BOOKS.
THE FASCINATION IN BUTLER.*
[FIRST NOTICE ] THE present age will owe a great debt of gratitude to Mr. Gladstone if this vigorous and impressive, though not always equable, volume succeeds, as we believe it will, in bringing back the present generation to the study of the great mind which is usually regarded as having clothed itself in language so crabbed and so cumbrous as to repel rather than attract even eager students. But we believe that Mr. Gladstone has chosen a time which is better adapted to restore Butler to his great place in English philosophy and theology than any time during the present century. This age is an age of eager explorers, and Butler was an eager explorer. It is not only an age of eager explorers, but it is very specially an age of eager explorers into the constitution of the human mind. Look, for instance, at the popularity which Browning, with a style often twice as crabbed as Butler's, • studies Sul,sidiary to ft., Work, Eitt:er. By the Eight Hon. W. E.
Gladstone. Oxford: C at e:Aluu
and much more than twice as indifferent to lucidity,—for Butler is always lucid if you will take the pains to follow all the threads of his thought,—has acquired even in the region of poetry by his determination to find clues to the various labyrinths of human consciousness. And look again at the achievements of the "Society for Psychical Research" in confronting and investigating many of the most intricate problems of instinctive and subconscious re,asoning, and the eagerness with which its inquiries have been followed by a daily increasing number of interested though too often rash and superficial thinkers,—and it will be impossible to say that the present age is repelled by manifold difficulties and com- plexities, even if it is not, as we think it often is, attracted by puzzles. Mr. Gladstone is well justified in saying that in spite of Butler's severe attack on the imagination as "the author of all error," Butler had been himself "duly endowed with his share of this faculty ; " indeed we should have said with a double share, a share in degree and kind needful for every great explorer. There are two lines of Wordsworth's which seem to us exactly to express Butler's genius :—
"The intellectual power through words and things Goes sounding on its dim and perilous way."
Not Columbus, not Nausea, in the physical world, could be said to have had more imaginative grasp than Butler in the spiritual world, of the goal to which his explorations were leading him. "The mental habit which he forms in us," as Mr. Gladstone finely says, "is that mental habit which in all questions lying within the scope of Butler's arguments, suits and adapts itself with gradually increasing precision to the degree of evidence adapted to the subject-matter ; where that is much, thankfully rejoices in the abundance ; where it is scanty, recognises the positive duty of accepting the limitation ; backed by the consciousness that in each and every case it is sufficient." What does this "conscious- ness that in each and every case," even where the evidence is "scanty," "it is sufficient," mean, except that Butler was not a mere cautious investigator, but that he was a genuine explorer, with his whole mind so fixed on the one paint of light which he discerned in the distance, that even by " scanty " evidence he was led onwards, though he could not but admit that it was scanty ? We are inclined to think that Mr. Glad- stone attaches too much importance to Butler's principle that "probability is the guide of life." Butler laid great stress on the probabilities no doubt, because that was the only way to arrest the attention of a sceptical, and almost infidel, genera- tion. But it does not seem to us that any one can read Butler without feeling that his inner thought was dominated by some- thing much deeper than a probability, an inner certainty for which he himself could hardly assign any fully adequate reason. His whole mind was possessed by the genius of Christianity as he understood it. When Mr. Gladstone says, and truly says, that even when Butler found the evidence "scanty," there was at the back of his mind a deep conviction that it was "sufficient," he sees that Butler's conviction went far beyond the evidence he could produce, as did the mind of Columbus, as does the mind of Nansen. At the very bottom of his heart he felt that he was certain of the point to which his exploration was leading him. He did not say to himself that because he had found five good reasons on one side, and only three on the other, he was bound to act as if the five pointed to the truth, and the three to an error, though after all, considering the weakness and ignorance of man, the three might turn out to indicate the truth and the five an error. On the contrary, his whole mind was attuned to the belief that the five pointed to the truth, and that the three were misleading. As we have said, he had the mind of a great explorer, he knew what he was bound to find, though he had not to his own full satisfaction found it. Christianity had conquered his conscience and conscious- ness more completely than be knew. As Mr. Gladstone finely says in his chapter on "Probability as the Guide of Life" (p. 343),—" His [Butler's] habit was to encamp near to the region of practice in all his philosophical inquiries ; that he might appease, and thus gently reclaim, the con- temptuous infidelity of his age." But how could he have felt so sure, as he evidently did, that the infidelity of his age was infidelity, if he had really held that the men who treated Christianity as representing a probability of say five to three were to be held as Christians, while the men who treated unbelief as representing a possibility of only three to five were to be held as infidels? We quite agree that in practical life we have often to act without being at all certain that we may not be acting wrongly, though we are following what seems to us the best clue within our reach. But then in such cases we never think of trying to convert other people to our view, or of thinking of them as infidels because they do not accept it. On the contrary we say,—' They do not take our view of the probabilities of the case, but very possibly they may estimate the chances more accurately than we do, and be right while we are wrong.' But that is not Butler's attitude at all. It is quite true that he professes only to show his readers that there is a great deal more to be said for Chris- tianity than they had supposed,—in fact, that it is utterly irrational to treat Christian faith as if it were the dream of an obsolete school of thought. That is all he proposes to him- self to do. But as Mr. Gladstone justly says, he actually achieves a great deal more than this. On those who study him well, he may be said to impose his own faith almost as the prophets of Israel imposed their own faith on their poets and singers. The attitude of his mind has so much power to prepossess those who steep themselves in his thought, that it carries them a great deal further than the mere reasons and arguments which he presses could ever have carried them. In a sense, devoid of charm as Butler's, style is generally supposed to be, he fascinates his readers by his own faith. Indeed, we hold that Butler attached an exaggerated importance to explicit reasoning. There is often so much more in the passion that underlies an implicit faith than there is in the pleas advanced for an explicit faith, that it frequently supplements all formal argument by a magic of its own, and often, we believe, by a power as thoroughly founded on implicit reason as any of the arguments pro- ceeding out of explicit reasoning. Butler treated probability as the guide of life ; but by appeals to probability alone,. we believe that, though he accomplished much, he accom- plished much less than he did by impressing those who study him with the fast hold that his powerful and intense nature had taken of the great objects of faith,—divine pro- vidence and the mind of Jesus Christ. He steers his way through rocks and shoals and quicksanols, discovering them all, evading them all, and seems to 'follow steadily the guidance of an inner mind which is keener than his sight and subtler than his reasoning, so that even the anxious glances which he casts at all the formidable obstacles in the way of faith, rather add to, than detract from, the impression pro- duced, by the undismayed fixity of his mental attitude as he sounds along his dim and perilous way." The way is dim, and perilous, but the goal is clear and certain.
Cardinal Newman in his Apologia tells us that the attitude of many minds in this age of ours might apparently be reflected in the prayer, "Oh God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul." If we surrender ourselves absolutely to Butler's teaching on "Probability as the guide of lifer we should express his teaching as to the best prayer to breathe, in this fashion, Oh God, whose existence I believe to be much more probable than not, save my soul, if I have a soul, which also seems to me much more probable than not.' That would be Butler's explicit teaching, but that is not at all the total effect of Butler's moral and intellectual influence. Mostof his writings breathe the very spirit of his wonderful and touching sermon on the love of God. In other words, his mind is so arrested and penetrated by the vision of God and of Christ's revelation concerning God, that the array of difficulties and bewildermente with which the scepticism of the day filled his writings, serve only to enhance the effect of finding his strong and steadfast mind so fixed on the Christian faith, that it gives the colour to all his thoughts and phrases, even when he is only endeavouring' to explain painfully to his readers that they have no right to treat Christianity as if it were simply an exploded superstition. He was never tired of enlarging on human ignorance. He insisted that every extension of our know- ledge, "every opened secret, discovery, effect, convinces us of numberless more which remain concealed, and which we had before no suspicion of," but none the less amidst this wide realm of darkness, the depths of his faith grew pan i passu with his humility. Butler had not learned in his day how much of the best reasoning of the mind is implicit and not explicit, and therefore be could not realise how much more he would effect by the depth of conviction with which he regarded all
the moral aspects of the Christian revelation, than he effected even by the cogent and vivid analogies presented in the great book to the understanding of which Mr. Gladstone has given us so many effective aids.
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