I say to understand him, for hitherto I had misunderstood him, as I believe most people then misunderstood, and perhaps still misunderstand, him. He had been presented to me as an advocate of the authority of Conscience; and his argument, put summarily, seemed to be that because reflection on our impulses showed us Conscience claiming authority therefore we ought to obey it. Well, I had no doubt that my conscience claimed authority, though it was a more utilitarian conscience than Butler’s: for, through all this search for principles I still adhered for practical purposes to the doctrine I had learnt from Mill, _i.e._ I still held to the maxim of aiming at the general happiness as the supreme directive rule of conduct, and I thought I could answer the objections that Butler brought against this view (in the “Dissertation on Virtue” at the end of the _Analogy_). My difficulty was, as I have said, that this claim of conscience, whether utilitarian or not, had to be harmonised with the claim of Rational Self-love; and that I vaguely supposed Butler to avoid or override [the latter claim]. 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.