Page:The optimism of Butler's 'Analogy'.djvu/50

46 And yet Bishop Butler would not, I think, have disguised from himself the fact that this success in estimating truth according to the measure of its practical efficiency is won by confining attention to a limited area within recognized frontiers. It leaves ultimate issues unresolved. It can afford to go on its way without touching them, but it knows that they are there, and will, ultimately, emerge. Butler is aware that a critical examination of the logical values of his argument from analogy is waiting for him in the background, however 'natural and just and conclusive' it is in its practical working. He would know that, finally, the debate would push home its inquiry into the character of those frontiers which it had been content to assume. It would be bound to pass criticism on itself: to challenge the validity of its own experience: to transcend the dualism which experience assumes, and to discover a monism in which both factors found their reconciliation. If knowledge be purposive, yet there must be a criterion of purposes: there must be a distinction in the reality of purposes: there must be an ultimate standard by which to determine what constitutes the truest form of practical efficiency. The knowledge may be symbolic, but the symbols must be graded; and they must be ever approaching nearer to the perfect expression in which the whole of reality is ultimately uttered. After all, we believe in 'the Word that was with God'. These is a Word which is adequate to its function. There cannot be for ever 'the something over' that is unexpressed.

The ultimate problem remains, that is; and the last word of all will still have to be discovered, when all that can be wrung out of psychological and practical valuations has been completed. Butler would not deny this, I would plead, even though he will not seriously concern himself over this ultimate problem, and has little to suggest about it. His own work, his own impressiveness, are done and won in other fields: and those fields are ours, and are at our very doors. In