The most threatening danger for such a man is to take the
professions of the world at their face value; he can inoculate himself
only by irony. The more extreme his case, the more devouring the hunger
to love and be loved, the more extreme the irony, and in Butler it
reached the absolute maximum, which is to interpret the professions of
the world as their exact opposite. As a reviewer of the _Note-Books_ in
_The Athenaeum_ recently said, Butler's method was to stand propositions
on their heads. He universalised his method; he applied it not merely to
scientific propositions of fact, but, even more ruthlessly, to the
converse of daily life. He divided up the world into a vast majority who
meant the opposite of what they said, and an infinitesimal minority who
were sincere. The truth that the vast majority are borderland cases
escaped him, largely because he was compelled by his isolation to regard
all his honest beliefs as proven certainties. That a man could like and
admire him and yet regard him as in many things mistaken and
wrong-headed was strictly incomprehensible to him, and from this angle
the curious relations which existed between him and Dr Richard Garnett
of the British Museum are of uncommon interest.
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