The Note-Books of Samuel Butler Part 56

Attempts at Cla.s.sification

are like nailing battens of our own flesh and blood upon ourselves as an inclined plane that we may walk up ourselves more easily; and yet it answers very sufficiently.

A Clergyman's Doubts

Under this heading a correspondence appeared in the Examiner, 15th February to 14th June, 1879. Butler wrote all the letters under various signatures except one or perhaps two. His first letter purported to come from "An Earnest Clergyman" aged forty-five, with a wife, five children, a country living worth 400 pounds a year, and a house, but no private means. He had ceased to believe in the doctrines he was called upon to teach. Ought he to continue to lead a life that was a lie or ought he to throw up his orders and plunge himself, his wife and children into poverty? The dilemma interested Butler deeply: he might so easily have found himself in it if he had not begun to doubt the efficacy of infant baptism when he did.

Fifteen letters followed, signed "Cantab," "Oxoniensis," and so forth, some recommending one course, some another. One, signed "X.Y.Z.," included "The Righteous Man" which will be found in the last group of this volume, headed "Poems." From the following letter signed "Ethics" Butler afterwards took two pa.s.sages (which I have enclosed, one between single asterisks the other between double asterisks), and used them for the "Dissertation on Lying" which is in Chapter V of Alps and Sanctuaries.

To the Editor of the Examiner.

Sir: I am sorry for your correspondent "An Earnest Clergyman" for, though he may say he has "come to smile at his troubles," his smile seems to be a grim one. We must all of us eat a peck of moral dirt before we die, but some must know more precisely than others when they are eating it; some, again, can bolt it without wry faces in one shape, while they cannot endure even the smell of it in another. "An Earnest Clergyman" admits that he is in the habit of telling people certain things which he does not believe, but says he has no great fancy for deceiving himself. "Cantab" must, I fear, deceive himself before he can tolerate the notion of deceiving other people. For my own part I prefer to be deceived by one who does not deceive himself rather than by one who does, for the first will know better when to stop, and will not commonly deceive me more than he can help. As for the other--if he does not know how to invest his own thoughts safely he will invest mine still worse; he will hold G.o.d's most precious gift of falsehood too cheap; he has come by it too easily; cheaply come, cheaply go will be his maxim. The good liar should be the converse of the poet; he should be made, not born.

It is not loss of confidence in a man's strict adherence to the letter of truth that shakes my confidence in him. I know what I do myself and what I must lose all social elasticity if I were not to do. * Turning for moral guidance to my cousins the lower animals-- whose unsophisticated instinct proclaims what G.o.d has taught them with a directness we may sometimes study--I find the plover lying when she reads us truly and, knowing that we shall hit her if we think her to be down, lures us from her young ones under the fiction of a broken wing. Is G.o.d angry, think you, with this pretty deviation from the letter of strict accuracy? or was it not He who whispered to her to tell the falsehood, to tell it with a circ.u.mstance, without conscientious scruples, and not once only but to make a practice of it, so as to be an habitual liar for at least six weeks in the year? I imagine so. When I was young I used to read in good books that it was G.o.d who taught the bird to make her nest, and, if so, He probably taught each species the other domestic arrangements which should be best suited to it. Or did the nest- building information come from G.o.d and was there an Evil One among the birds also who taught them to steer clear of pedantry? Then there is the spider--an ugly creature, but I suppose G.o.d likes it-- can anything be meaner than that web which naturalists extol as such a marvel of Providential ingenuity?

Ingenuity! The word reeks with lying. Once, on a summer afternoon, in a distant country I met one of those orchids whose main idea consists in the imitation of a fly; this lie they dispose so plausibly upon their petals that other flies who would steal their honey leave them unmolested. Watching intently and keeping very still, methought I heard this person speaking to the offspring which she felt within her though I saw them not.

"My children," she exclaimed, "I must soon leave you; think upon the fly, my loved ones; make it look as terrible as possible; cling to this thought in your pa.s.sage through life, for it is the one thing needful; once lose sight of it and you are lost."

Over and over again she sang this burden in a small, still voice, and so I left her. Then straightway I came upon some b.u.t.terflies whose profession it was to pretend to believe in all manner of vital truths which in their inner practice they rejected; thus, pretending to be certain other and hateful b.u.t.terflies which no bird will eat by reason of their abominable smell, these cunning ones conceal their own sweetness, live long in the land and see good days. Think of that, O Earnest Clergyman, my friend! No. Lying is like Nature, you may expel her with a fork, but she will always come back again.

Lying is like the poor, we must have it always with us. The question is, How much, when, where, to whom and under what circ.u.mstances is lying right? For, once admit that a plover may pretend to have a broken wing and yet be without sin if she have pretended well enough, and the thin edge of the wedge has been introduced so that there is no more saying that we must never lie. *

It is not, then, the discovery that a man has the power to lie that shakes my confidence in him; it is loss of confidence in his mendacity that I find it impossible to get over. I forgive him for telling me lies, but I cannot forgive him for not telling me the same lies, or nearly so, about the same things. This shows he has a slipshod memory, which is unpardonable, or else that he tells so many lies that he finds it impossible to remember all of them, and this is like having too many of the poor always with us. The plover and the spider have each of them their stock of half a dozen lies or so which we may expect them to tell when occasion arises; they are plausible and consistent, but we know where to have them; otherwise, if they were liable, like self-deceivers, to spring mines upon us in unexpected places, man would soon make it his business to reform them--not from within, but from without.

And now it is time I came to the drift of my letter, which is that if "An Earnest Clergyman" has not cheated himself into thinking he is telling the truth, he will do no great harm by stopping where he is.

Do not let him make too much fuss about trifles. The solemnity of the truths which he professes to uphold is very doubtful; there is a tacit consent that it exists more on paper than in reality. If he is a man of any tact, he can say all he is compelled to say and do all the Church requires of him--like a gentleman, with neither undue slovenliness nor undue unction--yet it shall be perfectly plain to all his paris.h.i.+oners who are worth considering that he is acting as a mouthpiece and that his words are spoken dramatically. As for the unimaginative, they are as children; they cannot and should not be taken into account. Men must live as they must write or act--for a certain average standard which each must guess at for himself as best he can; those who are above this standard he cannot reach; those, again, who are below it must be so at their own risk.

Pilate did well when he would not stay for an answer to his question, What is truth? for there is no such thing apart from the sayer and the sayee. ** There is that irony in nature which brings it to pa.s.s that if the sayer be a man with any stuff in him, provided he tells no lies wittingly to himself and is never unkindly, he may lie and lie and lie all the day long, and he will no more be false to any man than the sun will s.h.i.+ne by night; his lies will become truths as they pa.s.s into the hearer's soul. But if a man deceives himself and is unkind, the truth is not in him, it turns to falsehood while yet in his mouth, like the quails in the wilderness of Sinai. How this is so or why, I know not, but that the Lord hath mercy on whom He will have mercy and whom He willeth He hardeneth, and that the bad man can do no right and the good no wrong. **

A great French writer has said that the mainspring of our existence does not lie in those veins and nerves and arteries which have been described with so much care--these are but its masks and mouthpieces through which it acts but behind which it is for ever hidden; so in like manner the faiths and formulae of a Church may be as its bones and animal mechanism, but they are not the life of the Church, which is something rather that cannot be holden in words, and one should know how to put them off, yet put them off gracefully, if they wish to come too prominently forward. Do not let "An Earnest Clergyman"

take things too much au serieux. He seems to be contented where he is; let him take the word of one who is old enough to be his father, that if he has a talent for conscientious scruples he will find plenty of scope for them in other professions as well as in the Church. I, for aught he knows, may be a doctor and I might tell my own story; or I may be a barrister and have found it my duty to win a case which I thought a very poor one, whereby others, whose circ.u.mstances were sufficiently pitiable, lost their all; yet doctors and barristers do not write to the newspapers to air their poor consciences in broad daylight. Why should An Earnest (I hate the word) Clergyman do so? Let me give him a last word or two of fatherly advice.

Men may settle small things for themselves--as what they will have for dinner or where they will spend the vacation--but the great ones- -such as the choice of a profession, of the part of England they will live in, whether they will marry or no--they had better leave the force of circ.u.mstances to settle for them; if they prefer the phraseology, as I do myself, let them leave these matters to G.o.d.

When He has arranged things for them, do not let them be in too great a hurry to upset His arrangement in a tiff. If they do not like their present and another opening suggests itself easily and naturally, let them take that as a sign that they make a change; otherwise, let them see to it that they do not leave the frying-pan for the fire. A man, finding himself in the field of a profession, should do as cows do when they are put into a field of gra.s.s. They do not like any field; they like the open prairie of their ancestors.

They walk, however, all round their new abode, surveying the hedges and gates with much interest. If there is a gap in any hedge they will commonly go through it at once, otherwise they will resign themselves contentedly enough to the task of feeding.

I am, Sir,

One who thinks he knows a thing or two about

ETHICS.

XX--FIRST PRINCIPLES

The Baselessness of Our Ideas

That our ideas are baseless, or rotten at the roots, is what few who study them will deny; but they are rotten in the same way as property is robbery, and property is robbery in the same way as our ideas are rotten at the roots, that is to say it is a robbery and it is not.

No t.i.tle to property, no idea and no living form (which is the embodiment of idea) is indefeasible if search be made far enough.

Granted that our thoughts are baseless, yet they are so in the same way as the earth itself is both baseless and most firmly based, or again most stable and yet most in motion.

Our ideas, or rather, I should say, our realities, are all of them like our G.o.ds, based on superst.i.tious foundations. If man is a microcosm then kosmos is a megalanthrope and that is how we come to anthropomorphise the deity. In the eternal pendulum swing of thought we make G.o.d in our own image, and then make him make us, and then find it out and cry because we have no G.o.d and so on, over and over again as a child has new toys given to it, tires of them, breaks them and is disconsolate till it gets new ones which it will again tire of and break. If the man who first made G.o.d in his own image had been a good model, all might have been well; but he was impressed with an undue sense of his own importance and, as a natural consequence, he had no sense of humour. Both these imperfections he has fully and faithfully reproduced in his work and with the result we are familiar. All our most solid and tangible realities are but as lies that we have told too often henceforth to question them. But we have to question them sometimes. It is not the sun that goes round the world but we who go round the sun.

If any one is for examining and making requisitions on t.i.tle we can search too, and can require the t.i.tle of the state as against any other state, or against the world at large. But suppose we succeed in this, we must search further still and show by what t.i.tle mankind has ousted the lower animals, and by what t.i.tle we eat them, or they themselves eat gra.s.s or one another.

See what quicksands we fall into if we wade out too far from the terra firma of common consent! The error springs from supposing that there is any absolute right or absolute truth, and also from supposing that truth and right are any the less real for being not absolute but relative. In the complex of human affairs we should aim not at a supposed absolute standard but at the greatest coming- together-ness or convenience of all our ideas and practices; that is to say, at their most harmonious working with one another. Hit ourselves somewhere we are bound to do: no idea will travel far without colliding with some other idea. Thus, if we pursue one line of probable convenience, we find it convenient to see all things as ultimately one: that is, if we insist rather on the points of agreement between things than on those of disagreement. If we insist on the opposite view, namely, on the points of disagreement, we find ourselves driven to the conclusion that each atom is an individual ent.i.ty, and that the unity between even the most united things is apparent only. If we did not unduly insist upon--that is to say, emphasise and exaggerate--the part which concerns us for the time, we should never get to understand anything; the proper way is to exaggerate first one view and then the other, and then let the two exaggerations collide, but good-temperedly and according to the laws of civilised mental warfare. So we see first all things as one, then all things as many and, in the end, a mult.i.tude in unity and a unity in mult.i.tude. Care must be taken not to accept ideas which though very agreeable at first disagree with us afterwards, and keep rising on our mental stomachs, as garlic does upon our bodily.

Imagination

i

Imagination depends mainly upon memory, but there is a small percentage of creation of something out of nothing with it. We can invent a trifle more than can be got at by mere combination of remembered things.

ii

When we are impressed by a few only, or perhaps only one of a number of ideas which are bonded pleasantly together, there is hope; when we see a good many there is expectation; when we have had so many presented to us that we have expected confidently and the remaining ideas have not turned up, there is disappointment. So the sailor says in the play:

"Here are my arms, here is my manly bosom, but where's my Mary?"

iii

What tricks imagination plays! Thus, if we expect a person in the street we transform a dozen impossible people into him while they are still too far off to be seen distinctly; and when we expect to hear a footstep on the stairs--as, we will say, the postman's--we hear footsteps in every sound. Imagination will make us see a billiard hall as likely to travel farther than it will travel, if we hope that it will do so. It will make us think we feel a train begin to move as soon as the guard has said "All right," though the train has not yet begun to move if another train alongside begins to move exactly at this juncture, there is no man who will not be deceived. And we omit as much as we insert. We often do not notice that a man has grown a beard.

iv

I read once of a man who was cured of a dangerous illness by eating his doctor's prescription which he understood was the medicine itself. So William Sefton Moorhouse [in New Zealand] imagined he was being converted to Christianity by reading Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, which he had got by mistake for Butler's a.n.a.logy, on the recommendation of a friend. But it puzzled him a good deal.

v

At Ivy Hatch, while we were getting our beer in the inner parlour, there was a confused melee of voices in the bar, amid which I distinguished a voice saying:

"Imagination will do any b.l.o.o.d.y thing almost."

I was writing Life and Habit at the time and was much tempted to put this pa.s.sage in. Nothing truer has ever been said about imagination.

Then the voice was heard addressing the barman and saying:

"I suppose you wouldn't trust me with a quart of beer, would you?"