"Lucubratio Ebria," like "Darwin Among the Machines," has already appeared in THE NOTE-BOOKS OF SAMUEL BUTLER with a prefatory note by Mr. Festing Jones, explaining its connection with EREWHON and LIFEAND HABIT. I need therefore only repeat that it was written by Butler after his return to England and sent to New Zealand, where it was published in the PRESS on July 29, 1865.
There is a period in the evening, or more generally towards the still small hours of the morning, in which we so far unbend as to take a single glass of hot whisky and water. We will neither defend the practice nor excuse it. We state it as a fact which must be borne in mind by the readers of this article; for we know not how, whether it be the inspiration of the drink or the relief from the harassing work with which the day has been occupied or from whatever other cause, yet we are certainly liable about this time to such a prophetic influence as we seldom else experience. We are rapt in a dream such as we ourselves know to be a dream, and which, like other dreams, we can hardly embody in a distinct utterance. We know that what we see is but a sort of intellectual Siamese twins, of which one is substance and the other shadow, but we cannot set either free without killing both. We are unable to rudely tear away the veil of phantasy in which the truth is shrouded, so we present the reader with a draped figure, and his own judgment must discriminate between the clothes and the body. A truth's prosperity is like a jest's, it lies in the ear of him that hears it. Some may see our lucubration as we saw it, and others may see nothing but a drunken dream or the nightmare of a distempered imagination. To ourselves it is the speaking with unknown tongues to the early Corinthians; we cannot fully understand our own speech, and we fear lest there be not a sufficient number of interpreters present to make our utterance edify. But there! (Go on straight to the body of the article.)The limbs of the lower animals have never been modified by any act of deliberation and forethought on their own part. Recent researches have thrown absolutely no light upon the origin of life--upon the initial force which introduced a sense of identity and a deliberate faculty into the world; but they do certainly appear to show very clearly that each species of the animal and vegetable kingdom has been moulded into its present shape by chances and changes of many millions of years, by chances and changes over which the creature modified had no control whatever, and concerning whose aim it was alike unconscious and indifferent, by forces which seem insensate to the pain which they inflict, but by whose inexorably beneficent cruelty the brave and strong keep coming to the fore, while the weak and bad drop behind and perish. There was a moral government of this world before man came near it--a moral government suited to the capacities of the governed, and which unperceived by them has laid fast the foundations of courage, endurance, and cunning. It laid them so fast that they became more and more hereditary. Horace says well fortes creantur fortibus et bonis, good men beget good children;the rule held even in the geological period; good ichthyosauri begot good ichthyosauri, and would to our discomfort have gone on doing so to the present time had not better creatures been begetting better things than ichthyosauri, or famine or fire or convulsion put an end to them. Good apes begot good apes, and at last when human intelligence stole like a late spring upon the mimicry of our semi-simious ancestry, the creature learnt how he could of his own forethought add extra-corporaneous limbs to the members of his own body, and become not only a vertebrate mammal, but a vertebrate machinate mammal into the bargain.
It was a wise monkey that first learned to carry a stick, and a useful monkey that mimicked him. For the race of man has learned to walk uprightly much as a child learns the same thing. At first he crawls on all fours, then he clambers, laying hold of whatever he can; and lastly he stands upright alone and walks, but for a long time with an unsteady step. So when the human race was in its gorilla-hood it generally carried a stick; from carrying a stick for many million years it became accustomed and modified to an upright position. The stick wherewith it had learned to walk would now serve to beat its younger brothers, and then it found out its service as a lever. Man would thus learn that the limbs of his body were not the only limbs that he could command. His body was already the most versatile in existence, but he could render it more versatile still.
With the improvement in his body his mind improved also. He learnt to perceive the moral government under which he held the feudal tenure of his life--perceiving it he symbolised it, and to this day our poets and prophets still strive to symbolise it more and more completely.
