reason, still there is no Kantian barrier between inclination and duty, since all that reason insists upon is conformity of the action and its purpose with rational principles. So for Butler, evil action results from permitting our desires to run to wild extremes, unguided and ungoverned by the supreme faculty of our nature which claims sovereignty; it is the consequence of the destruction of the due and just proportion prescribed by reason. And, as was seen in the case of virtue, that, although the maintenance of the mean was the path or the process of the realization of the good, it nevertheless was not constituted by a purely quantitative distinction, that morality was not the mere preservation of an equilibrium, but that its essential nature lay in its accordance with right reason, or, in other words, in its rationality; so in the case of evil, although the destruction of the mean is the path along which men are led to vicious conduct, still the unique and condemnatory character of immorality is its non-conformity with reason's standard, that is, its irrationality.
It may be objected that to regard virtue as constituted by reason, is to represent Butler's system as a purely rationalistic one, inconsistent with the view of human nature as a whole; that, from this latter standpoint, the conclusion should be that virtue is constituted by the whole of human nature, and not by any one part of it. For Butler, however, although not for Kant, as has been previously noted, these two statements are identical, since the relation between the rational self and the sensible self is an organic one, in which reason s at once the highest part, and the principle of relation between all the parts. It is the governing principle, and governs on its own laws, but it does not act in vacua. The sensible nature is the matter upon which it acts. The sentient self has a place, although a subordinate one, in the end of the whole. The end is not the end of reason alone, but the end of human nature as a whole, toward which reason guides all our inclinations in order that each may find its due place in the common end. Thus, although morality is constituted by reason, in the sense that reason governs on its own principles, and decides on man's true end, still this does not make morality purely rationalistic, because in one sense reason
