Page:The optimism of Butler's 'Analogy'.djvu/28

24 Not only the hidden portion of the picture, but, also, even that little corner of it which our eyes do cover, is therefore beyond our perfect comprehension. For no smallest part can be taken alone. So, out of our knowledge of the part itself, we learn our incapacity to fully estimate it.

Butler thus reaches his characteristic conclusion, that every possible act of knowledge reveals itself as being but partial and incomplete. He defies you to know even this world that lies within our human experience, without knowing something of the world that lies beyond it. For every atom that exists demands the entire Universe to explain it.

No doubt, this is the argument which he drives hardest. While, for instance, asserting the supreme authority of Conscience in moral judgements, he manages to withdraw from the range of its verdict all the particular incidents in the Old Testament that offend, by refusing it the right to pronounce until it knows the ultimate and determining issue. And this it cannot know, without knowing the whole of things in Revelation. Such an argument, so pressed, cannot carry conviction. But it is good, still, to observe that it is the grandeur of his conception of this large coherence in the unity of things, which allows him the use of this argument. It is the immensity of our inheritance which reduces us to silence. It is the splendour of the vision which humiliates, even while it exalts.

And, if he is robust in his optimistic estimate of our human faculties, he is just as dauntless in his outlook on human conduct and human history. And this is all the more noticeable, when we remember how his indignant soul, in its austere passion for righteousness, had nursed a wrathful flame against the thin moral superficialities and cheap benevolence of the literary coteries in Queen Caroline's Salon.

Butler had looked, with serious eyes, into the black abyss of sin; he allowed no easy tolerance to blind him to the turbid disgrace of the story that man had made for