All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense; but some are greater nonsense than others.
 Samuel Butler, The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912). copy citation

Context

“People will still keep trying to find some formula that shall hedge-in the cuckoo of mental phenomena to their satisfaction. Half the books—nay, all of them that deal with thought and its ways in the academic spirit—are but so many of these hedges in various stages of decay.
God and Philosophies All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense; but some are greater nonsense than others. It is perhaps because God does not set much store by or wish to encourage them that he has attached such very slender rewards to them.
Common Sense, Reason and Faith Reason is not the ultimate test of truth nor is it the court of first instance.” source

Meaning and analysis

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