Bishop Butler

Preface

The publication within the last five years of two elaborate, and even sumptuous, editions of Bishop Butler's works seems to prove that they have still an interest for the reading public. Nor is it surprising that this should be the case. There is much in the temper and methods of our author which falls in with the needs of our own time and suits its scientific spirit.

With these larger and more elaborate editions the present work comes in no way into competition. Its object is twofold ; first, to view Butler in his historical setting, — to see him in the light of the times in which he lived, the questions with which his thoughts were occupied, the controversies in which he bore so leading a part. On this side this little book merely attempts in a limited field what all history aims at on a larger scale. But, in the second place, an endeavour has been made to appraise the value of Butler's contributions to English thought, to separate the solid and permanent element in his writings from the more or less ephemeral and transitory, to determine what lessons of abiding interest for our own day his works contain.

vi

PREFACE

In executing the former part of my task I have to acknowledge the deep debt I am under to Mr. Leslie Stephen's History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, and to Mr. Pattison's essay on Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750. Without these two admirable works this book would either never have been written or would have taken quite a different shape. If I have ventured sometimes to express my dissent from Mr. Stephen it is not because I impugn his facts or desire to controvert his arguments, but because I feel I differ from him on some fundamental questions of principle.

To Mr. Gladstone's edition of Butler's works I am greatly indebted for the division into sections which has made reference to the whole of Butler's writings for the first time possible and easy. In the references in the footnotes I have adopted throughout his division into sections. I have also followed him in referring to the Fifteen Sermons preached at the Eolls under the title of Sermons, and to the Six Sermons preached on public occasions as SS. In places, too, I have received real help from the Analysis given as a heading to the different sections. In other respects my debt to him is rather less that I anticipated. Of the Dissertations contained in the volume of Studies Subsidiary to Bidler's Works some seemed to lie somewhat apart from the main topics treated of by Butler himself, while others appeared of rather subordinate interest. Yet no lover of Butler can faU to acknowledge how much Mr. Gladstone has done for

PREFACE vii the study of Butler's works by making them generally accessible to the reading public, and commending them by the authority of his great name. Works to which Mr. G-ladstone acknowledged his obligations, and to the elucidation of which he devoted the declining years of his life, could not fail to have attractions for many, at least in our generation. Of other authors whom I have consulted I have learnt most from Dean Church and Mr. Bagehot. Dean Church's appreciation is singularly sympathetic, and expressed with that felicity of language which distinguishes all his writings, while Mr. Bagehot's article is marked by bis accustomed shrewdness and independence of judgment.

In conclusion, I have to express my gratitude to my friend and colleague Mr. H. W. B. Joseph for the trouble he has taken in revising my proofs, and for several valuable criticisms and suggestions.

New College, Oxford, Avgust 1901.

Chap. I-abk

I. Life and Times of Bishop Butler ... 1

II. MouAL Practice and Moral Theory in England in

THE First Half of the Eighteenth Century 58

III. Butler's Sermons . . . . • 88

IV. The Deists and the Deistical Controversy . 126 V. The "Analogy," Part I. . . . .146

VI. The "Analogy," Part II. . . • • 179 VII. The Two Dissertations of Personal Identity

AND OF THE NATURE OF ViETUE . . • 219

VIII. General Estimate and Summary . . .227 Index 257

X

BISHOP BUTLER: HIS LIFE AKD WRITINGS

Chapter I

Bishop Butler has recorded that he set before himself the search after truth as the business of his life.i This being his aim, his career was necessarily that of the student and thinker rather than of the man of action. As such, his life presents few incidents for his biographer to record. Another and even greater difficulty is presented by the character of the man himself. He lived during stirring times, but with a singular aloofness from them. His writings contain scarcely a reference to passing events (there is just one mention, and that is all, of the rebellion of '45 ^), and very few notices even of contemporary writers and thinkers. The consequence is that we know scarcely anything of what he thought or felt on current events or topics of the day. He lives and moves amongst them as one almost wholly unaffected by them. Nor was this absence of reference to specific events of his own time accidental. His impersonal style of writing was part of the very nature of the man. He wished to be

' Fourth Letter to Dr. Clarke.

- Sermons on Public Occasions, Sermon V. § 12.

judicial, impartial, and scientific, and he succeeded in no ordinary degree in realising his own ideal. His utterances were intended to be not so much his own individual utterances, as expressive of the voice of reason herself. Hence the absence of passion and of any personal feeling; hence, too, that quality in his writings which made them seem " somewhat too little vigorous, and not sufficiently earnest" for the taste of his contemporaries. But hence, also, that which has given them their permanent value and abiding authority ; which has made them, as it has been well expressed,^ the summary of the literature of an epoch ; which has caused them to be read and valued, while the almost innumerable publications among which they appeared have dropped out and been forgotten, or are studied at most by those who, from whatever cause, are led to rake among the ashes of a now almost forgotten controversy.

But this self-suppression, this impersonal character of his writings, however much it may have added to their philosophic and permanent value, has added at least in the same degree to the difficulty of the task of Butler's would-be biographer. It has deprived him of the most important and trustworthy materials from which a satisfactory biography might have been composed, that picture of the general development and growth of an author's thought and mind which must ever constitute the main interest of a student's and philosopher's Ufe.

Nor has external e\adence supplied to any considerable extent the void which Butler's method of writing has created. The bishop found no Boswell; and the earliest complete biography of him did not appear till more than sixty years after his death, and had then to be constructed from second-hand sources of

^ Pattison, Essay.

information. Some, but unfortunately very few, interesting details are indeed to be gathered from the almost contemporary Zi/e of Archbishop Seeker, published by Porteous in 1772. Bishop Wilson's Life and Letters supply two or three more scanty notices. But both these sources of information go but a little way to satisfy our curiosity ; and Mr. Bartlett's Meynoirs, together with the earlier Life by Kippis contributed to the revised edition of the Biographia Britannica} remain still our chief written authorities. Of more recent Lives, the two principal are that by Bishop Fitzgerald, prefixed to his edition of the Analogy ; and a brightly written and accurate Life by Bishop Steere, to be found in his edition of the Sermons. The research, however, of these later writers has been able to add but little to what was already to be found in the fuller works of their predecessors.

Tradition, unfortunately, has also done exceedingly little to supplement our scanty information. Bishop Philpotts, one of Butler's successors in the rectory of Stanhope, took much pains to glean what few traditions still lingered in the parish about his distinguished predecessor; but nothing practically came of the search. Old people seemed to remember that Butler was to be met riding fast on a black pony, and that he gave liberally to beggars ; but that was all. Nor did Oriel College, Bristol, or St. Paul's treasure up any certain memories about him. At each of these places his name survived, but scarcely anything besides. Of his life at Bristol, Dean Tucker, who was for some time his chaplain, has preserved a few details which will be related in their proper place. From one of Butler's own letters ^ we are able to frame a scanty

' PublLshed in 1772. It is said to have been based in part on notes furnished by one of the bishop's nephews.

- Letter to the Duchess of Somerset, see below, page 42.

picture of his chief occupations during his too brief sojourn at Auckland Castle ; and Dr. Nathaniel Foster, his chaplain in his closing years, has preserved for us, in a few short and hasty letters written to Seeker at the time, a somewhat meagre description of the closing scenes of his life.

Though the details which would fill in the picture and give it life and interest are thus wanting, yet the main facts of his career are notorious, and fortunately beyond dispute. Joseph Butler, the youngest of eight children of a well-to-do retired draper of the little country town of Wantage in Berkshire, was born in a house called the Chantry, lying just outside the town, on May 18, 1692.^ Eespecting his father, two facts only are known — that he was a Presbyterian in religion, and that he was in comfortable circumstances. Of Butler's childhood no records have been preserved.

1 There is perhaps some little doubt about the date of his birth. May 18, 1692, is the date given in all the biographies from Kippis downwards. On the other hand, the Register of the University of Oxford gives his age as seventeen when he matriculated a member of Oriel on March 17, 1714. If this date were correct he could not have been born till May 1096. But there are almost insuperable difficulties in accepting the age as stated in the University Register. In the first place, we should have to believe that the correspondence with Dr. Clarke was carried on by him while still a mere lad of sixteen ; but he himself, in his first letter, writes as if he had attained an age to which speculations of the kind he was engaged in were at least natural, and as if, further, he had already been engaged for some time in them. In the next place, he was ordained both deacon and priest in the year 1717. Now, supposing the accepted date of his birth to be correct, he would be by that time of the suitable age of twenty-five, whereas if we were to accept the date given in the University Register he would be only just twenty years old, an age at which, even in those lax times, it is unlikely that he would have received ordination. Nor is it likely, again, that so young a man could have been appointed to so important a post as that of preacher at the Rolls in the next year. On these different grounds it would seem as if the traditional date is to be preferred, and we must suppose that some error has crept at this point into the Register of the University.

His earliest instruction he received at the Grammar School of his native town, where he was a pupil under the Eev. Philip Barton. That he retained some regard for this, his earliest, instructor may be, perhaps, gathered from the fact that, when in 1740 he was appointed Dean of St. Paul's, he presented Mr. Barton to almost the first piece of preferment that fell to his gift, the rectory of Hutton in Essex.

If we may believe a statement in Kippis's Life, Butler, while still a boy, exhibited unusual signs of intellectual ability, and it was for this reason that his father designed him for admission into the Presbyterian ministry, and sent him to be educated at the then justly famous Dissenting Academy conducted by Mr. Samuel Jones, first at Gloucester, and subsequently at Tewkesbury. At this establishment the boy and his friends were educated not only in mathematics and classics, but also in logic and Hebrew.^ Indeed, Mr. Jones must have been a teacher of no ordinary skill and vigour, for among the sixteen pupils who were at this time under his instruction were to be found not only Butler himself, but also Seeker, his lifelong friend, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury ; Maddox, subsequently Bishop of Worcester; Chandler, the well-known Nonconformist divine ; and Bowes, afterwards Lord Chancellor of Ireland. Lardner, the famous Biblical critic, was also a pupil in the same school, but at a somewhat later date.

It was while a pupil at Tewkesbury that Butler gave the first public proof of his ability as a metaphysician and thinker, in the famous letters addressed by him to Dr. Clarke, then regarded as the foremost philosopher of his age. Clarke had given, in his Boyle Lectures delivered in 1704 and 1705, what he claimed to be a demonstrative proof of the being and attributes of

' Portoous's Life of Seeker.

God. Butler, writing first on November 14, 1713, ventures to throw doubts on two of the arguments on which Clarke had relied, or rather to state certain difficulties which stood in the way of his acceptance of them. In this letter, written when he was but twenty-one years of age, and at a time when he had received only a school training, he tells Dr. Clarke " that he had made it his business, ever since he thought himself capable of such sort of reasoning, to find out, if possible, a demonstrative proof of the being and attributes of God," and was therefore delighted to come upon so distinguished a reasoner as Clarke engaged on the same quest. The argument of Clarke to which Butler objects was one in which he deduced the omnipresence of God from His necessary existence. " If," said Clarke, " God could be absent from any one part of space, He could equally be absent from aU ; but if He could be absent from aU, this would seem to imply that His existence in any was not necessary ; but this supposition is incompatible with the presumed necessity of His self-existence." To this Butler objects, " the argimient proves, indeed, that God cannot be absent from all places at the same time, but fails to show that He may not be absent from them all at different times; and therefore God is not necessarily shown by it to be present in all spaces at any one time." When Clarke had replied, that " in his conception a necessary being has a necessary existence in every part of space," Butler professes himself somewhat doubtfully satisfied with the argument, but adds, in a subsequent letter ,i " I am reaUy at a loss about the nature of space and duration," as if he were not yet entirely convinced.

The otlier point on which he feels a difficulty is Clarke's contention that a self-existent Being must

> Letter V, be necessarily one ; for if there were more than one self-existent Being or substance, one or other of them would have to be thought of as contingent, and would therefore lose its quality of self-subsistence. To this Butler objects, that he can see here no necessary connection between the antecedent and the consequent. " For why is it not possible at least to conceive of each of the two self - existent substances as existing in absolute isolation and independence of the other ? in which case the self-existence of the one would not involve the contingency of the other." Clarke explains in answer, that in his view a Being or substance can only be regarded as self-existent when its existence is implied in and is necessary to the existence of every thing besides ; and that, if self-existence be used in this sense, then the idea of two self-existent Beings does necessarily involve a contradiction in terms. In this case, again, Butler admits that his opponent has the best of the argument, but writes in such terms that it is clear his mind was not entirely satisfied on the subject.

The correspondence was not without influence on Butler's fortunes, and perhaps on the views and methods of argument which he ultimately adopted. Clarke was so much impressed with the force and abiUty with which the objections were stated, and even more with the fairness of mind, candour, and love of truth that they displayed, that he took considerable pains to find out who his correspondent was, as the letters had been sent to him anonymously, having been posted by Seeker for his friend at Gloucester. Further, he seems to have regarded the writer of the letters, when discovered, as one whose interests were to be advanced ; and so he was partly responsible for obtaining for Butler his first piece of preferment, his appointment as preacher at the KoUs. On Butler himself

8 BISHOP BUTLEK : HIS LIFE AND WRITINGS the effect of the correspondence seems to have been to make him distrustful of the high ^ priori method wliieh Clarke had adopted. The hesitation with which he found himself beset in accepting as convincing and satisfactory the abstract arguments which Clarke put forward led him to prefer that humbler and more tentative, but more satisfactory and conclusive, method of reasoning which rests on an appeal to observed and generally admitted facts. This was the method which he actually employed alike in the Sermons and in the Analogy. In truth, demonstrations like those of Clarke and earlier of Spinoza, modelled on the method used by Newton in his Principia, are less applicable in the sphere of theology than in those of mathematics, optics, and celestial mechanics — and that for two reasons. In the first place, the ideas with which theology deals are less clear and adequately grasped by our minds than are the notions of space, time, motion, force, direction, equahty, and inequality which are used in the mathematical and kindred sciences; while, in the second place, we have not in theology the same chance of verifying our results by appeal to actual experience, and comparison with olaserved facts, which we possess in the case of the above-mentioned sciences. That Butler was wiser than his predecessor in his choice of method is shown by the far greater influence which his works have exercised on posterity than have those of Clarke, whose writings are now either wholly forgotten or only quoted as an example of an unconvincing and exploded metaphysic.

The correspondence took place during the last year of Butler's residence at Tewkesbury, and the same period was marked by a step which even more momentously affected his subsequent career. It was at this time that he resolved to quit the Presbyterian communion in which he had been brought up, and for the ministry of which he had hitherto been designed, and to become a member of the Chmch of England. What were the motives which induced him to make the change we have no direct knowledge. He is himself silent on this as on every other matter which relates merely to his own personal history. Seeker, when defending him after his death against the absurd charge of Eomanising which had been brought against him, assures us " that he had never been zealous in his noncomformity, but had from a boy occasionally conformed and attended the services of the Church of England." ^ The great importance which in several passages in his writings Butler attaches to the historical continuity of the Church, its unbroken life and tradition,2 shows that this aspect of the National Church must have appealed powerfully to his reason and imagination ; while, as he points out in another place,^ if it is easy to find objections to the system which the Church embodies, others equally great or even more formidable might be urged against the constitution of any of the existing Nonconformist sects. In truth, while these shared in the lethargy which had overtaken the Church, they were for the most part wanting in the learning and ability by which in that age the superior clergy of the Established Church were distinguished ; and the perpetual feuds which they waged with one another, and the tendency they exhibited to divide up into ever fresh sects, deprived them of the authority which the more powerful among them had at an earlier date commanded. But whatever the motives were which induced him to take the step, of one thing we may be certain, that it was not taken without careful and anxious consideration, and a judicial weighing of the

1 Seeker's article in tlie Gentleman's iVagarAne. ^Analogy, part ii. chap. i.

^Sermon for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, § 17.

arguments to l)e urged on either side. The whole east of Butler's own temper and character, anxious and careful even to excess, prechides any other supposition ; while the strenuousness of the opposition offered by his father, who is said even to have called in the assistance of the leading Presbyterian divines of the time to dissuade his son from the course he was meditating, would at least secure that the decision was taken neither hastily nor without due reflection.

When, however, the father found that his son's mind was fully made up on the matter he seems to have abandoned further resistance, and he allowed him to enter as a commoner at Oriel College, Oxford, on March 14, 1714 — a step taken with a view apparently to liis subsequent ordination. At Oriel Butler continued to reside till he took his B.A. degree four years later, October 18, 1718. Eespecting these years spent at Oxford we know, unfortunately, exceedingly little. The university at this time was a centre and hotbed of Jacobitism, — a cause with which, both by temperament and early training, Butler could liave had ])ut little sympathy. This fact, together with his naturally reserved and despondent temper, explains a certain distaste for Oxford which there is some evidence to show he entertained during his undergraduate days. Yet he was not withont friends, and deeply attached friends. One great intimacy we know him to heiye contracted, that with Edward Talbot, son of the Bishop of Sahsbury, a fellow of Oriel College, but also holding at that time the cure of the little village of West Hendred on the Berksliii-e Downs. By Edward Talbot, Butler seems to have been introduced to his father, from whom subsequently he received ordination; to his brother Charles, afterwards Lord Chancellor, to whom the Analogy was dedicated ; and to the excellent and amiable Martin Benson, student of Christ's Church, who remained his attached and lifelong friend. Of Benson, Bishop Porteous has preserved a charming portrait in his Life, of Arclbbifilwi) Seeker. " His purity," he writes, " though awfully strict, was inexpressibly amiable. It diffused such a sweetness through his temper and such a benevolence over his countenance as none, who were acquainted with him, can forget." Yet in spite of these friendships Butler, as we have already said, seems never to have grown heartily attached to Oxford. Indeed, from a letter written to Dr. Clarke, September 30, 1717, it appears that he even had thoughts of migrating to Cambridge, perhaps in order to be near to that distinguished man for whom he always entertained a sincere admiration. In the letter he consults Dr. Clarke on the choice of a tutor at Cambridge. The design, however, was from some cause or other abandoned, and Butler continued to reside at Oriel till he took his B.A. degree in the October of the following year.

A few days after taking his degree he was ordained deacon in the private chapel of the palace by his friend the Bishop of Salisbury, October 28, 1718 ; and received priest's orders from the same hands in St. James's, Westminster, on December 21st of the same year. His ordination as priest within a few months of his taking deacon's orders was probably connected with his appointment as preacher at the EoUs Chapel, which took place in this same autumn. This appointment, which he received from Sir George Jekyll, Master of the Eolls, he is said to have owed to the good offices of his friends, Bishop Talbot and his sons, and to the recommendation of his former correspondent. Dr. Clarke, now vicar of St. James's, Piccadilly. During the tenure of his preachership, — an office which he continued to hold for the next eight years, — Butler resided principally in London. When he arrived in town he found the so-called Bangorian controversy at its height. By some he has been credited with the authorship of an anonymous pamphlet written in support of Hoadly, the liberal Bishop of Bangor, who pleaded for the purely spiritual character of the Church, and for the exercise of toleration towards Dissenters. The external evidence, however, for connecting the pamphlet with Butler's name is extremely weak ; and at no period of his life does he seem to have had any relish for polemics and ecclesiastical controversy. We may therefore dismiss the suggestion as improbable. The sermons subsequently published (which he tells us ^ were a selection, taken more or less at random, from those preached in the EoUs Chapel during the course of the eight years for which he held the office of preacher) show that his mind was at this time mainly occupied, not with any passing topics of the day, but with the fundamental questions and problems of morals. Indeed, the air was at this time filled with such questions. Holjbes's works were probably still a powerful influence ; though the length to which Mandeville had pushed his principles (his Fable of the Bees had just appeared), and the conclusion he had drawn from them, " That private vices are public benefits," had served to alienate the sympathy of all right-thinking men from them, and even to shock the moral sense of the commmiity at large. Yet there was so much in Hobbes's writings which fell in with the professed selfishness and semi-avowed scepticism of the more refined and educated classes, that we find Butler selecting him as the most formidable exponent of the principles that he desired to impugn, and devoting some of his most telling pages to laying bare the fallacies and misrepresentations of human nature by which Hobbes's system was supported and vitiated.

Two other works on morals were at this time exciting much attention — Shaftesbury's Characteristics and ' Sermons, Preface.

Samuel Clarke's Discourses concerning the UnchangeaUe Obligations of Natural Religion and the Trutli and Certainty of the Christian Bevelation. The Characteristics had appeared only a few years previously ,i while Dr. Clarke's work was much in vogue, and rapidly passing through various editions. Shaftesbury, Butler mentions with approval in the Preface to his Sermons,^ but considers that he had not sufficiently vindicated the claim of " conscience " or " the moral sense," to speak with authority. Clarke's method he alludes to as the most " direct formal proof and, in some respects, the least liable to cavil and dispute," for treating questions of morals, though he prefers himself to adopt the humbler, but safer, method of a direct appeal to the facts of human nature. It is thus obvious that moral questions were, as the saying is, very much in the air ; and since Butler saw in our moral beliefs, rightly interpreted, the only sure foundation on which religious systems can rest, we need not wonder that he devoted his earliest literary effort to the adequate exposition and needful defence of our fundamental moral convictions.

Apart from the duties of his office as preacher at the Eolls, two matters of a more personal and private interest engaged much of Butler's thoughts during his residence in London. The first of these was the death, from smallpox, of his friend Edward Talbot, which took place two years after his first settlement there, in the course of the year 1720. Talbot is said to have commended on his deathbed his two friends Butler and Benson (with the latter of whom he was connected by marriage) to his father for promotion. In compliance with his son's dying wish. Bishop Talbot the next year conferred on Butler a prebendal stall in Salisbury Cathedral, a post which he continued to hold till ' 111 1711 A.D. - Sermons, Preface, § 7.

14 BISHOP BUTLEE: HIS LIFE AND WEITINGS appointed Bishop of Bristol. Shortly afterwards, on his promotion to the see of Durham, Bishop Talbot confen-ed on Benson a prebendal stall in his new cathedral.

The other matter which engaged Butler's attention was a correspondence which at this time he carried on with his friend Seeker on the subject of the latter taking orders in the Church of England. Seeker had, like Butler himself, been brought up a Dissenter, but had not seen his way to follow his friend when Butler had definitely joined the Church. Instead, he had determined to adopt the medical profession, and was at this time studying medicine in the schools of Paris. While here he was visited by Benson, then making a foreign tour, whom Butler had apparently furnished vnth a letter of introduction to his early friend. The joint influence of Benson and Butler availed to induce Seeker to take the step he had been long meditating, and definitely determine to join the ranks of the clergy of the Church of England. There is no reason to doubt that Seeker was actuated by conscientious motives in doing this, though his decision may have been quickened by a communication which Butler was authorised by Bishop Talbot to make to him, that should he see his way to becoming a clergyman the bishop would take care that he was not left unprovided for. Seeker tells us himself that he was largely determined to join the Church by the dissatisfaction he felt with the disorders and disturbances which at that time widely prevailed among the dissenting sects.^ As soon as he had made up his mind he hastened home and spent some years at Exeter College, Oxford, in taking his degree and preparing himself for the duties of his new calling. Soon after his ordination he married Catharine Benson, sister of Martin Benson, and cousin and intimate friend of ' Life, by Porteous.