Page:The optimism of Butler's 'Analogy'.djvu/20

16 His entire scheme starts from this initial assumption. He is absolutely sure that we can observe facts, so that they are really known to us. And he prepares to argue from these common facts of experience, known in the way in which we act upon them in the ordinary pursuits of daily life, to others that are like them, which belong to the region of natural and revealed religion. He is convinced that there is a certain department of the divine government which comes, now, under our view. We are in possession of it, in our degree. We cover it, more or less. We understand some of its method and use. And it is because this present experience is so sure and real that we can trust the abstract reasoning which attempts the treatment 'of the larger and more general government which lies beyond our view'.

Yet, to our dismay, Butler disguises this, his robust confidence in experience, by selecting for it the most unlucky title that he could possibly have chosen. He gives to this effective certitude the nickname of 'probability'. And the name has haunted his reputation. It has left upon the world's casual memory the impression that he had no solid intellectual ground to offer us; and that he invited us to stake our souls on a chance. He figures, in popular imagination, as the respectable grey-haired old confederate in the crowd, who induces the bystander to take the odds on the hidden pea. He himself uses the unfortunate metaphor of stakes or odds at one moment in the argument, where he is illustrating his point from common experience. And, always, the word probability evokes the thought of dialectical ingenuity, rather than of massive reasoning. It is the Apologist that it recalls, not the Thinker. We feel, as we start off on an estimate of the convergent probabilities, as if we were to be captured by craft, drawn by subtle complications into a position for which we shall not be able wholly to account. Each separate bit of the evidence will be too weak to bear the strain of the great conclusion. Yet the accumulative effect of the inconclusive premisses will