The Note-Books of Samuel Butler Part 15

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 Mult.i.tude

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 mult.i.tude of things doing an infinite mult.i.tude of actions in infinite time and s.p.a.ce; 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 gra.s.s 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, h.o.m.ogeneous 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-s.h.i.+rts and Babies

On Hindhead, last Easter, we saw a family wash hung out to dry.

There were papa's two great night-s.h.i.+rts 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-s.h.i.+rt 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-s.h.i.+rt.

A philosopher might be tempted, on seeing the little night-s.h.i.+rt, to suppose that the big night-s.h.i.+rts 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-s.h.i.+rt is made by the big ones. The thing that makes either the little night-s.h.i.+rt 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 pa.s.sed 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 cras.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.ses him a young butcher boy with his tray of meat upon his shoulder. He is ruddy, l.u.s.ty, 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 pa.s.sed 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 b.u.t.ter 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 pa.s.ses 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.