hence irreducible to the utilitarian content "There are," he maintains, "certain dispositions of mind, and certain actions, which are in themselves approved or disapproved by mankind, abstracted from the consideration of their tendency to the happiness or misery of the world; approved or disapproved by reflection, by that principle within, which is the guide of life, the judge of right and wrong." The various virtues and vices are in themselves, and as such, objects of approbation and disapprobation respectively, without regard to consequences.[1] The same view finds more explicit and emphatic expression in the Dissertation on Virtue, where he says that "benevolence, and the want of it, singly considered, are in no sort the whole of virtue and vice." The production of happiness is not the standard by which we adjudge moral worth.[2] He goes even so far as to aver that "imagining the whole of virtue to consist in singly aiming at promoting the happiness of mankind in the present state," is a "mistake than which none can be conceived more terrible." Butler is not very sure that "any author has designed to assert" that benevolence exhausts the content of morality, but he thinks that "some of great and distinguished merit have expressed themselves in a manner which may occasion some danger to the careless reader."[3] "Probably we may assume," as Professor Sidgwick remarks, and as is very generally supposed, "Shaftesbury to be one of the authors here referred to; almost certainly we may assume another to be Hutcheson, who, in his Inquiry Concerning the Original of Our Ideas of Virtue, had definitely identified virtue with benevolence."[4]
In regard to the relation of benevolence and conscience, Professor Sidgwick thinks that Butler's views underwent a change of stand-point, the stages of which are marked by the treatment found in the Sermons, the Note referred to above, and the Dissertation on Virtue. In the Methods of Ethics, he remarks that "Butler was the first writer who dwelt on the discrepancies between Virtue as
