Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/561

 560 H. RASHDALL: between Self-love and Benevolence constitutes virtue " (p. 113). " A balance " seems to suggest tbe notion of a ' compromise,' or a ' mean,' or a ' judicious mixture,' and of such a doctrine there is no trace in Butler. Butler believed somewhat too optimisti- cally perhaps that the preference of benevolence to any passions which conflicted with benevolence was the best way of securing a happy life in the ordinary, popular, unanalysed acceptation of the term. In the rare exceptions he nowhere suggests that a man should steer his course midway between complete selfishness and self-sacrificing benevolence ; still less does he (as Mr. Court- ney represents) ground the superiority of virtue to vice upon its utility. He consistently maintains that virtue or moral rectitude consists " in affection to and pursuit of what is right and good as such" (Sermon xi.), "that virtue is to be pursued as an end, eligible in and for itself" (Preface), though it is with the Cassandra- like air of a man who speaks to a stubborn and perverse generation, and is therefore driven to promise that " there shall be made all possible concessions to the favourite passion," Self-love. I have now cleared the ground for showing the baselessness or Mr. Courtney's assertion (p. 109), that as the result of an analysis of Butler's system there emerge " five different ways of stating the principles of ethics " five distinct answers to the ethical pro- blem : (1) "Follow nature"; (2) "Be guided by benevolence"; (3) " Be guided by cool self-love " ; (4) " Obey conscience " ; (5) " Love God ". I maintain that Butler has only one " principle of ethics " ' Obey conscience '. If a man goes on to ask, ' What will conscience prescribe ? ' Butler will answer, ' Be guided by self-love when your own good only is in question ; when other people are concerned, be guided by benevolence,' adding that in so doing a man will as a rule be promoting his own happiness at the same time. Butler never says, ' Be guided by cool self-love ' as a general principle of action, though he does say in effect, (1) ' If you insist on being guided by self-love, even then benevolence has a good deal to say for itself ' ; and (2) ' Since my own good is Aprimd facie rational end, a rational and self-consistent ilu-orij of virtue must establish that there is no ultimate irreconcilability between the claims of public and private good '. I have still to deal with the relation between Conscience and <1) the Following of Nature, (2) the Love of God. I must confess myself unable to understand how any one can have read the Preface and Sermon ii. without seeing that the principle " Follow nature " is not put forth as Butler's own answer to the ethical problem. It was a phrase which he found already in current use first, in that school of ancient philosophy with which he had most in common; secondly, in the "licentious talk" of the fashionable Mandevilles of his time, who maintained and that by no means as a mere speculation that the restraints of morality were " contrary to nature ". Xow Butler expressly assents to "Wollaston's remark that " to place virtue in following nature is at best a loose way of talk ". He goes on to expose the folly and