Life and Habit

by Samuel Butler

Overview

William Bateson claimed at the Darwin Centenary in 1909 that Samuel Butler (1835–1902) was 'the most brilliant and by far the most interesting of Darwin's opponents, whose works are at length emerging from oblivion.' Best remembered today as the author of the novels Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh, he also wrote on a range of subjects from translations of Homer to studies of evolutionary thought. In his Life and Habit (published in 1878) Butler contended that much of inheritance was based on habit making a feature ingrained, to the extent that it could pass between generations. However, he strongly contests Darwin's views on natural selection, and supports those of Lamarck – who he felt was unjustly overlooked in the scientific rush to acclaim Darwin – and of St George Mivart, whose On the Genesis of Species, published in 1871, was another blast against natural selection by a disenchanted Darwinist.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789356905849
Publisher:	Alpha Editions
Publication date:	01/28/2023
Pages:	186
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.43(d)

About the Author

Samuel Butler (1835 - 1902) was an iconoclastic Victorian-era English author who published a variety of works. Two of his most famous pieces are the Utopian satire Erewhon and a semi-autobiographical novel published posthumously, The Way of All Flesh. He is also known for examining Christian orthodoxy, substantive studies of evolutionary thought, studies of Italian art, and works of literary history and criticism. Butler made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, which remain in use to this day.

After Cambridge he went to live in a low-income parish in London 1858-59 as preparation for his ordination into the Anglican clergy; there he discovered that baptism made no apparent difference to the morals and behaviour of his peers and began questioning his faith. This experience would later serve as inspiration for his work The Fair Haven. Correspondence with his father about the issue failed to set his mind at peace, inciting instead his father's wrath. As a result, he emigrated in September 1859, on the ship Roman Emperor to New Zealand.

Butler went there like many early British settlers of privileged origins, to put as much distance as possible between himself and his family. He wrote of his arrival and life as a sheep farmer on Mesopotamia Station in A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863), and made a handsome profit when he sold his farm, but the chief achievement of his time there was the drafts and source material for much of his masterpiece Erewhon.

Table of Contents

1. On certain acquired habits; 2. Conscious and unconscious knowers – the law and grace; 3. Application of foregoing chapters to certain habits acquired after birth which are commonly considered instinctive; 4. Application of the foregoing principles to actions and habits acquired before birth; 5. Personal identity; 6. Personal identity–continued; 7. Our subordinate personalities; 8. Application of the foregoing chapters–the assimilation of outside matter; 9. On the abeyance of memory; 10. What we should expect to find if differentiations of structure and instinct are mainly due to memory; 11. Instinct as inherited memory; 12. Instincts of neuter insects; 13. Lamarck and Mr Darwin; 14. Mr Mivart and Mr Darwin; 15. Concluding remarks.