THE I'HILOSOI'HY OF BISHOP BUTLEK. 



61 



Discussion. 



Rev. Martin Anstey, B.D., M.A., said : Our thanks are due 

 to the lecturer for his most interesting and lucid exposition of 

 the philosophy of Butler. What Butler meant by his Doctrine of 

 Probability or by his maxim " probability is the guide of Life "' 

 was that every moral act and every religious decision was something 

 that called for the exercise of the moral judgment, the reason, 

 the conscience of the individual, the right or the wrong of which 

 could not be settled by an appeal to any quasi-infallible Jesuitical 

 authority. His Doctrine of Analogy was directed against the 

 arguments of the Deists, who rejected Revealed Religion but believed 

 in God, duty and immortality, or what they called Natural Religion. 

 Butler's argument is really a tu quoque, in which he showed that 

 whatever could be said against the God of the Bible, could also 

 be said against the God of Nature, e.g., If the God of the Bible 

 was responsible for the destruction of thousands of people, the 

 earthquake at Lisbon showed that the God of Nature was in like 

 manner equally responsible for the destruction of many thousands 

 of the inhabitants of that city. The argument does not solve 

 the problem of the origin of evil, but it shuts the mouth of the 

 deistic opponent of revealed religion by showing that his system 

 is open to exactly the same objection as that which he brought 

 against the teaching of the Biblical revelation. Butler's doctrine 

 of Human Nature was directed against those who maintained the 

 right of men to indulge their lower appetites as being as much a 

 part of their nature as their conscience. Butler denies this and 

 maintains that the various parts of man's nature are not related 

 to each other as co-ordinate parts of equal validity, but that the 

 selfish appetites, and the self-regarding prudential motives of 

 self love, are, by the very constitution of human nature, sub- 

 ordinated to his reason and his conscience in an ordered scale of 

 worth or value, so that when a conflict arises between appetite 

 and reason, it is contrary to the principle and constitution of human 

 nature that appetite should prevail, and only truly natural that reason 

 and conscience should rule, their authority over the lower instincts 

 being as much a part of their nature as the fact of their existence. 

 If conscience exists at all, it exists with the right to rule over every 



