Page:Philosophical Review Volume 9.djvu/425

409 As in the Analogy his argument depends upon assuming suffering to be the supernatural punishment, so here it depends on assuming the promptings of conscience to be supernatural commands."

Striking as the statement is, it seems to be essentially unfair, and to rest upon a confusion of the Bishop with the ethical thinker. It is certainly true that Butler did believe implicitly in such theological doctrine as is ascribed to him, but the ethical problem is not stated in theological terms, and morality is thus not dependent upon the inscrutability of God's ways. It is in fact the most natural and intelligible thing in the world. The system of rewards and punishments he did firmly believe in because it is part and parcel of our ideas of good and ill desert, which in turn are constituent elements of our idea of justice. But God is not a Deus ex machina to explain morality, and morality is not dependent upon the will of God any more than truth. The divine will is itself determined by the divine intelligence. "I am far from intending to deny," Butler says, "that the will of God is determined by what is fit, by the right and reason of the case. … It seems as inconceivable to suppose God to approve of one course of action, or one end, preferably to another, which yet his acting at all from design implies that he does, without supposing somewhat prior in that end to be the ground of the preference; as to suppose him to discern an abstract proposition to be true, without supposing somewhat prior in it to be the ground of the discernment."

From this may be inferred the true nature of Butler's metaphysic of ethics. While insisting that morality is grounded in human nature, and that its content is deducible from the structure of the self, he nevertheless holds that human nature has its place in the nature of the universe. Consequently, morality is in its last definition simply the 'eternal fitness' of things, and, like truth, is grounded in the nature of things. An examination into the 'nature of things' is, according to Butler, as will be remembered, the other method by which the subject matter of ethics may be treated. But such an