Page:The optimism of Butler's 'Analogy'.djvu/45

Rh meant to be known. So Butler's appeal is ever from the reason uninformed by experience to the reason which has accepted the facts set before it—from the reason e. g. which decrees what a Revelation must involve, to the reason which will be content to understand what a Revelation, in fact, actually is. He will never refuse facts, nor ever leave them behind. At every stage the reason is recalled by him to the actual verdict of experience.

This may compel Butler, as it does, to enforce the strictness of the limitations under which reason works; for it cannot go beyond what the facts that lie within its experience will justify. And that experience is very partial. And the facts are imperfectly comprehended.

But the very limitations that he enforces are not imposed from without; nor are they incidental to some formal insufficiency of reason itself. They spring up out of the very nature of experience itself. They are asserted by virtue of the facts themselves, which, in being known as what they are, declare themselves to be but partially known. The limitations come, not from any defects in our intellectual organs, but from the evident and undeniable narrowness of the area over which they have, as yet, been exercised.

There is, therefore, optimism, still, even in the recognition of limitation. Our capacities only need the widening of their area of exercise, to prove themselves adequate to new knowledge. And there need be no limit to this expression of their experience. Life is a perpetual progress in experience. And our knowledge, therefore, has, before it the vision of limitless growth. In all this, Butler shows himself the friend of the scientific temper which has become the dominant element in the modern mind. His certitude is the scientific certitude in the sure value of facts and faculties, which is so victoriously robust that it can absolutely afford to disregard the criticism of metaphysics.

The limitations which he emphasizes are the limitations