Main texts: The Analogy (1736); Of Personal Identity (1736); Of the Nature of Virtue (1736)

Introduction

The Analogy was published in London and Dublin in 1736 (Butler signed the work off with a short Advertisement dated May). A second, corrected, edition appeared in the same year. The book was considered important enough for Edward Bentham, a fellow and tutor at Oriel, immediately to set to work compiling an index of the first edition, which Butler amended and supplemented. Since Butler did not publish the index, it was presumably used by Bentham in his teaching then and (after Butler's death) when delivering an annual course of lectures as Regius Professor of Divinity, for which post he was sponsored by Secker. This suggests that The Analogy almost immediately became important in both systematic theology and apologetics.

The Analogy was dedicated to Charles Talbot, the elder brother of his dead friend Edward Talbot and the son of his patron William Talbot; Butler had been his chaplain since 1733. Like the Fifteen Sermons, it was published by the Knaptons, although by now the firm was diminishing as a force, deprived by death of its leading author, Samuel Clarke, and with others of its 1720s list also dead or inactive. Butler aside, its weightiest contribution in 1736 was Vincent Perronet's first Vindication of Mr. Locke, which defended Locke's epistemology, and its theological implications, from Peter Browne's Procedure, Extent, and Limits of Human Understanding (1728). Perronet demonstrates a knowledge of Berkeley's Alciphron and its critique of Browne's use of analogy and was to review Butler's Analogy in his Second Vindication of Mr. Locke (1738). The other early notice of The Analogy was by Thomas Bott, who had been a friend of Clarke's but whose Remarks upon Dr. Butler's Sixth Chapter of the Analogy of Religion, &c. Concerning Necessity; And also upon the Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue, London, J. Noon, 1737) is scarcely worth noticing. Bott attacks Butler from an extreme libertarian position, denouncing the lack of aggression against atheism but making few substantial criticisms.

Butler's full title is The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature. The book consists of a short Advertisement, a ten-page Introduction and two Parts, the first of seven chapters, the second of eight.