Hutcheson not wholly without intellectual character, but has a certain governing norm, or criterion, according to which it acts. The springs of action are: (1) original desires, corresponding to the five classes of senses above enumerated, viz., desires of the bodily senses, of the imagination or internal sense, of the sense of public happiness, of virtue, of honor; (2) various secondary desires consequent upon these. In moral action these desires, and not reason, give the initiative, but are subject to conscience, which is therefore the real controlling principle. The desires or affections are classifiable as turbulent and transient, or calm and enduring, and as selfish and benevolent. From the calm, enduring, benevolent desires conscience cannot withhold approval. The criterion of the moral

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sense, that is to say, is the idea of benevolence or the general good of mankind, the "greatest happiness of the greatest number" (a phrase originating with Hutcheson). If we examine all the actions which are accounted amiaable anywhere, and inquire into the grounds upon which they are approved, we shall find that, in the opinion of the person who approves them, they always appear as benevolent and flowing from the love of others and a study of their happiness, whether the approver be one of the persons beloved or not; so that all those kind affections which incline us to make others happy, and all actions supposed to flow from such affections, appear morally good if, while they are benevolent towards some persons, they be not pernicious to others. Nor shall we find anything able anywhere in any action whatsoever where there is no benevolence imagined; nor on any disposition or capacity which is not. applicable to and designed for benevolent purposes." The principle of benevolence does not exclude self-love: a man may be "in part an object of his own benevolence; and those actions which flow from self-love, and yet evidence no want of benevolence, having no hurtful effect upon others, seem perfectly indifferent in a moral sense, and raise neither the love or hatred of the observer. Self-love is

really as necessary to the good of the whole as benevolence, as that attraction which causes the cohesion of the parts is as necessary to the regular state of the whole as gravitation." The only real sanction of moral action is the voice of conscience, governed by the thought of benevolence.

Esthetics. There is a sense of the beautiful, as of the good; i.e., the perception of beauty is immediate, it is a matter of sensibility or feeling, i.e., of pleasure or pain. The sense of the beautiful is an internal sense, a perception of relations rather than things. The fundamental relation of beauty is that of uniformity amidst variety: "mathematically speaking, beauty is a compound ratio of these two, so that when the uniformity of bodies is equal, the beauty is as the variety, and when the variety is equal, the beauty is as the uniformity." There is a beauty of universal truths, laws, actions, moral principles. Our ideas of the beautiful are in a measure effects of association of ideas.

Result. The general observations made upon the system of Shaftesbury apply to that of Hutcheson, a close follower, almost a copyist, of Shaftesbury. Hutcheson is generally regarded as the founder of the Scottish School of Philosophy, a school the chief characteristics of which are that (1) it makes the self its chief object of study; (2) it employs as method "induction;" (3) it maintains the doctrine of the existence in mankind of a "common sense" perceptive of eternal and necessary truths.1

§ 66.

Joseph Butler (1692-1752).- Butler was educated by a private tutor at a "Dissenters' Academy" (to which his father sent him, with a view to making a Presbyterian minister of him) and at the University of Oxford. His entrance to Oxford was preceded by an expressed intention

1 See McCosh, "Scottish Philosophy."

2 Butler's Works; "Butler" by Collins (" Blackwood's English Philosophers"); "Encyclopædia Britannica."

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to conform to the principles of the Established Church. On finishing his university course he decided to enter the ministry of the Church, and was ordained in 1717. He occupied a number of more or less important ecclesiastical posts, among them the rectorship of Stanhope, the deanship of St. Paul's in London, the bishoprics of Bristol and Durham. His benevolence is said to have been something extraordinary.

Works. Butler's philosophical "works" comprise (fifteen) "Sermons " on ethical and religious topics (1726), "The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature" (1736), “Two Brief Dissertations on Personal Identity, and the Nature of Virtue," appended to the " Analogy," and a few Letters to Samuel Clarke. The "Analogy" was a reply to Tindal's "Christianity as Old as Creation," the so-called "Bible of Deism."

Philosophy. Butler possesses some importance as an opponent of the Deistic doctrine of religion, but owes his place (not a mean one) in the history of philosophy chiefly to his ethical doctrines.

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Theory of Religion. In opposition to the Deists, Butler attempts to show (1) that nothing in “reason or experience" precludes for us the probability and probability, he says, is our only guide in such matters that we are immortal, and that the future state is a state of rewards and punishments in other words, that the government of the world is a moral government (as taught by revealed religion); (2) that, in view of the imperfection of reason and experience, Revelation is probable, and that it is no more (nor less) impossible of comprehension than the ordinary course of nature. In connection with the question — "the most important that can possibly be asked " of immortality, arises that of the "meaning of that identity or sameness of person which is implied in the notion of our living now and hereafter in any two successive moments." On this point, Butler answers that we live and act constantly

as if we were the same to-day that we were yesterday and shall be to-morrow, that only real beings—not mere abstract ideas are capable of life and action, happiness and misery, and that every person is "conscious that he is now the same person or self he was as far back as his remembrance reaches."

Ethics. "That which renders beings capable of moral government" is the "having a moral nature, moral faculties of perception and action." And, on the other hand, the being moral is the exercise of these faculties. The moral faculties of man comprise, according to Butler, four classes of principles: (1) certain "propensions, aversions, passions, and affections" having relations to external objects which constitute "human nature" in relation to such objects; (2) self-love, which constitutes our moral nature as respects ourselves; (3) a natural “ principle of benevolence," our nature as regards others, "which is in some degree to society what self-love is to the individual;” (4) a "principle of reflection," conscience, by "which we approve and disapprove our own actions." In the most general sense of the term, moral action is action from and according to any one of these principles, — any part of our moral nature; in a less wide sense it is action from and according to whichever is the strongest; in a more restricted sense still it is action from and according to a principle which prevails, not by reason of mere strength, but by virtue of its nature as representing most fully human nature as a unit and the whole, and as being therefore the most excellent. This last principle is doubtless the "principle of reflexion," or conscience, which, only, is unequivocally peculiar to man as distinguished from the brute; no action that is not "suitable" or "proportionable" to this principle has a truly moral character or is truly good. "The very constitution of our nature requires that we bring our whole conduct before this faculty; wait its determination; enforce upon ourselves its authority; and make it the business of our lives, as it is absolutely the whole business of a moral

agent, to conform ourselves to it." Next in rank to this is self-love, which implies a certain degree of "calculation," or reflection. "Reasonable self-love and conscience are the chief or superior principles in the nature of man." That self-love, though condemned by moralists who disapprove of Hobbes's making it the sole principle of ethics, is a real principle of our nature, becomes evident from the consideration of the fact that while as "members of one another" we are "made for society," we are "intended to take care of our own life and health and private good." Self-love is not necessarily inconsistent with love for others, but may be involved in that, or, on the other hand, involve that, without detriment to it. Without self-love benevolence would often be without an object, except the indefinite one of merely avoiding pain. "The gordness or badness of actions does not arise from hence, that the epithet 'interested' or 'disinterested' may be applied to them, any more than that any other indifferent epithet, suppose 'inquisitive' or 'jealous,' may or may not be applied to them; not from their being attended with future pleasure or pain, but from their being what they are, namely, what becomes such creatures as we are, what the state of the case requires, or the contrary. Or, in other words, we may judge that an action is morally good or evil before we so much as consider whether it be interested or disinterested. . . . Self-love in its one degree is as just and morally good as any other affection whatever. Benevolence towards particular persons may be to a degree of weakness, and so be blamable; and disinterestedness is so far from being commendable that the utmost possible depravity which we can in imagination conceive is that of disinterested cruelty." Injustice is done to self-love by confounding it with the pursuance of the gratifications of the passions, which in themselves are not directly related to the self, but to the external world. It is this gratification rather than real self-love that is "unfriendly to benevolence." Self-love is distinguished from the " ticular affections, passions, and appetites to particular

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