The Note-Books of Samuel Butler

What i

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players, continually being nearly sent into a pocket, b

wind-up and down, here and there-but not one

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his country; he is the twitching of a nerve, a smile,

band playing in the street, a face seen in the fire, or on the gnarled

p a tray of spoiled tarts which she sold cheaper. They most of them

y be, or how low we may have fallen, we would not change identity with any other person. Hence our self-conceit su

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As for hell, we are in a burning fiery furnace all o

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n. We have wriggled into it by holding that everything is both one and many, both infinite in time and space and yet finite, both like and unlike to the same thing, bot

h a thing as free will and that there is such another thing as necessity-the recognit

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o be read as a Gordian knot th

tribution of an

fe of Dr. Butler was an omnium gatheru

ell is a superstition, slugs have no shells and thrive just as well. But a snail with

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ng process of

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ugh me as water

g sufficient conclusions

o parts play, the unseen world i

st their tails by the time they r

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s well as those of other people, will keep him from the commission

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stinct, not by rule. Nevertheless one had better know the rule

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t every one can, in the end, get what he wants if he only tries. This is the general rule. Th

ng the level of this mean, but not for making every one two inches t

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al innate desire on the part of ever

Wo

r the casino must play and all must lose more or less heavi

y come, not knowing what they will be, hoping for a lucky car

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rticularly wise-still,

not try to stop this, we should try to make the self-interes

idual and

this world provided he can live in men's good thoughts long after he has left it. The world at large does not so much care how much suffering the individ

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myself experienced. I should say I had proved pretty well the extremes of mental

ving something to squander. Squandering is in itself delightful, and so I found it with my life in my younger days. I do not squander it now, but I am not sorry

we Live

l. Still, the life we live beyond the grave is our truest life, and our happiest, for we pass it in the profoundest sleep as though we were children in our cradles. If we are wronged it hurts us not; if we wrong others, we do not suffer for it;

of it when it is in its highest vitality, centuries, it may be, after his apparent death, so it is best and happiest if during

re years and ten of immortality. There are very few workers who are not sustained by this belief, or at least hope, but it may well b

ld Made

h they had never been, we should remember that the world, so far as we can see, was made to enjoy rather than to last. Come-and-go pervades every

ages as they have done and probably will continue to do? The life of a great thing may be so long as practically to come to immortality even now, but that is not the point. The point is that if anything was aimed at at all when things began to shape or to be shaped, it seems to have been a short life and a merry one,

that it should be good of its kind. Many ephemeral things ar

g in

a good deal, and less in the individual, to whom, so far as I can see, he is indifferent. After we are dead it matters not to the life

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at I come in free, gratis, to the work of hundreds and thousands of better men than myself who often were much worse paid than I have been. If a man's true self is his karma-the life which his work lives but

and

you must get rid of the other also. There is birth in death

ragments each one of which, however, is absorbed at once into the sea of life

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when you are born? In the one case we are born and in th

omy forebodings on this head and forgotten all about them. At any rate we know no more about the very end of our lives than about the very beginning.

oduc

ut in the discontent of the germs with their surroundings inside those pare

almost Id

al or vegetable, think little, but that little almost identically on every subject. That "almost" is t

Worth

for an embryo, no

cua

believe that in all cases the pleasure arises from rest-rest, that is to say, from the considerabl

thing about it, though the subordinates in question doubtless do. But when the desirability of removing is abnormally great, we know about the effort of retaining perfectly well, and the gradual increase in our perception of the effort suggests strongly

ction, education, increased intelligence and multiplication of the spermatozoa; so that our whole life is in reality a series of complex efforts in respect of these, conscious or unconscious according to their comparative commonness. They are the central fact i

d His

g experience; and truth is but its own most enlarged, general and enduring sense of the coming togetherness or convenience of the vario

set over a bellows and a stewpan

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at one time exercised upon the invention of these very organs themselves. Tentative bankruptcy acts afford good illustrations of the manner in which organisms have been developed. The ligaments which bind the tendons of our

; and in like manner such a tool as a locomotive engine, apparently entirely separated from the body, must still from time to time, a

o

of that other's ends, and this constitutes him a machine in use. Therefore the word "tool" implies also the existence of a living, intelligent being capable of desiring the end for which the tool is used, for this is involved in the idea of a desired end. And as few tools grow naturally fit for use (for even a stick or a fulle

ear the impress of their object, and are so often in use that we may speak of them as though they always were so. Strictly, a thing is a tool or not a tool just as it may happen to be in use or not. Thus a stone may be picked up and used to hammer a nail with, but the stone is not a tool until picked up with an eye to use; it is a tool as soon as this happens, and, if thrown away immediatel

s a more complex instrument, about the toolishness of which no doubt can be entertained. It will, however, I think, be held that even a piece of gravel found in situ and left there untouched, provided it is so left because it was

, but in the recognition of its utility and in the forces directed through it in virtue of this recognition. This appears more plainly when we reflect that a very complex machine, if intended for use by children whose ai

but upon the ease or difficulty experienced by the person using it in comparison with what he or others of average capacity

lever, whichever one wills; so that all the problems of mechanics are present to us in the simple stone which may be used as a hammer, or in the stick that

and Mak

omething that will do, for example, the top of my tin case (for holding pencils). This

ningThese are the

s the railway train and the hedge, combine many examples of both. Thus the train, on the whole, is used for bringing things together, but it is also used for sending them apart, and its divisions into classes are alike for separating and keeping together. The hedge is also both for joining things (as a flock of sheep) and for disjoining (as for keeping the sheep from getting into corn). These are the more immediate e

is, in the main, a thing that makes for splitty-uppiness; still, there is an odour of tog

hout considering it also as a piece of string, nor at a

n Fac

hich it turns out for the world's wearing or the machinery whereby its ends are achieved? The manufacture is only possible by reason of the machinery; it is produced by this. The

ing body as constituting himself rather than of the work that the life and living body turn out. The instinct being as strong as it is, I suppose

ivial

ulls us half over London. There is not an action of a muscle in a horse's leg upon a winter's night as it drags a carriage to the Albert Hall but is in connection with, and part outcome of, the force generated when Handel sat in his room at Gopsall and wrote the Messiah. Think of all the forces which that force has control

tity on which death is but the seal, or solemn signing, as the abnegation of all further act and deed on the part of the s

ndred years or so after his death? His physical life was but as a dawn preceding the sunrise of that life of the world to come which he was to enjoy hereafter. True, there was a little stir-a little abiding of shepherds in the fields, keeping watch o

he beginning of others. So he that loses his s