Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/556

V. DISCUSSION. MR. W. L. COURTNEY ON BISHOP BUTLER. By Eev. H. EASHDALL. It is from no desire to disparage Mr. Courtney's Constructive Ethics (see MIND 43, p. 435) as a whole that I venture to offer some criticisms upon what I cannot but think his somewhat superficial and unsympathetic treatment of one of the greatest of our English moralists, Bishop Butler. I for one should not dispute the truth of Mr. Courtney's assertion that "the newer studies, and the recent lights of modern times have given . . . . an almost old-world air to Butler's position". In one sense the same might be said of Kant ; while in another sense Kant and Butler have formulated in different but not, I believe, fundamentally antagonistic ways the first principles of all ethical systems which supply any real basis for moral obligation. My present purpose is, however, not to estimate Butler's place in the history of ethics, but to show that Mr. Courtney has not understood him. My first quarrel with Mr. Courtney is that he classifies Butler with the representatives of " Sentimental Altruism". While acknowledging (p. 105) that " it is more for the convenience of classification than for any exact similarity of doctrine that Butler has been classed with such men as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson," he defends this procedure by saying that Butler, though he some- times called it a power of judging, ' ' yet as often treated Conscience as emotional " (p. 94) ; and again (p. 106) that Butler's Conscience is " partly intellectual and partly emotional ". Now Mr. Courtney makes no distinction between Butler's doctrine in the Sermons and his doctrine in the " Dissertation on Virtue," published ten years later. All his quotations come from the former; and if the above assertions are meant to apply to the doctrine of the Sermons, I do not believe that it is possible to bring forward a single passage which will support the allegation. Certainly Mr. Courtney does not produce a single syllable in support of them. Nothing but confusion can come from ignoring the very consider- able change which Butler's system undergoes in the " Disserta- tion". For the present, however, I confine myself to the Sermons, and I maintain that, so far as they are concerned, Butler is fully entitled to be classed as a Eationalist. When we remember the aberrations into which an exaggeration of the analogy between moral and mathematical truth had led even Clarke and still more Wollaston, it is no wonder that the cautious Butler was on his guard against modes of statement which might seem positively to identify moral and mathematical truth. Still, it is clear enough that his Conscience, though its relation to the other