to them "not only for the greater part of the important ideas which have been thrown into circulation among its thinking men in their time, but for a revolution in its general modes of thought and investigation". Bentham and Coleridge, he argued,

were destined to renew a lesson given to mankind by every age, and always disregarded — to show that speculative philosophy, which to the superficial appears a thing so remote from the business of life and the outward interests of men, is in reality the thing on earth which most influences them, and in the long run overbears every other influence save those which it must itself obey. The writers of whom we speak have never been read by the multitude; except for the more slight of their works, their readers have been few: but they have been the teachers of the teachers; there is hardly to be found in England an individual of any importance in the world of mind, who (whatever opinions he may have afterwards adopted) did not first learn to think from one of these two.

To effect a revolution in "general modes of thought"; to inhabit a realm ("speculative philosophy") that seems utterly remote from "the business of life" and yet to influence society more than anyone else; to be "the teachers of the teachers"; to be the figures from whom all serious minds "learn to think". Even if these claims were to be greatly diluted, the implication would still be that the intellectual work of Bentham and Coleridge was of extraordinary value to society, even though its direct impact (in terms of the number of people who read their major books) was minimal. Their importance is in itself a salutary warning against the danger of taking the short view of the question of public value in matters relating to the life of the mind.

What, then, were their great innovations? Bentham, said Mill, was "the great critical thinker of his age and country", "the great questioner of things established". He was the iconoclast who was no respecter of institutions and traditions. A latter-day Benthamite might well say: why should we fund the humanities just because we have funded them in the past? Bentham, continued Mill, "introduced into morals and politics those habits of thought and modes of investigation, which are essential to the idea of science". A latter-day Benthamite might very well say: prove the value of what you do by quantifying it. Be precise, be scientific, be empirical, do not rely on windy rhetoric. Give me a metric. Famously, Bentham's utilitarian principle was "the greatest happiness of the greatest number". If push-pin (a children's game) gives happiness to more people than poetry, then push-pin is more valuable than poetry. "Quantity of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry." In this view, quantity — or, as we would now say, "access" or "inclusion" — trumps intellectual athleticism and aesthetic value. By this logic, government might well find itself subsidising access to courses in push-pin's modern equivalents — computer games — and leaving poetry to the mercy of the market.