But reading him at this stage with more care, I found in him, with pleasure and surprise, a view very similar to that which had developed itself in my own mind in struggling to assimilate Mill and Kant. I found he expressly admitted that “interest, my own happiness, is a manifest obligation,” and that “Reasonable Self-love” [is “one of the two chief or superior principles in the nature of man”]. That is, he recognised a “Dualism of the Governing Faculty”--or as I prefer to say “Dualism of the Practical Reason,” since the ‘authority’ on which Butler laid stress must present itself to my mind as the authority of reason, before I can admit it.
Of this more presently: what I now wish to make clear is that it was on this side--if I may so say--that I entered into Butler’s system and came under the influence of his powerful and cautious intellect. But the effect of his influence carried me a further step away from Mill: for I was led by it to abandon the doctrine of Psychological Hedonism, and to recognise the existence of ‘disinterested’ or ‘extra-regarding’ impulses to action, [impulses] not directed towards the agent’s pleasure [cf. chap. iv. of Book i. of _The Methods of Ethics_]. In fact as regards what I may call a Psychological basis of Ethics, I found myself much more in agreement with Butler than Mill.
And this led me to reconsider my relation to Intuitional Ethics. The strength and vehemence of Butler’s condemnation of pure Utilitarianism, in so cautious a writer, naturally impressed me much. And I had myself become, as I had to admit to myself, an Intuitionist to a certain extent. For the supreme rule of aiming at the general happiness, as I had come to see, must rest on a fundamental moral intuition, if I was to recognise it as binding at all. And in reading the writings of the earlier English Intuitionists, More and Clarke, I found the axiom I required for my Utilitarianism [That a rational agent is bound to aim at Universal Happiness], in one form or another, holding a prominent place (cf. _History of Ethics_, pp. 172, 181).
I had then, theoretically as well as practically, accepted this fundamental moral intuition; and there was also the Kantian principle, which I recognised as irresistibly valid, though not adequate to give complete guidance.--I was then an “intuitional” moralist to this extent: and if so, why not further? The orthodox moralists such as Whewell (then in vogue) said that there was a whole intelligible system of intuitions: but how were they to be learnt? I could not accept Butler’s view as to the sufficiency of a plain man’s conscience: for it appeared to me that plain men agreed rather verbally than really.