ve
but little influence on the present state of theology; it was not a book
for all time, but was limited to the problems of the period at which it
appeared.

Throughout the whole of the _Analogy_ it is manifest that the interest
which lay closest to Butler's heart was the ethical. His whole cast of
thinking was practical. The moral nature of man, his conduct in life, is
that on account of which alone an inquiry into religion is of importance.
The systematic account of this moral nature is to be found in the famous
_Sermons preached at the Chapel of the Rolls_, especially in the first
three. In these sermons Butler has made substantial contributions to
ethical science, and it may be said with confidence, that in their own
department nothing superior in value appeared during the long interval
between Aristotle and Kant. To both of these great thinkers he has certain
analogies. He resembles the first in his method of investigating the end
which human nature is intended to realize; he reminds of the other by the
consistency with which he upholds the absolute supremacy of moral law.

In his ethics, as in his theology, Butler had constantly in view a certain
class of adversaries, consisting partly of the philosophic few, partly of
the fashionably educated many, who all participated in one common mode of
thinking. The keynote of this tendency had been struck by Hobbes, in whose
philosophy man was regarded as a mere selfish sensitive machine, moved
solely by pleasures and pains. Cudworth and Clarke had tried to place
ethics on a nobler footing, but their speculations were too abstract for
Butler and not sufficiently "applicable to the several particular relations
and circumstances of life."

His inquiry is based on teleological principles. "Every work, both of
nature and art, is a system; and as every particular thing both natural and
artificial is for some use or purpose out of or beyond itself, one may add
to what has been already brought into the idea of a system its
conduciveness to this one or more ends." Ultimately this view of nature, as
the sphere of the realization of final causes, rests on a theological
basis; but Butler does not introduce prominently into his ethics the
specifically theological groundwork, and may be thought willing to ground
his principle on experience. The ethical question then is, as with
Aristotle, what is the [Greek: telos] of man? The answer to this question
is to be obtained by an analysis