GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

200 ETHICS
approve, if it "vetted" them. We should, that is to say,
habitually act from Self-love or from Benevolence or from
one of the particular impulses, but, Butler adds, in a
properly regulated nature such action would be in accordance
with the dictates of Conscience, should it be
called upon to judge them. A brief presentation of
Butler's scheme would, therefore! run as follows* The
particular in*p^f supply the raw materials of good and
evil; these raw materials are in the first instance organized
into what we know as character by cool Self-love and
Benevolence, and cool Self-love and Benevolence are
themselves supervised and regulated by Conscience. The
good man is not one who is constantly taking stock of his
actions and submitting them to the bar of moral enquiry,
with a view to determining whether the approved relation
between the impulses, the two principles and Conscience
has in fact been observed; he is one who habitually does
what is right, without stopping to think whether it is
tight or not. Conscience is, indeed, in him like the good
headmaster or business manager, who can absent himself
from his school or business in the reasonable assurance
that everything will go on in just the same way as it would
have done had he been present. Thus Butler would agree
with Aristotle that goodness of character is "a settled
condition of the soul 99 1
, which naturally and habitually
expresses itself in actions of a certain sort, these being
the actions of which Conscience would approve, even
though it is not actually called upon to deliver judgment.
In the second place, Butler does not, of course, maintain
that Conscience always is in control; all that he says is
that in a properly regulated nature it ought to be in
control, and that in any nature, however debased,
it is
always possible for it to assume control. Butler maintains,
in other words, that we are free, free, that is to say, to go
wrong, but also free, however much we may have gone
wrong, to recover our ground and begin to go right. He
sees in fact that morality depends upon the freedom of
1 See Chapter IV, p. 99.