52 COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART i 



not the question which mainly interested him. When 

 he had said " Obey conscience," he thought he had 

 given the main instruction required of him as a moralist. 

 Still, the other question cannot be suppressed. Eeason- 

 able men must ask, " Granted that we are to obey 

 conscience, what is the general line of its commands ? 

 "What is the unifying principle of its various utter- 

 ances ? Surely it is incredible that such a principle 

 should be entirely lacking, and scarcely less so that 

 the principle of goodness should be inscrutable to a 

 reverent human inquiry ! " Butler deals with this 

 further question, but he does so informally in a 

 series of not easily reconcilable obiter dicta. 1 Some- 

 times it seems as if benevolence were the master 

 principle of human conduct. In such passages Butler 

 takes his stand, where Comte afterwards rallied, 

 with the prophets of altruism. Sometimes, again, 

 Butler seems to speak as if conscience guided us just 

 where rational self-love would conduct us were it but 

 sufficiently far-seeing. In such words Butler conde- 

 scends to the cant, not of our century, but of his own, 

 though he does so with manifest uneasiness, and with 

 a bad grace. But, perhaps most frequently, he antici- 

 pates Herbert Spencer in pleading for a balance between 

 egoism and altruism. If we must define the principle 

 underlying good conduct, why, we find there are two 

 ultimate principles. At the back of our moral nature 

 there is, if not an irreducible multitude of special com- 

 mands, yet an irreducible dualism a pair of regnant 

 principles, and the line dividing them must be drawn by 

 a sort of practical tact. Theory is helpless to reach 

 past this " dual control." 



1 Of. Dr. T. B. Kilpatrick's Introduction to Butler's Three Sermons on 

 Human Nature. 



