case requires, or the contrary.' We are "constituted SO as to condemn falsehood, unprovoked violence, injustice, and to approve of benevolence to some preferably to others, abstracted from all consideration which conduct is likeliest to produce an overbalance of happiness or misery." Yet, thirdly, the only final justification or explanation of virtue is its reduction to self-interest. "Let it be allowed, though virtue or moral rectitude does indeed consist in affection to and pursuit of what is right and good, as such; yet, that when we sit down in a cool hour, we can neither justify to ourselves this or any other pursuit, till we are convinced that it will be for our happiness, or at least not contrary to it." 2

8. Criticism of Butler's theory. (1) Its hedonistic tendency. We thus find in Butler several lines of thought which it is difficult, if not impossible, to harmonise with one another. He seems to be almost equally impressed by the interested and the disinterested sides of conduct, but to be more fully persuaded of the importance of its self-regarding than of that of its benevolent side. Virtue is not synonymous with benevolence, but in the last analysis it is synonymous with self-love. The latter is a reflective and reasonable principle of life; prudence and virtue are co-ordinate, if not coincident. In spite of the authority of conscience, and the intrinsic quality of that rightness which it approves, Butler's morality is not disinterested; its raison d'être is the individual happiness to which it leads. The approval or disapproval of conscience is immediate and direct, independent of the consequences to which the action leads; but the logical basis of this approval or disapproval is the bearing of the action upon the agent's happiness in the present and in the future. Though the approval of

1 Preface to Sermons, § 33.

2 Sermons, xi. § 21. Cf. Sermons, xii. § 20: "It is manifest that nothing can be of consequence to mankind or any creature but happiness."

conscience is immediate, and not the result of calculation, yet the course approved is always that of self-interest in the future, if not in the present. The authority of conscience is therefore, after all, not original, but secondary, derived from self-interest. Butler's conscience is in itself a merely formal principle; and when he gives it content, that content is the content of self-love. This is, of course, to abandon Rationalism for Hedonism.

(2) Its psychological character.-Failing such an identification of virtue with prudence, of conscience with selflove, we have no explanation of morality, no theory of virtue, but a mere psychology of the moral life. And this is, in general, Butler's position. He is willing, in the main, to rest in the immediate and authoritative approval of conscience, without investigating the object of its approval or the basis of its authority. Conscience is the regulative faculty in human nature, and virtue is that conduct which it dictates as fitting or natural to man. Even as a psychological statement, we must dissent from Butler's artificial divorce between act and consequence. Even psychologically, the action is not separated from its consequences, and judged to be in itself right or wrong; the consequences reveal the nature of the action, and are themselves part of it. But we must advance beyond the merely psychological to the strictly ethical view; we must investigate the 'why' and the 'what' of conscience's approval and disapproval, the ground and meaning of that approval and disapproval.

(3) Its dualism (i.) of virtue and prudence. His refusal to identify conscience with self-love leads Butler to rest in an irreducible dualism of the spheres governed by these two principles respectively-the spheres of virtue and prudence. For conscience and self-love are at least co-ordinate in authority; the epicurean rule of life,' though not identical with the moral,' has its place alongside the latter. Regard for our interest or 'good on the whole' is as legitimate as regard for the right.

M

This is Butler's way of moderating the rigorism of his rational standpoint: he recognises the reasonableness' of self-love as a principle of conduct. But it is impossible thus to adjust the rival claims of virtue and prudence; and Butler, when pressed, falls back, as we have seen, upon the old hedonistic device of resolving the virtuous into the prudential self. This dilemma is the result of his inadequate conception of virtue. The right' must contain the 'good,' virtue must include prudence. Or rather, the true moral ideal must be the supreme good, or simply the good-that good which not only transcends all other goods but explains their goodness, and in undivided loyalty to which the moral being finds his perfect satisfaction. The true moral interest must be supreme, embracing and transcending, including and interpreting, all the interests of life. The mere sug

gestion of a 'self' whose satisfaction or interest is still to seek after the moral task is done, is proof sufficient that that task has been inadequately conceived. The only way to make the various circles of our life's activities concentric, is by discovering their common

centre.

(ii.) Of benevolence and self-love.-Finally, Butler's difficulty in reconciling benevolence and self-love arises from the same fundamental defect. If the self does not find its perfect satisfaction in the life of virtue, neither, of course, will other selves find theirs; and it is only because the self is thus inadequately conceived, that the conflict of individual interests arises. It is the prudential, not the virtuous, self which finds it necessary to compete with others for the goods of life, because its interest and theirs are mutually exclusive. If we would find deliverance from Hobbes's 'war of every man against every man,' we must learn to see how deeply unnatural that warfare is. Again we must insist that, as the good of human life is not conceived aright until it is seen to be a good so complete that the individual has no private

interests of his own apart from his participation in it, so it is not conceived aright until it is seen to be a good so comprehensive that all individuals alike shall find in it their common good.1

9. (B) Intuitionism. Its divergences from Butler.Contemporary Rationalism retains essentially the form in which Butler stereotyped the theory. That his 'psychological' standpoint is still the standpoint of the school is indicated by the term which it adopts to characterise its view, namely, 'Intuitionism.' That moral principles are directly and immediately recognised, that they are selfevident or axiomatic truths of reason, and that conscience is the faculty of such immediate and unerring moral insight, all this is held in common by Butler and by the Scottish School of Common-Sense.' The absolute authoritativeness of these first principles of morality, and therefore of conscience, as the faculty which reveals them, is also common ground. But the conscience of contemporary Intuitionism has a much narrower range than Butler's conscience. The latter was a faculty of particular moral judgments or perceptions,' which told the plain man unerringly and immediately the course of present duty in almost any circumstances.' The contemporary conscience is found unequal to this task. The historical sense has developed greatly since Butler wrote, and has forced us to acknowledge that the 'human nature' which seemed to him a constant and unchanging quantity is a growth, and, with it, its virtue' and 'vice'; that the content of our particular moral judgments varies

1 Such a conception is perhaps suggested by Butler himself in his principle of the 'love of God,' which seems to transcend both conscience and self-love. Cf. T. B. Kilpatrick, Introduction to Butler's Sermons.—The above is not intended, of course, as an exhaustive estimate of Butler's contribution to ethical thought, and is necessarily more critical in tone than such an estimate would be. So far as the broad lines of his theory are concerned, indeed, Butler may be fairly regarded as one of the founders of Eudæmonism. Cf. infra, p. 218.

much with time and place and circumstance, that these judgments are, in a very real sense, empirical judgments. The Intuitionist has accordingly been compelled either to acknowledge that conscience, in Butler's sense of the term, is educated by experience, and is dependent upon such empirical instruction for all the concreteness of its dicta, or so to narrow the meaning of the term 'conscience' as to make it the unerring faculty of general or 'first' principles merely, and to attribute to the very fallible and empirically minded 'judgment' the application of these immutable principles to the variety of particular circumstances and cases as they arise. The latter alternative is the one chosen. The historical element in morality is carefully sifted from the unhistorical, the temporal and changeable manifestation from the eternal and unchanging essence. Morality is reduced to simple or ultimate ideas -such as justice, temperance, truthfulness; these, it is claimed, have no history, and their a priori origin is the source of their absolute validity.

Its defects.-(1) The current intuitional doctrine is thus forced to sacrifice all the concreteness and particularity which belonged to Butler's theory of conscience. The uneducated conscience, the original faculty, provides us with no more than the merest generalities or abstractions, which must be made concrete before they have any real significance. Moral life consists of particulars, of 'situations,' of definite circumstances and individual occasions; and an indeterminate or vague morality is no morality at all. Intuitionism, with its fixed and absolute principles of conduct, can find no place in its ethical scheme for the actual variation in moral opinion. What, for example, is the 'equality' demanded by the principle of justice? Very different answers would be given to this question by different epochs of human civilisation, and by different communities in the same epoch. Make the conception concrete, and it is found to be a changing one; allow for