The Note-Books of Samuel Butler
by Samuel Butler · English · Gutenberg #6173 · 811,679 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Note-Books of Samuel Butler
Author: Samuel Butler
Editor: Henry Festing Jones
Release date: July 1, 2004 [eBook #6173]
Most recently updated: August 3, 2014
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6173
Credits: Transcribed from the 1912 A. C. Fifield edition by David Price
*** 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@pglaf.org
[Picture: Photograph of Samuel Butler]
The Note-Books of
Samuel Butler
Author of “Erewhon”
* * * * *
Selections arranged and edited by
Henry Festing Jones
* * * * *
With photogravure portrait by Emery Walker from a
photograph taken by Alfred Cathie in 1898
* * * * *
London
A. C. Fifield, 13 Clifford’s Inn, E.C.
1912
* * * * *
WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH
_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, archæology, 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.
Contents
PAGE
Biographical Statement 1
I. Lord, What is Man? 9
II. Elementary Morality 24
III. The Germs of Erewhon and of Life and Habit 39
IV. Memory and Design 56
V. Vibrations 66
VI. Mind and Matter 74
VII. On the Making of Music, Pictures and Books 93
VIII. Handel and Music 110
IX. A Painter’s Views on Painting 135
X. The Position of a Homo Unius Libri 155
XI. Cash and Credit 168
XII. The Enfant Terrible of Literature 183
XIII. Unprofessional Sermons 200
XIV. Higgledy-Piggledy 215
XV. Titles and Subjects 229
XVI. Written Sketches 237
XVII. Material for a Projected Sequel to Alps and 259
Sanctuaries
XVIII. Material for Erewhon Revisited 288
XIX. Truth and Convenience 297
XX. First Principles 309
XXI. Rebelliousness 332
XXII. Reconciliation 346
XXIII. Death 353
XXIV. The Life of the World to Come 360
XXV. Poems 379
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
Homœopathy 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 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_ 18_th_, 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 An but you can never eliminate the A.
8. Let An 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_, 2_nd_ _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 à 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
If you walk at night and your face comes up against a spider’s web woven
across the road, what a shock that thin line gives you! You fristle
through every nerve of your body.
Shocks and Memory
Memory is our sense that we are being shocked now as we were shocked
then.
Shocks
Given matter conscious in one part of itself of a shock in another part
(i.e. knowing in what part of itself it is shocked) retaining a memory of
each shock for a little while afterwards, able to feel whether two shocks
are simultaneous or in succession, and able to know whether it has been
shocked much or little—given also that association does not stick to the
letter of its bond—and the rest will follow.
Design
i
There is often connection but no design, as when I stamp my foot with
design and shake something down without design, or as when a man runs up
against another in the street and knocks him down without intending it.
This is undesign within design.
Fancied insults are felt by people who see design in a connection where
they should see little connection, and no design.
Connection with design is sometimes hard to distinguish from connection
without design; as when a man treads on another’s corns, it is not always
easy to say whether he has done so accidentally or on purpose.
Men have been fond in all ages of ascribing connection where there is
none. Thus astrology has been believed in. Before last Christmas I said
I had neglected the feasts of the Church too much, and that I should
probably be more prosperous if I paid more attention to them: so I hung
up three pieces of ivy in my rooms on Xmas Eve. A few months afterwards
I got the entail cut off my reversion, but I should hardly think there
was much connection between the two things. Nevertheless I shall hang
some holly up this year.
ii
It seems also designed, ab extra (though who can say whether this is
so?), that no one should know anything whatever about the ultimate, or
even deeper springs of growth and action. If not designed the result is
arrived at as effectually as though it were so.
Accident, Design and Memory
It is right to say either that heredity and memory are one and the same
thing, or that heredity is a mode of memory, or that heredity is due to
memory, if it is thereby intended that animals can only grow in virtue of
being able to recollect. Memory and heredity are the means of preserving
experiences, of building them together, of uniting a mass of often
confused detail into homogeneous and consistent mind and matter, but they
do not originate. The increment in each generation, at the moment of its
being an increment, has nothing to do with memory or heredity, it is due
to the chances and changes of this mortal state. Design comes in at the
moment that a living being either feels a want and forecasts for its
gratification, or utilises some waif or stray of accident on the
principle, which underlies all development, that enough is a little more
than what one has. It is the business of memory and heredity to conserve
and to transmit from one generation to another that which has been
furnished by design, or by accident designedly turned to account.
It is therefore not right to say, as some have supposed me to mean, that
we can do nothing which we do not remember to have done before. We can
do nothing very difficult or complicated which we have not done before,
unless as by a tour de force, once in a way, under exceptionally
favourable circumstances, but our whole conscious life is the performance
of acts either imperfectly remembered or not remembered at all. There
are rain-drops of new experiences in every life which are not within the
hold of our memory or past experience, and, as each one of these
rain-drops came originally from something outside, the whole river of our
life has in its inception nothing to do with memory, though it is only
through memory that the rain-drops of new experience can ever unite to
form a full flowing river of variously organised life and intelligence.
Memory and Mistakes
Memory vanishes with extremes of resemblance or difference. Things which
put us in mind of others must be neither too like nor too unlike them.
It is our sense that a position is not quite the same which makes us find
it so nearly the same. We remember by the aid of differences as much as
by that of samenesses. If there could be no difference there would be no
memory, for the two positions would become absolutely one and the same,
and the universe would repeat itself for ever and ever as between these
two points.
When ninety-nine hundredths of one set of phenomena are presented while
the hundredth is withdrawn without apparent cause, so that we can no
longer do something which according to our past experience we ought to
find no difficulty in doing, then we may guess what a bee must feel as it
goes flying up and down a window-pane. Then we have doubts thrown upon
the fundamental axiom of life, i.e. that like antecedents will be
followed by like consequents. On this we go mad and die in a short time.
Mistaken memory may be as potent as genuine recollection, so far as its
effects go, unless it happens to come more into collision with other and
not mistaken memories than it is able to contend against.
Mistakes or delusions occur mainly in two ways.
First, when the circumstances have changed a little but not enough to
make us recognise the fact: this may happen either because of want of
attention on our part or because of the hidden nature of the alteration,
or because of its slightness in itself, the importance depending upon its
relations to something else which make a very small change have an
importance it would not otherwise have: in these cases the memory reverts
to the old circumstances unmodified, a sufficient number of the
associated ideas having been reproduced to make us assume the remainder
without further inspection, and hence follows a want of harmony between
action and circumstances which results in trouble somewhere.
Secondly, through the memory not reverting in full perfection, though the
circumstances are reproduced fully and accurately.
Remembering
When asked to remember “something” indefinitely you cannot: you look
round at once for something to suggest what you shall try and remember.
For thought must be always about some “thing” which thing must either be
a thing by courtesy, as an air of Handel’s, or else a solid, tangible
object, as a piano or an organ, but always the thing must be linked on to
matter by a longer or shorter chain as the case may be. I was thinking
of this once while walking by the side of the Serpentine and, looking
round, saw some ducks alighting on the water; their feet reminded me of
the way the sea-birds used to alight when I was going to New Zealand and
I set to work recalling attendant facts. Without help from outside I
should have remembered nothing.
A Torn Finger-Nail
Henry Hoare [a college friend], when a young man of about
five-and-twenty, one day tore the quick of his fingernail—I mean he
separated the fleshy part of the finger from the nail—and this reminded
him that many years previously, while quite a child, he had done the same
thing. Thereon he fell to thinking of that time which was impressed upon
his memory partly because there was a great disturbance in the house
about a missing five-pound note and partly because it was while he had
the scarlet fever.
Following the train of thought aroused by his torn finger, he asked
himself how he had torn it, and after a while it came back to him that he
had been lying ill in bed as a child of seven at the house of an aunt who
lived in Hertfordshire. His arms often hung out of the bed and, as his
hands wandered over the wooden frame, he felt that there was a place
where nut had come out so that he could put his fingers in. One day, in
trying to stuff a piece of paper into this hole, he stuffed it in so far
and so tightly that he tore the quick of nail. The whole thing came back
vividly and, though he had not thought of it for nearly twenty years, he
could see the room in his aunt’s house and remembered how his aunt use to
sit by his bedside writing at a little table from which he had got the
piece of paper which he had stuffed into the hole.
So far so good. But then there flashed upon him an idea that was not so
pleasant. I mean it came upon him with irresistible force that the piece
of paper, he had stuffed into the hole in the bedstead was the missing
five-pound note about which there had been so much disturbance. At that
time he was so young that a five-pound note was to him only a piece of
paper; when he heard that the money was missing, he had thought it was
five sovereigns; or perhaps he was too ill to think anything, or to be
questioned; I forget what I was told about this—at any rate he had no
idea of the value of the piece of paper he was stuffing into the hole.
But now the matter had recurred to him at all he felt so sure that it was
the note that he immediately went down to Hertfordshire, where his aunt
was still living, and asked, to the surprise of every one, to be allowed
to wash his hands in the room he had occupied as a child. He was told
that there were friends staying in the house who had the room at present,
but, on his saying he had a reason and particularly begging to be allowed
to remain alone a little while in this room, he was taken upstairs and
left there.
He went to the bed, lifted up the chintz which then covered the frame,
and found his old friend the hole. A nut had been supplied and he could
no longer get his finger into it. He rang the bell and when the servant
came asked for a bed-key. All this time he was rapidly acquiring the
reputation of being a lunatic throughout the whole house, but the key was
brought, and by the help of it he got the nut off. When he had done so,
there, sure enough, by dint of picking with his pocket-knife, he found
the missing five-pound note.
See how the return of a given present brings back the presents that have
been associated with it.
Unconscious Association
One morning I was whistling to myself the air “In Sweetest Harmony” from
_Saul_. Jones heard me and said:
“Do you know why you are whistling that?”
I said I did not.
Then he said: “Did you not hear me, two minutes ago, whistling ‘Eagles
were not so Swift’?”
I had not noticed his doing so, and it was so long since I had played
that chorus myself that I doubt whether I should have consciously
recognised it. That I did recognise it unconsciously is tolerably clear
from my having gone on with “In Sweetest Harmony,” which is the air that
follows it.
Association
If you say “Hallelujah” to a cat, it will excite no fixed set of fibres
in connection with any other set and the cat will exhibit none of the
phenomena of consciousness. But if you say “Me-e-at,” the cat will be
there in a moment, for the due connection between the sets of fibres has
been established.
Language
The reason why words recall ideas is that the word has been artificially
introduced among the associated ideas, and the presence of one idea
recalls the others.
V
Vibrations
Contributions to Evolution
To me it seems that my contributions to the theory of evolution have been
mainly these:
1. The identification of heredity and memory and the corollaries
relating to sports, the reversion to remote ancestors, the phenomena of
old age, the causes of the sterility of hybrids and the principles
underlying longevity—all of which follow as a matter of course. This was
_Life and Habit_. [1877.]
2. The re-introduction of teleology into organic life which, to me,
seems hardly (if at all) less important than the _Life and Habit_ theory.
This was _Evolution Old and New_. [1879.]
3. An attempt to suggest an explanation of the physics of memory. I was
alarmed by the suggestion and fathered it upon Professor Hering who
never, that I can see, meant to say anything of the kind, but I forced my
view on him, as it were, by taking hold of a sentence or two in his
lecture, on _Memory as a Universal Function of Organised Matter_ and thus
connected memory with vibrations. This was _Unconscious Memory_.
[1880.]
What I want to do now [1885] is to connect vibrations not only with
memory but with the physical constitution of that body in which the
memory resides, thus adopting Newland’s law (sometimes called
Mendelejeff’s law) that there is only one substance, and that the
characteristics of the vibrations going on within it at any given time
will determine whether it will appear to us as (say) hydrogen, or sodium,
or chicken doing this, or chicken doing the other. [This touched upon in
the concluding chapter of _Luck or Cunning_? 1887.]
I would make not only the mind, but the body of the organism to depend on
the characteristics of the vibrations going on within it. The same
vibrations which remind the chicken that it wants iron for its blood
actually turn the pre-existing matter in the egg into the required
material. According to this view the form and characteristics of the
elements are as much the living expositions of certain vibrations—are as
much our manner of perceiving that the vibrations going on in that part
of the one universal substance are such and such—as the colour yellow is
our perception that a substance is being struck by vibrations of light,
so many to the second, or as the action of a man walking about is our
mode of perceiving that such and such another combination of vibrations
is, for the present, going on in the substance which, in consequence, has
assumed the shape of the particular man.
It is somewhere in this neighbourhood that I look for the connection
between organic and inorganic.
The Universal Substance
i
We shall never get straight till we leave off trying to separate mind and
matter. Mind is not a thing or, if it be, we know nothing about it; it
is a function of matter. Matter is not a thing or, if it be, we know
nothing about it; it is a function of mind.
We should see an omnipotent, universal substance, sometimes in a
dynamical and sometimes in a statical condition and, in either condition,
always retaining a little of its opposite; and we should see this
substance as at once both material and mental, whether it be in the one
condition or in the other. The statical condition represents content,
the dynamical, discontent; and both content and discontent, each still
retaining a little of its opposite, must be carried down to the lowest
atom.
Action is the process whereby thought, which is mental, is materialised
and whereby substance, which is material, is mentalised. It is like the
present, which unites times past and future and which is the only time
worth thinking of and yet is the only time which has no existence.
I do not say that thought actually passes into substance, or mind into
matter, by way of action—I do not know what thought is—but every thought
involves bodily change, i.e. action, and every action involves thought,
conscious or unconscious. The action is the point of juncture between
bodily change, visible and otherwise sensible, and mental change which is
invisible except as revealed through action. So that action is the
material symbol of certain states of mind. It translates the thought
into a corresponding bodily change.
ii
When the universal substance is at rest, that is, not vibrating at all,
it is absolutely imperceptible whether by itself or anything else. It is
to all intents and purposes fast asleep or, rather, so completely
non-existent that you can walk through it, or it through you, and it
knows neither time nor space but presents all the appearance of perfect
vacuum. It is in an absolutely statical state. But when it is not at
rest, it becomes perceptible both to itself and others; that is to say,
it assumes material guise such as makes it imperceptible both to itself
and others. It is then tending towards rest, i.e. in a dynamical state.
The not being at rest is the being in a vibratory condition. It is the
disturbance of the repose of the universal, invisible and altogether
imperceptible substance by way of vibration which constitutes matter at
all; it is the character of the vibrations which constitutes the
particular kind of matter. (May we imagine that some vibrations vibrate
with a rhythm which has a tendency to recur like the figures in a
recurring decimal, and that here we have the origin of the reproductive
system?)
We should realise that all space is at all times full of a stuff endowed
with a mind and that both stuff and mind are immaterial and imperceptible
so long as they are undisturbed, but the moment they are disturbed the
stuff becomes material and the mind perceptible. It is not easy to
disturb them, for the atmosphere protects them. So long as they are
undisturbed they transmit light, etc., just as though they were a rigid
substance, for, not being disturbed, they detract nothing from any
vibration which enters them.
What will cause a row will be the hitting upon some plan for waking up
the ether. It is here that we must look for the extension of the world
when it has become over-peopled or when, through its gradual cooling
down, it becomes less suitable for a habitation. By and by we shall make
new worlds.
Mental and Physical
A strong hope of £20,000 in the heart of a poor but capable man may
effect a considerable redistribution of the forces of nature—may even
remove mountains. The little, unseen impalpable hope sets up a vibrating
movement in a messy substance shut in a dark warm place inside the man’s
skull. The vibrating substance undergoes a change that none can note,
whereupon rings of rhythm circle outwards from it as from a stone thrown
into a pond, so that the Alps are pierced in consequence.
Vibrations, Memory and Chemical Properties
The quality of every substance depends upon its vibrations, but so does
the quality of all thought and action. Quality is only one mode of
action; the action of developing, the desire to make this or that, and do
this or that, and the stuff we make are alike due to the nature and
characteristics of vibrations.
I want to connect the actual manufacture of the things a chicken makes
inside an egg with the desire and memory of the chickens, so as to show
that one and the same set of vibrations at once change the universal
substratum into the particular phase of it required and awaken a
consciousness of, and a memory of and a desire towards, this particular
phase on the part of the molecules which are being vibrated into it. So,
for example, that a set of vibrations shall at once turn plain white and
yolk of egg into the feathers, blood and bones of a chicken and, at the
same time, make the mind of the embryo to be such or such as it is.
Protoplasm and Reproduction
The reason why the offspring of protoplasm progressed, and the offspring
of nothing else does so, is that the viscid nature of protoplasm allows
vibrations to last a very long time, and so very old vibrations get
carried into any fragment that is broken off; whereas in the case of air
and water, vibrations get soon effaced and only very recent vibrations
get carried into the young air and the young water which are, therefore,
born fully grown; they cannot grow any more nor can they decay till they
are killed outright by something decomposing them. If protoplasm was
more viscid it would not vibrate easily enough; if less, it would run
away into the surrounding water.
Germs within Germs
When we say that the germ within the hen’s egg remembers having made
itself into a chicken on past occasions, or that each one of 100,000
salmon germs remembers to have made itself into a salmon (male or female)
in the persons of the single pair of salmon its parents, do we intend
that each single one of these germs was a witness of, and a concurring
agent in, the development of the parent forms from their respective
germs, and that each one of them therefore, was shut up within the parent
germ, like a small box inside a big one?
If so, then the parent germ with its millions of brothers and sisters was
in like manner enclosed within a grand-parental germ, and so on till we
are driven to admit, after even a very few generations, that each
ancestor has contained more germs than could be expressed by a number
written in small numerals, beginning at St. Paul’s and ending at Charing
Cross. Mr. Darwin’s provisional theory of pangenesis comes to something
very like this, so far as it can be understood at all.
Therefore it will save trouble (and we should observe no other
consideration) to say that the germs that unite to form any given
sexually produced individual were not present in the germs, or with the
germs, from which the parents sprang, but that they came into the
parents’ bodies at some later period.
We may perhaps find it convenient to account for their intimate
acquaintance with the past history of the body into which they have been
introduced by supposing that in virtue of assimilation they have acquired
certain periodical rhythms already pre-existing in the parental bodies,
and that the communication of the characteristics of these rhythms
determines at once the physical and psychical development of the
individual in a course as nearly like that of the parents as changed
surroundings will allow.
For, according to my _Life and Habit_ theory, everything in connection
with embryonic development is referred to memory, and this involves that
the thing remembering should have been present and an actor in the
development which it is supposed to remember; but we have just settled
that the germs which unite to form any individual, and which when united
proceed to develop according to what I suppose to be their memory of
their previous developments, were not participators in any previous
development and cannot therefore remember it. They cannot remember even
a single development, much less can they remember that infinite series of
developments the recollection and epitomisation of which is a _sine qua
non_ for the unconsciousness which we note in normal development. I see
no way of getting out of this difficulty so convenient as to say that a
memory is the reproduction and recurrence of a rhythm communicated
directly or indirectly from one substance to another, and that where a
certain rhythm exists there is a certain stock of memories, whether the
actual matter in which the rhythm now subsists was present with the
matter in which it arose or not.
There is another little difficulty in the question whether the matter
that I suppose introduced into the parents’ bodies during their
life-histories, and that goes to form the germs that afterwards become
their offspring, is living or non-living. If living, then it has its own
memories and life-histories which must be cancelled and undone before the
assimilation and the becoming imbued with new rhythms can be complete.
That is to say it must become as near non-living as anything can become.
Sooner or later, then, we get this introduced matter to be non-living (as
we may call it) and the puzzle is how to get it living again. For we
strenuously deny equivocal generation. When matter is living we contend
that it can only have been begotten of other like living matter; we deny
that it can have become living from non-living. Here, however, within
the bodies of animals and vegetables we find equivocal generation a
necessity; nor do I see any way out of it except by maintaining that
nothing is ever either quite dead or quite alive, but that a little
leaven of the one is always left in the other. For it would be as
difficult to get the thing dead if it is once all alive, as alive if once
all dead.
According to this view to beget offspring is to communicate to two pieces
of protoplasm (which afterwards combine) certain rhythmic vibrations
which, though too feeble to generate visible action until they receive
accession of fresh similar rhythms from exterior objects, yet on receipt
of such accession set the game of development going and maintain it. It
will be observed that the rhythms supposed to be communicated to any
germs are such as have been already repeatedly refreshed by rhythms from
exterior objects in preceding generations, so that a consonance is
rehearsed and pre-arranged, as it were, between the rhythm in the germ
and those that in the normal course of its ulterior existence are likely
to flow into it. If there is too serious a discord between inner and
outer rhythms the organism dies.
Atoms and Fixed Laws
When people talk of atoms obeying fixed laws, they are either ascribing
some kind of intelligence and free will to atoms or they are talking
nonsense. There is no obedience unless there is at any rate a
potentiality of disobeying.
No objection can lie to our supposing potential or elementary volition
and consciousness to exist in atoms, on the score that their action would
be less regular or uniform if they had free will than if they had not.
By giving them free will we do no more than those who make them bound to
obey fixed laws. They will be as certain to use their freedom of will
only in particular ways as to be driven into those ways by obedience to
fixed laws.
The little element of individual caprice (supposing we start with free
will), or (supposing we start with necessity) the little element of
stiffneckedness, both of which elements we find everywhere in nature,
these are the things that prevent even the most reliable things from
being absolutely reliable. It is they that form the point of contact
between this universe and something else quite different in which none of
those fundamental ideas obtain without which we cannot think at all. So
we say that nitrous acid is more reliable than nitric for etching.
Atoms have a mind as much smaller and less complex than ours as their
bodies are smaller and less complex.
Complex mind involves complex matter and vice versa. On the whole I
think it would be most convenient to endow all atoms with a something of
consciousness and volition, and to hold them to be _pro tanto_, living.
We must suppose them able to remember and forget, i.e. to retain certain
vibrations that have been once established—gradually to lose them and to
receive others instead. We must suppose some more intelligent, versatile
and of greater associative power than others.
Thinking
All thinking is of disturbance, dynamical, a state of unrest tending
towards equilibrium. It is all a mode of classifying and of criticising
with a view of knowing whether it gives us, or is likely to give us,
pleasure or no.
Equilibrium
In the highest consciousness there is still unconsciousness, in the
lowest unconsciousness there is still consciousness. If there is no
consciousness there is no thing, or nothing. To understand perfectly
would be to cease to understand at all.
It is in the essence of heaven that we are not to be thwarted or
irritated, this involves absolute equilibrium and absolute equilibrium
involves absolute unconsciousness. Christ is equilibrium—the not wanting
anything, either more or less. Death also is equilibrium. But Christ is
a more living kind of death than death is.
VI
Mind and Matter
Motion
WE cannot define either motion or matter, but we have certain rough and
ready ideas concerning them which, right or wrong, we must make the best
of without more words, for the chances are ten to one that attempted
definition will fuzz more than it will clear.
Roughly, matter and motion are functions one of another, as are mind and
matter; they are essentially concomitant with one another, and neither
can vary but the other varies also. You cannot have a thing “matter” by
itself which shall have no motion in it, nor yet a thing “motion” by
itself which shall exist apart from matter; you must have both or
neither. You can have matter moving much, or little, and in all
conceivable ways; but you cannot have matter without any motion more than
you can have motion without any matter that is moving.
Its states, its behaviour under varying circumstances, that is to say the
characteristics of its motions, are all that we can cognise in respect of
matter. We recognise certain varying states or conditions of matter and
give one state one name, and another another, as though it were a man or
a dog; but it is the state not the matter that we cognise, just as it is
the man’s moods and outward semblance that we alone note, while knowing
nothing of the man. Of matter in its ultimate essence and apart from
motion we know nothing whatever. As far as we are concerned there is no
such thing: it has no existence: for _de non apparentibus et non
existentibus eadem est ratio_.
It is a mistake, therefore, to speak about an “eternal unchangeable
underlying substance” as I am afraid I did in the last pages of _Luck or
Cunning_? but I am not going to be at the trouble of seeing. For, if the
substance is eternal and unknowable and unchangeable, it is tantamount to
nothing. Nothing can be nearer non-existence than eternal unknowableness
and unchangeableness.
If, on the other hand, the substance changes, then it is not unknowable,
or uncognisable, for by cognising its changes we cognise it. Changes are
the only things that we can cognise. Besides, we cannot have substance
changing without condition changing, and if we could we might as well
ignore condition. Does it not seem as though, since the motions or
states are all that we cognise, they should be all that we need take
account of? Change of condition is change of substance. Then what do we
want with substance? Why have two ideas when one will do?
I suppose it has all come about because there are so many tables and
chairs and stones that appear not to be moving, and this gave us the idea
of a solid substance without any motion in it.
How would it be to start with motion approximately patent, and motion
approximately latent (absolute patency and absolute latency being
unattainable), and lay down that motion latent as motion becomes patent
as substance, or matter of chair-and-table order; and that when patent as
motion it is latent as matter and substance?
I am only just recovering from severe influenza and have no doubt I have
been writing nonsense.
Matter and Mind
i
People say we can conceive the existence of matter and the existence of
mind. I doubt it. I doubt how far we have any definite conception of
mind or of matter, pure and simple.
What is meant by conceiving a thing or understanding it? When we hear of
a piece of matter instinct with mind, as protoplasm, for example, there
certainly comes up before our closed eyes an idea, a picture which we
imagine to bear some resemblance to the thing we are hearing of. But
when we try to think of matter apart from every attribute of matter (and
this I suspect comes ultimately to “apart from every attribute of mind”)
we get no image before our closed eyes—we realise nothing to ourselves.
Perhaps we surreptitiously introduce some little attribute, and then we
think we have conceived of matter pure and simple, but this I think is as
far as we can go. The like holds good for mind: we must smuggle in a
little matter before we get any definite idea at all.
ii
Matter and mind are as heat and cold, as life and death, certainty and
uncertainty, union and separateness. There is no absolute heat, life,
certainty, union, nor is there any absolute cold, death, uncertainty or
separateness.
We can conceive of no ultimate limit beyond which a thing cannot become
either hotter or colder, there is no limit; there are degrees of heat and
cold, but there is no heat so great that we cannot fancy its becoming a
little hotter, that is we cannot fancy its not having still a few degrees
of cold in it which can be extracted. Heat and cold are always relative
to one another, they are never absolute. So with life and death, there
is neither perfect life nor perfect death, but in the highest life there
is some death and in the lowest death there is still some life. The
fraction is so small that in practice it may and must be neglected; it is
neglected, however, not as of right but as of grace, and the right to
insist on it is never finally and indefeasibly waived.
iii
An energy is a soul—a something working in us.
As we cannot imagine heat apart from something which is hot, nor motion
without something that is moving, so we cannot imagine an energy, or
working power, without matter through which it manifests itself.
On the other hand, we cannot imagine matter without thinking of it as
capable of some kind of working power or energy—we cannot think of matter
without thinking of it as in some way ensouled.
iv
Matter and mind form one another, i.e. they give to one another the form
in which we see them. They are the helpmeets to one another that cross
each other and undo each other and, in the undoing, do and, in the doing,
undo, and so see-saw _ad infinitum_.
Organic and Inorganic
Animals and plants cannot understand our business, so we have denied that
they can understand their own. What we call inorganic matter cannot
understand the animals’ and plants’ business, we have therefore denied
that it can understand anything whatever.
What we call inorganic is not so really, but the organisation is too
subtle for our senses or for any of those appliances with which we assist
them. It is deducible however as a necessity by an exercise of the
reasoning faculties.
People looked at glaciers for thousands of years before they found out
that ice was a fluid, so it has taken them and will continue to take them
not less before they see that the inorganic is not wholly inorganic.
The Power to make Mistakes
This is one of the criteria of life as we commonly think of it. If
oxygen could go wrong and mistake some other gas for hydrogen and thus
learn not to mistake it any more, we should say oxygen was alive. The
older life is, the more unerring it becomes in respect of things about
which it is conversant—the more like, in fact, it becomes to such a thing
as the force of gravity, both as regards unerringness and
unconsciousness.
Is life such a force as gravity in process of formation, and was gravity
once—or rather, were things once liable to make mistakes on such a
subject as gravity?
If any one will tell me what life is I will tell him whether the
inorganic is alive or not.
The Omnipresence of Intelligence
A little while ago no one would admit that animals had intelligence.
This is now conceded. At any rate, then, vegetables had no intelligence.
This is being fast disputed. Even Darwin leans towards the view that
they have intelligence. At any rate, then, the inorganic world has not
got an intelligence. Even this is now being denied. Death is being
defeated at all points. No sooner do we think we have got a _bona fide_
barrier than it breaks down. The divisions between varieties, species,
genus, all gone; between instinct and reason, gone; between animals and
plants, gone; between man and the lower animals, gone; so, ere long, the
division between organic and inorganic will go and will take with it the
division between mind and matter.
The Super-Organic Kingdom
As the solid inorganic kingdom supervened upon the gaseous (vestiges of
the old being, nevertheless, carried over into and still persisting in
the new) and as the organic kingdom supervened upon the inorganic
(vestiges of the old being, again, carried over into and still persisting
in the new) so a third kingdom is now in process of development, the
super-organic, of which we see the germs in the less practical and more
emotional side of our nature.
Man, for example, is the only creature that interests himself in his own
past, or forecasts his future to any considerable extent. This tendency
I would see as the monad of a new regime—a regime that will be no more
governed by the ideas and habits now prevailing among ourselves than we
are by those still obtaining among stones or water. Nevertheless, if a
man be shot out of a cannon, or fall from a great height, he is to all
intents and purposes a mere stone. Place anything in circumstances
entirely foreign to its immediate antecedents, and those antecedents
become non-existent to it, it returns to what it was before they existed,
to the last stage that it can recollect as at all analogous to its
present.
Feeling
Man is a substance, he knows not what, feeling, he knows not how, a rest
and unrest that he can only in part distinguish. He is a substance
feeling equilibrium or want of equilibrium; that is to say, he is a
substance in a statical or dynamical condition and feeling the passage
from one state into the other.
Feeling is an art and, like any other art, can be acquired by taking
pains. The analogy between feelings and words is very close. Both have
their foundation in volition and deal largely in convention; as we should
not be word-ridden so neither should we be feeling-ridden; feelings can
deceive us; they can lie; they can be used in a non-natural, artificial
sense; they can be forced; they can carry us away; they can be
restrained.
When the surroundings are familiar, we know the right feeling and feel it
accordingly, or if “we” (that is the central government of our
personality) do not feel it, the subordinate departmental personality,
whose business it is, feels it in the usual way and then goes on to
something else. When the surroundings are less familiar and the
departmental personality cannot deal with them, the position is reported
through the nervous system to the central government which is frequently
at a loss to know what feeling to apply. Sometimes it happens to discern
the right feeling and apply it, sometimes it hits upon an inappropriate
one and is thus induced to proceed from solecism to solecism till the
consequences lead to a crisis from which we recover and which, then
becoming a leading case, forms one of the decisions on which our future
action is based. Sometimes it applies a feeling that is too
inappropriate, as when the position is too horribly novel for us to have
had any experience that can guide the central government in knowing how
to feel about it, and this results in a cessation of the effort involved
in trying to feel. Hence we may hope that the most horrible apparent
suffering is not felt beyond a certain point, but is passed through
unconsciously under a natural, automatic anæsthetic—the unconsciousness,
in extreme cases, leading to death.
It is generally held that animals feel; it will soon be generally held
that plants feel; after that it will be held that stones also can feel.
For, as no matter is so organic that there is not some of the inorganic
in it, so, also, no matter is so inorganic that there is not some of the
organic in it. We know that we have nerves and that we feel, it does not
follow that other things do not feel because they have no nerves—it only
follows that they do not feel as we do. The difference between the
organic and the inorganic kingdoms will some day be seen to lie in the
greater power of discriminating its feelings which is possessed by the
former. Both are made of the same universal substance but, in the case
of the organic world, this substance is able to feel more fully and
discreetly and to show us that it feels.
Animals and plants, as they advance in the scale of life differentiate
their feelings more and more highly; they record them better and
recognise them more readily. They get to know what they are doing and
feeling, not step by step only, nor sentence by sentence, but in long
flights, forming chapters and whole books of action and sensation. The
difference as regards feeling between man and the lower animals is one of
degree and not of kind. The inorganic is less expert in differentiating
its feelings, therefore its memory of them must be less enduring; it
cannot recognise what it could scarcely cognise. One might as well for
some purposes, perhaps, say at once, as indeed people generally do for
most purposes, that the inorganic does not feel; nevertheless the
somewhat periphrastic way of putting it, by saying that the inorganic
feels but does not know, or knows only very slightly, how to
differentiate its feelings, has the advantage of expressing the fact that
feeling depends upon differentiation and sense of relation _inter se_ of
the things differentiated—a fact which, if never expressed, is apt to be
lost sight of.
As, therefore, human discrimination is to that of the lower animals, so
the discrimination of the lower animals and plants is to that of
inorganic things. In each case it is greater discriminating power (and
this is mental power) that underlies the differentiation, but in no case
can there be a denial of mental power altogether.
Opinion and Matter
Moral force and material force do pass into one another; a conflict of
opinion often ends in a fight. Putting it the other way, there is no
material conflict without attendant clash of opinion. Opinion and matter
act and react as do all things else; they come up hand in hand out of
something which is both and neither, but, so far as we can catch sight of
either first on our mental horizon, it is opinion that is the prior of
the two.
Moral Influence
The caracal lies on a shelf in its den in the Zoological Gardens quietly
licking its fur. I go up and stand near it. It makes a face at me. I
come a little nearer. It makes a worse face and raises itself up on its
haunches. I stand and look. It jumps down from its shelf and makes as
if it intended to go for me. I move back. The caracal has exerted a
moral influence over me which I have been unable to resist.
Moral influence means persuading another that one can make that other
more uncomfortable than that other can make oneself.
Mental and Physical Pabulum
When we go up to the shelves in the reading-room of the British Museum,
how like it is to wasps flying up and down an apricot tree that is
trained against a wall, or cattle coming down to drink at a pool!
Eating and Proselytising
All eating is a kind of proselytising—a kind of dogmatising—a maintaining
that the eater’s way of looking at things is better than the eatee’s. We
convert the food, or try to do so, to our own way of thinking, and, when
it sticks to its own opinion and refuses to be converted, we say it
disagrees with us. An animal that refuses to let another eat it has the
courage of its convictions and, if it gets eaten, dies a martyr to them.
So we can only proselytise fresh meat, the convictions of putrid meat
begin to be too strong for us.
It is good for a man that he should not be thwarted—that he should have
his own way as far, and with as little difficulty, as possible. Cooking
is good because it makes matters easier by unsettling the meat’s mind and
preparing it for new ideas. All food must first be prepared for us by
animals and plants, or we cannot assimilate it; and so thoughts are more
easily assimilated that have been already digested by other minds. A man
should avoid converse with things that have been stunted or starved, and
should not eat such meat as has been overdriven or underfed or afflicted
with disease, nor should he touch fruit or vegetables that have not been
well grown.
Sitting quiet after eating is akin to sitting still during divine service
so as not to disturb the congregation. We are catechising and converting
our proselytes, and there should be no row. As we get older we must
digest more quietly still, our appetite is less, our gastric juices are
no longer so eloquent, they have lost that cogent fluency which carried
away all that came in contact with it. They have become sluggish and
unconciliatory. This is what happens to any man when he suffers from an
attack of indigestion.
Sea-Sickness
Or, indeed, any other sickness is the inarticulate expression of the pain
we feel on seeing a proselyte escape us just as we were on the point of
converting it.
Indigestion
This, as I have said above, may be due to the naughtiness of the
stiff-necked things that we have eaten, or to the poverty of our own
arguments; but it may also arise from an attempt on the part of the
stomach to be too damned clever, and to depart from precedent
inconsiderately. The healthy stomach is nothing if not conservative.
Few radicals have good digestions.
Assimilation and Persecution
We cannot get rid of persecution; if we feel at all we must persecute
something; the mere acts of feeding and growing are acts of persecution.
Our aim should be to persecute nothing but such things as are absolutely
incapable of resisting us. Man is the only animal that can remain on
friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
Matter Infinitely Subdivisible
We must suppose it to be so, but it does not follow that we can know
anything about it if it is divided into pieces smaller than a certain
size; and, if we can know nothing about it when so divided, then, _qua_
us, it has no existence and therefore matter, _qua_ us, is not infinitely
subdivisible.
Differences
We often say that things differ in degree but not in kind, as though
there were a fixed line at which degree ends and kind begins. There is
no such line. All differences resolve themselves into differences of
degree. Everything can in the end be united with everything by easy
stages if a way long enough and round-about enough be taken. Hence to
the metaphysician everything will become one, being united with
everything else by degrees so subtle that there is no escape from seeing
the universe as a single whole. This in theory; but in practice it would
get us into such a mess that we had better go on talking about
differences of kind as well as of degree.
Union and Separation
In the closest union there is still some separate existence of component
parts; in the most complete separation there is still a reminiscence of
union. When they are most separate, the atoms seem to bear in mind that
they may one day have to come together again; when most united, they
still remember that they may come to fall out some day and do not give
each other their full, unreserved confidence.
The difficulty is how to get unity and separateness at one and the same
time. The two main ideas underlying all action are desire for closer
unity and desire for more separateness. Nature is the puzzled sense of a
vast number of things which feel they are in an illogical position and
should be more either of one thing or the other than they are. So they
will first be this and then that, and act and re-act and keep the balance
as near equal as they can, yet they know all the time that it isn’t right
and, as they incline one way or the other, they will love or hate.
When we love, we draw what we love closer to us; when we hate a thing, we
fling it away from us. All disruption and dissolution is a mode of
hating; and all that we call affinity is a mode of loving.
The puzzle which puzzles every atom is the puzzle which puzzles
ourselves—a conflict of duties—our duty towards ourselves, and our duty
as members of a body politic. It is swayed by its sense of being a
separate thing—of having a life to itself which nothing can share; it is
also swayed by the feeling that, in spite of this, it is only part of an
individuality which is greater than itself and which absorbs it. Its
action will vary with the predominance of either of these two states of
opinion.
Unity and Multitude
We can no longer separate things as we once could: everything tends
towards unity; one thing, one action, in one place, at one time. On the
other hand, we can no longer unify things as we once could; we are driven
to ultimate atoms, each one of which is an individuality. So that we
have an infinite multitude of things doing an infinite multitude of
actions in infinite time and space; and yet they are not many things, but
one thing.
The Atom
The idea of an indivisible, ultimate atom is inconceivable by the lay
mind. If we can conceive an idea of the atom at all, we can conceive it
as capable of being cut in half indeed, we cannot conceive it at all
unless we so conceive it. The only true atom, the only thing which we
cannot subdivide and cut in half, is the universe. We cannot cut a bit
off the universe and put it somewhere else. Therefore, the universe is a
true atom and, indeed, is the smallest piece of indivisible matter which
our minds can conceive; and they cannot conceive it any more than they
can the indivisible, ultimate atom.
Our Cells
A string of young ducklings as they sidle along through grass beside a
ditch—how like they are to a single serpent! I said in _Life and Habit_
that a colossal being, looking at the earth through a microscope, would
probably think the ants and flies of one year the same as those of the
preceding year. I should have added:—So we think we are composed of the
same cells from year to year, whereas in truth the cells are a succession
of generations. The most continuous, homogeneous things we know are only
like a lot of cow-bells on an alpine pasture.
Nerves and Postmen
A letter, so long as it is connected with one set of nerves, is one
thing; loose it from connection with those nerves—open your fingers and
drop it in the opening of a pillar box—and it becomes part and parcel of
another nervous system. Letters in transitu contain all manner of varied
stimuli and shocks, yet to the postman, who is the nerve that conveys
them, they are all alike, except as regards mere size and weight. I
should think, therefore, that our nerves and ganglia really see no
difference in the stimuli that they convey.
And yet the postman does see some difference: he knows a business letter
from a valentine at a glance and practice teaches him to know much else
which escapes ourselves. Who, then, shall say what the nerves and
ganglia know and what they do not know? True, to us, as we think of a
piece of brain inside our own heads, it seems as absurd to consider that
it knows anything at all as it seems to consider that a hen’s egg knows
anything; but then if the brain could see us, perhaps the brain might say
it was absurd to suppose that that thing could know this or that.
Besides what is the self of which we say that we are self-conscious? No
one can say what it is that we are conscious of. This is one of the
things which lie altogether outside the sphere of words.
The postman can open a letter if he likes and know all about the message
he is conveying, but, if he does this, he is diseased _qua_ postman. So,
maybe, a nerve might open a stimulus or a shock on the way sometimes, but
it would not be a good nerve.
Night-Shirts and Babies
On Hindhead, last Easter, we saw a family wash hung out to dry. There
were papa’s two great night-shirts and mamma’s two lesser night-gowns and
then the children’s smaller articles of clothing and mamma’s drawers and
the girls’ drawers, all full swollen with a strong north-east wind. But
mamma’s night-gown was not so well pinned on and, instead of being full
of steady wind like the others, kept blowing up and down as though she
were preaching wildly. We stood and laughed for ten minutes. The
housewife came to the window and wondered at us, but we could not resist
the pleasure of watching the absurdly life-like gestures which the
night-gowns made. I should like a _Santa Famiglia_ with clothes drying
in the background.
A love story might be told in a series of sketches of the clothes of two
families hanging out to dry in adjacent gardens. Then a gentleman’s
night-shirt from one garden, and a lady’s night-gown from the other
should be shown hanging in a third garden by themselves. By and by there
should be added a little night-shirt.
A philosopher might be tempted, on seeing the little night-shirt, to
suppose that the big night-shirts had made it. What we do is much the
same, for the body of a baby is not much more made by the two old babies,
after whose pattern it has cut itself out, than the little night-shirt is
made by the big ones. The thing that makes either the little night-shirt
or the little baby is something about which we know nothing whatever at
all.
Our Organism
Man is a walking tool-box, manufactory, workshop and bazaar worked from
behind the scenes by someone or something that we never see. We are so
used to never seeing more than the tools, and these work so smoothly,
that we call them the workman himself, making much the same mistake as
though we should call the saw the carpenter. The only workman of whom we
know anything at all is the one that runs ourselves and even this is not
perceivable by any of our gross palpable senses.
The senses seem to be the link between mind and matter—never forgetting
that we can never have either mind or matter pure and without alloy of
the other.
Beer and My Cat
Spilt beer or water seems sometimes almost human in its uncertainty
whether or no it is worth while to get ever such a little nearer to the
earth’s centre by such and such a slight trickle forward.
I saw my cat undecided in his mind whether he should get up on the table
and steal the remains of my dinner or not. The chair was some eighteen
inches away with its back towards the table, so it was a little
troublesome for him to get his feet first on the bar and then on the
table. He was not at all hungry but he tried, saw it would not be quite
easy and gave it up; then he thought better of it and tried again, and
saw again that it was not all perfectly plain sailing; and so backwards
and forwards with the first-he-would-and-then-he-wouldn’tism of a mind so
nearly in equilibrium that a hair’s weight would turn the scale one way
or the other.
I thought how closely it resembled the action of beer trickling on a
slightly sloping table.
The Union Bank
There is a settlement in the Union Bank building, Chancery Lane, which
has made three large cracks in the main door steps. I remember these
cracks more than twenty years ago, just after the bank was built, as mere
thin lines and now they must be some half an inch wide and are still
slowly widening. They have altered very gradually, but not an hour or a
minute has passed without a groaning and travailing together on the part
of every stone and piece of timber in the building to settle how a _modus
vivendi_ should be arrived at. This is why the crack is said to be
caused by a settlement—some parts of the building willing this and some
that, and the battle going on, as even the steadiest and most unbroken
battles must go, by fits and starts which, though to us appearing as an
even tenor, would, if we could see them under a microscope, prove to be a
succession of bloody engagements between regiments that sometimes lost
and sometimes won. Sometimes, doubtless, strained relations have got
settled by peaceful arbitration and reference to the solicitors of the
contending parts without open visible rupture; at other times, again,
discontent has gathered on discontent as the snow upon a sub-alpine
slope, flake by flake, till the last is one too many and the whole comes
crashing down—whereon the cracks have opened some minute fraction of an
inch wider.
Of this we see nothing. All we note is that a score of years have gone
by and that the cracks are rather wider. So, doubtless, if the materials
of which the bank is built could speak, they would say they knew nothing
of the varied interests that sometimes coalesce and sometimes conflict
within the building. The joys of the rich depositor, the anguish of the
bankrupt are nothing to them; the stream of people coming in and going
out is as steady, continuous a thing to them as a blowing wind or a
running river to ourselves; all they know or care about is that they have
a trifle more weight of books and clerks and bullion than they once had,
and that this hinders them somewhat in their effort after a permanent
settlement.
The Unity of Nature
I meet a melancholy old Savoyard playing on a hurdy-gurdy, grisly,
dejected, dirty, with a look upon him as though the iron had long since
entered into his soul. It is a frosty morning but he has very little
clothing, and there is a dumb despairing look about him which is surely
genuine. There passes him a young butcher boy with his tray of meat upon
his shoulder. He is ruddy, lusty, full of life and health and spirits,
and he vents these in a shrill whistle which eclipses the hurdy-gurdy of
the Savoyard.
The like holds good with the horses and cats and dogs which I meet daily,
with the flies in window panes and with plants, some are successful,
other have now passed their prime. Look at the failures _per se_ and
they make one very unhappy, but it helps matters to look at them in their
capacities as parts of a whole rather than as isolated.
I cannot see things round about me without feeling that they are all
parts of one whole which is trying to do something; it has not perhaps a
perfectly clear idea of what it is trying after, but it is doing its
best. I see old age, decay and failure as the relaxation, after effort,
of a muscle in the corporation of things, or as a tentative effort in a
wrong direction, or as the dropping off of particles of skin from a
healthy limb. This dropping off is the death of any given generation of
our cells as they work their way nearer and nearer to our skins and then
get rubbed off and go away. It is as though we sent people to live
nearer and nearer the churchyard the older they grew. As for the skin
that is shed, in the first place it has had its turn, in the second it
starts anew under fresh auspices, for it can at no time cease to be part
of the universe, it must always live in one way or another.
Croesus and His Kitchen-Maid
I want people to see either their cells as less parts of themselves than
they do, or their servants as more.
Croesus’s kitchen-maid is part of him, bone of his bone and flesh of his
flesh, for she eats what comes from his table and, being fed of one
flesh, are they not brother and sister to one another in virtue of
community of nutriment which is but a thinly veiled travesty of descent?
When she eats peas with her knife, he does so too; there is not a bit of
bread and butter she puts into her mouth, nor a lump of sugar she drops
into her tea, but he knoweth it altogether, though he knows nothing
whatever about it. She is en-Croesused and he enscullery-maided so long
as she remains linked to him by the golden chain which passes from his
pocket to hers, and which is greatest of all unifiers.
True, neither party is aware of the connection at all as long as things
go smoothly. Croesus no more knows the name of, or feels the existence
of, his kitchen-maid than a peasant in health knows about his liver;
nevertheless he is awakened to a dim sense of an undefined something when
he pays his grocer or his baker. She is more definitely aware of him
than he of her, but it is by way of an overshadowing presence rather than
a clear and intelligent comprehension. And though Croesus does not eat
his kitchen-maid’s meals otherwise than vicariously, still to eat
vicariously is to eat: the meals so eaten by his kitchen-maid nourish the
better ordering of the dinner which nourishes and engenders the better
ordering of Croesus himself. He is fed therefore by the feeding of his
kitchen-maid.
And so with sleep. When she goes to bed he, in part, does so too. When
she gets up and lays the fire in the back-kitchen he, in part, does so.
He lays it through her and in her, though knowing no more what he is
doing than we know when we digest, but still doing it as by what we call
a reflex action. _Qui facit per alium facit per se_, and when the
back-kitchen fire is lighted on Croesus’s behalf, it is Croesus who
lights it, though he is all the time fast asleep in bed.
Sometimes things do not go smoothly. Suppose the kitchen-maid to be
taken with fits just before dinner-time; there will be a reverberating
echo of disturbance throughout the whole organisation of the palace. But
the oftener she has fits, the more easily will the household know what it
is all about when she is taken with them. On the first occasion Lady
Croesus will send some one rushing down into the kitchen, there will, in
fact, be a general flow of blood (i.e. household) to the part affected
(that is to say, to the scullery-maid); the doctor will be sent for and
all the rest of it. On each repetition of the fits the neighbouring
organs, reverting to a more primary undifferentiated condition, will
discharge duties for which they were not engaged, in a manner for which
no one would have given them credit, and the disturbance will be less and
less each time, till by and by, at the sound of the crockery smashing
below, Lady Croesus will just look up to papa and say:
“My dear, I am afraid Sarah has got another fit.”
And papa will say she will probably be better again soon, and will go on
reading his newspaper.
In course of time the whole thing will come to be managed automatically
downstairs without any reference either to papa, the cerebrum, or to
mamma, the cerebellum, or even to the medulla oblongata, the housekeeper.
A precedent or routine will be established, after which everything will
work quite smoothly.
But though papa and mamma are unconscious of the reflex action which has
been going on within their organisation, the kitchen-maid and the cells
in her immediate vicinity (that is to say her fellow-servants) will know
all about it. Perhaps the neighbours will think that nobody in the house
knows, and that because the master and mistress show no sign of
disturbance therefore there is no consciousness. They forget that the
scullery-maid becomes more and more conscious of the fits if they grow
upon her, as they probably will, and that Croesus and his lady do show
more signs of consciousness, if they are watched closely, than can be
detected on first inspection. There is not the same violent perturbation
that there was on the previous occasions, but the tone of the palace is
lowered. A dinner party has to be put off; the cooking is more
homogeneous and uncertain, it is less highly differentiated than when the
scullery-maid was well; and there is a grumble when the doctor has to be
paid and also when the smashed crockery has to be replaced.
If Croesus discharges his kitchen-maid and gets another, it is as though
he cut out a small piece of his finger and replaced it in due course by
growth. But even the slightest cut may lead to blood-poisoning, and so
even the dismissal of a kitchen-maid may be big with the fate of empires.
Thus the cook, a valued servant, may take the kitchen-maid’s part and go
too. The next cook may spoil the dinner and upset Croesus’s temper, and
from this all manner of consequences may be evolved, even to the
dethronement and death of the king himself. Nevertheless as a general
rule an injury to such a low part of a great monarch’s organism as a
kitchen-maid has no important results. It is only when we are attacked
in such vital organs as the solicitor or the banker that we need be
uneasy. A wound in the solicitor is a very serious thing, and many a man
has died from failure of his bank’s action.
It is certain, as we have seen, that when the kitchen-maid lights the
fire it is really Croesus who is lighting it, but it is less obvious that
when Croesus goes to a ball the scullery-maid goes also. Still this
should be held in the same way as it should be also held that she eats
vicariously when Croesus dines. For he must return the balls and the
dinner parties and this comes out in his requiring to keep a large
establishment whereby the scullery-maid retains her place as part of his
organism and is nourished and amused also.
On the other hand, when Croesus dies it does not follow that the
scullery-maid should die at the same time. She may grow a new Croesus,
as Croesus, if the maid dies, will probably grow a new kitchen-maid,
Croesus’s son or successor may take over
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