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Read Ebook: The Note-Books of Samuel Butler by Butler Samuel Jones Henry Festing Editor
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Ebook has 2557 lines and 144237 words, and 52 pages
Second Edition of The Way of All Flesh.
July 15. The second Erewhon dinner at Pagani's; 53 present: the day was fixed by Mr. George Bernard Shaw.
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.
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.
Evolution Old and New, a reprint of the second edition with prefatory note by R. A. Streatfeild.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Life is the distribution of an error--or errors.
Murray said that my Life of Dr. Butler was an omnium gatherum. Yes, but life is an omnium gatherum.
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.
Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.
Life is eight parts cards and two parts play, the unseen world is made manifest to us in the play.
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.
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