The Note Books Of Samuel Butler

78 Mind and Matter

Even Darwin leans towards the view that they have intelli-
gence. At any rate, then, the inorganic world has not got
an intelligence. Even this is now being denied. Death is
being defeated at all points. No sooner do we think we have
got a "bona fide barrier than it breaks down. The divisions
between varieties, species, genus, all gone; between in-
stinct and reason, gone ; between animals and plants, gone ;
between man and the lower animals, gone ; so, ere long, the
division between organic and inorganic will go and will take
with it the division between mind and matter.

The Super-Organic Kingdom

As the solid inorganic kingdom supervened upon the
gaseous (vestiges of the old being, nevertheless, carried over
into and still persisting in the new) and as the organic king-
dom supervened upon the inorganic (vestiges of the old
being, again, carried over into and still persisting in the new)
so a third kingdom is now in process of development, the
super-organic, of which we see the germs in the less practical
and more emotional side of our nature.

Man, for example, is the only creature that interests him-
self in his own past, or forecasts his future to any consider-
able extent. This tendency I would see as the monad of a
new regime—a regime that will be no more governed by the
ideas and habits now prevailing among ourselves than we
are by those still obtaining among stones or water. Never-
theless, if a man be shot out of a cannon, or fall from a great
height, he is to all intents and purposes a mere stone. Place
anything in circumstances entirely foreign to its immediate
antecedents, and those antecedents become non-existent to
it, it returns to what it was before they existed, to the last
stage that it can recollect as at all analogous to its present.

Feeling

Man is a substance, he knows not what, feeling, he knows
not how, a rest and unrest that he can only in part distin-
guish. He is a substance feeling equilibrium or want of
equilibrium; that is to say, he is a substance in a statical