Justice & Law Quote by Samuel Butler

The line wears the costume of scientific common sense, but Butler is really poking at the moral stories people tell about themselves. “Self-preservation” sounds like a clean, biological axiom; calling it “the first law of nature” borrows the authority of physics and Darwin-era thought. That borrowed authority is the trick. Butler, a poet with a skeptic’s ear for Victorian pieties, compresses a whole era’s anxiety into one blunt maxim: when pressure hits, lofty principles get quickly retranslated into survival tactics.

The intent is double-edged. On its face, it’s a permission slip: of course you put your own oxygen mask on first; nature requires it. Underneath, it’s an accusation. If self-preservation is the “first law,” then a lot of social virtue starts to look like etiquette layered over fear. The phrase quietly implies that altruism is either secondary or strategic - a luxury good that flourishes when resources and status feel secure, then evaporates when they don’t.

Context matters because Butler is writing in the long shadow of Darwin, where “nature” became a courtroom witness for whatever ideology wanted to sound inevitable. His sentence mimics that rhetorical move while exposing its moral consequences: once you naturalize self-interest, you can excuse cowardice, hoarding, hypocrisy, even cruelty as merely “natural.” The brilliance is its cold simplicity. It can be read as a survival handbook or as a satire of the way people smuggle self-serving behavior past their own consciences by calling it law.