The love is almost pathetically lavish.  Letters like these reveal to us a man so avid of affection that he must of necessity erect every barrier and defence to avoid a mortal wound.  His sensibility was rentree, probably as a consequence of his appalling childhood; and the indication helps us to understand not only the inordinate suspiciousness with which he behaved to Darwin, but the extent to which irony was his favoured weapon.  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.  They afford a strange example of mutual mystification.

Thus at least one-half the world, not of life only (which does not greatly matter, for one can live as happily with half the world as with the whole) but of thought, was closed to him.  Most of the poetry, the music, and the art of the world was humbug to him, and it was only by insisting that Homer and Shakespeare were exactly like himself that he managed to except them from his natural aversion.  So, in the last resort, he humbugged himself quite as vehemently as he imagined the majority of men were engaged in humbugging him.  If his standard of truth was higher than that of the many, it was lower than that of the few.  There is a kingdom where the crass division into sheep and goats is merely clumsy and inopportune.  In the slow meanderings of this Memoir we too often catch a glimpse of Butler measuring giants with the impertinent foot-rule of his common sense.  One does not like him the less for it, but it is, in spite of all the disconcerting jokes with which it may be covered, a futile and ridiculous occupation.  Persistently there emerges from the record the impression of something childish, whether in petulance or gaminerie, a crudeness as well as a shrewdness of judgment and ideal.  Where Butler thought himself complete, he was insufficient; and where he thought himself insufficient, he was complete.  To himself he appeared a hobbledehoy by the side of Pauli; to us he appears a hobbledehoy by the side of Miss Savage.