Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Butler

Reason, Butler suggests, is a ladder that kicks itself away once you climb high enough. The line is engineered as a paradox: it flatters the rational mind with the promise of distance and clarity, then undercuts that confidence by insisting that logic, pursued to its end, produces results that feel illogical, even anti-logical. The pleasure is in the sting. It reads like an argument and behaves like a trap.

Butler wrote in a Victorian world intoxicated by systems: Darwinian explanations, industrial efficiencies, moral philosophies that tried to mathematize the soul. As a poet and skeptic of institutional certainty (especially religious and social orthodoxies), he’s not attacking thinking so much as the cult of thinking-the-right-way. “Follow reason far enough” implies a certain fanaticism: the type that keeps tightening the screws until the machine breaks. At the extremes, pure rationalism hits its own limits - infinite regress, self-reference, the way neat premises smuggle in messy values. The conclusions become “contrary to reason” not because they’re random, but because they reveal that reason is built on assumptions reason cannot fully justify.

The subtext is cultural: Victorian confidence in progress meets the dawning realization that every explanatory system has blind spots. Butler’s irony is to turn reason into its own dissident, making the rationalist confront a fear usually reserved for the faithful: that the deeper you go, the less your tools can promise salvation.