"Man is God's highest present development. He is the latest thing in God"
About this Quote
The line treats humanity as a stage, not a summit. Calling man God’s highest present development elevates human beings yet slips in a limit: present. The achievement is provisional. The second sentence sharpens the irony. The latest thing in God sounds like a shop window slogan, as if humanity were merely the newest model in a continuing series. The phrasing flatters human pride while quietly deflating it, turning the supposed crown of creation into something temporary and replaceable.
Samuel Butler wrote from a Victorian milieu charged by Darwin’s theory and the crisis of faith it stirred. He was both engaged with evolutionary ideas and skeptical of their blind mechanism. In books like Life and Habit and Evolution, Old and New, he argued for a purposive, memory-driven evolution closer to Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin than to Charles Darwin’s natural selection. At the same time, as a satirist in works such as Erewhon, he mocked the smug faith in progress. The advertising lilt of latest thing nods to consumer culture and to the era’s fetish for novelty, suggesting that human exceptionalism may be little more than fashionable self-regard.
The implications are double-edged. If humanity embodies God’s current best expression, then dignity and responsibility follow: the divine unfolds through human consciousness, creativity, and moral choice. This tilts toward a developmental or process-inflected theology in which God and world are dynamically entwined and history matters. Yet the irony persists. If there is a latest, there will be a later. Evolution, cultural or biological, may move beyond us, a theme Butler toyed with when he imagined machines evolving and outstripping their makers. The aphorism invites humility. Human beings are extraordinary, but not final; sacred, but not secure. To be the latest is to be both celebrated and superseded, poised between gratitude for what we are and vigilance about what we might become.
Samuel Butler wrote from a Victorian milieu charged by Darwin’s theory and the crisis of faith it stirred. He was both engaged with evolutionary ideas and skeptical of their blind mechanism. In books like Life and Habit and Evolution, Old and New, he argued for a purposive, memory-driven evolution closer to Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin than to Charles Darwin’s natural selection. At the same time, as a satirist in works such as Erewhon, he mocked the smug faith in progress. The advertising lilt of latest thing nods to consumer culture and to the era’s fetish for novelty, suggesting that human exceptionalism may be little more than fashionable self-regard.
The implications are double-edged. If humanity embodies God’s current best expression, then dignity and responsibility follow: the divine unfolds through human consciousness, creativity, and moral choice. This tilts toward a developmental or process-inflected theology in which God and world are dynamically entwined and history matters. Yet the irony persists. If there is a latest, there will be a later. Evolution, cultural or biological, may move beyond us, a theme Butler toyed with when he imagined machines evolving and outstripping their makers. The aphorism invites humility. Human beings are extraordinary, but not final; sacred, but not secure. To be the latest is to be both celebrated and superseded, poised between gratitude for what we are and vigilance about what we might become.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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