Butler, Samuel, 1835-1902 -- Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc.
I am not one of those who have travelled along a set road towards an end
that I have foreseen and desired to reach. I have made a succession of
jaunts or pleasure trips from meadow to meadow, but no long journey
unless life itself be reckoned so. Nevertheless, I have strayed into no
field in which I have not found a flower that was worth the finding, I
have gone into no public place in which I have not found sovereigns lying
about on the ground which people would not notice and be at the trouble
of picking up. They have been things which any one else has had—or at
any rate a very large number of people have had—as good a chance of
picking up as I had. My finds have none of them come as the result of
research or severe study, though they have generally given me plenty to
do in the way of research and study as soon as I had got hold of them. I
take it that these are the most interesting—or whatever the least
offensive word may be:
1. The emphasising the analogies between crime and disease.
[_Erewhon_.]
2. The emphasising also the analogies between the development of the
organs of our bodies and of those which are not incorporate with our
bodies and which we call tools or machines. [_Erewhon_ and _Luck or
Cunning_?]
3. The clearing up the history of the events in connection with the
death, or rather crucifixion, of Jesus Christ; and a reasonable
explanation, first, of the belief on the part of the founders of
Christianity that their master had risen from the dead and, secondly, of
what might follow from belief in a single supposed miracle. [_The
Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ_, _The Fair Haven_ and
_Erewhon Revisited_.]
4. The perception that personal identity cannot be denied between
parents and offspring without at the same time denying it as between the
different ages (and hence moments) in the life of the individual and, as
a corollary on this, the ascription of the phenomena of heredity to the
same source as those of memory. [_Life and Habit_.]
5. The tidying up the earlier history of the theory of evolution.
[_Evolution Old and New_.]
6. The exposure and discomfiture of Charles Darwin and Wallace and their
followers. [_Evolution Old and New_, _Unconscious Memory_, _Luck or
Cunning_? and “The Deadlock in Darwinism” in the _Universal Review_
republished in _Essays on Life_, _Art and Science_.] {376}
7. The perception of the principle that led organic life to split up
into two main divisions, animal and vegetable. [_Alps and Sanctuaries_,
close of Chapter XIII: _Luck or Cunning_?]
8. The perception that, if the kinetic theory is held good, our thought
of a thing, whatever that thing may be, is in reality an exceedingly weak
dilution of the actual thing itself. [Stated, but not fully developed,
in _Luck or Cunning_? Chapter XIX, also in some of the foregoing notes.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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