Page:Philosophical Review Volume 9.djvu/414

398 and live at large up to the extent of his natural power, as passion, humor, wilfulness, happen to carry him;" "but from his make, constitution, or nature, he is in the strictest and most proper sense a law unto himself." He hath the rule of right written within. "Your obligation to obey this law, is its being the law of your nature." Nothing can interfere with its rightful claims to universal rule, and if passion prevail, as it often does, it is mere usurpation, mere force triumphing over authority. "Had conscience strength, as it has right; had it power, as it has manifest authority; it would absolutely govern the world." From these numerous utterances we may see with what exalted conviction and deep-toned eloquence Butler preached the doctrine of the supremacy of conscience, and with what strength of asseveration and firm sense of fealty he proclaimed the authority of this inner judge, and the obligatory character of its behests. Yet however profoundly true this may be, it would be a mistake to suppose that Butler rested the final authority of conscience and our obligation to the pursuit of virtue simply on the "marks of authority which conscience bears upon it," that he merely accepts "such an inner sentiment without any attempt to analyze it." It implies a forgetfulness of his whole method and system to assert that he gives no analysis or characterization of conscience, obligation, and virtue, but only points to the fact of their existence. The real validity of the obligation to follow conscience is not ultimately dependent upon a psychological experience, upon the mere consciousness of obligation alone, or upon the fact that we naturally and unavoidably approve the good and disapprove the evil.

If this introspective discovery and assertion of the existence of conscience and its mode of action were all that is implied in Butler's treatment, then it would be undeniably true, as is so commonly said, that his ethical teaching is nothing but a psychology of the moral life, and not an explanation of morality, that he is