The Note-Books of Samuel Butler / Butler, Samuel, 1835-1902

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Title: The Note-Books of Samuel Butler

Author: Samuel Butler

Release Date: July, 2004  [EBook #6173]
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[This file was first posted on November 21, 2002]

Edition: 10

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE NOTE-BOOKS OF SAMUEL BUTLER ***




Transcribed from the 1912 A. C. Fifield edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk




THE NOTE-BOOKS OF SAMUEL BUTLER




PREFACE



Early in his life Samuel Butler began to carry a note-book and to
write down in it anything he wanted to remember; it might be
something he heard some one say, more commonly it was something he
said himself.  In one of these notes he gives a reason for making
them:

"One's thoughts fly so fast that one must shoot them; it is no use
trying to put salt on their tails."

So he bagged as many as he could hit and preserved them, re-written
on loose sheets of paper which constituted a sort of museum stored
with the wise, beautiful, and strange creatures that were continually
winging their way across the field of his vision.  As he became a
more expert marksman his collection increased and his museum grew so
crowded that he wanted a catalogue.  In 1874 he started an index, and
this led to his reconsidering the notes, destroying those that he
remembered having used in his published books and re-writing the
remainder.  The re-writing shortened some but it lengthened others
and suggested so many new ones that the index was soon of little use
and there seemed to be no finality about it ("Making Notes," pp. 100-
1 post).  In 1891 he attached the problem afresh and made it a rule
to spend an hour every morning re-editing his notes and keeping his
index up to date.  At his death, in 1902, he left five bound volumes,
with the contents dated and indexed, about 225 pages of closely
written sermon paper to each volume, and more than enough unbound and
unindexed sheets to made a sixth volume of equal size.

In accordance with his own advice to a young writer (p. 363 post), he
wrote the notes in copying ink and kept a pressed copy with me as a
precaution against fire; but during his lifetime, unless he wanted to
refer to something while he was in my chambers, I never looked at
them.  After his death I took them down and went through them.  I
knew in a general way what I should find, but I was not prepared for
such a multitude and variety of thoughts, reflections, conversations,
incidents.  There are entries about his early life at Langar, Handel,
school days at Shrewsbury, Cambridge, Christianity, literature, New
Zealand, sheep-farming, philosophy, painting, money, evolution,
morality, Italy, speculation, photography, music, natural history,
archaeology, botany, religion, book-keeping, psychology, metaphysics,
the Iliad, the Odyssey, Sicily, architecture, ethics, the Sonnets of
Shakespeare.  I thought of publishing the books just as they stand,
but too many of the entries are of no general interest and too many
are of a kind that must wait if they are ever to be published.  In
addition to these objections the confusion is very great.  One would
look in the earlier volumes for entries about New Zealand and
evolution and in the later ones for entries about the Odyssey and the
Sonnets, but there is no attempt at arrangement and anywhere one may
come upon something about Handel, or a philosophical reflection,
between a note giving the name of the best hotel in an Italian town
and another about Harry Nicholls and Herbert Campbell as the Babes in
the Wood in the pantomime at the Grecian Theatre.  This confusion has
a charm, but it is a charm that would not, I fear, survive in print
and, personally, I find that it makes the books distracting for
continuous reading.  Moreover they were not intended to be published
as they stand ("Preface to Vol.  II," p. 215 post), they were
intended for his own private use as a quarry from which to take
material for his writing, and it is remarkable that in practice he
scarcely ever used them in this way ("These Notes," p. 261 post).
When he had written and re-written a note and spoken it and repeated
it in conversation, it became so much a part of him that, if he
wanted to introduce it in a book, it was less trouble to re-state it
again from memory than to search through his "precious indexes" for
it and copy it ("Gadshill and Trapani," p. 194, "At Piora," p. 272
post).  But he could not have re-stated a note from memory if he had
not learnt it by writing it, so that it may be said that he did use
the notes for his books, though not precisely in the way he
originally intended.  And the constant re-writing and re-considering
were useful also by forcing him to settle exactly what he thought and
to state it as clearly and tersely as possible.  In this way the
making of the notes must have had an influence on the formation of
his style--though here again he had no such idea in his mind when
writing them ("Style," pp. 186-7 post)

In one of the notes he says:

"A man may make, as it were, cash entries of himself in a day-book,
but the entries in the ledger and the balancing of the accounts
should be done by others."

When I began to write the Memoir of Butler on which I am still
engaged, I marked all the more autobiographical notes and had them
copied; again I was struck by the interest, the variety, and the
confusion of those I left untouched.  It seemed to me that any one
who undertook to become Butler's accountant and to post his entries
upon himself would have to settle first how many and what accounts to
open in the ledger, and this could not be done until it had been
settled which items were to be selected for posting.  It was the
difficulty of those who dare not go into the water until after they
have learnt to swim.  I doubt whether I should ever have made the
plunge if it had not been for the interest which Mr. Desmond
MacCarthy took in Butler and his writings.  He had occasionally
browsed on my copy of the books, and when he became editor of a
review, the New Quarterly, he asked for some of the notes for
publication, thus providing a practical and simple way of entering
upon the business without any very alarming plunge.  I talked his
proposal over with Mr. R. A. Streatfeild, Butler's literary executor,
and, having obtained his approval, set to work.  From November 1907
to May 1910, inclusive, the New Quarterly published six groups of
notes and the long note on "Genius" (pp. 174-8 post).  The experience
gained in selecting, arranging, and editing these items has been of
great use to me and I thank the proprietor and editor of the New
Quarterly for permission to republish such of the notes as appeared
in their review.

In preparing this book I began by going through the notes again and
marking all that seemed to fall within certain groups roughly
indicated by the arrangement in the review.  I had these selected
items copied, distributed them among those which were already in
print, shuffled them and turned them over, meditating on them,
familiarising myself with them and tentatively forming new groups.
While doing this I was continually gleaning from the books more notes
which I had overlooked, and making such verbal alterations as seemed
necessary to avoid repetition, to correct obvious errors and to
remove causes of reasonable offence.  The ease with which two or more
notes would condense into one was sometimes surprising, but there
were cases in which the language had to be varied and others in which
a few words had to be added to bridge over a gap; as a rule, however,
the necessary words were lying ready in some other note.  I also
reconsidered the titles and provided titles for many notes which had
none.  In making these verbal alterations I bore in mind Butler's own
views on the subject which I found in a note about editing letters:

"Granted that an editor, like a translator, should keep as
religiously close to the original text as he reasonably can, and, in
every alteration, should consider what the writer would have wished
and done if he or she could have been consulted, yet, subject to
these limitations, he should be free to alter according to his
discretion or indiscretion."

My "discretion or indiscretion" was less seriously strained in making
textual changes than in determining how many, and what, groups to
have and which notes, in what order, to include in each group.  Here
is a note Butler made about classification:

"Fighting about words is like fighting about accounts, and all
classification is like accounts.  Sometimes it is easy to see which
way the balance of convenience lies, sometimes it is very hard to
know whether an item should be carried to one account or to another."

Except in the group headed "Higgledy-Piggledy," I have endeavoured to
post each note to a suitable account, but some of Butler's leading
ideas, expressed in different forms, will be found posted to more
than one account, and this kind of repetition is in accordance with
his habit in conversation.  It would probably be correct to say that
I have heard him speak the substance of every note many times in
different contexts.  In seeking for the most characteristic context,
I have shifted and shifted the notes and considered and re-considered
them under different aspects, taking hints from the delicate
chameleon changes of significance that came over them as they
harmonised or discorded with their new surroundings.  Presently I
caught myself restoring notes to positions they had previously
occupied instead of finding new places for them, and the increasing
frequency with which difficulties were solved by these restorations
at last forced me to the conclusion, which I accepted only with very
great regret, that my labours were at an end.

I do not expect every one to approve of the result.  If I had been
trying to please every one, I should have made only a very short and
unrepresentative selection which Mr. Fifield would have refused to
publish.  I have tried to make suck a book as I believe would have
pleased Butler.  That is to say, I have tried to please one who, by
reason of his intimate knowledge of the subject and of the
difficulties, would have looked with indulgence upon the many
mistakes which it is now too late to correct, even if knew how to
correct them.  Had it been possible for him to see what I have done,
he would have detected all my sins, both of omission and of
commission, and I like to imagine that he would have used some such
consoling words as these:  "Well, never mind; one cannot have
everything; and, after all, 'Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.'"

Here will be found much of what he used to say as he talked with one
or two intimate friends in his own chambers or in mine at the close
of the day, or on a Sunday walk in the country round London, or as we
wandered together through Italy and Sicily; and I would it were
possible to charge these pages with some echo of his voice and with
some reflection of his manner.  But, again; one cannot have
everything.


"Men's work we have," quoth one, "but we want them -
Them palpable to touch and clear to view."
Is it so nothing, then, to have the gem
But we must cry to have the setting too?


In the New Quarterly each note was headed with a reference to its
place in the Note-Books.  This has not been done here because, on
consideration, it seemed useless, and even irritating, to keep on
putting before the reader references which he could not verify.  I
intend to give to the British Museum a copy of this volume wherein
each note will show where the material of which it is composed can be
found; thus, if the original Note-Books are also some day given to
the Museum, any one sufficiently interested will be able to see
exactly what I have done in selecting, omitting, editing, condensing
and classifying.

Some items are included that are not actually in the Note-Books; the
longest of these are the two New Zealand articles "Darwin among the
Machines" and "Lucubratio Ebria" as to which something is said in the
Prefatory Note to "The Germs of Erewhon and of Life and Habit" (pp.
39-42 post).  In that Prefatory Note a Dialogue on Species by Butler
and an autograph letter from Charles Darwin are mentioned.  Since the
note was in type I have received from New Zealand a copy of the
Weekly Press of 19th June, 1912, containing the Dialogue again
reprinted and a facsimile reproduction of Darwin's letter.  I thank
Mr. W. H. Triggs, the present editor of the Press, Christchurch, New
Zealand, also Miss Colborne-Veel and the members of the staff for
their industry and perseverance in searching for and identifying
Butler's early contributions to the newspaper.

The other principal items not actually in the Note-Books, the letter
to T. W. G. Butler (pp. 53-5 post), "A Psalm of Montreal" (pp. 388-9
post) and "The Righteous Man" (pp. 390-1 post).  I suppose Butler
kept all these out of his notes because he considered that they had
served their purpose; but they have not hitherto appeared in a form
now accessible to the general reader.

All the footnotes are mine and so are all those prefatory notes which
are printed in italics and the explanatory remarks in square brackets
which occur occasionally in the text.  I have also preserved, in
square brackets, the date of a note when anything seemed to turn on
it.  And I have made the index.

The Biographical Statement is founded on a skeleton Diary which is in
the Note-Books.  It is intended to show, among other things, how
intimately the great variety of subjects touched upon in the notes
entered into and formed part of Butler's working life.  It does not
stop at the 18th of June, 1902, because, as he says (p. 23 post),
"Death is not more the end of some than it is the beginning of
others"; and, again (p. 13 post), for those who come to the true
birth the life we live beyond the grave is our truest life.  The
Biographical Statement has accordingly been carried on to the present
time so as to include the principal events that have occurred during
the opening period of the "good average three-score years and ten of
immortality" which he modestly hoped he might inherit in the life of
the world to come.

HENRY FESTING JONES.
Mount Eryx,
Trapani, Sicily,
August, 1912.



BIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT



1835.  Dec. 4.  Samuel Butler born at Langar Rectory, Nottingham, son
of the Rev. Thomas Butler, who was the son of Dr. Samuel Butler,
Headmaster of Shrewsbury School from 1798 to 1836, and afterwards
Bishop of Lichfield.

1843-4.  Spent the winter in Rome and Naples with his family.

1846.  Went to school at Allesley, near Coventry.

1848.  Went to school at Shrewsbury under Dr. Kennedy.

Went to Italy for the second time with his family.

First heard the music of Handel.

1854.  Entered at St. John's College, Cambridge.

1858.  Bracketed 12th in the first class of the Classical Tripos and
took his degree.

Went to London and began to prepare for ordination, living among the
poor and doing parish work:  this led to his doubting the efficacy of
infant baptism and hence to his declining to take orders.

1859.  Sailed for New Zealand and started sheep-farming in Canterbury
Province:  while in the colony he wrote much for the Press of
Christchurch, N.Z.

1862.  Dec. 20.  "Darwin on The Origin of Species.  A Dialogue,"
unsigned but written by Butler, appeared in the Press and was
followed by correspondence to which Butler contributed.

1863.  A First Year in Canterbury Settlement:  made out of his
letters home to his family together with two articles reprinted from
the Eagle (the magazine of St. John's College, Cambridge):  MS. lost.

1863.  "Darwin among the Machines," a letter signed "Cellarius"
written by Butler, appeared in the Press.

1864.  Sold out his sheep run and returned to England in company with
Charles Paine Pauli, whose acquaintance he had made in the colony.
He brought back enough to enable him to live quietly, settled for
good at 15 Clifford's Inn, London, and began life as a painter,
studying at Cary's, Heatherley's and the South Kensington Art Schools
and exhibiting pictures occasionally at the Royal Academy and other
exhibitions:  while studying art he made the acquaintance of, among
others, Charles Gogin, William Ballard and Thomas William Gale
Butler.

"Family Prayers":  a small painting by Butler.

1865.  "Lucubratio Ebria," an article, containing variations of the
view in "Darwin among the Machines," sent by Butler from England,
appeared in the Press.

The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as contained in the
Four Evangelists critically examined:  a pamphlet of VIII+48 pp.
written in New Zealand:  the conclusion arrived at is that the
evidence is insufficient to support the belief that Christ died and
rose from the dead:  MS. lost, probably used up in writing The Fair
Haven.

1869-70.  Was in Italy for four months, his health having broken down
in consequence of over-work.

1870 or 1871.  First meeting with Miss Eliza Mary Ann Savage, from
whom he drew Alethea in The Way of All Flesh.

1872.  Erewhon or Over the Range:  a Work of Satire and Imagination:
MS. in the British Museum.

1873.  Erewhon translated into Dutch.

The Fair Haven:  an ironical work, purporting to be "in defence of
the miraculous element in our Lord's ministry upon earth, both as
against rationalistic impugners and certain orthodox defenders,"
written under the pseudonym of John Pickard Owen with a memoir of the
supposed author by his brother William Bickersteth Owen.  This book
reproduces--the substance of his pamphlet on the resurrection:  MS.
at Christchurch, New Zealand.

1874.  "Mr. Heatherley's Holiday," his most important oil painting,
exhibited at the Royal Academy Exhibition, now in the National
Gallery of British Art.

1876.  Having invested his money in various companies that failed,
one of which had its works in Canada, and having spent much time
during the last few years in that country, trying unsuccessfully to
save part of his capital, he now returned to London, and during the
next ten years experienced serious financial difficulties.

First meeting with Henry Festing Jones.

1877.  Life and Habit:  an Essay after a Completer View of Evolution:
dedicated to Charles Paine Pauli:  although dated 1878 the book was
published on Butler's birthday, 4th December, 1877:  MS. at the
Schools, Shrewsbury.

1878.  "A Psalm of Montreal" in the Spectator:  There are probably
many MSS. of this poem in existence given by Butler to friends:  one,
which he gave to H. F. Jones, is in the Fitzwilliam Museum,
Cambridge.

A Portrait of Butler, painted in this year by himself, now at St.
John's College, Cambridge.

1879.  Evolution Old and New:  A comparison of the theories of
Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck with that of Charles Darwin:
MS. in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

A Clergyman's Doubts and God the Known and God the Unknown appeared
in the Examiner:  MS. lost.

Erewhon translated into German.

1880.  Unconscious Memory:  A comparison between the theory of Dr.
Ewald Hering, Professor of Physiology in the University of Prague,
and the Philosophy of the Unconscious of Dr. Edward von Hartmann,
with translations from both these authors and preliminary chapters
bearing upon Life and Habit, Evolution Old and New, and Charles
Darwin's Edition of Dr. Krause's Erasmus Darwin.

A Portrait of Butler, painted in this year by himself, now at the
Schools, Shrewsbury.  A third portrait of Butler, painted by himself
about this time, is at Christchurch, New Zealand.

1881.  A property at Shrewsbury, in which under his grandfather's
will he had a reversionary interest contingent on his surviving his
father, was re-settled so as to make his reversion absolute:  he
mortgaged this reversion and bought small property near London:  this
temporarily alleviated his financial embarrassment but added to his
work, for he spent much time in the management of the houses, learnt
book-keeping by double-entry and kept elaborate accounts.

Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino illustrated by
the author, Charles Gogin and Henry Festing Jones:  an account of his
holiday travels with dissertations on most of the subjects that
interested him:  MS. with H. F. Jones.

1882.  A new edition of Evolution Old and New, with a short preface
alluding to the recent death of Charles Darwin, an appendix and an
index.

1883.  Began to compose music as nearly as he could in the style of
Handel.

1884.  Selections from Previous Works with "A Psalm of Montreal" and
"Remarks on G. J. Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals."

1885.  Death of Miss Savage.

Gavottes, Minuets, Fugues and other short pieces for the piano by
Samuel Butler and Henry Festing Jones:  MS. with H. F. Jones.

1886.  Holbein's La Danse:  a note on a drawing in the Museum at
Basel.

Stood, unsuccessfully, for the Professorship of Fine Arts in the
University of Cambridge.

Dec. 29.  Death of his father and end of his financial
embarrassments.

1887.  Engaged Alfred Emery Cathie as clerk and general attendant.

Luck or Cunning as the main means of Organic Modification?  An
attempt to throw additional light upon Charles Darwin's theory of
Natural Selection.

Was entertained at dinner by the Municipio of Varallo-Sesia on the
Sacro Monte.

1888.  Took up photography.

1888.  Ex Voto:  an account of the Sacro Monte or New Jerusalem at
Varallo-Sesia, with some notice of Tabachetti's remaining work at
Crea and illustrations from photographs by the author:  MS. at
Varallo-Sesia.

Narcissus:  a Cantata in the Handelian form, words and music by
Samuel Butler and Henry Festing Jones:  MS. of the piano score in the
British Museum.  MS. of the orchestral score with H. F. Jones.

In this and the two following years contributed some articles to the
Universal Review, most of which were republished after his death as
Essays on Life, Art, and Science (1904).

1890.  Began to study counterpoint with William Smith Rockstro and
continued to do so until Rockstro's death in 1895.

1892.  The Humour of Homer.  A Lecture delivered at the Working Men's
College, Great Ormond Street, London, January 30, 1892, reprinted
with preface and additional matter from the Eagle.

Went to Sicily, the first of many visits, to collect evidence in
support of his theory identifying the Scheria and Ithaca of the
Odyssey with Trapani and the neighbouring Mount Eryx.

1893.  "L'Origine Siciliana dell' Odissea."  Extracted from the
Rassegna della Letteratura Siciliana.

"On the Trapanese Origin of the Odyssey" (Translation).

1894.  Ex Voto translated into Italian by Cavaliere Angelo Rizzetti.

"Ancora sull' origine dell' Odissea."  Extracted from the Rassegna
della Letteratura Siciliana.

1895.  Went to Greece and the Troad to make up his mind about the
topography of the Iliad.

1896.  The Life and Letters of Dr. Samuel Butler (his grandfather) in
so far as they illustrate the scholastic, religious and social life
of England from 1790-1840:  MS. at the Shrewsbury Town Library or
Museum.

His portrait painted by Charles Gogin, now in the National Portrait
Gallery.

1897.  The Authoress of the Odyssey, where and when she wrote, who
she was, the use she made of the Iliad and how the poem grew under
her hands:  MS. at Trapani.

1897.  Death of Charles Paine Pauli.

1898.  The Iliad rendered into English prose:  MS. at St. John's
College, Cambridge.

1899.  Shakespeare's Sonnets reconsidered and in part rearranged,
with introductory chapters, notes and a reprint of the original 1609
edition:  MS. with R. A. Streatfeild.

1900.  The Odyssey rendered into English prose:  MS. at Aci-Reale,
Sicily.

1901.  Erewhon Revisited twenty years later both by the Original
Discoverer of the Country and by his Son:  this was a return not only
to Erewhon but also to the subject of the pamphlet on the
resurrection.  MS. in the British Museum.

1902.  June, 18.  Death of Samuel Butler.


1902.  "Samuel Butler," an article by Richard Alexander Streatfeild
in the Monthly Review (September).

"Samuel Butler," an obituary notice by Henry Festing Jones in the
Eagle (December).

1903.  Samuel Butler Records and Memorials, a collection of obituary
notices with a note by R. A. Streatfeild, his literary executor,
printed for private circulation:  with reproduction of a photograph
of Butler taken at Varallo in 1889.

The Way of All Flesh, a novel, written between 1872 and 1885,
published by R. A. Streatfeild:  MS. with Mr. R. A. Streatfeild.

1904.  Seven Sonnets and A Psalm of Montreal printed for private
circulation.

Essays on Life, Art and Science, being reprints of his Universal
Review articles, together with two lectures.

Ulysses, an Oratorio:  Words and music by Samuel Butler and Henry
Festing Jones:  MS. of the piano score in the British Museum, MS. of
the orchestral score with H. F. Jones.

"The Author of Erewhon," an article by Desmond MacCarthy in the
Independent Review (September).

1904.  Diary of a Journey through North Italy to Sicily (in the
spring of 1903, undertaken for the purpose of leaving the MSS. of
three books by Samuel Butler at Varallo-Sesia, Aci-Reale and Trapani)
by Henry Festing Jones, with reproduction of Gogin's portrait of
Butler.  Printed for private circulation.

1907.  Nov.  Between this date and May, 1910, some Extracts from The
Note-Books of Samuel Butler appeared in the New Quarterly Review
under the editorship of Desmond MacCarthy.

1908.  July 16.  The first Erewhon dinner at Pagani's Restaurant,
Great Portland Street; 32 persons present:  the day was fixed by
Professor Marcus Hartog.

Second Edition of The Way of All Flesh.

1909.  God the Known and God the Unknown republished in book form
from the Examiner (1879) by A. C. Fifield, with prefatory note by R.
A. Streatfeild.

July 15.  The second Erewhon dinner at Pagani's; 53 present:  the day
was fixed by Mr. George Bernard Shaw.

1910.  Feb. 10.  Samuel Butler Author of Erewhon, a Paper read before
the British Association of Homoeopathy at 43 Russell Square, W.C., by
Henry Festing Jones.  Some of Butler's music was performed by Miss
Grainger Kerr, Mr. R. A. Streatfeild, Mr. J. A. Fuller Maitland and
Mr. H. J. T. Wood, the Secretary of the Association.

June.  Unconscious Memory, a new edition entirely reset with a note
by R. A. Streatfeild and an introduction by Professor Marcus Hartog,
M.A., D.Sc., F.L.S., F.R. H.S., Professor of Zoology in University
College, Cork.

July 14.  The third Erewhon dinner at Pagani's Restaurant; 58
present:  the day was fixed by the Right Honourable Augustine
Birrell, K.C., M.P.

Nov. 16.  Samuel Butler Author of Erewhon.  A paper read before the
Historical Society of St. John's College, Cambridge, in the
Combination-room of the college, by Henry Festing Jones.  The Master
(Mr. R. F. Scott), who was also Vice-Chancellor of the University,
was in the chair and a Vote of Thanks was proposed by Professor
Bateson, F.R.S.

1910.  Nov. 28.  Life and Habit, a new edition with a preface by R.
A. Streatfeild and author's addenda, being three pages containing
passages which Butler had cut out of the original book or had
intended to insert in a future edition.

1911.  May 25.  The jubilee number of the Press, New Zealand,
contained an account of Butler's connection with the newspaper and
reprinted "Darwin among the Machines" and "Lucubratio Ebria."

July 15.  The fourth Erewhon dinner at Pagani's Restaurant; 75
present:  the day was fixed by Sir William Phipson Beale, Bart.,
K.C., M.P.

Nov.  Charles Darwin and Samuel Butler:  A Step towards
Reconciliation, by Henry Festing Jones.  A pamphlet giving the
substance of a correspondence between Mr. Francis Darwin and the
author and reproducing letters by Charles Darwin about the quarrel
between himself and Butler referred to in Chapter IV of Unconscious
Memory.

Evolution Old and New, a reprint of the second edition (1882) with
prefatory note by R. A. Streatfeild.

1912.  June 1.  Letter from Henry Festing Jones in the Press,
Christchurch, New Zealand, about Butler's Dialogue, which had
appeared originally in the Press December 20, 1862, and could not be
found.

June 8.  "Darwin on the Origin of Species.  A Dialogue "discovered in
consequence of the foregoing letter and reprinted in the Press.

June 15.  The Press reprinted some of the correspondence, etc. which
followed on the original appearance of the Dialogue.

Some of Butler's water-colour drawings having been given to the
British Museum, two were included in an exhibition held there during
the summer.

July 12.  The Fifth Erewhon Dinner at Pagani's Restaurant; 90
present; the day was fixed by Mr. Edmund Gosse, C.B., LL.D.



I--LORD, WHAT IS MAN?



Man


i

We are like billiard balls in a game played by unskilful players,
continually being nearly sent into a pocket, but hardly ever getting
right into one, except by a fluke.

ii

We are like thistle-down blown about by the wind--up and down, here
and there--but not one in a thousand ever getting beyond seed-hood.

iii

A man is a passing mood coming and going in the mind of his country;
he is the twitching of a nerve, a smile, a frown, a thought of shame
or honour, as it may happen.

iv

How loosely our thoughts must hang together when the whiff of a
smell, a band playing in the street, a face seen in the fire, or on
the gnarled stem of a tree, will lead them into such vagaries at a
moment's warning.

v

When I was a boy at school at Shrewsbury, old Mrs. Brown used to keep
a tray of spoiled tarts which she sold cheaper.  They most of them
looked pretty right till you handled them.  We are all spoiled tarts.

vi

He is a poor creature who does not believe himself to be better than
the whole world else.  No matter how ill we may be, or how low we may
have fallen, we would not change identity with any other person.
Hence our self-conceit sustains and always must sustain us till death
takes us and our conceit together so that we need no more sustaining.

vii

Man must always be a consuming fire or be consumed.  As for hell, we
are in a burning fiery furnace all our lives--for what is life but a
process of combustion?


Life


i

We have got into life by stealth and petitio principii, by the free
use of that contradiction in terms which we declare to be the most
outrageous violation of our reason.  We have wriggled into it by
holding that everything is both one and many, both infinite in time
and space and yet finite, both like and unlike to the same thing,
both itself and not itself, both free and yet inexorably fettered,
both every adjective in the dictionary and at the same time the flat
contradiction of every one of them.

ii

The beginning of life is the beginning of an illusion to the effect
that there is such a thing as free will and that there is such
another thing as necessity--the recognition of the fact that there is
an "I can" and an "I cannot," an "I may" and an "I must."

iii

Life is not so much a riddle to be read as a Gordian knot that will
get cut sooner or later.

iv

Life is the distribution of an error--or errors.

v

Murray (the publisher) said that my Life of Dr. Butler was an omnium
gatherum.  Yes, but life is an omnium gatherum.

vi

Life is a superstition.  But superstitions are not without their
value.  The snail's shell is a superstition, slugs have no shells and
thrive just as well.  But a snail without a shell would not be a slug
unless it had also the slug's indifference to a shell.

vii

Life is one long process of getting tired.

viii

My days run through me as water through a sieve.

ix

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient
premises.

x

Life is eight parts cards and two parts play, the unseen world is
made manifest to us in the play.

xi

Lizards generally seem to have lost their tails by the time they
reach middle life.  So have most men.

xii

A sense of humour keen enough to show a man his own absurdities, as
well as those of other people, will keep him from the commission of
all sins, or nearly all, save those that are worth committing.

xiii

Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct,
not by rule.  Nevertheless one had better know the rules, for they
sometimes guide in doubtful cases--though not often.

xiv

There are two great rules of life, the one general and the other
particular.  The first is that every one can, in the end, get what he
wants if he only tries.  This is the general rule.  The particular
rule is that every individual is, more or less, an exception to the
general rule.

xv

Nature is essentially mean, mediocre.  You can have schemes for
raising the level of this mean, but not for making every one two
inches taller than his neighbour, and this is what people really care
about.

xvi

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of
every organism to live beyond its income.


The World


i

The world is a gambling-table so arranged that all who enter the
casino must play and all must lose more or less heavily in the long
run, though they win occasionally by the way.

ii

We play out our days as we play out cards, taking them as they come,
not knowing what they will be, hoping for a lucky card and sometimes
getting one, often getting just the wrong one.

iii

The world may not be particularly wise--still, we know of nothing
wiser.

iv

The world will always be governed by self-interest.  We should not
try to stop this, we should try to make the self-interest of cads a
little more coincident with that of decent people.


The Individual and the World


There is an eternal antagonism of interest between the individual and
the world at large.  The individual will not so much care how much he
may suffer in this world provided he can live in men's good thoughts
long after he has left it.  The world at large does not so much care
how much suffering the individual may either endure or cause in this
life, provided he will take himself clean away out of men's thoughts,
whether for good or ill, when he has left it.


My Life


i

I imagine that life can give nothing much better or much worse than
what I have myself experienced.  I should say I had proved pretty
well the extremes of mental pleasure and pain; and so I believe each
in his own way does, almost every man.

ii

I have squandered my life as a schoolboy squanders a tip.  But then
half, or more than half the fun a schoolboy gets out of a tip
consists in the mere fact of having something to squander.
Squandering is in itself delightful, and so I found it with my life
in my younger days.  I do not squander it now, but I am not sorry
that I have squandered a good deal of it.  What a heap of rubbish
there would have been if I had not!  Had I not better set about
squandering what is left of it?


The Life we Live in Others


A man should spend his life or, rather, does spend his life in being
born.  His life is his birth throes.  But most men miscarry and never
come to the true birth at all and some live but a very short time in
a very little world and none are eternal.  Still, the life we live
beyond the grave is our truest life, and our happiest, for we pass it
in the profoundest sleep as though we were children in our cradles.
If we are wronged it hurts us not; if we wrong others, we do not
suffer for it; and when we die, as even the Handels and Bellinis and
Shakespeares sooner or later do, we die easily, know neither fear nor
pain and live anew in the lives of those who have been begotten of
our work and who have for the time come up in our room.

An immortal like Shakespeare knows nothing of his own immortality
about which we are so keenly conscious.  As he knows nothing of it
when it is in its highest vitality, centuries, it may be, after his
apparent death, so it is best and happiest if during his bodily life
he should think little or nothing about it and perhaps hardly suspect
that he will live after his death at all.

And yet I do not know--I could not keep myself going at all if I did
not believe that I was likely to inherit a good average three-score
years and ten of immortality.  There are very few workers who are not
sustained by this belief, or at least hope, but it may well be
doubted whether this is not a sign that they are not going to be
immortal--and I am content (or try to be) to fare as my neighbours.


The World Made to Enjoy


When we grumble about the vanity of all human things, inasmuch as
even the noblest works are not eternal but must become sooner or
later as though they had never been, we should remember that the
world, so far as we can see, was made to enjoy rather than to last.
Come-and-go pervades everything of which we have knowledge, and
though great things go more slowly, they are built up of small ones
and must fare as that which makes them.

Are we to have our enjoyment of Handel and Shakespeare weakened
because a day will come when there will be no more of either Handel
or Shakespeare nor yet of ears to hear them?  Is it not enough that
they should stir such countless multitudes so profoundly and kindle
such intense and affectionate admiration for so many ages as they
have done and probably will continue to do?  The life of a great
thing may be so long as practically to come to immortality even now,
but that is not the point.  The point is that if anything was aimed
at at all when things began to shape or to be shaped, it seems to
have been a short life and a merry one, with an extension of time in
certain favoured cases, rather than a permanency even of the very
best and noblest.  And, when one comes to think of it, death and
birth are so closely correlated that one could not destroy either
without destroying the other at the same time.  It is extinction that
makes creation possible.

If, however, any work is to have long life it is not enough that it
should be good of its kind.  Many ephemeral things are perfect in
their way.  It must be of a durable kind as well.


Living in Others


We had better live in others as much as we can if only because we
thus live more in the race, which God really does seem to care about
a good deal, and less in the individual, to whom, so far as I can
see, he is indifferent.  After we are dead it matters not to the life
we have led in ourselves what people may say of us, but it matters
much to the life we lead in others and this should be our true life.


Karma


When I am inclined to complain about having worked so many years and
taken nothing but debt, though I feel the want of money so
continually (much more, doubtless, than I ought to feel it), let me
remember that I come in free, gratis, to the work of hundreds and
thousands of better men than myself who often were much worse paid
than I have been.  If a man's true self is his karma--the life which
his work lives but which he knows very little about and by which he
takes nothing--let him remember at least that he can enjoy the karma
of others, and this about squares the account--or rather far more
than squares it.  [1883.]


Birth and Death


i

They are functions one of the other and if you get rid of one you
must get rid of the other also.  There is birth in death and death in
birth.  We are always dying and being born again.

ii

Life is the gathering of waves to a head, at death they break into a
million fragments each one of which, however, is absorbed at once
into the sea of life and helps to form a later generation which comes
rolling on till it too breaks.

iii

What happens to you when you die?  But what happens to you when you
are born?  In the one case we are born and in the other we die, but
it is not possible to get much further.

iv

We commonly know that we are going to die though we do not know that
we are going to be born.  But are we sure this is so?  We may have
had the most gloomy forebodings on this head and forgotten all about
them.  At any rate we know no more about the very end of our lives
than about the very beginning.  We come up unconsciously, and go down
unconsciously; and we rarely see either birth or death.  We see
people, as consciousness, between the two extremes.


Reproduction


Its base must be looked for not in the desire of the parents to
reproduce but in the discontent of the germs with their surroundings
inside those parents, and a desire on their part to have a separate
maintenance. {16} [1880.]


Thinking almost Identically


The ova, spermatozoa and embryos not only of all human races but of
all things that live, whether animal or vegetable, think little, but
that little almost identically on every subject.  That "almost" is
the little rift within the lute which by and by will give such
different character to the music.  [1889.]


Is Life Worth Living?


This is a question for an embryo, not for a man.  [1883.]


Evacuations


There is a resemblance, greater or less, between the pleasure we
derive from all the evacuations.  I believe that in all cases the
pleasure arises from rest--rest, that is to say, from the
considerable, though in most cases unconscious labour of retaining
that which it is a relief to us to be rid of.

In ordinary cases the effort whereby we retain those things that we
would get rid of is unperceived by the central government, being, I
suppose, departmentally made; we--as distinguished from the
subordinate personalities of which we are composed--know nothing
about it, though the subordinates in question doubtless do.  But when
the desirability of removing is abnormally great, we know about the
effort of retaining perfectly well, and the gradual increase in our
perception of the effort suggests strongly that there has been effort
all the time, descending to conscious and great through unconscious
and normal from unconscious and hardly any at all.  The relaxation of
this effort is what causes the sense of refreshment that follows all
healthy discharges.

All our limbs and sensual organs, in fact our whole body and life,
are but an accretion round and a fostering of the spermatozoa.  They
are the real "He."  A man's eyes, ears, tongue, nose, legs and arms
are but so many organs and tools that minister to the protection,
education, increased intelligence and multiplication of the
spermatozoa; so that our whole life is in reality a series of complex
efforts in respect of these, conscious or unconscious according to
their comparative commonness.  They are the central fact in our
existence, the point towards which all effort is directed.
Relaxation of effort here, therefore, is the most complete and
comprehensive of all relaxations and, as such, the supreme
gratification--the most complete rest we can have, short of sleep and
death.


Man and His Organism


i

Man is but a perambulating tool-box and workshop, or office,
fashioned for itself by a piece of very clever slime, as the result
of long experience; and truth is but its own most enlarged, general
and enduring sense of the coming togetherness or convenience of the
various conventional arrangements which, for some reason or other, it
has been led to sanction.  Hence we speak of man's body as his
"trunk."

ii

The body is but a pair of pincers set over a bellows and a stewpan
and the whole fixed upon stilts.

iii

A man should see himself as a kind of tool-box; this is simple
enough; the difficulty is that it is the tools themselves that make
and work the tools.  The skill which now guides our organs and us in
arts and inventions was at one time exercised upon the invention of
these very organs themselves.  Tentative bankruptcy acts afford good
illustrations of the manner in which organisms have been developed.
The ligaments which bind the tendons of our feet or the valves of our
blood vessels are the ingenious enterprises of individual cells who
saw a want, felt that they could supply it, and have thus won
themselves a position among the old aristocracy of the body politic.

The most incorporate tool--as an eye or a tooth or the fist, when a
blow is struck with it--has still something of the non-ego about it;
and in like manner such a tool as a locomotive engine, apparently
entirely separated from the body, must still from time to time, as it
were, kiss the soil of the human body and be handled, and thus become
incorporate with man, if it is to remain in working order.


Tools


A tool is anything whatsoever which is used by an intelligent being
for realising its object.  The idea of a desired end is inseparable
from a tool.  The very essence of a tool is the being an instrument
for the achievement of a purpose.  We say that a man is the tool of
another, meaning that he is being used for the furtherance of that
other's ends, and this constitutes him a machine in use.  Therefore
the word "tool" implies also the existence of a living, intelligent
being capable of desiring the end for which the tool is used, for
this is involved in the idea of a desired end.  And as few tools grow
naturally fit for use (for even a stick or a fuller's teasel must be
cut from their places and modified to some extent before they can be
called tools), the word "tool" implies not only a purpose and a
purposer, but a purposer who can see in what manner his purpose can
be achieved, and who can contrive (or find ready-made and fetch and
employ) the tool which shall achieve it.

Strictly speaking, nothing is a tool unless during actual use.
Nevertheless, if a thing has been made for the express purpose of
being used as a tool it is commonly called a tool, whether it is in
actual use or no.  Thus hammers, chisels, etc., are called tools,
though lying idle in a tool-box.  What is meant is that, though not
actually being used as instruments at the present moment, they bear
the impress of their object, and are so often in use that we may
speak of them as though they always were so.  Strictly, a thing is a
tool or not a tool just as it may happen to be in use or not.  Thus a
stone may be picked up and used to hammer a nail with, but the stone
is not a tool until picked up with an eye to use; it is a tool as
soon as this happens, and, if thrown away immediately the nail has
been driven home, the stone is a tool no longer.  We see, therefore,
matter alternating between a toolish or organic state and an
untoolish or inorganic.  Where there is intention it is organic,
where there is no intention it is inorganic.  Perhaps, however, the
word "tool" should cover also the remains of a tool so long as there
are manifest signs that the object was a tool once.

The simplest tool I can think of is a piece of gravel used for making
a road.  Nothing is done to it, it owes its being a tool simply to
the fact that it subserves a purpose.  A broken piece of granite used
for macadamising a road is a more complex instrument, about the
toolishness of which no doubt can be entertained.  It will, however,
I think, be held that even a piece of gravel found in situ and left
there untouched, provided it is so left because it was deemed
suitable for a road which was designed to pass over the spot, would
become a tool in virtue of the recognition of its utility, while a
similar piece of gravel a yard off on either side the proposed road
would not be a tool.

The essence of a tool, therefore, lies in something outside the tool
itself.  It is not in the head of the hammer, nor in the handle, nor
in the combination of the two that the essence of mechanical
characteristics exists, but in the recognition of its utility and in
the forces directed through it in virtue of this recognition.  This
appears more plainly when we reflect that a very complex machine, if
intended for use by children whose aim is not serious, ceases to rank
in our minds as a tool, and becomes a toy.  It is seriousness of aim
and recognition of suitability for the achievement of that aim, and
not anything in the tool itself, that makes the tool.

The goodness or badness, again, of a tool depends not upon anything
within the tool as regarded without relation to the user, but upon
the ease or difficulty experienced by the person using it in
comparison with what he or others of average capacity would
experience if they had used a tool of a different kind.  Thus the
same tool may be good for one man and bad for another.

It seems to me that all tools resolve themselves into the hammer and
the lever, and that the lever is only an inverted hammer, or the
hammer only an inverted lever, whichever one wills; so that all the
problems of mechanics are present to us in the simple stone which may
be used as a hammer, or in the stick that may be used as a lever, as
much as in the most complicated machine.  These are the primordial
cells of mechanics.  And an organ is only another name for a tool.


Organs and Makeshifts


I have gone out sketching and forgotten my water-dipper; among my
traps I always find something that will do, for example, the top of
my tin case (for holding pencils).  This is how organs come to change
their uses and hence their forms, or at any rate partly how.


Joining and Disjoining


These are the essence of change.

One of the earliest notes I made, when I began to make notes at all,
I found not long ago in an old book, since destroyed, which I had in
New Zealand.  It was to the effect that all things are either of the
nature of a piece of string or a knife.  That is, they are either for
bringing and keeping things together, or for sending and keeping them
apart.  Nevertheless each kind contains a little of its opposite and
some, as the railway train and the hedge, combine many examples of
both.  Thus the train, on the whole, is used for bringing things
together, but it is also used for sending them apart, and its
divisions into classes are alike for separating and keeping together.
The hedge is also both for joining things (as a flock of sheep) and
for disjoining (as for keeping the sheep from getting into corn).
These are the more immediate ends.  The ulterior ends, both of train
and hedge, so far as we are concerned, and so far as anything can
have an end, are the bringing or helping to bring meat or dairy
produce into contact with man's inside, or wool on to his back, or
that he may go in comfort somewhere to converse with people and join
his soul on to theirs, or please himself by getting something to come
within the range of his senses or imagination.

A piece of string is a thing that, in the main, makes for
togetheriness; whereas a knife is, in the main, a thing that makes
for splitty-uppiness; still, there is an odour of togetheriness
hanging about a knife also, for it tends to bring potatoes into a
man's stomach.

In high philosophy one should never look at a knife without
considering it also as a piece of string, nor at a piece of string
without considering it also as a knife.


Cotton Factories


Surely the work done by the body is, in one way, more its true life
than its limbs and organisation are.  Which is the more true life of
a great cotton factory--the bales of goods which it turns out for the
world's wearing or the machinery whereby its ends are achieved?  The
manufacture is only possible by reason of the machinery; it is
produced by this.  The machinery only exists in virtue of its being
capable of producing the manufacture; it is produced for this.  The
machinery represents the work done by the factory that turned it out.

Somehow or other when we think of a factory we think rather of the
fabric and mechanism than of the work, and so we think of a man's
life and living body as constituting himself rather than of the work
that the life and living body turn out.  The instinct being as strong
as it is, I suppose it sound, but it seems as though the life should
be held to be quite as much in the work itself as in the tools that
produce it--and perhaps more.


Our Trivial Bodies


i

Though we think so much of our body, it is in reality a small part of
us.  Before birth we get together our tools, in life we use them, and
thus fashion our true life which consists not in our tools and tool-
box but in the work we have done with our tools.  It is Handel's
work, not the body with which he did the work, that pulls us half
over London.  There is not an action of a muscle in a horse's leg
upon a winter's night as it drags a carriage to the Albert Hall but
is in connection with, and part outcome of, the force generated when
Handel sat in his room at Gopsall and wrote the Messiah.  Think of
all the forces which that force has controlled, and think, also, how
small was the amount of molecular disturbance from which it
proceeded.  It is as though we saw a conflagration which a spark had
kindled.  This is the true Handel, who is a more living power among
us one hundred and twenty-two years after his death than during the
time he was amongst us in the body.

ii

The whole life of some people is a kind of partial death--a long,
lingering death-bed, so to speak, of stagnation and nonentity on
which death is but the seal, or solemn signing, as the abnegation of
all further act and deed on the part of the signer.  Death robs these
people of even that little strength which they appeared to have and
gives them nothing but repose.

On others, again, death confers a more living kind of life than they
can ever possibly have enjoyed while to those about them they seemed
to be alive.  Look at Shakespeare; can he be properly said to have
lived in anything like his real life till a hundred years or so after
his death?  His physical life was but as a dawn preceding the sunrise
of that life of the world to come which he was to enjoy hereafter.
True, there was a little stir--a little abiding of shepherds in the
fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night--a little buzzing in
knots of men waiting to be hired before the daybreak--a little
stealthy movement as of a burglar or two here and there--an
inchoation of life.  But the true life of the man was after death and
not before it.

Death is not more the end of some than it is the beginning of others.
So he that loses his soul may find it, and he that finds may lose it.



II--ELEMENTARY MORALITY



The Foundations of Morality


i

These are like all other foundations; if you dig too much about them
the superstructure will come tumbling down.

ii

The foundations which we would dig about and find are within us, like
the Kingdom of Heaven, rather than without.

iii

To attempt to get at the foundations is to try to recover
consciousness about things that have passed into the unconscious
stage; it is pretty sure to disturb and derange those who try it on
too much.


Counsels of Imperfection


It is all very well for mischievous writers to maintain that we
cannot serve God and Mammon.  Granted that it is not easy, but
nothing that is worth doing ever is easy.  Easy or difficult,
possible or impossible, not only has the thing got to be done, but it
is exactly in doing it that the whole duty of man consists.  And when
the righteous man turneth away from his righteousness that he hath
committed and doeth that which is neither quite lawful nor quite
right, he will generally be found to have gained in amiability what
he has lost in holiness.

If there are two worlds at all (and that there are I have no doubt)
it stands to reason that we ought to make the best of both of them,
and more particularly of the one with which we are most immediately
concerned.  It is as immoral to be too good as to be too anything
else.  The Christian morality is just as immoral as any other.  It is
at once very moral and very immoral.  How often do we not see
children ruined through the virtues, real or supposed, of their
parents?  Truly he visiteth the virtues of the fathers upon the
children unto the third and fourth generation.  The most that can be
said for virtue is that there is a considerable balance in its
favour, and that it is a good deal better to be for it than against
it; but it lets people in very badly sometimes.

If you wish to understand virtue you must be sub-vicious; for the
really virtuous man, who is fully under grace, will be virtuous
unconsciously and will know nothing about it.  Unless a man is out-
and-out virtuous he is sub-vicious.

Virtue is, as it were, the repose of sleep or death.  Vice is the
awakening to the knowledge of good and evil--without which there is
no life worthy of the name.  Sleep is, in a way, a happier, more
peaceful state than waking and, in a way, death may be said to be
better than life, but it is in a very small way.  We feel such talk
to be blasphemy against good life and, whatever we may say in death's
favour, so long as we do not blow our brains out we show that we do
not mean to be taken seriously.  To know good, other than as a heavy
sleeper, we must know vice also.  There cannot, as Bacon said, be a
"Hold fast that which is good" without a "Prove all things" going
before it.  There is no knowledge of good without a knowledge of evil
also, and this is why all nations have devils as well as gods, and
regard them with sneaking kindness.  God without the devil is dead,
being alone.


Lucifer


We call him at once the Angel of Light and the Angel of Darkness:  is
this because we instinctively feel that no one can know much till he
has sinned much--or because we feel that extremes meet, or how?


The Oracle in Erewhon


The answer given by the oracle was originally written concerning any
vice--say drunkenness, but it applies to many another--and I wrote
not "sins" but "knows":  {26}

He who knows aught
Knows more than he ought;
But he who knows nought
Has much to be taught.


God's Laws


The true laws of God are the laws of our own well-being.


Physical Excellence


The question whether such and such a course of conduct does or does
not do physical harm is the safest test by which to try the question
whether it is moral or no.  If it does no harm to the body we ought
to be very chary of calling it immoral, while if it tends towards
physical excellence there should be no hesitation in calling it
moral.  In the case of those who are not forced to over-work
themselves--and there are many who work themselves to death from mere
inability to restrain the passion for work, which masters them as the
craving for drink masters a drunkard--over-work in these cases is as
immoral as over-eating or drinking.  This, so far as the individual
is concerned.  With regard to the body politic as a whole, it is, no
doubt, well that there should be some men and women so built that
they cannot be stopped from working themselves to death, just as it
is unquestionably well that there should be some who cannot be
stopped from drinking themselves to death, if only that they may keep
the horror of the habit well in evidence.


Intellectual Self-Indulgence


Intellectual over-indulgence is the most gratuitous and disgraceful
form which excess can take, nor is there any the consequences of
which are more disastrous.


Dodging Fatigue


When fatigued, I find it rests me to write very slowly with attention
to the formation of each letter.  I am often thus able to go on when
I could not otherwise do so.


Vice and Virtue


i

Virtue is something which it would be impossible to over-rate if it
had not been over-rated.  The world can ill spare any vice which has
obtained long and largely among civilised people.  Such a vice must
have some good along with its deformities.  The question "How, if
every one were to do so and so?" may be met with another "How, if no
one were to do it?"  We are a body corporate as well as a collection
of individuals.

As a matter of private policy I doubt whether the moderately vicious
are more unhappy than the moderately virtuous; "Very vicious" is
certainly less happy than "Tolerably virtuous," but this is about
all.  What pass muster as the extremes of virtue probably make people
quite as unhappy as extremes of vice do.

The truest virtue has ever inclined toward excess rather than
asceticism; that she should do this is reasonable as well as
observable, for virtue should be as nice a calculator of chances as
other people and will make due allowance for the chance of not being
found out.  Virtue knows that it is impossible to get on without
compromise, and tunes herself, as it were, a trifle sharp to allow
for an inevitable fall in playing.  So the Psalmist says, "If thou,
Lord, wilt be extreme to mark what is done amiss:  O Lord who may
abide it?" and by this he admits that the highest conceivable form of
virtue still leaves room for some compromise with vice.  So again
Shakespeare writes, "They say, best men are moulded out of faults;
And, for the most, become much more the better For being a little
bad."

ii

The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable; absolute virtue
is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the
dullnesses of it and the pomposities of it.

iii

God does not intend people, and does not like people, to be too good.
He likes them neither too good nor too bad, but a little too bad is
more venial with him than a little too good.

iv

As there is less difference than we generally think between the
happiness of men who seem to differ widely in fortune, so is there
also less between their moral natures; the best are not so much
better than the worst, nor the worst so much below the best as we
suppose; and the bad are just as important an element in the general
progress as the good, or perhaps more so.  It is in strife that life
lies, and were there no opposing forces there would be neither moral
nor immoral, neither victory nor defeat.

v

If virtue had everything her own way she would be as insufferable as
dominant factions generally are.  It is the function of vice to keep
virtue within reasonable bounds.

vi

Virtue has never yet been adequately represented by any who have had
any claim to be considered virtuous.  It is the sub-vicious who best
understand virtue.  Let the virtuous people stick to describing vice-
-which they can do well enough.


My Virtuous Life


I have led a more virtuous life than I intended, or thought I was
leading.  When I was young I thought I was vicious:  now I know that
I was not and that my unconscious knowledge was sounder than my
conscious.  I regret some things that I have done, but not many.  I
regret that so many should think I did much which I never did, and
should know of what I did in so garbled and distorted a fashion as to
have done me much mischief.  But if things were known as they
actually happened, I believe I should have less to be ashamed of than
a good many of my neighbours--and less also to be proud of.


Sin


Sin is like a mountain with two aspects according to whether it is
viewed before or after it has been reached:  yet both aspects are
real.


Morality


turns on whether the pleasure precedes or follows the pain.  Thus, it
is immoral to get drunk because the headache comes after the
drinking, but if the headache came first, and the drunkenness
afterwards, it would be moral to get drunk.


Change and Immorality


Every discovery and, indeed, every change of any sort is immoral, as
tending to unsettle men's minds, and hence their custom and hence
their morals, which are the net residuum of their "mores" or customs.
Wherefrom it should follow that there is nothing so absolutely moral
as stagnation, except for this that, if perfect, it would destroy all
mores whatever.  So there must always be an immorality in morality
and, in like manner, a morality in immorality.  For there will be an
element of habitual and legitimate custom even in the most unhabitual
and detestable things that can be done at all.


Cannibalism


Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of
one's peers.  Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country.


Abnormal Developments


If a man can get no other food it is more natural for him to kill
another man and eat him than to starve.  Our horror is rather at the
circumstances that make it natural for the man to do this than at the
man himself.  So with other things the desire for which is inherited
through countless ancestors, it is more natural for men to obtain the
nearest thing they can to these, even by the most abnormal means if
the ordinary channels are closed, than to forego them altogether.
The abnormal growth should be regarded as disease but, nevertheless,
as showing more health and vigour than no growth at all would do.  I
said this in Life and Habit (ch. iii. p. 52) when I wrote "it is more
righteous in a man that he should eat strange food and that his cheek
so much as lank not, than that he should starve if the strange food
be at his command." {30}


Young People


With regard to sexual matters, the best opinion of our best medical
men, the practice of those nations which have proved most vigorous
and comely, the evils that have followed this or that, the good that
has attended upon the other should be ascertained by men who, being
neither moral nor immoral and not caring two straws what the
conclusion arrived at might be, should desire only to get hold of the
best available information.  The result should be written down with
some fulness and put before the young of both sexes as soon as they
are old enough to understand such matters at all.  There should be no
mystery or reserve.  None but the corrupt will wish to corrupt facts;
honest people will accept them eagerly, whatever they may prove to
be, and will convey them to others as accurately as they can.  On
what pretext therefore can it be well that knowledge should be
withheld from the universal gaze upon a matter of such universal
interest?  It cannot be pretended that there is nothing to be known
on these matters beyond what unaided boys and girls can be left
without risk to find out for themselves.  Not one in a hundred who
remembers his own boyhood will say this.  How, then, are they
excusable who have the care of young people and yet leave a matter of
such vital importance so almost absolutely to take care of itself,
although they well know how common error is, how easy to fall into
and how disastrous in its effects both upon the individual and the
race?

Next to sexual matters there are none upon which there is such
complete reserve between parents and children as on those connected
with money.  The father keeps his affairs as closely as he can to
himself and is most jealous of letting his children into a knowledge
of how he manages his money.  His children are like monks in a
monastery as regards money and he calls this training them up with
the strictest regard to principle.  Nevertheless he thinks himself
ill-used if his son, on entering life, falls a victim to designing
persons whose knowledge of how money is made and lost is greater than
his own.


The Family


i

I believe that more unhappiness comes from this source than from any
other--I mean from the attempt to prolong family connection unduly
and to make people hang together artificially who would never
naturally do so.  The mischief among the lower classes is not so
great, but among the middle and upper classes it is killing a large
number daily.  And the old people do not really like it much better
than the young.

ii

On my way down to Shrewsbury some time since I read the Bishop of
Carlisle's Walks in the Regions of Science and Faith, {31} then just
published, and found the following on p. 129 in the essay which is
entitled "Man's Place in Nature."  After saying that young sparrows
or robins soon lose sight of their fellow-nestlings and leave off
caring for them, the bishop continues:-

"Whereas 'children of one family' are constantly found joined
together by a love which only grows with years, and they part for
their posts of duty in the world with the hope of having joyful
meetings from time to time, and of meeting in a higher world when
their life on earth is finished."

I am sure my great-grandfather did not look forward to meeting his
father in heaven--his father had cut him out of his will; nor can I
credit my grandfather with any great longing to rejoin my great-
grandfather--a worthy man enough, but one with whom nothing ever
prospered.  I am certain my father, after he was 40, did not wish to
see my grandfather any more--indeed, long before reaching that age he
had decided that Dr. Butler's life should not be written, though R.
W. Evans would have been only too glad to write it.  Speaking for
myself, I have no wish to see my father again, and I think it likely
that the Bishop of Carlisle would not be more eager to see his than I
mine.


Unconscious Humour


"Writing to the Hon. Mrs. Watson in 1856, Charles Dickens says:  'I
have always observed within my experience that THE MEN WHO HAVE LEFT
HOME VERY YOUNG have, MANY LONG YEARS AFTERWARDS, had the tenderest
regard for it.  That's a pleasant thing to think of as one of the
wise adjustments of this life of ours.'" {32a}


Homer's Odyssey


From the description of the meeting between Ulysses and Telemachus it
is plain that Homer considered it quite as dreadful for relations who
had long been separated to come together again as for them to
separate in the first instance.  And this is about true. {32b}


Melchisedec


He was a really happy man.  He was without father, without mother and
without descent.  He was an incarnate bachelor.  He was a born
orphan.


Bacon for Breakfast


Now [1893] when I am abroad, being older and taking less exercise, I
do not want any breakfast beyond coffee and bread and butter, but
when this note was written [1880] I liked a modest rasher of bacon in
addition, and used to notice the jealous indignation with which heads
of families who enjoyed the privilege of Cephas and the brethren of
our Lord regarded it.  There were they with three or four elderly
unmarried daughters as well as old mamma--how could they afford
bacon?  And there was I, a selfish bachelor--.  The appetising,
savoury smell of my rasher seemed to drive them mad.  I used to feel
very uncomfortable, very small and quite aware how low it was of me
to have bacon for breakfast and no daughters instead of daughters and
no bacon.  But when I consulted the oracles of heaven about it, I was
always told to stick to my bacon and not to make a fool of myself.  I
despised myself but have not withered under my own contempt so
completely as I ought to have done.


God and Man


To love God is to have good health, good looks, good sense,
experience, a kindly nature and a fair balance of cash in hand.  "We
know that all things work together for good to them that love God."
To be loved by God is the same as to love Him.  We love Him because
He first loved us.


The Homeric Deity and the Pall Mall Gazette


A writer in the Pall Mall Gazette (I think in 1874 or 1875, and in
the autumn months, but I cannot now remember) summed up Homer's
conception of a god as that of a "superlatively strong, amorous,
beautiful, brave and cunning man."  This is pretty much what a good
working god ought to be, but he should also be kind and have a strong
sense of humour, together with a contempt for the vices of meanness
and for the meannesses of virtue.  After saying what I have quoted
above the writer in the Pall Mall Gazette goes on, "An impartial
critic can judge for himself how far, if at all, this is elevated
above the level of mere fetish worship."  Perhaps it is that I am not
an impartial critic, but, if I am allowed to be so, I should say that
the elevation above mere fetish worship was very considerable.


Good Breeding the Summum Bonum


When people ask what faith we would substitute for that which we
would destroy, we answer that we destroy no faith and need substitute
none.  We hold the glory of God to be the summum bonum, and so do
Christians generally.  It is on the question of what is the glory of
God that we join issue.  We say it varies with the varying phases of
God as made manifest in his works, but that, so far as we are
ourselves concerned, the glory of God is best advanced by advancing
that of man.  If asked what is the glory of man we answer "Good
breeding"--using the words in their double sense and meaning both the
continuance of the race and that grace of manner which the words are
more commonly taken to signify.  The double sense of the words is all
the more significant for the unconsciousness with which it is passed
over.


Advice to the Young


You will sometimes find your elders laying their heads together and
saying what a bad thing it is for young men to come into a little
money--that those always do best who have no expectancy, and the
like.  They will then quote some drivel from one of the Kingsleys
about the deadening effect an income of 300 pounds a year will have
upon a man.  Avoid any one whom you may hear talk in this way.  The
fault lies not with the legacy (which would certainly be better if
there were more of it) but with those who have so mismanaged our
education that we go in even greater danger of losing the money than
other people are.


Religion


Is there any religion whose followers can be pointed to as distinctly
more amiable and trustworthy than those of any other?  If so, this
should be enough.  I find the nicest and best people generally
profess no religion at all, but are ready to like the best men of all
religions.


Heaven and Hell


Heaven is the work of the best and kindest men and women.  Hell is
the work of prigs, pedants and professional truth-tellers.  The world
is an attempt to make the best of both.


Priggishness


The essence of priggishness is setting up to be better than one's
neighbour.  Better may mean more virtuous, more clever, more
agreeable or what not.  The worst of it is that one cannot do
anything outside eating one's dinner or taking a walk without setting
up to know more than one's neighbours.  It was this that made me say
in Life and Habit [close of ch. ii.] that I was among the damned in
that I wrote at all.  So I am; and I am often very sorry that I was
never able to reach those more saintly classes who do not set up as
instructors of other people.  But one must take one's lot.


Lohengrin


He was a prig.  In the bedroom scene with Elsa he should have said
that her question put him rather up a tree but that, as she wanted to
know who he was, he would tell her and would let the Holy Grail
slide.


Swells


People ask complainingly what swells have done, or do, for society
that they should be able to live without working.  The good swell is
the creature towards which all nature has been groaning and
travailing together until now.  He is an ideal.  He shows what may be
done in the way of good breeding, health, looks, temper and fortune.
He realises men's dreams of themselves, at any rate vicariously.  He
preaches the gospel of grace.  The world is like a spoilt child, it
has this good thing given it at great expense and then says it is
useless!


Science and Religion


These are reconciled in amiable and sensible people but nowhere else.


Gentleman


If we are asked what is the most essential characteristic that
underlies this word, the word itself will guide us to gentleness, to
absence of such things as brow-beating, overbearing manners and fuss,
and generally to consideration for other people.


The Finest Men


I suppose an Italian peasant or a Breton, Norman or English
fisherman, is about the best thing nature does in the way of men--the
richer and the poorer being alike mistakes.


On being a Swell all Round


I have never in my life succeeded in being this.  Sometimes I get a
new suit and am tidy for a while in part, meanwhile the hat, tie,
boots, gloves and underclothing all clamour for attention and, before
I have got them well in hand, the new suit has lost its freshness.
Still, if ever I do get any money, I will try and make myself really
spruce all round till I find out, as I probably shall in about a
week, that if I give my clothes an inch they will take an ell.
[1880.]


Money


is the last enemy that shall never be subdued.  While there is flesh
there is money--or the want of money; but money is always on the
brain so long as there is a brain in reasonable order.


A Luxurious Death


Death in anything like luxury is one of the most expensive things a
man can indulge himself in.  It costs a lot of money to die
comfortably, unless one goes off pretty quickly.


Money, Health and Reputation


Money, if it live at all, that is to say if it be reproductive and
put out at any interest, however low, is mortal and doomed to be lost
one day, though it may go on living through many generations of one
single family if it be taken care of.  No man is absolutely safe.  It
may be said to any man, "Thou fool, this night thy money shall be
required of thee."  And reputation is like money:  it may be required
of us without warning.  The little unsuspected evil on which we trip
may swell up in a moment and prove to be the huge, Janus-like
mountain of unpardonable sin.  And his health may be required of any
fool, any night or any day.

A man will feel loss of money more keenly than loss of bodily health,
so long as he can keep his money.  Take his money away and deprive
him of the means of earning any more, and his health will soon break
up; but leave him his money and, even though his health breaks up and
he dies, he does not mind it so much as we think.  Money losses are
the worst, loss of health is next worst and loss of reputation comes
in a bad third.  All other things are amusements provided money,
health and good name are untouched.


Solicitors


A man must not think he can save himself the trouble of being a
sensible man and a gentleman by going to his solicitor, any more than
he can get himself a sound constitution by going to his doctor; but a
solicitor can do more to keep a tolerably well-meaning fool straight
than a doctor can do for an invalid.  Money is to the solicitor what
souls are to the parson or life to the physician.  He is our money-
doctor.


Doctors


Going to your doctor is having such a row with your cells that you
refer them to your solicitor.  Sometimes you, as it were, strike
against them and stop their food, when they go on strike against
yourself.  Sometimes you file a bill in Chancery against them and go
to bed.


Priests


We may find an argument in favour of priests if we consider whether
man is capable of doing for himself in respect of his moral and
spiritual welfare (than which nothing can be more difficult and
intricate) what it is so clearly better for him to leave to
professional advisers in the case of his money and his body which are
comparatively simple and unimportant.



III--THE GERMS OF EREWHON AND OF LIFE AND HABIT



Prefatory Note


The Origin of Species was published in the autumn of 1859, and Butler
arrived in New Zealand about the same time and read the book soon
afterwards.  In 1880 he wrote in Unconscious Memory (close of Chapter
1):  "As a member of the general public, at that time residing
eighteen miles from the nearest human habitation, and three days'
journey on horseback from a bookseller's shop, I became one of Mr.
Darwin's many enthusiastic admirers, and wrote a philosophic dialogue
(the most offensive form, except poetry and books of travel into
supposed unknown countries, that even literature can assume) upon the
Origin of Species.  This production appeared in the Press,
Canterbury, New Zealand, in 1861 or 1862, but I have long lost the
only copy I had."

The Press was founded by James Edward FitzGerald, the first
Superintendent of the Province of Canterbury.  Butler was an intimate
friend of FitzGerald, was closely associated with the newspaper and
frequently wrote for it.  The first number appeared 25th May, 1861,
and on 25th May, 1911, the Press celebrated its jubilee with a number
which contained particulars of its early life, of its editors, and of
Butler; it also contained reprints of two of Butler's contributions,
viz. Darwin among the Machines, which originally appeared in its
columns 13 June, 1863, and Lucubratio Ebria, which originally
appeared 29 July, 1865.  The Dialogue was not reprinted because,
although the editor knew of its existence and searched for it, he
could not find it.  At my request, after the appearance of the
jubilee number, a further search was made, but the Dialogue was not
found and I gave it up for lost.

In March, 1912, Mr. R. A. Streatfeild pointed out to me that Mr.
Tregaskis, in Holborn, was advertising for sale an autograph letter
by Charles Darwin sending to an unknown editor a Dialogue on Species
from a New Zealand newspaper, described in the letter as being
"remarkable from its spirit and from giving so clear and accurate a
view of Mr. D.'s theory."  Having no doubt that this referred to
Butler's lost contribution to the Press, I bought the autograph
letter and sent it to New Zealand, where it now is in the Canterbury
Museum, Christchurch.  With it I sent a letter to the editor of the
Press, giving all further information in my possession about the
Dialogue.  This letter, which appeared 1 June, 1912, together with
the presentation of Darwin's autograph, stimulated further search,
and in the issue for 20th December, 1862, the Dialogue was found by
Miss Colborne-Veel, whose father was editor of the paper at the time
Butler was writing for it.  The Press reprinted the Dialogue 8th
June, 1912.

When the Dialogue first appeared it excited a great deal of
discussion in the colony and, to quote Butler's words in a letter to
Darwin (1865), "called forth a contemptuous rejoinder from (I
believe) the Bishop of Wellington."  This rejoinder was an article
headed "Barrel-Organs," the idea being that there was nothing new in
Darwin's book, it was only a grinding out of old tunes with which we
were all familiar.  Butler alludes to this controversy in a note made
on a letter from Darwin which he gave to the British Museum.  "I
remember answering an attack (in the Press, New Zealand) on me by
Bishop Abraham, of Wellington, as though I were someone else, and, to
keep up the deception, attacking myself also.  But it was all very
young and silly."  The bishop's article and Butler's reply, which was
a letter signed A. M. and some of the resulting correspondence were
reprinted in the Press, 15th June, 1912.

At first I thought of including here the Dialogue, and perhaps the
letter signed A. M.  They are interesting as showing that Butler was
among the earliest to study closely the Origin of Species, and also
as showing the state of his mind before he began to think for
himself, before he wrote Darwin among the Machines from which so much
followed; but they can hardly be properly considered as germs of
Erewhon and Life and Habit.  They rather show the preparation of the
soil in which those germs sprouted and grew; and, remembering his
last remark on the subject that "it was all very young and silly," I
decided to omit them.  The Dialogue is no longer lost, and the
numbers of the Press containing it and the correspondence that ensued
can be seen in the British Museum.

Butler's other two contributions to the Press mentioned above do
contain the germs of the machine chapters in Erewhon, and led him to
the theory put forward in Life and Habit.  In 1901 he wrote in the
preface to the new and revised edition of Erewhon:  "The first part
of Erewhon written was an article headed Darwin among the Machines
and signed 'Cellarius.'  It was written in the Upper Rangitata
district of Canterbury Province (as it then was) of New Zealand, and
appeared at Christchurch in the Press newspaper, June 13, 1863.  A
copy of this article is indexed under my books in the British Museum
catalogue."

The article is in the form of a letter, and the copy spoken of by
Butler, as indexed under his name in the British Museum, being
defective, the reprint which appeared in the jubilee number of the
Press has been used in completing the version which follows.

Further on in the preface to the 1901 edition of Erewhon he writes:
"A second article on the same subject as the one just referred to
appeared in the Press shortly after the first, but I have no copy.
It treated machines from a different point of view and was the basis
of pp. 270-274 of the present edition of Erewhon.  This view
ultimately led me to the theory I put forward in Life and Habit,
published in November, 1877. {41}  I have put a bare outline of this
theory (which I believe to be quite sound) into the mouth of an
Erewhonian professor in Chapter XXVII of this book."

This second article was Lucubratio Ebria, and was sent by Butler from
England to the editor of the Press in 1865, with a letter from which
this is an extract:


"I send you an article which you can give to FitzGerald or not, just
as you think it most expedient--for him.  Is not the subject worked
out, and are not the Canterbury people tired of Darwinism?  For me--
is it an article to my credit?  I do not send it to FitzGerald
because I am sure he would put it into the paper. . . .  I know the
undue lenience which he lends to my performances, and believe you to
be the sterner critic of the two.  That there are some good things in
it you will, I think, feel; but I am almost sure that considering
usque ad nauseam etc., you will think it had better not appear. . . .
I think you and he will like that sentence:  'There was a moral
government of the world before man came into it.'  There is hardly a
sentence in it written without deliberation; but I need hardly say
that it was done upon tea, not upon whiskey . . .

"P.S.  If you are in any doubt about the expediency of the article
take it to M.

"P.P.S.  Perhaps better take it to him anyhow."


The preface to the 1901 edition of Erewhon contains some further
particulars of the genesis of that work, and there are still further
particulars in Unconscious Memory, Chapter II, "How I wrote Life and
Habit."

The first tentative sketch of the Life and Habit theory occurs in the
letter to Thomas William Gale Butler which is given post.  This T. W.
G. Butler was not related to Butler, they met first as art-students
at Heatherley's, and Butler used to speak of him as the most
brilliant man he had ever known.  He died many years ago.  He was the
writer of the "letter from a friend now in New Zealand," from which a
quotation is given in Life and Habit, Chapter V (pp. 83, 84).  Butler
kept a copy of his letter to T. W. G. Butler, but it was imperfectly
pressed; he afterwards supplied some of the missing words from
memory, and gave it to the British Museum.


Darwin among the Machines


[To the Editor of the Press, Christchurch, New Zealand--13 June,
1863.]

Sir--There are few things of which the present generation is more
justly proud than of the wonderful improvements which are daily
taking place in all sorts of mechanical appliances.  And indeed it is
matter for great congratulation on many grounds.  It is unnecessary
to mention these here, for they are sufficiently obvious; our present
business lies with considerations which may somewhat tend to humble
our pride and to make us think seriously of the future prospects of
the human race.  If we revert to the earliest primordial types of
mechanical life, to the lever, the wedge, the inclined plane, the
screw and the pulley, or (for analogy would lead us one step further)
to that one primordial type from which all the mechanical kingdom has
been developed, we mean to the lever itself, and if we then examine
the machinery of the Great Eastern, we find ourselves almost
awestruck at the vast development of the mechanical world, at the
gigantic strides with which it has advanced in comparison with the
slow progress of the animal and vegetable kingdom.  We shall find it
impossible to refrain from asking ourselves what the end of this
mighty movement is to be.  In what direction is it tending?  What
will be its upshot?  To give a few imperfect hints towards a solution
of these questions is the object of the present letter.

We have used the words "mechanical life," "the mechanical kingdom,"
"the mechanical world" and so forth, and we have done so advisedly,
for as the vegetable kingdom was slowly developed from the mineral,
and as, in like manner, the animal supervened upon the vegetable, so
now, in these last few ages, an entirely new kingdom has sprung up of
which we as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the
antediluvian prototypes of the race.

We regret deeply that our knowledge both of natural history and of
machinery is too small to enable us to undertake the gigantic task of
classifying machines into the genera and sub-genera, species,
varieties and sub-varieties, and so forth, of tracing the connecting
links between machines of widely different characters, of pointing
out how subservience to the use of man has played that part among
machines which natural selection has performed in the animal and
vegetable kingdom, of pointing out rudimentary organs [see note]
which exist in some few machines, feebly developed and perfectly
useless, yet serving to mark descent from some ancestral type which
has either perished or been modified into some new phase of
mechanical existence.  We can only point out this field for
investigation; it must be followed by others whose education and
talents have been of a much higher order than any which we can lay
claim to.

Some few hints we have determined to venture upon, though we do so
with the profoundest diffidence.  Firstly we would remark that as
some of the lowest of the vertebrata attained a far greater size than
has descended to their more highly organised living representatives,
so a diminution in the size of machines has often attended their
development and progress.  Take the watch for instance.  Examine the
beautiful structure of the little animal, watch the intelligent play
of the minute members which compose it; yet this little creature is
but a development of the cumbrous clocks of the thirteenth century--
it is no deterioration from them.  The day may come when clocks,
which certainly at the present day are not diminishing in bulk, may
be entirely superseded by the universal use of watches, in which case
clocks will become extinct like the earlier saurians, while the watch
(whose tendency has for some years been rather to decrease in size
than the contrary) will remain the only existing type of an extinct
race.

The views of machinery which we are thus feebly indicating will
suggest the solution of one of the greatest and most mysterious
questions of the day.  We refer to the question:  What sort of
creature man's next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely
to be.  We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that
we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to
the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily
giving them greater power and supplying, by all sorts of ingenious
contrivances, that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be
to them what intellect has been to the human race.  In the course of
ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.  Inferior in power,
inferior in that moral quality of self-control, we shall look up to
them as the acme of all that the best and wisest man can ever dare to
aim at.  No evil passions, no jealousy, no avarice, no impure desires
will disturb the serene might of those glorious creatures.  Sin,
shame and sorrow will have no place among them.  Their minds will be
in a state of perpetual calm, the contentment of a spirit that knows
no wants, is disturbed by no regrets.  Ambition will never torture
them.  Ingratitude will never cause them the uneasiness of a moment.
The guilty conscience, the hope deferred, the pains of exile, the
insolence of office and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy
takes--these will be entirely unknown to them.  If they want
"feeding" (by the use of which very word we betray our recognition of
them as living organism) they will be attended by patient slaves
whose business and interest it will be to see that they shall want
for nothing.  If they are out of order they will be promptly attended
to by physicians who are thoroughly acquainted with their
constitutions; if they die, for even these glorious animals will not
be exempt from that necessary and universal consummation, they will
immediately enter into a new phase of existence, for what machine
dies entirely in every part at one and the same instant?

We take it that when the state of things shall have arrived which we
have been above attempting to describe, man will have become to the
machine what the horse and the dog are to man.  He will continue to
exist, nay even to improve, and will be probably better off in his
state of domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than
he is in his present wild state.  We treat our horses, dogs, cattle
and sheep, on the whole, with great kindness, we give them whatever
experience teaches us to be best for them, and there can be no doubt
that our use of meat has added to the happiness of the lower animals
far more than it has detracted from it; in like manner it is
reasonable to suppose that the machines will treat us kindly, for
their existence is as dependent upon ours as ours is upon the lower
animals.  They cannot kill us and eat us as we do sheep, they will
not only require our services in the parturition of their young
(which branch of their economy will remain always in our hands) but
also in feeding them, in setting them right if they are sick, and
burying their dead or working up their corpses into new machines.  It
is obvious that if all the animals in Great Britain save man alone
were to die, and if at the same time all intercourse with foreign
countries were by some sudden catastrophe to be rendered perfectly
impossible, it is obvious that under such circumstances the loss of
human life would be something fearful to contemplate--in like manner,
were mankind to cease, the machines would be as badly off or even
worse.  The fact is that our interests are inseparable from theirs,
and theirs from ours.  Each race is dependent upon the other for
innumerable benefits, and, until the reproductive organs of the
machines have been developed in a manner which we are hardly yet able
to conceive, they are entirely dependent upon man for even the
continuance of their species.  It is true that these organs may be
ultimately developed, inasmuch as man's interest lies in that
direction; there is nothing which our infatuated race would desire
more than to see a fertile union between two steam engines; it is
true that machinery is even at this present time employed in
begetting machinery, in becoming the parent of machines often after
its own kind, but the days of flirtation, courtship and matrimony
appear to be very remote and indeed can hardly be realised by our
feeble and imperfect imagination.

Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by
day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily
bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the
energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life.
The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come
when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its
inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a
moment question.

Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed
against them.  Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the
well-wisher of his species.  Let there be no exceptions made, no
quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of
the race.  If it be urged that this is impossible under the present
condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is
already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that
we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to
destroy and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely
acquiescent in our bondage.

For the present we shall leave this subject which we present gratis
to the members of the Philosophical Society.  Should they consent to
avail themselves of the vast field which we have pointed out, we
shall endeavour to labour in it ourselves at some future and
indefinite period.

I am, Sir, &c.,

CELLARIUS,

NOTE.--We were asked by a learned brother philosopher who saw this
article in MS. what we meant by alluding to rudimentary organs in
machines.  Could we, he asked, give any example of such organs?  We
pointed to the little protuberance at the bottom of the bowl of our
tobacco pipe.  This organ was originally designed for the same
purpose as the rim at the bottom of a tea-cup, which is but another
form of the same function.  Its purpose was to keep the heat of the
pipe from marking the table on which it rested.  Originally, as we
have seen in very early tobacco pipes, this protuberance was of a
very different shape to what it is now.  It was broad at the bottom
and flat, so that while the pipe was being smoked, the bowl might
rest upon the table.  Use and disuse have here come into play and
served to reduce the function to its present rudimentary condition.
That these rudimentary organs are rarer in machinery than in animal
life is owing to the more prompt action of the human selection as
compared with the slower but even surer operation of natural
selection.  Man may make mistakes; in the long run nature never does
so.  We have only given an imperfect example, but the intelligent
reader will supply himself with illustrations.


Lucubratio Ebria


[From the Press, 29 July, 1865]

There is a period in the evening, or more generally towards the still
small hours of the morning, in which we so far unbend as to take a
single glass of hot whisky and water.  We will neither defend the
practice nor excuse it.  We state it as a fact which must be borne in
mind by the readers of this article; for we know not how, whether it
be the inspiration of the drink, or the relief from the harassing
work with which the day has been occupied, or from whatever other
cause, yet we are certainly liable about this time to such a
prophetic influence as we seldom else experience.  We are rapt in a
dream such as we ourselves know to be a dream, and which, like other
dreams, we can hardly embody in a distinct utterance.  We know that
what we see is but a sort of intellectual Siamese twins, of which one
is substance and the other shadow, but we cannot set either free
without killing both.  We are unable to rudely tear away the veil of
phantasy in which the truth is shrouded, so we present the reader
with a draped figure, and his own judgment must discriminate between
the clothes and the body.  A truth's prosperity is like a jest's, it
lies in the ear of him that hears it.  Some may see our lucubration
as we saw it; and others may see nothing but a drunken dream, or the
nightmare of a distempered imagination.  To ourselves it as the
speaking with unknown tongues to the early Corinthians; we cannot
fully understand our own speech, and we fear lest there be not a
sufficient number of interpreters present to make our utterance
edify.  But there!  (Go on straight to the body of the article)

The limbs of the lower animals have never been modified by any act of
deliberation and forethought on their own part.  Recent researches
have thrown absolutely no light upon the origin of life--upon the
initial force which introduced a sense of identity, and a deliberate
faculty into the world; but they do certainly appear to show very
clearly that each species of the animal and vegetable kingdom has
been moulded into its present shape by chances and changes of many
millions of years, by chances and changes over which the creature
modified had no control whatever, and concerning whose aim it was
alike unconscious and indifferent, by forces which seem insensate to
the pain which they inflict, but by whose inexorably beneficent
cruelty the brave and strong keep coming to the fore, while the weak
and bad drop behind and perish.  There was a moral government of this
world before man came near it--a moral government suited to the
capacities of the governed, and which, unperceived by them, has laid
fast the foundations of courage, endurance and cunning.  It laid them
so fast that they became more and more hereditary.  Horace says well,
fortes creantur fortibus et bonis good men beget good children; the
rule held even in the geological period; good ichthyosauri begat good
ichthyosauri, and would to our discomfort have gone on doing so to
the present time, had not better creatures been begetting better
things than ichthyosauri, or famine, or fire, or convulsion put an
end to them.  Good apes begat good apes, and at last when human
intelligence stole like a late spring upon the mimicry of our semi-
simious ancestry, the creature learnt how he could, of his own
forethought, add extra-corporaneous limbs to the members of his body
and become not only a vertebrate mammal, but a vertebrate machinate
mammal into the bargain.

It was a wise monkey that first learned to carry a stick and a useful
monkey that mimicked him.  For the race of man has learned to walk
uprightly much as a child learns the same thing.  At first he crawls
on all fours, then he clambers, laying hold of whatever he can; and
lastly he stands upright alone and walks, but for a long time with an
unsteady step.  So when the human race was in its gorilla-hood it
generally carried a stick; from carrying a stick for many million
years it became accustomed and modified to an upright position.  The
stick wherewith it had learned to walk would now serve it to beat its
younger brothers and then it found out its service as a lever.  Man
would thus learn that the limbs of his body were not the only limbs
that he could command.  His body was already the most versatile in
existence, but he could render it more versatile still.  With the
improvement in his body his mind improved also.  He learnt to
perceive the moral government under which he held the feudal tenure
of his life--perceiving it he symbolised it, and to this day our
poets and prophets still strive to symbolise it more and more
completely.

The mind grew because the body grew--more things were perceived--more
things were handled, and being handled became familiar.  But this
came about chiefly because there was a hand to handle with; without
the hand there would be no handling; and no method of holding and
examining is comparable to the human hand.  The tail of an opossum is
a prehensile thing, but it is too far from his eyes--the elephant's
trunk is better, and it is probably to their trunks that the
elephants owe their sagacity.  It is here that the bee in spite of
her wings has failed.  She has a high civilisation but it is one
whose equilibrium appears to have been already attained; the
appearance is a false one, for the bee changes, though more slowly
than man can watch her; but the reason of the very gradual nature of
the change is chiefly because the physical organisation of the insect
changes, but slowly also.  She is poorly off for hands, and has never
fairly grasped the notion of tacking on other limbs to the limbs of
her own body and so, being short-lived to boot, she remains from
century to century to human eyes in statu quo.  Her body never
becomes machinate, whereas this new phase of organism, which has been
introduced with man into the mundane economy, has made him a very
quicksand for the foundation of an unchanging civilisation; certain
fundamental principles will always remain, but every century the
change in man's physical status, as compared with the elements around
him, is greater and greater; he is a shifting basis on which no
equilibrium of habit and civilisation can be established; were it not
for this constant change in our physical powers, which our mechanical
limbs have brought about, man would have long since apparently
attained his limit of possibility; he would be a creature of as much
fixity as the ants and bees--he would still have advanced but no
faster than other animals advance.  If there were a race of men
without any mechanical appliances we should see this clearly.  There
are none, nor have there been, so far as we can tell, for millions
and millions of years.  The lowest Australian savage carries weapons
for the fight or the chase, and has his cooking and drinking utensils
at home; a race without these things would be completely ferae
naturae and not men at all.  We are unable to point to any example of
a race absolutely devoid of extra-corporaneous limbs, but we can see
among the Chinese that with the failure to invent new limbs, a
civilisation becomes as much fixed as that of the ants; and among
savage tribes we observe that few implements involve a state of
things scarcely human at all.  Such tribes only advance pari passu
with the creatures upon which they feed.

It is a mistake, then, to take the view adopted by a previous
correspondent of this paper; to consider the machines as identities,
to animalise them, and to anticipate their final triumph over
mankind.  They are to be regarded as the mode of development by which
human organism is most especially advancing, and every fresh
invention is to be considered as an additional member of the
resources of the human body.  Herein lies the fundamental difference
between man and his inferiors.  As regards his flesh and blood, his
senses, appetites, and affections, the difference is one of degree
rather than of kind, but in the deliberate invention of such unity of
limbs as is exemplified by the railway train--that seven-leagued foot
which five hundred may own at once--he stands quite alone.

In confirmation of the views concerning mechanism which we have been
advocating above, it must be remembered that men are not merely the
children of their parents, but they are begotten of the institutions
of the state of the mechanical sciences under which they are born and
bred.  These things have made us what we are.  We are children of the
plough, the spade, and the ship; we are children of the extended
liberty and knowledge which the printing press has diffused.  Our
ancestors added these things to their previously existing members;
the new limbs were preserved by natural selection, and incorporated
into human society; they descended with modifications, and hence
proceeds the difference between our ancestors and ourselves.  By the
institutions and state of science under which a man is born it is
determined whether he shall have the limbs of an Australian savage or
those of a nineteenth century Englishman.  The former is supplemented
with little save a rug and a javelin; the latter varies his physique
with the changes of the season, with age, and with advancing or
decreasing wealth.  If it is wet he is furnished with an organ which
is called an umbrella and which seems designed for the purpose of
protecting either his clothes or his lungs from the injurious effects
of rain.  His watch is of more importance to him than a good deal of
his hair, at any rate than of his whiskers; besides this he carries a
knife, and generally a pencil case.  His memory goes in a pocket
book.  He grows more complex as he becomes older and he will then be
seen with a pair of spectacles, perhaps also with false teeth and a
wig; but, if he be a really well-developed specimen of the race, he
will be furnished with a large box upon wheels, two horses, and a
coachman.

Let the reader ponder over these last remarks, and he will see that
the principal varieties and sub-varieties of the human race are not
now to be looked for among the negroes, the Circassians, the Malays,
or the American aborigines, but among the rich and the poor.  The
difference in physical organisation between these two species of man
is far greater than that between the so-called types of humanity.
The rich man can go from here to England whenever he feels so
inclined.  The legs of the other are by an invisible fatality
prevented from carrying him beyond certain narrow limits.  Neither
rich nor poor as yet see the philosophy of the thing, or admit that
he who can tack a portion of one of the P. & O. boats on to his
identity is a much more highly organised being than one who cannot.
Yet the fact is patent enough, if we once think it over, from the
mere consideration of the respect with which we so often treat those
who are richer than ourselves.  We observe men for the most part
(admitting however some few abnormal exceptions) to be deeply
impressed by the superior organisation of those who have money.  It
is wrong to attribute this respect to any unworthy motive, for the
feeling is strictly legitimate and springs from some of the very
highest impulses of our nature.  It is the same sort of affectionate
reverence which a dog feels for man, and is not infrequently
manifested in a similar manner.

We admit that these last sentences are open to question, and we
should hardly like to commit ourselves irrecoverably to the
sentiments they express; but we will say this much for certain,
namely, that the rich man is the true hundred-handed Gyges of the
poets.  He alone possesses the full complement of limbs who stands at
the summit of opulence, and we may assert with strictly scientific
accuracy that the Rothschilds are the most astonishing organisms that
the world has ever yet seen.  For to the nerves or tissues, or
whatever it be that answers to the helm of a rich man's desires,
there is a whole army of limbs seen and unseen attachable:  he may be
reckoned by his horse-power--by the number of foot-pounds which he
has money enough to set in motion.  Who, then, will deny that a man
whose will represents the motive power of a thousand horses is a
being very different from the one who is equivalent but to the power
of a single one?

Henceforward, then, instead of saying that a man is hard up, let us
say that his organisation is at a low ebb, or, if we wish him well,
let us hope that he will grow plenty of limbs.  It must be remembered
that we are dealing with physical organisations only.  We do not say
that the thousand-horse man is better than a one-horse man, we only
say that he is more highly organised, and should be recognised as
being so by the scientific leaders of the period.  A man's will,
truth, endurance are part of him also, and may, as in the case of the
late Mr. Cobden, have in themselves a power equivalent to all the
horse-power which they can influence; but were we to go into this
part of the question we should never have done, and we are compelled
reluctantly to leave our dream in its present fragmentary condition.


Letter to Thomas William Gale Butler
February 18th, 1876.


MY DEAR NAMESAKE . . .

My present literary business is a little essay some 25 or 30 pp.
long, which is still all in the rough and I don't know how it will
shape, but the gist of it is somewhat as follows:-

1.  Actions which we have acquired with difficulty and now perform
almost unconsciously--as in playing a difficult piece of music,
reading, talking, walking and the multitude of actions which escape
our notice inside other actions, etc.--all this worked out with some
detail, say, four or five pages.

General deduction that we never do anything in this unconscious or
semi-conscious manner unless we know how to do it exceedingly well
and have had long practice.

Also that consciousness is a vanishing quantity and that as soon as
we know a thing really well we become unconscious in respect of it--
consciousness being of attention and attention of uncertainty--and
hence the paradox comes clear, that as long as we know that we know a
thing (or do an action knowingly) we do not know it (or do the action
with thorough knowledge of our business) and that we only know it
when we do not know of our knowledge.

2.  Whatever we do in this way is all one and the same in kind--the
difference being only in degree.  Playing [almost?] unconsciously--
writing, more unconsciously (as to each letter)--reading, very
unconsciously--talking, still more unconsciously (it is almost
impossible for us to notice the action of our tongue in every
letter)--walking, much the same--breathing, still to a certain extent
within our own control--heart's beating, perceivable but beyond our
control--digestion, unperceivable and beyond our control, digestion
being the oldest of the . . . habits.

3.  A baby, therefore, has known how to grow itself in the womb and
has only done it because it wanted to, on a balance of
considerations, in the same way as a man who goes into the City to
buy Great Northern A Shares . . .  It is only unconscious of these
operations because it has done them a very large number of times
already.  A man may do a thing by a fluke once, but to say that a
foetus can perform so difficult an operation as the growth of a pair
of eyes out of pure protoplasm without knowing how to do it, and
without ever having done it before, is to contradict all human
experience.  Ipso facto that it does it, it knows how to do it, and
ipso facto that it knows how to do it, it has done it before.  Its
unconsciousness (or speedy loss of memory) is simply the result of
over-knowledge, not of under-knowledge.  It knows so well and has
done it so often that its power of self-analysis is gone.  If it knew
what it was doing, or was conscious of its own act in oxidising its
blood after birth, I should suspect that it had not done it so often
before; as it is I am confident that it must have done it more often-
-much more often--than any act which we perform consciously during
our whole lives.

4.  When, then, did it do it?  Clearly when last it was an impregnate
ovum or some still lower form of life which resulted in that
impregnate ovum.

5.  How is it, then, that it has not gained perceptible experience?
Simply because a single repetition makes little or no difference; but
go back 20,000 repetitions and you will find that it has gained in
experience and modified its performance very materially.

6.  But how about the identity?  What is identity?  Identity of
matter?  Surely no.  There is no identity of matter between me as I
now am, and me as an impregnate ovum.  Continuity of existence?  Then
there is identity between me as an impregnate ovum and my father and
mother as impregnate ova.  Drop out my father's and mother's lives
between the dates of their being impregnate ova and the moment when I
became an impregnate ovum.  See the ova only and consider the second
ovum as the first two ova's means not of reproducing themselves but
of continuing themselves--repeating themselves--the intermediate
lives being nothing but, as it were, a long potato shoot from one eye
to the place where it will grow its next tuber.

7.  Given a single creature capable of reproducing itself and it must
go on reproducing itself for ever, for it would not reproduce itself,
unless it reproduced a creature that was going to reproduce itself,
and so on ad infinitum.

Then comes Descent with Modification.  Similarity tempered with
dissimilarity, and dissimilarity tempered with similarity--a
contradiction in terms, like almost everything else that is true or
useful or indeed intelligible at all.  In each case of what we call
descent, it is still the first reproducing creature identically the
same--doing what it has done before--only with such modifications as
the struggle for existence and natural selection have induced.  No
matter how highly it has been developed, it can never be other than
the primordial cell and must always begin as the primordial cell and
repeat its last performance most nearly, but also, more or less, all
its previous performances.

A begets A' which is A with the additional experience of a dash.  A'
begets A'' which is A with the additional experiences of A' and A'';
and so on to A(n) but you can never eliminate the A.

8.  Let A(n) stand for a man.  He begins as the primordial cell--
being verily nothing but the primordial cell which goes on splitting
itself up for ever, but gaining continually in experience.  Put him
in the same position as he was in before and he will do as he did
before.  First he will do his tadpoles by rote, so to speak, on his
head, from long practice; then he does his fish trick; then he grows
arms and legs, all unconsciously from the inveteracy of the habit,
till he comes to doing his man, and this lesson he has not yet learnt
so thoroughly.  Some part of it, as the breathing and oxidisation
business, he is well up to, inasmuch as they form part of previous
roles, but the teeth and hair, the upright position, the power of
speech, though all tolerably familiar, give him more trouble--for he
is very stupid--a regular dunce in fact.  Then comes his newer and
more complex environment, and this puzzles him--arrests his
attention--whereon consciousness springs into existence, as a spark
from a horse's hoof.

To be continued--I see it will have to be more than 30 pp.  It is
still foggy in parts, but I must clear it a little.  It will go on to
show that we are all one animal and that death (which was at first
voluntary, and has only come to be disliked because those who did not
dislike it committed suicide too easily) and reproduction are only
phases of the ordinary waste and repair which goes on in our bodies
daily.

Always very truly yours,
S. BUTLER.



IV--MEMORY AND DESIGN



Clergymen and Chickens


[Extract from a lecture On Memory as a Key to the Phenomena of
Heredity delivered by Butler at the Working Men's College, Great
Ormond Street, on Saturday, 2nd December, 1882.]

Why, let me ask, should a hen lay an egg which egg can become a
chicken in about three weeks and a full-grown hen in less than a
twelvemonth, while a clergyman and his wife lay no eggs but give
birth to a baby which will take three-and-twenty years before it can
become another clergyman?  Why should not chickens be born and
clergymen be laid and hatched?  Or why, at any rate, should not the
clergyman be born full grown and in Holy Orders, not to say already
beneficed?  The present arrangement is not convenient, it is not
cheap, it is not free from danger, it is not only not perfect but is
so much the reverse that we could hardly find words to express our
sense of its awkwardness if we could look upon it with new eyes, or
as the cuckoo perhaps observes it.

The explanation usually given is that it is a law of nature that
children should be born as they are, but this is like the parched pea
which St. Anthony set before the devil when he came to supper with
him and of which the devil said that it was good as far as it went.
We want more; we want to know with what familiar set of facts we are
to connect the one in question which, though in our midst, at present
dwells apart as a mysterious stranger of whose belongings, reason for
coming amongst us, antecedents, and so forth, we believe ourselves to
be ignorant, though we know him by sight and name and have a fair
idea what sort of man he is to deal with.

We say it is a phenomenon of heredity that chickens should be laid as
eggs in the first instance and clergymen born as babies, but, beyond
the fact that we know heredity extremely well to look at and to do
business with, we say that we know nothing about it.  I have for some
years maintained this to be a mistake and have urged, in company with
Professor Hering, of Prague, and others, that the connection between
memory and heredity is so close that there is no reason for regarding
the two as generically different, though for convenience sake it may
be well to specify them by different names.  If I can persuade you
that this is so, I believe I shall be able to make you understand why
it is that chickens are hatched as eggs and clergymen born as babies.

When I say I can make you understand why this is so, I only mean that
I can answer the first "why" that any one is likely to ask about it,
and perhaps a "why" or two behind this.  Then I must stop.  This is
all that is ever meant by those who say they can tell us why a thing
is so and so.  No one professes to be able to reach back to the last
"why" that any one can ask, and to answer it.  Fortunately for
philosophers, people generally become fatigued after they have heard
the answer to two or three "whys" and are glad enough to let the
matter drop.  If, however, any one will insist on pushing question
behind question long enough, he will compel us to admit that we come
to the end of our knowledge which is based ultimately upon ignorance.
To get knowledge out of ignorance seems almost as hopeless a task as
to get something out of any number of nothings, but this in practice
is what we have to do and the less fuss we make over it the better.

When, therefore, we say that we know "why" a thing is so and so, we
mean that we know its immediate antecedents and connections, and find
them familiar to us.  I say that the immediate antecedent of, and the
phenomenon most closely connected with, heredity is memory.  I do not
profess to show why anything can remember at all, I only maintain
that whereas, to borrow an illustration from mathematics, life was
formerly an equation of, say, 100 unknown quantities, it is now one
of only, inasmuch as memory and heredity have been shown to be one
and the same thing.


Memory

i

Memory is a kind of way (or weight--whichever it should be) that the
mind has got upon it, in virtue of which the sensation excited
endures a little longer than the cause which excited it.  There is
thus induced a state of things in which mental images, and even
physical sensations (if there can be such a thing as a physical
sensation) exist by virtue of association, though the conditions
which originally called them into existence no longer continue.

This is as the echo continuing to reverberate after the sound has
ceased.

ii

To be is to think and to be thinkable.  To live is to continue
thinking and to remember having done so.  Memory is to mind as
viscosity is to protoplasm, it gives a tenacity to thought--a kind of
pied a terre from which it can, and without which it could not,
advance.

Thought, in fact, and memory seem inseparable; no thought, no memory;
and no memory, no thought.  And, as conscious thought and conscious
memory are functions one of another, so also are unconscious thought
and unconscious memory.  Memory is, as it were, the body of thought,
and it is through memory that body and mind are linked together in
rhythm or vibration; for body is such as it is by reason of the
characteristics of the vibrations that are going on in it, and memory
is only due to the fact that the vibrations are of such
characteristics as to catch on to and be caught on to by other
vibrations that flow into them from without--no catch, no memory.


Antitheses


Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death to one another.  To
live is to remember and to remember is to live.  To die is to forget
and to forget is to die.  Everything is so much involved in and is so
much a process of its opposite that, as it is almost fair to call
death a process of life and life a process of death, so it is to call
memory a process of forgetting and forgetting a process of
remembering.  There is never either absolute memory or absolute
forgetfulness, absolute life or absolute death.  So with light and
darkness, heat and cold, you never can get either all the light, or
all the heat, out of anything.  So with God and the devil; so with
everything.  Everything is like a door swinging backwards and
forwards.  Everything has a little of that from which it is most
remote and to which it is most opposed and these antitheses serve to
explain one another.


Unconscious Memory


A man at the Century Club was falling foul of me the other night for
my use of the word "memory."  There was no such thing, he said, as
"unconscious memory"--memory was always conscious, and so forth.  My
business is--and I think it can be easily done--to show that they
cannot beat me off my unconscious memory without my being able to
beat them off their conscious memory; that they cannot deny the
legitimacy of my maintaining the phenomena of heredity to be
phenomena of memory without my being able to deny the legitimacy of
their maintaining the recollection of what they had for dinner
yesterday to be a phenomenon of memory.  My theory of the unconscious
does not lead to universal unconsciousness, but only to pigeon-holing
and putting by.  We shall always get new things to worry about.  If I
thought that by learning more and more I should ever arrive at the
knowledge of absolute truth, I would leave off studying.  But I
believe I am pretty safe.


Reproduction and Memory


There is the reproduction of an idea which has been produced once
already, and there is the reproduction of a living form which has
been produced once already.  The first reproduction is certainly an
effort of memory.  It should not therefore surprise us if the second
reproduction should turn out to be an effort of memory also.  Indeed
all forms of reproduction that we can follow are based directly or
indirectly upon memory.  It is only the one great act of reproduction
that we cannot follow which we disconnect from memory.


Personal Identity


We are so far identical with our ancestors and our contemporaries
that it is very rarely we can see anything that they do not see.  It
is not unjust that the sins of the fathers should be visited upon the
children, for the children committed the sins when in the persons of
their fathers; they ate the sour grapes before they were born:  true,
they have forgotten the pleasure now, but so has a man with a sick
headache forgotten the pleasure of getting drunk the night before.


Sensations


Our sensations are only distinguishable because we feel them in
different places and at different times.  If we feel them at very
nearly the same time and place we cannot distinguish them.


Cobwebs in the Dark