commonly understood and 'conduct likeliest to produce an overbalance of happiness.'" And, in a footnote, he adds: "It may be interesting to notice a gradual change in Butler's view on this most important point. In the first of his sermons on Human Nature, published some years before the Analogy, he does not notice any more than Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, any possible want of harmony between Conscience and Benevolence. A note to Sermon XII, however, seems to indicate a stage of transition between the view of the first sermon and the view of the Dissertation."[1] This suggestion, coupled with Professor Sidgwick's interpretation that Butler held only to a duality of regulative principles, might lead to the inference that in the Sermons Butler viewed conscience and benevolence as identical, and later discovered fundamental divergencies between them. Such a change, however, does not seem to me to have taken place, In the earlier sermons, where he is dealing with human nature as a whole, he dwells upon the coincidence of both self-love and benevolence with conscience. While he insists always on their non-conflicting character, or, as it may be expressed, on their partial identity, he nowhere, I think, intends to imply that benevolence exhausts the content of conscience. The passage in Sermon IX, the treatment in Sermon XII, and the appended note, to which Professor Sidgwick refers, have been already discussed, and seem to be in essential agreement with the Dissertation. The logical necessities of Butler's system would permit neither the complete identification of benevolence and virtue, nor the acknowledgment of any basal divergence between them. In the section on self-love in the Dissertation, immediately preceding the one on benevolence, Butler has just maintained that prudence is a species of virtue. So, when he turns to benevolence, he speaks of it as part, but in no sense as the whole, of virtue. It is true that he is more emphatic and explicit in the Dissertation than in the Sermons in arguing against the reduction of virtue to benevolence, but it may be fair to assume that this is due to the probable fact that at the time of writing the former he had an acquaintance with Hutcheson's Inquiry, which he seems to have
- ↑ P. 85, note.; Cf. also History of Ethics, pp. 198, 199.
