of our being. They are sufficient to justify our most vital decisions. We fall back on them with a sense of absolute security. We act on them without a fear. Yes! and we are perfectly right, Butler would say. In all practical affairs we have no other way of acting.
And Religion is a practical affair. Religion is a problem of action. It is no metaphysic; it is a life. As action, as life, it conforms to all other types of life and action. It finds its certainties (that is) in what the metaphysician would condemn as probabilities. Religion is asking no more of you than your daily common practical experience does, when it invites you to trust to convictions that you cannot prove by syllogisms. It simply asks you to carry into its domain the same practical temper which avails you so well in all your earthly affairs.
Now, we can see the immense significance of this firm reliance on ordinary experience at the moment when Butler wrote. For it was the moment at which Natural Science was becoming the norm of certitude. It was beginning to assert the dominance that we know so well to-day, in determining the conditions which reason and imagination are prepared to accept as credible, and the certainties to which conduct is ready to conform.
And Butler, by his confidence in experience, has already struck up an alliance with Natural Science. He has drawn it all over to his side in this matter of probability. For Science is merely an extension of this ordinary experience of ours over an immense area, by means of organized research into the multiplicity and variety of facts. And, if so, it submits to all the usual conditions of our practical experience. It depends on truths which it takes for granted. Its strongest certitudes are incapable of proof. They are what the metaphysicians would term probabilities. The real existence of its facts; the validity of our impressions of the facts; the value of convictions based on expectation, and derived from sheer force of habit and association; these are, for Science, its primal grounds, for which it offers no verification. It can only
