Samuel Butler

“ Strike either body or soul—that is to say, effect either a physical or a mental change, and the harmonics of the other sound. So long as body is minded in a certain way—so long, that is to say, as it feels, knows, remembers, concludes, and forecasts one set of things—it will be in one form; if it assumes a new one, otherwise than by external violence, no matter how slight the change may be, it is only through having changed its mind, through having forgotten and died to some trains of thought, and having been correspondingly born anew by the adoption of new ones. ”

“ What theory could do more than just keep itself alive under conditions so unfavourable? Even under the most favourable conditions descent with modification would have been a hard plant to rear, but, as things were, the wonder is that it was not killed outright at once. We all know how large a share social influences have in deciding what kind of reception a book or theory is to meet with; true, these influences are not permanent, but at first they are almost irresistible; in reality it was not the theory of descent that was matched against that of fixity, but Lamarck against Cuvier ”

“ Darwin’s mind can be seen as though it were the twitchings of a dog’s nose, that any idea can be formed of the difficulty in which he found himself involved by his initial blunder of thinking he had got a distinctive feature which entitled him to claim the theory of evolution as an original idea of his own. He found his natural selection hang round his neck like a millstone. There is hardly a page in the “Origin of Species” in which traces of the struggle going on in Mr. Darwin’s mind are not discernible, with a result alike exasperating and pitiable. ”

“ Our philosophers have made the mistake of forgetting that they cannot carry the rough-and-ready language of common sense into precincts within which politeness and philosophy are supreme. Common sense sees life and death as distinct states having nothing in common, and hence in all respects the antitheses of one another; so that with common sense there should be no degrees of livingness, but if a thing is alive at all it is as much alive as the most living of us, and if dead at all it is stone dead in every part of it. ”

“ If we stick out beyond a certain point we go mad, as fanatics, or at the best make Coleridges of ourselves; and yet upon a small scale these same miracles are the breath and essence of life; to cease to work them is to die. And by miracle I do not merely mean something new, strange, and not very easy of comprehension—I mean something which violates every canon of thought which in the palpable world we are accustomed to respect; something as alien to, and inconceivable by, us as contradiction in terms, the destructibility of force or matter, or the creation of something out of nothing. ”

“ The organic world can alone feel, just as man can alone speak; but as speech is only the development of powers the germs of which are possessed by the lower animals, so feeling is only a sign of the employment and development of powers the germs of which exist in inorganic substances. It has all the characteristics of an art, and though it must probably rank as the oldest of those arts that are peculiar to the organic world, it is one which is still in process of development. None of us, indeed, can feel well on more than a very few subjects, and many can hardly feel at all. ”

“ Logic has been the true Tower of Babel, which we have thought to build so that we might climb up into the heavens, and have no more miracle, but see God and live—nor has confusion of tongues failed to follow on our presumption. Truly St. Paul said well that the just shall live by faith; and the question “By what faith?” is a detail of minor moment, for there are as many faiths as species, whether of plants or animals, and each of them is in its own way both living and saving.
All, then, whether fusion or diffusion, whether of ideas or things, is miraculous. ”

“ Is luck the only element of fitness, or is not cunning even more indispensable?
Mr. Darwin has a habit, borrowed, perhaps, mutatis mutandis, from the framers of our collects, of every now and then adding the words “through natural selection,” as though this squared everything, and descent with modification thus became his theory at once. This is not the case. Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck believed in natural selection to the full as much as any follower of Mr. Charles Darwin can do. ”

“ But the course of true philosophy never did run smooth; no sooner have we fairly grasped the conception of a single eternal and for ever unknowable underlying substance, then we are faced by mind and matter. Long-standing ideas and current language alike lead us to see these as distinct things—mind being still commonly regarded as something that acts on body from without as the wind blows upon a leaf, and as no less an actual entity than the body. Neither body nor mind seems less essential to our existence than the other ”

“ It is here, if anywhere, that body or substance is guilty of the contradiction in terms of combining with that which is without material substance and cannot, therefore, be conceived by us as passing in and out with matter, till the two become a body ensouled and a soul embodied.
All body is more or less ensouled. As it gets farther and farther from ourselves, indeed, we sympathise less with it; nothing, we say to ourselves, can have intelligence unless we understand all about it—as though intelligence in all except ourselves meant the power of being understood rather than of understanding. ”

“ No one who has not a strong social position should ever advance a new theory, unless a life of hard fighting is part of what he lays himself out for. It was one of Mr. Darwin’s great merits that he had a strong social position, and had the good sense to know how to profit by it. The magnificent feat which he eventually achieved was unhappily tarnished by much that detracts from the splendour that ought to have attended it, but a magnificent feat it must remain. ”

“ When I advocated the theory of the livingness, or quasi-livingness of machines, in the chapters of “Erewhon” of which all else that I have written on biological subjects is a development, I took care that people should see the position in its extreme form; the non-livingness of bodily organs is to the full as startling a paradox as the livingness of non-bodily ones, and we have a right to expect the fullest explicitness from those who advance it. Of course it must be borne in mind that a machine can only claim any appreciable even aroma of livingness so long as it is in actual use. ”

“ People who think—as against those who feel and act—want hard and fast lines—without which, indeed, they cannot think at all; these lines are as it were steps cut on a slope of ice without which there would be no descending it. When we have begun to travel the downward path of thought, we ask ourselves questions about life and death, ego and non ego, object and subject, necessity and free will, and other kindred subjects. ”

“ There is design, or cunning, but it is a cunning not despotically fashioning us from without as a potter fashions his clay, but inhering democratically within the body which is its highest outcome, as life inheres within an animal or plant.
All animals and plants are corporations, or forms of democracy, and may be studied by the light of these, as democracies, not infrequently, by that of animals and plants. ”

“ Returning to the point raised in my title, is luck, I would ask, or cunning, the more fitting matter to be insisted upon in connection with organic modification? Do animals and plants grow into conformity with their surroundings because they and their fathers and mothers take pains, or because their uncles and aunts go away? For the survival of the fittest is only the non-survival or going away of the unfittest—in whose direct line the race is not continued, and who are therefore only uncles and aunts of the survivors. ”

“ Greatness, indeed, of the highest kind—that of one who is without fear and without reproach—will not ultimately be allowed him, but greatness of a rare kind can only be denied him by those whose judgment is perverted by temper or personal ill-will. He found the world believing in fixity of species, and left it believing—in spite of his own doctrine—in descent with modification. ”

“ Darwin, we should be wrong. Design had a great deal to do with the telescope, but it had nothing or hardly anything whatever to do with the eye. The telescope owes its development to cunning, the eye to luck, which, it would seem, is so far more cunning than cunning that one does not quite understand why there should be any cunning at all. The main means of developing the eye was, according to Mr. Darwin, not use as varying circumstances might direct with consequent slow increase of power and an occasional happy flight of genius, but natural selection. ”

“ Darwin’s qualities without the other. If he had been more faultless, he might have written better books, but we should have listened worse. A book’s prosperity is like a jest’s—in the ear of him that hears it.
Mr. Spencer would not—at least one cannot think he would—have been able to effect the revolution which will henceforth doubtless be connected with Mr. Darwin’s name. He had been insisting on evolution for some years before the “Origin of Species” came out, but he might as well have preached to the winds, for all the visible effect that had been produced. ”

“ I shall perhaps best promote the acceptance of the two main points on which I have been insisting for some years past, I mean, the substantial identity between heredity and memory, and the reintroduction of design into organic development, by treating them as if they had something of that physical life with which they are so closely connected. Ideas are like plants and animals in this respect also, as in so many others, that they are more fully understood when their relations to other ideas of their time, and the history of their development are known and borne in mind. ”

“ Each emphasizes what the other passes over most lightly—each carries to its extreme conceivable development that which in the other is only sketched in by a faint suggestion—but neither has any feature rigorously special to itself. Granted that death is a greater new departure in an organism’s life, than any since that congeries of births and deaths to which the name embryonic stages is commonly given, still it is a new departure of the same essential character as any other—that is to say, though there be much new there is much, not to say more, old along with it. ”

“ Paul, as though a life beyond the grave, and a death on this side of it, were each some strange thing which happened to them alone of all men; but who dies absolutely once for all, and for ever at the hour that is commonly called that of death, and who does not die daily and hourly? Does any man in continuing to live from day to day or moment to moment, do more than continue in a changed body, with changed feelings, ideas, and aims, so that he lives from moment to moment only in virtue of a simultaneous dying from moment to moment also? ”

“ If a thing is living, it is so living that it has one foot in the grave already; if dead, it is dead as a thing that has already re-entered into the womb of Nature. And within the residue of life that is in the dead there is an element of death; and within this there is an element of life, and so ad infinitum—again, as reflections in two mirrors that face one another.
In brief, there is nothing in life of which there are not germs, and, so to speak, harmonics in death, and nothing in death of which germs and harmonics may not be found in life. ”

“ Darwin was perfectly innocent of any intention of getting rid of mind, and did not, probably, care the toss of sixpence whether the universe was instinct with mind or no—what he did care about was carrying off the palm in the matter of descent with modification, and the distinctive feature was an adjunct with which his nervous, sensitive, Gladstonian nature would not allow him to dispense. ”

“ Evolution has been accepted not “because of” Mr. Darwin’s doctrine, but because Mr. Darwin so fogged us about his doctrine that we did not understand it. We thought we were backing his bill for descent with modification, whereas we were in reality backing it for descent with modification by means of natural selection from among fortuitous variations. This last really is Mr. Darwin’s theory, except in so far as it is also Mr. A. R. Wallace’s; descent, alone, is just as much and just as little Mr. Darwin’s doctrine as it is Professor Ray Lankester’s or mine. ”

“ When the note of life is struck the harmonics of death are sounded, and so, again, to strike death is to arouse the infinite harmonics of life that rise forthwith as incense curling upwards from a censer. If in the midst of life we are in death, so also in the midst of death we are in life, and whether we live or whether we die, whether we like it and know anything about it or no, still we do it to the Lord—living always, dying always, and in the Lord always, the unjust and the just alike, for God is no respecter of persons. ”

“ Food is very thoughtful: through thought it comes, and back through thought it shall return; the process of its conversion and comprehension within our own system is mental as well as physical, and here, as everywhere else with mind and evolution, there must be a cross, but not too wide a cross—that is to say, there must be a miracle, but not upon a large scale. ”

“ Some organisms, indeed, are so admirably adapted to their surroundings, and some organs discharge their functions with so much appearance of provision, that we are apt to think they must owe their development to sense of need and consequent contrivance, but this opinion is fantastic; the appearance of design is delusive; what we are tempted to see as an accumulated outcome of desire and cunning, we should regard as mainly an accumulated outcome of good luck. ”