The Note-Books of Samuel Butler Part 55

xiv

Truth generally is kindness, but where the two diverge or collide, kindness should override truth.

Falsehood

i

Truth consists not in never lying but in knowing when to lie and when not to do so. De minimis non curat veritas.

Yes, but what is a minimum? Sometimes a maximum is a minimum and sometimes it is the other way.

ii

Lying is like borrowing or appropriating in music. It is only a good, sound, truthful person who can lie to any good purpose; if a man is not habitually truthful his very lies will be false to him and betray him. The converse also is true; if a man is not a good, sound, honest, capable liar there is no truth in him.

iii

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.

iv

I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.

v

A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.

vi

Cursed is he that does not know when to shut his mind. An open mind is all very well in its way, but it ought not to be so open that there is no keeping anything in or out of it. It should be capable of shutting its doors sometimes, or it may be found a little draughty.

vii

He who knows not how to wink knows not how to see; and he who knows not how to lie knows not how to speak the truth. So he who cannot suppress his opinions cannot express them.

viii

There can no more be a true statement without falsehood distributed through it, than a note on a well-tuned piano that is not intentionally and deliberately put out of tune to some extent in order to have the piano in the most perfect possible tune. Any perfection of tune as regards one key can only be got at the expense of all the rest.

ix

Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him.

x

I seem to see lies crowding and crus.h.i.+ng at a narrow gate and working their way in along with truths into the domain of history.

Nature's Double Falsehood

That one great lie she told about the earth being flat when she knew it was round all the time! And again how she stuck to it that the sun went round us when it was we who were going round the sun! This double falsehood has irretrievably ruined my confidence in her.

There is no lie which she will not tell and stick to like a Gladstonian. How plausibly she told her tale, and how many ages was it before she was so much as suspected! And then when things did begin to look bad for her, how she brazened it out, and what a desperate business it was to bring her s.h.i.+fts and prevarications to book!

Convenience

i

We wonder at its being as hard often to discover convenience as it is to discover truth. But surely convenience is truth.

ii

The use of truth is like the use of words; both truth and words depend greatly upon custom.

iii

We do with truth much as we do with G.o.d. We create it according to our own requirements and then say that it has created us, or requires that we shall do or think so and so--whatever we find convenient.

iv

"What is Truth?" is often asked, as though it were harder to say what truth is than what anything else is. But what is Justice? What is anything? An eternal contradiction in terms meets us at the end of every enquiry. We are not required to know what truth is, but to speak the truth, and so with justice.

v

The search after truth is like the search after perpetual motion or the attempt to square the circle. All we should aim at is the most convenient way of looking at a thing--the way that most sensible people are likely to find give them least trouble for some time to come. It is not true that the sun used to go round the earth until Copernicus's time, but it is true that until Copernicus's time it was most convenient to us to hold this. Still, we had certain ideas which could only fit in comfortably with our other ideas when we came to consider the sun as the centre of the planetary system.

Obvious convenience often takes a long time before it is fully recognised and acted upon, but there will be a nisus towards it as long and as widely spread as the desire of men to be saved trouble.

If truth is not trouble-saving in the long run it is not truth: truth is only that which is most largely and permanently trouble- saving. The ultimate triumph, therefore, of truth rests on a very tangible basis--much more so than when it is made to depend upon the will of an unseen and unknowable agency. If my views about the Odyssey, for example, will, in the long run, save students from perplexity, the students will be sure to adopt them, and I have no wish that they should adopt them otherwise.

It does not matter much what the truth is, but our knowing the truth- -that is to say our hitting on the most permanently convenient arrangement of our ideas upon a subject whatever it may be--matters very much; at least it matters, or may matter, very much in some relations. And however little it matters, yet it matters, and however much it matters yet it does not matter. In the utmost importance there is unimportance, and in the utmost unimportance there is importance. So also it is with certainty, life, matter, necessity, consciousness and, indeed, with everything which can form an object of human sensation at all, or of those after-reasonings which spring ultimately from sensations. This is a round-about way of saying that every question has two sides.

vi

Our concern is with the views we shall choose to take and to let other people take concerning things, and as to the way of expressing those views which shall give least trouble. If we express ourselves in one way we find our ideas in confusion and our action impotent: if in another our ideas cohere harmoniously, and our action is edifying. The convenience of least disturbing vested ideas, and at the same time rearranging our views in accordance with new facts that come to our knowledge, this is our proper care. But it is idle to say we do not know anything about things--perhaps we do, perhaps we don't--but we at any rate know what sane people think and are likely to think about things, and this to all intents and purposes is knowing the things themselves. For the things only are what sensible people agree to say and think they are.

vii

The arrangement of our ideas is as much a matter of convenience as the packing of goods in a druggist's or draper's store and leads to exactly the same kind of difficulties in the matter of cla.s.sifying them. We all admit the arbitrariness of cla.s.sifications in a languid way, but we do not think of it more than we can help--I suppose because it is so inconvenient to do so. The great advantage of cla.s.sification is to conceal the fact that subdivisions are as arbitrary as they are.

Cla.s.sification

There can be no perfect way, for cla.s.sification presupposes that a thing has absolute limits whereas there is nothing that does not partake of the universal infinity--nothing whose boundaries do not vary. Everything is one thing at one time and in some respects, and another at other times and in other respects. We want a new mode of measurement altogether; at present we take what gaps we can find, set up milestones, and declare them irremovable. We want a measure which shall express, or at any rate recognise, the harmonics of resemblance that lurk even in the most absolute differences and vice versa.