Samuel Clarke, who defended Newton’s view of the world
against Leibnitz’s strictures, is perhaps chiefly interesting to
us as one of the authorities of Bishop Joseph Butler.
It is Clarke’s defence of free will, Clarke’s idealist
theory of eternal “fitness” as the basis of ethical distinctions,
perhaps Clarke’s teaching on immortality, that Butler regards
Butler.
as “the common known arguments” and authoritative enunciation’s
of truth in the regions of philosophy or Natural Theology[1]
Butler himself occupies a peculiar position in more respects
than one. He has profoundly influenced British thinking,
but is little known abroad. He is difficult to classify. We
may be helped in assigning him his proper place if we observe
that, almost invariably, he accepts certain beliefs which he
forbears to press. Thus in his most important contribution
to ethics, the Three Sermons on Human Nature—i., ii., iii. of the
Sermons—he grants the validity of an appeal to “nature”
upon the lines of a sort of Stoical idealism, but for his own part
he prefers the humbler appeal to human nature. He makes the
issue, as far as possible, a question of fact. We, from the altered
modern point of view, may doubt whether Butler’s curious
account of the mechanism of moral psychology is a simple
report of facts. There are (a) given instinctive “pro pensions”;
(b) a part of higher principles, “benevolence” and “rational
self-love,” equally valid with each other, though at times they
may seem to conflict; (c) there is the master principle of conscience,
which judges between motives, but does not itself
constitute a motive to action. Butler is opposing the psychological
hedonism[2] of Hobbes. He does not find it true to
experience that man necessarily acts at the dictation of selfish
motives. But Butler—for reasons satisfactory to himself, and
eminently characteristic of the man; he hoped to conciliate
his age!—dwells so much upon the rewards of goodness, as
bribes (we must almost say) to rational self-love, that some
have called Butler himself an ethical hedonist; though his
sermon on the “Love of God” ought surely to free him from
that charge. In all this, Butler was convinced that he was
giving a simple statement of facts. Any one introspectively
apprehending the facts must grant, he thought, that benevolence
was an integral part of human nature and that conscience
was rightfully supreme. This reveals the empiricist
temper, and points to an attempted empiricist solution of great
problems. Butler holds that more ambitious philosophies
are valid, but he shrinks from their use. The same thing is
seen again in the Analogy. Butler divests himself in this book
of the principles of “liberty” and “moral fitness” in which
personally he believes.[3]
Part i. of this book shows the “Analogy” of “Natural Religion” to the “Constitution and Course of Nature.” Probably “Nature” is here employed in a more familiar or humbler sense than in the passing reference in the Sermons. The Analogy means by “nature,” indisputable human experience. Deists believed in a God of unmixed benevolence; Butler’s contention is that justice, punishment, hell-fire itself are credible in their similarity to the known experiences of man’s life upon earth. What the Three Sermons sought to find written small within—a law of inflexible justice or righteousness—part i. of the Analogy seeks to discover written in larger characters without us. Butler is charged by Sir Leslie Stephen with arguing illegitimately—professing to make no appeal to “moral fitness,” and yet contending that the facts of human life show (the beginnings of) moral retribution for good and evil. Assuredly Butler did not mean to give up his right of speaking about moral evil and good when he waived the “high priori” method of vindicating their real existence. Yet it is a very grave question whether the idea of God’s moral government admits of being argued as pure matter of fact. Butler tries to do this. You call it unjust, he says in effect, that you should be punished. You argue, for example, that you have no free will. Well, what of that? Does it not look very much as though you were being punished? Does not nature seem to treat you as if you had free will?[4] One thing more should be noted about Butler. He nowhere formally argues for the truth of theism. He will not waste time upon triflers who deny what he thinks, in the light of the (empiricist) Design argument, an absolutely clear truth.[5] On the whole then Butler in personal conviction is an intuitionalist, wavering towards the idealism of his age; but in argument he is an empiricist, trying to reason every question as one of given facts. None the less, in the issue, it is the very element which goes beyond an appeal to facts—it is the depth and purity of Butler’s moral nature—which fascinates the reader, and wins praise from Matthew Arnold or Goldwin Smith or even Leslie Stephen. Precisely because he goes beyond phenomenal sequences, it is impossible to fling him aside unheard. On the other hand, no Christian, and perhaps no theist, is interested in maintaining that Butler grasps the whole truth. At the most we might say this: If theism is a growing doctrine, Butler in England like Kant in Germany stands for a fresh ethical emphasis.
Stephen accuses Butler of reasoning in a circle. The things which make for our ultimate welfare are the things we call morally good. No wonder if they prove to involve happiness; that is their definition! But is it? Does not Stephen himself rather say that morally good things are conditions of social, not personal welfare? Butler’s argument is that the individual suffers (and feels that he suffers deservedly) from neglecting these If George Eliot is guilty of a platitude when she says that “consequences are unpitying,” then Butler’s argument is empty: but not otherwise.
Butler on the soul may be studied in chap. i. of the Analogy—where we observe the old assumption of an immaterial and so immortal principle—and in his appendix on Personal Identity. Wherever moral postulates make their presence felt, Butler’s doctrine of man, as of God, leaps into new vigour.
It is a moot point whether S. Clarke’s Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God is really a priori. Clarke appeals to the immensity of time and space as involving infinity in God. A modification of his views is the starting-point of W. H Gillespie’s able Argument a priori for the Being and Attributes of the Godhead, published part by part 1833–1872. We find something curiously similar in James Martineau’s Study of Religion (“Implicit Attributes of God as Cause,” sub fin.). One might also compare J. R. Seeley’s Natural Religion—though he is no decided champion of a personal God-and F. Max Müller’s Gifford Lectures. Dismissing his earlier intuitionalism, in order, like Butler, to conciliate an empiricist age, M. Muller tried to show that even sense experience throws us on the Infinite-which for him was the kernel of the idea of God. He therefore appealed to the Indian goddess Aditi or immensity, a deity connected with a set of personal gods called Adityas. Looking into the immensity of space, man also looks into the depths of godhead. Whatever one may think of the cogency of such arguments, it seems safe to conclude that thinkers, who dislike constructive idealism, but accept time and space as boundless given quanta, reach in that way the thought of infinity, and if they are theists, necessarily connect their theism with reflexions on the nature of Time and Space.
We have already spoken of Kant’s peculiar philosophical positions. One result of these is a very damaging attack upon traditional theism. Kant puts together, as belonging to “Rational Theology, ”, three arguments—he is fond of triads, though they have not the significance for him which they came to have for Hegel. Then he Kant as critic of theism. attacks the arguments, one after another. Is there anything fresh in the attack? Or is it simply a reiteration of his sceptical contrast between phenomena and noumena, and of his confinement of (valid) knowledge to the former? Perhaps the attack on cause as used in the cosmological argument is independent of Kant’s philosophical peculiarities. The argument affirms a first cause, or uncaused cause. Does it not then deny rather than assert universal causation? But that special criticism is a question of detail. A more entirely novel and more general principle of Kant’s attack upon theism is the challenge of our right to build up the idea of God bit by bit out of different arguments. The arguments had been regarded as alternative or else as cumulative proofs, all pointing to one conclusion—God exists. Kant insists that they are incompatible with each
- ↑ Analogy, part i. chap. i. (“the natural and moral proofs of a future life commonly insisted upon”); last sentence of part i., Conclusion (“the proper proofs of) [natural] religion from our moral nature,” &c.); part ii. chap. viii. sub fin., “the proof” of religion, “arising out of the two . . . principles of liberty and moral fitness.”
- ↑ These useful distinctions are stated and well explained in W. R. Sorley’s Ethics of Naturalism.
- ↑ Analogy, iii. chap. viii.; following S. Clarke?
- ↑ Part ii. of the Analogy tries similarly to establish Christianity as credible matter of fact, sufficiently analogous to known facts of experience (Apologetics) apart from any moral “value judgments” (as Ritschlians might say).
- ↑ See (e.g.) ii. chap. ix. The Three Sermons also point to a moral argument for theism, but forbear to press it (Sermon ii.; when the third sense of the word “Nature” is being explained).
