Page:The optimism of Butler's 'Analogy'.djvu/24

20 your way forward by hints, and suggestions, and experiments, and expectations, and probabilities? God is the same God, at whatever level of life you encounter Him. And always He will guide you by His eye, and not, as if you were a mule, by bit and bridle. Religion is no exception to what you already know so familiarly: it follows the same rule.

So Butler continually argues; and all the force of his mind comes out in this splendid confidence that he has in facts, in experience, in the validity of our faculties. He was no metaphysician. We feel this in the chapters on the Future Life, and on Necessity. He is here at his weakest. He fails to convince. He is not in his true atmosphere or element. He comes to himself, and to his full power, when he is flinging aside all the metaphysical problem which underlies life, as freely as the plain man does in practice, in daily experience, in science. Butler has no desire to taunt, when he convicts men of acting on probability. Far from it! He desires to emphasize the authoritative and justifiable character of such evidence: for, indeed, he needs it for his own purpose. He wishes to lend to the plain man in the street, and to the scientific man in the laboratory, his own robust assurance, his own unqualified belief, that in refusing to go behind the evidence and to question its validity, they and he were utterly and entirely in their right.

'It is not my design,' he says, 'to inquire further into the nature, the foundation, and the measure of probability, ... or to guard against the errors to which reasoning from analogy is liable. This belongs to the subject of Logic, and is a part of that subject which has not yet been thoroughly considered. Indeed, I shall not take upon me to say how far the extent, compass, and force of analogical reasoning can be reduced to general heads and rules, and the whole be formed into a system. But though so little has been attempted in this way, by those who have treated of our intellectual powers, this does not hinder but that we may be, as we unquestionably are, assured that analogy is of weight, in various degrees, towards determining our judgement and our practice.... It is enough to the present