guard and further security,' without which our private interests would be neglected.' Were it not for hunger, thirst, and weariness, our reason would tell us in vain that food and sleep were necessary for our preservation. The testimony which these arrangements give to a divine design is heightened by a peculiar refinement. The passions, he says, urge us towards external things themselves distinct from the pleasure arising from them.' We eat, that is, for the sake of eating, not because eating is pleasant. The purpose of this doctrine appears more plainly as it was afterwards worked out by Lord Kames, a disciple of Shaftesbury and Butler. Kames tries to evade the doctrine that our will is always determined by pain or pleasure by substituting the words attraction and aversion, and by maintaining, for example, that many unpleasant things have an attraction for us.3 Self-love thus plays a peculiar part in the hierarchy of passions. According to other psychologists, self-love is the aggregate of all our passions; the sum of all the desires which seek for gratification. According to Butler, it is only 'one part of human nature,'' co-ordinate with a vast variety of other passions. It differs from them, however, in this—that its only office is to prompt us to gratify its colleagues. If, he says, there were no passion but self-love, there could be no such thing as happiness. Thus hunger makes us eat without regarding the pleasure which is to be derived from eating; and then selflove supplies the singular defect by ordering us to gratify our hunger in order to gain the pleasure. It would be simpler to portion out the self-love amongst the various passions instead of distributing the provinces in this curiously arbitrary manner. The psychology is manifestly defective, and its complexity was one reason why Butler failed to impress his contemporaries more decidedly. A cumbrous system, expressed in very loose phraseology, is likely to deter all but the most resolute students. And yet it was only by help of this complex hypothesis, or series of hypotheses, that Butler could manage to put into shape his expression of what was doubtless a most important truth. 1 Butler's Works, ii. 69, sermon v. 2 Ib. ii. 153, sermon xi. Essays on Principles of Morality,' &c. See pp. 8, 124. Ib. ii. 156, sermon xi. 53. Butler was protesting, like Shaftesbury, against the popular doctrine of the time, which resolved all human actions into selfishness. There is an ambiguity in the statement which has perplexed the speculations of many moralists. Philosophers wished to explain everything, and to explain everything by deduction from a few axiomatic principles. Such a principle seemed to be the selfishness of all actions. The most general statement that can be made about a voluntary action is that it is voluntary; or, in words which seem to be identical, that it is done because the actor pleases, or because the will is determined by the balance of pleasure over pain. All actions, then, may be called selfish in the sense that they are the product of motives acting on a man's self. The proposition is so wide as to be harmless, or, as some writers maintain, useless. If,' says Butler, 'because every particular affection is a man's own . . . such particular affection must be called self-love, according to this way of speaking, no creature whatever can possibly act but from self-love.' 2 The doctrine thus understood is compatible with belief in the most disinterested motives. But, unluckily, selfish had been changed into a sense much narrower, more fruitful of consequences, and essentially debasing. It became, for example, in Mandeville's hands, equivalent to the opinion that men always act upon a calculation of their own private interests. The calculations might be wrong, but the motive was in all cases the same; and actions of self-sacrificing heroism, such, for example, as that of Regulus, became unintelligible paradoxes. Such an axiom was highly convenient as affording an easy foundation for a calculus of human motive. The reaction against the false simplification which it introduced shows itself in Butler's view of the strangely complex constitution of human nature, a peculiarity which is still more conspicuous in some later writers of the school, whilst it urged him to deny that even the particular passions had immediate pleasure When 1 See the obvious argument in Shaftesbury, 'Moralists,' p. 2, sec. I. will and pleasure are synonymous; when everything which pleases us is called pleasure, and we never choose or prefer but as we please, 'tis trifling to say 'pleasure is our good.' For this has as little meaning as to say, we choose what we think eligible, and we are pleased with what delights and pleases us. 2 Butler's Works, ii. 154, sermon xi. for their object. They are divinely implanted impulses, and have no relation to any grovelling motives. 54. Butler's denial that benevolence could by any possibility be resolved into selfishness might dispense with this questionable psychology. He asserts that self-love may be developed in excess, even with a view to our private happi'Disengagement,' he says, 'is absolutely necessary to enjoyment,' and a person may attend so rigidly to his own interests as to lose many opportunities of gratification. Overfondness for ourselves, like overfondness for children, may defeat its own object. Taking Butler's psychology, the assertion is doubtful; for the injury to our happiness would seem to result not from the excessive strength of the passion, but from an intellectual error, which perplexes our view of our own interests, or from a want of due impartiality, which leads it to prefer one passion to another. But the assertion, less rigidly construed, is undeniable. A man in whose eyes self assumes a disproportionate magnitude is less likely to be happy than one who is absorbed by desire for the happiness of others. Butler shows conclusively the inadequacy of the analysis of all heroism and philanthropy into a love of our own trumpery individuality. He is puzzled and perplexed in his utterance; he mixes his theories with many irrelevant and inconclusive doctrines; he painfully builds up an elaborate system which will not bear serious inspection; he makes needless concessions to the demoralising doctrine which he is denouncing, even at the moment of denouncing it; and yet the protest was as honourable as it was needed at a time when most theologians agreed that nothing but threats of hell could make men virtuous, whilst the belief in hell was yet daily weakening. The theological conception of human vileness remained, whilst the only check applicable to vile creatures was disappearing. Butler would enthrone the conscience in place of self-love. In exalting conscience, it is true, he exemplifies the facile dogmatism of the Common-Sense school, and his attempted expulsion of self-love makes the 1 Shaftesbury puts this very clearly ('Wit and Humour,' part iii. sec. 3), where he objects to those who would reduce all the balances and weights of the human heart to simple selfishness. 2 Butler's Works, ii. 157, sermon xi. mechanism of human nature singularly cumbrous. But, with all his faults, Butler remains, in a practical sense, the deepest moralist of the century. He alone refuses to shut his eyes with the optimistic theists to the dark side of the world, and yet does not, with their opponents, equivocally deny the existence of virtue. Seeing God through conscience, the same faculty which reveals to him the prevalence of vice, reveals also the antagonistic force opposed to it. The description of the sense of duty as the voice of God must be pronounced an error, if by those words we mean that it implies a supernatural guidance, that it is enforced by supernatural sanctions, and inculcates a course of conduct directed to fit men, not for this world, but for the next. But Butler's language, regarded as the utterance of a deep conviction of the unspeakable importance of our moral instincts, conveyed a profound rebuke to his age. Talk about nature and harmony, he says to the easygoing optimists of the Shaftesbury type, may be very charming to æsthetic philosophers, but it will not sway the brutal passions of mankind. Your denial that virtue exists, he says to Mandeville, or your assertion that virtue is merely a name for clever calculation of your own private interests, he says to the utilitarians of his time, is in various degrees debasing and unsatisfactory. You have not yet found a successor to the old God. Theology, in him, seems to utter an expiring protest against the meanness and the flimsiness of the rival theories by which men attempted to replace it. His theory of the universe is distorted, gloomy, and radically unscientific. But it takes into account the dark side from which shallow metaphysicians averted their faces; it rejects the debasing conceptions which followed when the divine element was exiled from the existing world with nothing offered in its place; and it emphatically asserted that conscience was a mystery which had not yet received a sufficient explanation. His error lay in the assumption that because the instinct, which moved him so deeply, was unexplained, it was, therefore, supernatural. He endeavours to honour conscience by taking it altogether out of the sphere of scientific observation, and forcing it to bear testimony not to the goodness which counteracts the many vices and weaknesses of humanity, but to the interference of an extramundane power; and thus cling ing to the dogma of corruption whilst asserting the existence of virtuous instincts in man. 55. Butler has thus endeavoured to evade the great dilemma by absorbing nature in God as revealed to conscience, instead of absorbing God in nature. Each man is a little kingdom in himself, with a constitution of divine origin; and our duty consists in observing its laws, though we know not the purpose for which they were ordained. The position occupied by Hutcheson may be roughly described by saying that, whilst holding a very similar theory, the constitution, with him, no longer rests upon divine right, but is justified as conducive to the welfare of the subject. He, therefore, forms a connecting link between the utilitarians and the intuitional school; and his writings bring out very distinctly the relations between the two systems. 56. Francis Hutcheson was the son of a dissenting minister, in the North of Ireland, and the descendant of a Scotch family. He represents that variety of theology in which the old Calvinism was replaced by eighteenth-century rationalism, whilst the old hatred to priestcraft survived. Like Butler, he had an early correspondence with Clarke, and is said to have retained a profound conviction of the futility of the a priori method of that philosopher. Perhaps his dislike to orthodox systems went a little further. At any rate, he accepted the offer of a 'private academy' in Dublin, instead of becoming a minister, according to his first intention. Whilst in Dublin, he published his 'Enquiry into the Ideas of Beauty and Virtue,' and soon afterwards a Treatise on the Passions.' In 1729 he accepted the chair of moral philosophy in the University of Glasgow, and remained there till his death in the fifty-third year of his age (1747). The only blemish which his enthusiastic biographer can discover in his character is a certain quickness of temper. He gave offence, it seems, by 'honest freedom;' but otherwise lived as became a professor of moral philosophy. The tone of his writings is amiable, though in him, as in most of his contemporaries, we are apt to be annoyed at the exceeding placidity and complacency with which this questionable world is contemplated. The awful shadow of sin and misery never 1 See Life by Leechman, prefixed to 'System of Moral Philosophy.' |