Life and Habit

by Samuel Butler

Overview

I cannot think that "natural selection," working upon small, fortuitous, indefinite, unintelligent variations, would produce the results we see around us. One wants something that will give a more definite aim to variations, and hence, at times, cause bolder leaps in advance. One cannot but doubt whether so many plants and animals would be being so continually saved "by the skin of their teeth"... -from "Lamarck and Mr. Darwin" George Bernard Shaw called him "the greatest English writer of the latter half of the nineteenth century." Samuel Butler, the son of an Anglican clergyman who grew up to be one of the most prominent freethinkers of the Victorian era, was a vocal apologist for theism, and his Life and Habit, published in 1877, is a beautifully written critique of Charles Darwin and his theory of natural selection, one that laments its lack of call for a creative mind behind the evolution of life. This is a vital work for appreciating Butler's other criticisms of scientific rationalism, including his 1879 book Evolution, Old and New, as well as the evolution of the concept of evolution itself. Also available from Cosimo Classics: Butler's God the Known and God the Unknown. British author SAMUEL BUTLER (1835-1902) is best known for his satire Erehwon.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781596056992
Publisher:	Cosimo Classics
Publication date:	12/01/2005
Pages:	324
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.73(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.