feared might prove "a danger to the careless reader." When the Sermons were composed, he may not have felt the need of such a strong protest, since he was more concerned with a refutation of the 'selfism' of Hobbes than of the theory which identifies virtue with benevolence. At that time it was hardly possible for him to have had a knowledge of Hutcheson's system, since, it is to be remembered, the Inquiry, Hutcheson's first work, was published in 1725, only one year before the publication of Butler's collection of sermons.
On the other hand, while refusing to identify virtue with benevolence, it would be fatally inconsistent for Butler to look upon them as naturally divergent or contradictory. Since, for him, human nature is an organic unity, there cannot be any real discrepancy between reasonable benevolence and conscience, any more than between 'cool self-love' and conscience. The pursuit of our own or of the general happiness is subject to, and conditioned by, the approval of conscience and the dictates of morality, and it is only a perversion of the principles of action that can lead to discrepancies. If, in any particular instance, a virtuous act may have the appearance of being productive of misery, and a vicious one of happiness, we are under obligation to follow conscience, and trust to the moral government of the universe to award happiness according to desert.[1]
In the two principles of self-love and benevolence, Butler is simply recognizing the fundamentally rational character of the egoistic and altruistic tendencies in human nature. And, by the conception of a social-self and a common interest, he transcends the dualism of interested and disinterested action. True self-love always looks to others, and true benevolence always looks to self, and virtue as the end of life is a good so complete that all individuals alike find in it their common good and happiness. Self-love must not only have the same end as benevolence, but it must include benevolence, and, to reverse the proposition, benevolence must include self-love. Thus the two become synthesized in one general principle of our nature. That Butler recognized, much more clearly than is usually supposed, that
- ↑ Diss. on Virtue, § 16, p. 410.
