reference to his fundamental doctrine. When in his emphasis of self-love, benevolence, or conscience, he is led into seeming inconsistency, if were member his underlying conception the contradiction vanishes, or at most remains only as a confusion in language. That broad foundation, together with his teleological method, dominates his whole thought, and is accountable for all those striking results of his speculation which justly cause Butler's contribution to ethical theory to be regarded as the most important that was made in the two thousand years which elapsed between Aristotle and Kant. Since this central position of human nature as an organic unity furnishes the key to Butler's whole system, it is necessary to introduce a study of his ethical thought with an analysis of it, the significance of which can probably be better appreciated if we contrast Butler's view with some type of extreme rationalism, such as that of Kant.
The problem which confronted Butler was handed down to him by his predecessors of the seventeenth century. Hobbes, as is well known, by his theory of the "state of nature" and "social contract," had made moral distinctions purely artificial, conventional, and relative. In answer to this, numerous attempts were made to prove the rational, natural, and absolute character of moral laws. The intellectual moralists had rehabilitated the Stoical assertion that morality was part of the "nature of things," and maintained further that moral distinctions were "eternal," "immutable," mathematically necessary, and completely rational; while the sentimentalists, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, had added a "moral sense," a faculty of immediate perception of moral distinctions and laws. Now, Butler, following, on the whole, the lead of Hobbes's opponents, seeks to demonstrate that morality is grounded in the peculiar nature and constitution of man. He sees that there are two methods which may be employed, one which aims at showing that morality is part of the "nature of things," the other that it is grounded in the peculiar constitution of human nature.[1] Cudworth and Clarke had
- ↑ Pref. to Sermons, Sect. 7, p. 5. The references are to Gladstone's first ed. (1896) of Butler's works. The references to sections, although not to pages, are applicable also to Gladstone's second ed. (1898).
