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 happiness. '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.'

clouds his spirits. In striking contrast to Butler, he is smooth, voluble, and discursive; and the even flow of his eloquence is apt to become soporific. The 'System of Moral Philosophy appeared in 1755, eight years after his death, and gives the fullest account of his system; but the essence is contained in his earlier treatises.

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57. Hutcheson is a far more servile disciple of Shaftesbury than Butler, and his easy-going optimism resembles that of his master. 'Happiness,' he tells us, 'is far superior to misery, even in this present world,' and he lays little stress upon the other. God is everywhere revealed in nature. The 'stupendous orbs' (a cant phrase which at once stamps the argument), the convenient arrangements of the earth and the solar system, and the structure of animals, testify unmistakably to the beneficent Creator. Our sufferings are 'the kind admonitions and exhortations of the Universal Parent;' and we may enable ourselves to meet cheerfully all apparent evils by 'a firm persuasion of an omnipotent, omniscient, and most benign Universal Parent, disposing of all things in this system for the very best... and permitting no further evil than what the most proper constitution requires or necessarily brings along with it.' His theology differs from Shaftesbury's, by attributing a slightly more distinct personality to the Creator; the Universal Parent is not so closely identified with nature; and, instead of an all-pervading harmony, Hutcheson prefers to use the more technical and definite phraseology of final causes. The chief difference between the master and the disciple is, that Hutcheson forces into the framework of a system the doctrines which are in a state of solution in Shaftesbury's rather turbid eloquence. This is especially the case with the 'moral sense'a term which had been used by Shaftesbury, though with no special emphasis, whilst in Hutcheson it becomes the keystone of an elaborate system. By explaining its nature and functions, we shall give the essential principle of Hutcheson's philosophy.

58. The mind,' says Shaftesbury, . . . cannot be without its eye and ear, so as to discern proportion, distinguish sound, and scan each sentiment and thought which comes before it.' It detects the harmonious and the dissonant in affections as 1 'System of Moral Philosophy,' i. 190. 2 Ib. i. 185. a Ib. i. 215.

the bodily eye detects them in outward things. Hutcheson takes up this hint, and presents the resulting theory in a compact form in the opening of the 'Enquiry concerning Beauty and Virtue.' We have, as he puts it, internal as well as external senses; the external perceiving sounds and colours as the internal perceive moral excellence or turpitude. This theory is worked up into an elaborate psychological analysis in the opening chapters of the System of Moral Philosophy.' He there endeavours to anatomise the complex internal organisation by which our actions are determined; for, as he remarks, 'human happiness which is the end of this art' (the art, that is, of morality) 'cannot be distinctly known without the knowledge of the constitution of this species.'3 Beyond and above the senses which reveal the external world and provide us with all our 'materials of knowledge,'' we have a number of finer perceptions,' 5 which he proceeds to enumerate. There are the senses of beauty and harmony, or of the imagination; the sympathetic sense, the sense which causes us to take pleasure in action, the moral sense, the sense of honour, the senses of decency and dignity, a parental, and social, and religious sense. Each of these senses produces, or is identical with, a certain 'determination of the will.' There is a determination of the will towards our own happiness and another, not resoluble into the first, and entitled to override it in cases of conflict, towards the 'universal happiness of others.' The system, already sufficiently complex, is further perplexed by cross-divisions of the various passions which appear to be identical with the senses, into selfish and benevolent, extensive and limited, calm and turbulent; and we are ready, after reading the list, to agree fully with Hutcheson's observation that human nature must appear a very complex and confused fabric, unless we can discover some order and subordination among these powers.'' The complexity is reached by the simple device, common to many metaphysicians, of assuming that to every name that can be given corresponds a distinct entity. He makes, however, very little

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