Non-fiction: Life and Habit

Overview
Samuel Butler’s 1877 treatise Life and Habit advances a bold rethinking of evolution, mind, and identity by arguing that heredity is a form of memory and that instinct is inherited habit. Against a rising orthodoxy that attributed organic change primarily to blind selection, Butler restores purposiveness, practice, and recollection to the center of life. He treats living beings as historical continuities rather than isolated individuals: what we call the “self” is a rolling inheritance of habits, know-how, and dispositions accumulated over countless generations and carried forward unconsciously.

Core Thesis
The book’s governing claim is that life persists by remembering. Every organism embodies an immense stock of ancestral “unconscious memory” that guides development, behavior, and adaptation. Instincts are not miraculous endowments dropped into animals; they are old solutions repeatedly practiced by predecessors until they have sunk beneath awareness and now reappear as seeming spontaneities. Development likewise proceeds as an act of recollection: the embryo reenacts, not as a literal history lesson, but as a compact rehearsal of prior successes, the procedures by which its lineage learned to build itself.

Arguments and Examples
Butler presses the case through concrete examples and homely analogies. A chick pecks, a spider spins, a bee shapes wax: these efficient behaviors are too exact, too swiftly executed to be fabricated afresh in a single lifetime. They manifest a stored competence, just as a pianist’s fingers find passages by habitual memory. What we call heredity, he suggests, is this inherited proficiency. The new organism is not an absolute beginning but a continued person, the offspring being essentially the parent prolonged by a different route. Hence the newborn is, in one respect, very old, older than any single ancestor, because it carries the time-deep experiences of its line.

This perspective also reframes variation and adaptation. Changes arise as living beings, striving to maintain and better their conditions, acquire new habits that may, given repetition and advantage, become fixed and transmissible. Natural selection still matters, but it sifts and stabilizes habits rather than creating them. Butler’s language of will and desire is not mystical but economical: to say organisms “try” is to capture the ubiquitous tendency of life to repeat what works, to refine it, and to hand it on.

Identity and the Self
Life and Habit dissolves the boundary between individual and lineage. The “I” who speaks is a chorus of ancestral practices; the body is a society of parts whose coordination has been learned. Memory thus underwrites personal identity far more deeply than conscious recollection, which is a late and superficial flower of a far older mnemonic root. Morals and manners also appear as habits sedimented by community life, knitting selves to a broader living continuity.

Style and Approach
Butler’s method is essayistic, combative, and witty. He raids common experience rather than laboratory minutiae, preferring clarity and serviceable metaphors to technical jargon. His polemics against the exaltation of blind chance are tempered by respect for empirical caution: he does not deny selection but refuses to let it monopolize explanation when the facts of instinct, development, and practice point to memory-like inheritance.

Context and Legacy
Published amid fierce Victorian debates over evolution, Life and Habit offered a dissenting synthesis that contrasted with strictly selectionist accounts. Butler later engaged cognate theories of “unconscious memory” and continued the argument in Unconscious Memory and Evolution, Old and New. While modern genetics rejects the literal inheritance of acquired habits, Butler’s central intuition, that development and behavior are guided by historically accumulated, system-level memory, proved suggestive, influencing later thinkers who explored memory analogies in biology and culture. The book endures as a provocative, humane attempt to make sense of life as continuity, practice, and recollection.