 As previously noted Butler discusses two other important constituents of human nature in addition to conscience and the particular passions: self-love and benevolence. Central to Butler’s analysis of self-love is his extremely influential dismissal of psychological egoism — in C. D. Broad’s words “he killed the theory so thoroughly that he sometimes seems to the modern reader to be flogging dead horses” (Broad 1930, 55; but see Penelhum 1985; Henson 1988; Sober 1992). For Butler, the kind of egoism exemplified for him by Hobbes — “the selfish theory” in eighteenth century parlance — rests on the failure to distinguish principles from passions. There is a trivial sense in which all of our passions are our own and the pleasure we have in discharging or pursuing any passion is “self” love. But it is also uninteresting: we can’t conclude much from the fact that every passion we take pleasure in is our passion. We certainly can’t conclude that human beings are always motivated by selfishness. That selfish theorists thought we could was due in part to their confusing the “ownership of an impulse with its object” (Broad 1930, 65)—the inference from that the passions are ours to that we are the objects of the passions. Although the passions belong to us it does not therefore follow that our “self”, or our self-gratification, is the object of the passion.