contrast of the God of imagination and the God of conscience, the God of
beauty and the God of fear. How do we know that the Being who refreshes
is the same as He who imposes the toil, that the God of anxiety is the
same as the God of help, that the intensely personal Deity of the inward
heart is the same as the almost neutral spirit of external nature, which
seems a thing more than a person, a light and impalpable vapour just
beautifying the universe, and no more?
If we are to offer a suggestion, as we have stated a difficulty, we
should hold that the only way of obviating or explaining the contrast,
which is so perplexing to susceptible minds, is by recurring to the same
primary assumption which is required to satisfy our belief in God’s
infinity, omnipotence, or veracity. We cannot _prove_ in any way that
God is infinite any more than that space is infinite; nor that God is
omnipotent, since we do not know what powers there are in nature—that He
is perfectly true, for we have had no experience or communication with
Him, in which His veracity could be tested. We assume these propositions,
and treat them, moreover, not as hypothetical assumptions or provisional
theories to be discarded if new facts should be discovered, and to be
rejected if more elaborate research should require it, but as positive
and clear certainties, on which we must ever act, and to which we must
reduce and square all new information that may be brought home to us. In
these respects we assume that God is perfect, and it is only necessary
for the solution of our difficulty to assume that He is perfect in all.
We have in both cases the same amount and description of evidence, the
same inward consciousness, the same speaking and urging voice, requiring
us to believe. In every step of religious argument we require the
assumption, the belief, the faith if the word is better, in an absolutely
_perfect_ Being—in and by whom we are, who is omnipotent as well as most
holy, who moves on the face of the whole world and ruleth all things by
the word of His power. If we grant this, the difficulty of the opposition
between what we have called the natural and the supernatural religion is
removed; and without granting it, that difficulty is perhaps insuperable.
It follows from the very idea and definition of an infinitely-perfect
Being, that He is within us, as well as without us—ruling the clouds of
the air, and the fishes of the sea, as well as the fears and thoughts
of man—smiling through the smile of nature, as well as warning with
the pain of conscience, ‘Sine qualitate bonum; sine quantitate magnum;
sine indigentiâ creatorem; sine situ præsidentem; sine habitu omnia
continentem; sine loco ubique totum; sine tempore sempiternum; sine ullâ
sui mutatione mutabilia facientem, nihilque patientem.’ If we assume
this, life is simple; without this all is dark.
The religion of the imagination is, in its consequences upon the
character, free and poetical. No one need trouble himself to set
about its defence. Its agreeability sufficiently defends it and its
congeniality to a refined and literary age. The religion of the
conscience will seem to many of the present day selfish and morbid.
And doubtless it may become so if it be allowed to eat into the fibre
of the character, and to supersede the manliness by which it should be
supported. The whole of religion, of course, is not of this sort, and
it is one which only very imperfect beings can have a share in. But so
long as men are very imperfect, the sense of great imperfection should
cleave to them, and while the consciousness of sin is on the mind, the
consequent apprehension of deserved punishment seems in its proper degree
to be a reasonable service. However, any more of this discussion is
scarcely to our purpose. No attentive reader of Butler’s writings will
hesitate to say that he, at all events, was an example of the ‘anxious
and scrupulous worshipper, who makes a conscience of changing anything,
of omitting anything, being in all things fearful to offend,’[4] and most
likely it was from this habit and characteristic of his mind, that he
obtained the unenviable reputation of living and dying a Papist.
Of Butler’s personal habits nothing in the way of detail has descended
to us. He was never married, and there is no evidence of his ever having
spoken to any lady save Queen Caroline. We hear, however, for certain
that he was commonly present at her Majesty’s philosophical parties, at
which all questions, religious and moral, speculative and practical, were
discussed with a freedom that would astonish the present generation.
Less intellectual unbelief existed probably at that time than there is
now, but there was an infinitely freer expression of what did exist. The
French Revolution frightened the English people. The awful calamities
and horrors of that period were thought to be, as in part they were, the
results and consequences of the irreligious opinions which just before
prevailed. Scepticism became what in the days of Lord Hervey it was not,
an ungentlemanly state of mind. At no meeting of the higher classes,
certainly at none where ladies are present, is there a tenth part of the
plain questioning and _bonâ fide_ discussion of primary Christian topics,
that there was at the select suppers of Queen Caroline. The effect of
these may be seen in many passages, and even in the whole tendency, of
Butler’s writings. No great Christian writer, perhaps, is so exclusively
occupied with elementary topics and philosophical reasonings. His mind
is ever directed towards the first principles of belief, and doubtless
this was because, more than any other, he lived with men who plainly and
clearly denied them. His frequent allusion to the difficulties of such
discussions are likewise suggestive of a familiar personal experience.
The whole list of directions which he gives the clergy of Durham on
religious argument shows a daily familiarity with sceptical men. ‘It is
come,’ he says, ‘I know not how, to be taken for granted by many persons
that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry, but that it is
now at length discovered to be false. And accordingly they treat it as if
this were an agreed point among all people of discernment, and nothing
remained but to set it up as a principal subject of ridicule, as it were
by way of reprisals for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of
the world.’ No one would so describe the tone of talk now, nor would
there be an equal reason for remembering Butler’s general caution against
rashly entering the lists with the questioners. Among gentlemen a
clergyman has scarcely the chance. ‘Then, again, the general evidence of
religion is complex and various. It consists of a long series of things:
one preparatory to and confirming another from the beginning of the world
till the present time, and it is easy to see how impossible it must
be in a cursory conversation to unite all this into one argument, and
represent it as it ought; and, could it be done, how utterly indisposed
would people be to attend to it. I say, in cursory conversation; whereas
unconnected objections are thrown out in few words, and are easily
apprehended without more attention than is usual in common talk, so
that, notwithstanding we have the best cause in the world, and though a
man were very capable of defending it, yet I know not why he should be
forward to undertake it upon so great a disadvantage and to so little
good effect, as it must be amid the gaiety and carelessness of common
conversation.’ It is not likely from these remarks that Butler had much
pleasure at the Queen’s talking parties.
What his pleasures were, indeed, does not very distinctly appear. In
reading we doubt if he took any keen interest. A voracious reader is
apt, when he comes to write, to exhibit his reading in casual references
and careless innuendoes, which run out insensibly from the fulness
of his literary memory. But of this in Butler there is nothing. His
writings contain little save a bare and often not a very plain statement
of the necessary argument; you cannot perhaps find a purely literary
allusion in his writings; none, at all events, which shows he had any
favourite books, whose topics were ever present to his mind, and whose
well-known words might be a constant resource in moments of weariness
and melancholy. There is, too, a philippic in the well-known ‘Preface’
against vague and thoughtless reading, which seems as if he felt the
evil consequences more than the agreeableness of that sin. Some men find
a compensation in the excitement of writing, for all other evils and
exclusions; but it is probable that, if Butler hated anything, he hated
his pen. Composition is pleasant work for men of ready words, fine ears,
and thick-coming illustrations. Wit and eloquence please the writer as
much as the reader. There is even some pleasantness in feeling that you
have given a precise statement of a strong argument. But Butler, so far
from having the pleasures of eloquence, had not even the comfort of
perspicuity. He never could feel that he had made an argument tell by his
way of wording it; it tells in his writings, if it tells at all, by its
own native and inherent force. In some places the mode of statement is
even stupid; it seems selected to occasion a difficulty. You often see
that writers,—Gibbon, for instance,—believe that their words are good
to eat, as well as to read; they had plainly a pleasure in rolling them
about in the mouth like sugar-plums, and gradually smoothing off any
knots or excrescences; but there is nothing of this in Butler.
The circumstance of so great a thinker being such a poor writer is not
only curious in itself, but indicates the class of thinkers to which
Butler belongs. Philosophers may be divided into seers on the one hand,
and into gropers on the other. Plato, to use a contrast which is often
used for other purposes, is the type of the first. On all subjects he
seems to have before him a landscape of thought, with clear outline, and
pure air, keen rocks and shining leaves, an Attic sky and crystal-flowing
river, each detail of which was as present, as distinct, as familiar
to his mind as the view from the Acropolis, or the road to Decelea. As
were his conceptions so is his style. What Protagoras said and Socrates
replied, what Thrasymachus and Polemo, what Gorgias and Callicles, all
comes out in distinct sequence and accurate expression; each feature is
engraved on the paper; an exact beauty is in every line. What a contrast
is the style of Aristotle! He sees nothing—he is like a man groping in
the dark about a room which he knows. He hesitates and suggests; proposes
first one formula and then another; rejects both, gives a multitude
of reasons, and ends at last with an expression which he admits to be
incorrect and an apologetic ‘let it make no difference.’ There are whole
passages in his writings—the discussion about Solon and happiness in the
‘Ethics,’ is an instance—in which he appears like a schoolboy who knows
the answer to a sum, but cannot get the figures to come to it.
This awkward and hesitating manner is likewise that of Butler. He
seems to have an obscure feeling, an undefined perception, of what
the truth is; but his manipulation of words and images is not apt
enough to bring it out. Like the miser in the story, he has a shilling
_about_ him somewhere, if people will only give him time and solitude
to make research for it. As a person hunting for a word or name he has
forgotten, he knows what it is, _only_ he cannot say it. The fault is one
characteristic of a strong and sound mind wanting in imagination. The
visual faculty is deficient. The soundness of such men’s understanding
ensures a correct report of what comes before them, and its strength is
shown in vigorous observations upon it; but they are unable to bring
those remarks out, the delineative power is wanting, they have no picture
of the particulars in their minds; no instance or illustration occurs
to them. Popular, in the large sense of the term, such writers can
never be. Influential they may often become. The learned have time for
difficulties; the critical mind is pleased with crooked constructions;
the detective intellect likes the research for lurking and half-hidden
truth. In this way portions of Aristotle have been noted these thousand
years, as Chinese puzzles; and without detracting for a moment from
Butler’s real merit, it may be allowed that some of his influence,
especially that which he enjoys in the English universities, is partially
due to that obscurity of style, which renders his writings such apt
exercises for the critical intellect, which makes the truth when found
seem more valuable from the difficulty of finding it, and gives scope for
an able lecturer to elucidate, annotate, and expound.
The fame of Butler rests mainly on two remarkable courses of reasoning,
one of which is contained in the well-known Sermons, the second in
the ‘Analogy.’ Both seem to be in a great measure suggested by the
circumstances and topics of the time. There was a certain naturalness
in Butler’s mind, which took him straight to the questions on which
men differed around him. Generally, it is safer to prove what no one
denies, and easier to explain difficulties which no one has ever felt.
A quiet reputation is best obtained in the literary _quæstiunculæ_ of
important subjects. But a simple and straightforward man studies great
topics because he feels a want of the knowledge which they contain; and
if he has ascertained an apparent solution of any difficulty, he is
anxious to impart it to others. He goes straight to the real doubts and
fundamental discrepancies; to those on which it is easy to excite odium,
and difficult to give satisfaction; he leaves to others the amusing
skirmishing and superficial literature accessory to such studies. Thus
there is nothing light in Butler; all is grave, serious, and essential;
nothing else would be characteristic of him.
The Sermons of Butler are primarily intended as an answer to that
recurring topic of ethical discussion, the Utilitarian Philosophy. He
is occasionally spoken of by enthusiastic disciples as having uprooted
this for ever. But this is hardly so. The selfish system still lives and
flourishes. Nor must any writer on the fundamental differences of human
opinion propose to himself such an aim. The source of the great heresies
of belief lies in their congeniality to certain types of character
frequent in the world, and liable to be reproduced by inevitable and
recurring circumstances. We do not mean that the variations of creeds
are the native and essential variances of the minds which believe them,
for this would render truth a matter of personal character, and make
general discussion impossible. We believe that all minds are originally
so constituted as to be able to acquire right opinions on all subjects
of the first importance to them; but, nevertheless, that the native bent
of their character instinctively inclines them to particular views; that
one man is naturally prone to one error, and another to its opposite;
that this is increased by circumstances, and becomes for practical
purposes invincible, unless it be met on the part of every man by early
and vigorous resistance. The Epicurean philosophy is an example of these
recurring and primary errors, inasmuch as it is congenial to clear,
vigorous, and hasty minds, which have no great depth of feeling, and no
searching introspection of thought, which prefer a ready solution to an
accurate, an easy to an elaborate, a simple to a profound. Draw a slight
worldliness—and the events of life will draw it—over such a mind, and you
have the best Epicurean. There is a use, however, in discussing topics
like these. Nothing would be more perverse than to abstain from proving
certain truths, because some men were naturally prone to the opposite
errors; rather, on the contrary, should we din them into the ears, and
thrust them upon the attention, of mankind; go out into the highways and
hedges, and leave as few as possible for invincible ignorance to mislead
or to excuse. It is much in every generation to state the ancient truth
in the manner which that generation requires; to state the old answer
to the old difficulty; to transmit, if not discover; convince, if not
invent; to translate into the language of the living, the truths first
discovered by the dead. This defence, though suggested by the subject,
is not, however, required by Butler. He may claim the higher praise of
having explained his subject in a manner essentially more satisfactory
than his predecessors.
We are not concerned to follow Butler into the entire range of this
ancient and well-discussed topic. We are only called on to make, and we
shall only make, two or three remarks on the position which he occupies
with respect to it. His grand merit is the simple but important one of
having given a less complex and more graphic description of the facts of
human consciousness than any one had done before. Before his time the
Utilitarians had the advantage of appearing to be the only people who
talked about real life and human transactions. The doctrines avowed by
their opponents were cloudy, lofty, and impalpable. Platonic philosophy
in its simple form is utterly inexplicable to the English mind. A plain
man will not soon succeed in making anything of an archetypal idea. If
an ordinary sensible Englishman takes up even such a book as Cudworth’s
‘Immutable Morality,’ it is nearly inevitable that he should put it down
as mystical fancy. True as a considerable portion of the conclusions of
that treatise are or may be, nevertheless the truth is commonly so put
as to puzzle an Englishman, and the error so as particularly to offend
him. We may open at random. ‘Wherefore,’ says Cudworth, ‘the result of
all that we have hitherto said is this, that the intelligible natures
and essences of things are neither arbitrary nor fantastical, that is,
neither alterable by any will or opinion; and therefore everything is
necessarily and immutably to science and knowledge what it is, whether
absolutely, or relatively to all minds and intellects in the world.
So that if moral good and evil, just and unjust, signify any reality,
either absolute or relative, in the things so denominated, as they must
have some certain natures, which are the actions or souls of men, they
are neither alterable by will or opinion. Upon which ground that wise
philosopher, Plato, in his “Minos,” determined that Νόμος, a law, is
not δόγμα πόλεως, any arbitrary decree of a city or supreme governors;
because there may be unjust decrees, which, therefore, are no laws, but
the _invention of that which_ IS, or what is absolutely or immutably
just in its own nature; though it be very true also that the arbitrary
constitutions of those that have the lawful authority of commanding when
they are not materially unjust, are laws also in a secondary sense,
by virtue of that natural and immutable justice or law that requires
political order to be observed. But I have not taken all this pains
only to confute scepticism or fantasticism, or merely to defend or
corroborate our argument for the immutable nature of the just and unjust;
but also for some other weighty purposes that are very much conducing
to the business we have in hand. And first of all, that the soul is not
a mere _tabula rasa_, a naked and passive thing, which has no innate
furniture or activity of its own, nor anything at all in it but what
was impressed on it from without; for, if it were so, then there could
not possibly be any such thing as moral good and evil, just and unjust,
forasmuch as these differences do not arise merely from outward objects
or from the impresses which they make upon us by sense, there being no
such thing in them, in which sense it is truly affirmed by the author
of the “Leviathan” (p. 24), “That there is no common rule of good and
evil to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves,” that is,
either considered absolutely in themselves, or relatively to external
sense only, but according to some other interior analogy which things
have to a certain inward determination in the soul itself from whence
the foundation of all this difference must needs arise, as I shall show
afterwards; not that the anticipations of morality spring merely from
intellectual forms and notional ideas of the mind, or from certain rules
or propositions printed on the “soul as on a book,” but from some other
more inward and vital principle in intellectual beings, as such, whereby
they have a natural determination in them to do certain things, and
to avoid others, which could not be, if they were mere naked, passive
things.’
It is instructive to compare Butler’s way of stating a doctrine
substantially similar:—
‘Mankind has various instincts and principles of action,
as brute creatures have; some leading most directly and
immediately to the good of the community, and some most
directly to private good.
‘Man has several which brutes have not; particularly reflection
or conscience, an approbation of some principles or actions,
and disapprobation of others.
‘Brutes obey their instincts or principles of action, according
to certain rules; suppose the constitution of their body, and
the objects around them.
‘The generality of mankind also obey their instincts and
principles, all of them; those propensions we call good, as
well as the bad, according to the same rules, namely, the
constitution of their body, and the external circumstances
which they are in.
‘Brutes, in acting according to the rules before mentioned,
their bodily constitution and circumstances, act suitably to
their whole nature.
‘Mankind also, in acting thus, would act suitably to their
whole nature, if no more were to be said of man’s nature than
what has been now said; if that, as it is a true, were also a
complete, adequate account of our nature.
‘But that is not a complete account of man’s nature. Somewhat
further must be brought in to give us an adequate notion of it,
namely, that one of those principles of action, conscience, or
reflection, compared with the rest, as they all stand together
in the nature of man, plainly bears upon it marks of authority
over all the rest, and claims the absolute direction of them
all, to allow or forbid their gratification; a disapprobation
of reflection being in itself a principle manifestly superior
to a mere propension. And the conclusion is, that to allow no
more to this superior principle or part of our nature, than to
other parts; to let it govern and guide only occasionally in
common with the rest, as its turn happens to come, from the
temper and circumstances one happens to be in,—this is not to
act conformably to the constitution of man. Neither can any
human creature be said to act conformably to his constitution
of nature, unless he allows to that superior principle the
absolute authority which is due to it. And this conclusion is
abundantly confirmed from hence, that one may determine what
course of action the economy of man’s nature requires, without
so much as knowing in what degrees of _strength_ the several
principles prevail, or which of them have actually the greatest
influence.
‘The practical reason of insisting so much upon this natural
authority of the principle of reflection or conscience is,
that it seems in a great measure overlooked by many, who are
by no means the worst sort of men. It is thought sufficient
to abstain from gross wickedness, and to be humane and kind
to such as happen to come in their way. Whereas, in reality,
the very constitution of our nature requires that we bring
our whole conduct before this superior 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. This is
the true meaning of that ancient precept, _Reverence thyself_.’