Page:Philosophical Review Volume 9.djvu/420

404 should be as emphatic on the subject as modern thinkers might wish. As Professor James Seth has remarked, "the historical sense has developed greatly since Butler wrote, and has forced us to acknowledge that the 'human nature' which seemed to him a constant and unchanging quantity is a growth, and with it, its 'virtue' and 'vice'; that the content of our particular moral judgments varies much with time and place and circumstance, that these judgments are, in a very real sense, empirical judgments." Not only has the historical sense greatly developed since Butler's day, but it may be further suggested that the metaphysical theory of an identity which persists through its differences, although familiar enough to modern thought, was not a current conception of the time of Butler. This metaphysical concept has exercised an obvious influence upon the development of ethical theory. Probably it seemed to Butler that too much insistence on the idea of variation and change in moral ideas and conduct would endanger the essential and immutable element in moral truth, that too great stress upon the differences would conceal the identity which lies at the heart of all moral conduct, and is the presupposition of all moral manifestation—a fear which we can understand when we remember that Butler was writing, partly at least, in opposition to a theory which had reduced all morality to 'custom and contract.' And in days of empirical evolutionism it might not be unfruitful for us to have that immutable truth recalled to mind.

Yet, as has been said, Butler is prepared to meet this difficulty, and to allow that conscience has its rudimentary stage, and that morality, therefore, has been progressive. He does not mean that the child has as fully developed a conscience as the adult; that the primitive man has a conscience as mature and rich as that of the civilized man ; that the uneducated conscience perceives morality as unerringly as the enlightened conscience. Nature has endowed us only with the capacity for morality, but the experience of the individual and of the race must teach us the concrete lessons of life, and "these are learnt," Butler says, "so insensibly and so perfectly as to be mistaken for instinct,