e ourselves. What would follow if we
reversed this and regarded our limbs and organs as machines which we had
manufactured as parts of our bodies? In the first place, how did we come
to make them without knowing anything about it? But then, how comes
anybody to do anything unconsciously? The answer usually would be: By
habit. But can a man be said to do a thing by habit when he has never
done it before? His ancestors have done it, but not he. Can the habit
have been acquired by them for his benefit? Not unless he and his
ancestors are the same person. Perhaps, then, they are the same person.

In February, 1876, partly to clear his mind and partly to tell someone,
he wrote down his thoughts in a letter to his namesake, Thomas William
Gale Butler, a fellow art-student who was then in New Zealand; so much of
the letter as concerns the growth of his theory is given in _The Note-
Books of Samuel Butler_ (1912).

In September, 1877, when _Life and Habit_ was on the eve of publication,
Mr. Francis Darwin came to lunch with him in Clifford's Inn and, in
course of conversation, told him that Professor Ray Lankester had written
something in _Nature_ about a lecture by Dr. Ewald Hering of Prague,
delivered so long ago as 1870, "On Memory as a Universal Function of
Organized Matter." This rather alarmed Butler, but he deferred looking
up the reference until after December, 1877, when his book was out, and
then, to his relief, he found that Hering's theory was very similar to
his own, so that, instead of having something sprung upon him which would
have caused him to want to alter his book, he was supported. He at once
wrote to the _Athenaeum_, calling attention to Hering's lecture, and then
pursued his studies in evolution.

_Life and Habit_ was followed in 1879 by _Evolution Old and New_, wherein
he compared the teleological or purposive view of evolution taken by
Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck with the view taken by Charles
Darwin, and came to the conclusion that the old was better. But while
agreeing with the earlier writers in thinking that the variations whose
accumulation results in species were originally due to intelligence, he
could not take the view that the intelligence resided in an external
personal God. He had done with all that when he gave up the Resurrection
of Jesus Christ from the dead. He proposed to place the intelligence
inside the creature ("The Deadlock in Darwinism," _post_).

In 1