Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/77

52 some moralist tries to reduce justice in all its forms to benevolence, the natural conscience is dissatisfied. Retribution it approves, not because retribution may ultimately increase happiness, but because retribution seems good to it. And if the natural conscience is again appealed to, and is at last brought to admit that benevolence is, after all, really the highest end, and punishment only a means, then this appeal is simply a setting of conscience against itself. The popular conscience is, as an instinct, once for all confused and uncertain about the true relations of justice and benevolence. It is useless to ask this instinct to do what the natural conditions that made it never prepared it to do, namely, to make a system of morals. A thinker like Butler, with his seriousness and depth of insight, defends the claims of conscience only by analyses which bring home to us that our conscience is a mystery, and that its assertions about all the deepest ethical questions become uncertain or confused as soon as we cross-question it. An instinct is, in short, like any other habit. You run fast down a familiar flight of stairs so long as you do not think what your feet are doing. Reflect upon your running, and ten chances to one you shall stumble. Even so conscience is a perfectly confident guide as long as you ask it no philosophical questions.

The objections here in question have been so frequently urged that it is hardly worth while for those who can feel their force to dwell on them very long. It is enough for the present purpose to add what all the moral skeptics from the time of the Sophists have insisted upon, namely, that the