Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/574

 562 W. L. DAVIDSON I SEPAEATION OF QUESTIONS, ETC. lence, we have other facts of our nature (viz., particular appetites, passions and affections) whose object is external hunger, for example, whose object is food. In this respect, therefore, bene- volence agrees with these (its object, like theirs, is external), and so has to be affiliated with these. But if so, there can be no greater contrariety between self-love and benevolence than there is between these and self-love. But nobody maintains that there is any contrariety between self-love and these. Therefore, no- body has a right to maintain that there is any contrariety between self-love and benevolence. Whatever may be thought of this as proof of the thing we have supposed Butler to intend, it obviously is no proof of the existence of disinterested motives ; and proof of this (in the strict sense of the term) is impossible. Hence also the futility of attempts to reduce Virtue to a single principle of our nature. It is only by sleight of hand that either the pure egoist or the pure altruist is able to give anything like plausibility to his doctrine only by surreptitiously introducing the element or principle that he began by excluding. Is regard to one's own interest set forth as the sum of virtue ? Then this personal regard is forthwith identified with prudence, and pru- dence is used convertibly with self-love, and self-love is denned as a rational principle, and reason for the individual's good incul- cates a regard to others. Or, is the whole benevolence '? Then benevolence (we are told) must be taken as directed by reason, and reason includes conscience (" Eationality," as Butler says, "including in this both the discernment of what is right, and a disposition to regulate ourselves by it"), and conscience "dis- cerns " prudence to be right : and there you have it. 1 One prin- ciple is clearly insufficient. We are neither all egoism nor all altruism, and the great problem of Ethics really is, not how to resolve the one into the other, but how to balance these two principles, neither submerging the one nor over-exalting the other. Some questions then are ultimate, and ought to be treated as such. But these ultimate questions obviously require a test ; for, without a test, we run the risk of erecting into the ultimate what- ever we please. What then is the test ? It can be but one thing Experience. That is ultimate which, accepting experience as our guide, cannot be reduced into anything simpler : whenever we can resolve a question into one more fundamental, that (still trusting to experience) is derived. But experience varies ; and so questions that are ultimate now may cease to be ultimate 1 It is historically curious that Butler, while rejecting the doctrine that " Benevolence is the sum of Virtue '' in the Dissertation, frequently accepts it in the Sermons. See, for instance, Ser. XII. and Ser. IX. In this last he says" That mankind is a community, that we all stand in a relation to each other, that there is a public end and interest of society which each particular is obliged to support, is the sum of morals ".