Page:EB1911 - Volume 26.djvu/794

 Samuel Clarke, who defended Newton’s view of the world against Leibnitz’s strictures, is perhaps chiefly interesting to us as one of the authorities of Bishop Joseph Butler. It is Clarke’s defence of free will, Clarke’s idealist theory of eternal “fitness” as the basis of ethical distinctions, perhaps Clarke’s teaching on immortality, that Butler regards

as “the common known arguments” and authoritative enunciation’s of truth in the regions of philosophy or Natural Theology Butler himself occupies a peculiar position in more respects than one. He has profoundly influenced British thinking, but is little known abroad. He is difficult to classify. We may be helped in assigning him his proper place if we observe that, almost invariably, he accepts certain beliefs which he forbears to press. Thus in his most important contribution to ethics, the Three Sermons on Human Nature—i., ii., iii. of the Sermons—he grants the validity of an appeal to “nature” upon the lines of a sort of Stoical idealism, but for his own part he prefers the humbler appeal to human nature. He makes the issue, as far as possible, a question of fact. We, from the altered modern point of view, may doubt whether Butler’s curious account of the mechanism of moral psychology is a simple report of facts. There are (a) given instinctive “pro pensions”; (b) a part of higher principles, “benevolence” and “rational self-love,” equally valid with each other, though at times they may seem to conflict; (c) there is the master principle of conscience, which judges between motives, but does not itself constitute a motive to action. Butler is opposing the psychological hedonism of Hobbes. He does not find it true to experience that man necessarily acts at the dictation of selfish motives. But Butler—for reasons satisfactory to himself, and eminently characteristic of the man; he hoped to conciliate his age!—dwells so much upon the rewards of goodness, as bribes (we must almost say) to rational self-love, that some have called Butler himself an ethical hedonist; though his sermon on the “Love of God” ought surely to free him from that charge. In all this, Butler was convinced that he was giving a simple statement of facts. Any one introspectively apprehending the facts must grant, he thought, that benevolence was an integral part of human nature and that conscience was rightfully supreme. This reveals the empiricist temper, and points to an attempted empiricist solution of great problems. Butler holds that more ambitious philosophies are valid, but he shrinks from their use. The same thing is seen again in the Analogy. Butler divests himself in this book of the principles of “liberty” and “moral fitness” in which personally he believes.

We have already spoken of Kant’s peculiar philosophical positions. One result of these is a very damaging attack upon traditional theism. Kant puts together, as belonging to “Rational Theology, ”, three arguments—he is fond of triads, though they have not the significance for him which they came to have for Hegel. Then he

attacks the arguments, one after another. Is there anything fresh in the attack? Or is it simply a reiteration of his sceptical contrast between phenomena and noumena, and of his confinement of (valid) knowledge to the former? Perhaps the attack on cause as used in the cosmological argument is independent of Kant’s philosophical peculiarities. The argument affirms a first cause, or uncaused cause. Does it not then deny rather than assert universal causation? But that special criticism is a question of detail. A more entirely novel and more general principle of Kant’s attack upon theism is the challenge of our right to build up the idea of God bit by bit out of different arguments. The arguments had been regarded as alternative or else as cumulative proofs, all pointing to one conclusion—God exists. Kant insists that they are incompatible with each