Page:The optimism of Butler's 'Analogy'.djvu/34

30 a scheme, system, or constitution, whose parts correspond to each other, and to a whole; as really as any work of art, or of any particular model of a civil constitution and government. In this great scheme of the natural world, individuals have various peculiar relations to other individuals of their own species. And whole species are, we find, variously related to other species, upon this earth.

Nor do we know, how much further these kinds of relations may extend. And, as there is not any action or natural event, which we are acquainted with, so single and unconnected, as not to have a respect to some other actions and events: so possibly each of them, when it has not an immediate, may yet have a remote, natural relation to other actions and events, much beyond the compass of this present work. There seems indeed nothing, from whence we can so much as make a conjecture, whether all creatures, actions, and events, throughout the whole world of nature, have relations to each other. But, as it is obvious, that all events have future unknown consequences; so if we trace any, as far as we can go, into what is connected with it, we shall find, that if such event were not connected with somewhat further in nature unknown to us, somewhat both past and present, such event could not possibly have been at all.

Nor can we give the whole account of any one thing whatever: of all its causes, ends, and necessary adjuncts; those adjuncts, I mean, without which it could not have been. By this most astonishing connexion, these reciprocal correspondencies and mutual relations, everything which we see in the course of nature is actually brought about. And things seemingly the most insignificant imaginable are perpetually observed to be necessary conditions to other things of the greatest importance: so that any one thing whatever may, for aught we know to the contrary, be a necessary condition of any other (Anal, I. vii. 4-6).

Even in this great passage, we fall under Butler's unfortunate habit of throwing an air of depression over his most inspiring conceptions. For it is brought in to justify his assertion that 'God's moral government must be as much beyond our comprehension as his Nature government suggests'; so that we omit to notice that our ignorance is, itself, the witness to our comprehension of the coherence of the entire Universe in one unbroken and