Page:Philosophical Review Volume 24.djvu/444

428 The resemblance both in general and in detail between this theory and that of the other philosopher-bishop of the time is close and striking. Butler's moral philosophy is more systematically developed than Berkeley's; but almost every feature which has contributed to make Butler's work the greatest product of British ethical thought is present in Berkeley's scattered remarks. For Berkeley, as for Butler, reason is ultimately the basis of moral obligation, and the general happiness the summum bonum. For both, moral rules are also laws of nature, and action in accoranceaccordance [sic] with nature leads to the attainment of the moral end. They take precisely the same view of nature, as a divinely organized system of ends. Both emphasize, in language strangely similar, the moral importance of the disposition to social life existing in mankind; and both are animated by the same principles of practical social idealism. Only in their view of the interrelation of the 'principles of human nature' do they diverge. Or, it would be truer to say that while Butler's chief originality lies in his moral psychology, Berkeley has almost entirely omitted to make any psychological analysis. But all in all, the similarities are so notable as to suggest the possibility that one was directly influenced by the other. But such a suspicion is really gratuitous. It is indeed just possible, so far as the dates of publication of their works are concerned, that each was indebted to the other. Butler's Sermons were first published in 1726. Berkeley's Passive Obedience appeared in 1712, and Alciphron in 1732. But there is no internal evidence whatever that Passive Obedience influenced the Sermons, or the Sermons, Alciphron. The resemblance may be quite sufficiently accounted for by the antipathy to Hobbes felt by both thinkers, and the similarity of the attitude adopted by them towards the tendencies of ethical thought represented on the one hand by the so-called Cambridge Platonists, and on the other hand by such men of the world as Mandeville and Shaftesbury. To Hobbism both Berkeley and Butler were fundamentally opposed, though Berkeley at least was influenced by the Hobbist doctrine that moral rules are natural laws. From the Cambridge Platonists both learned something—the immutability of moral principles