Dear Darwin

I am going down home this week, but expect that before I return my book will be out; it has been vexatiously delayed by printers— but shd leave the binders Thursday or Friday and I have left instructions that two copies should be at once sent you— one of which, if you think fit after reading it you will perhaps be kind enough to give to your father.¹

I confess that I do not like the thought of either his seeing it or of your doing so, for it has resolved itself into a down right attack upon your father’s view of evolution and a defence of what I conceive to be Lamarck’s, and this is what I neither anticipated nor wished but what I was simply driven into.² I should like if you will pardon me just to state how and why I did not say more to you on this head when I saw you last.³ Two or three days before I saw you a man had insisted on my reading Mivart’s book, and sent me a copy—⁴ I read it and when I saw you had got through about a quarter of it. I at once felt that something was wanted to give an aim to variations, and if you remember said that I felt this— I then got your father’s last edition of the Origin which I had not looked at for some years having lent my own copy to some one who had not returned it— I read the answers to Mivart, some of which were convincing, but others did not seem to me to be so.⁵ Then I read on and came to the chapter on instinct—and on p. 206 was horrified to read “It would be a serious error &c … ”⁶ Now this cut at the very root of what I was doing and I felt as though I had better burn my M.S at once— I finished the chapter—and was I need not say ⁠⟨⁠    ⁠⟩⁠ more sure than before that I must have blundered—the conclusion on page 233 “I am surprised &c” knocked me out of time I can assure you.⁷ This was the first I had ever heard of the doctrine of inherited habit— which I had conceived was the new feature of my own book—and now to find that it was a stale old theory of the exploded Lamarck and was demonstrably impossible when my book was three parts done was, I can assure you, no small blow.

On thinking it over however I was again met with the weight of the evidence in favour of structure and habit being mainly due to memory, and accordingly gathered what I could from encyclopædias of what Lamarck had said—also I read as much about bees and ants as I could lay my hands on and in a little time saw my way again. I had no time to read Lamarck, but shall do so at once and, I think, translate him now—unless I find he has been translated already—but let that pass. Then reading your father more closely—and, I may say, more sceptically—the full antagonism between him and Lamarck came for the first time before me, and I saw plainly that there was no possibility of compromise between the two views. Then I fell to analysing your father’s answers to miscellaneous objections more closely and was met, and this time brought up by, the passage on p. 171 “In the earlier editions &c” on which I have been very severe in my own book⁸—but simply from the necessities of my own position, for either your father or Lamarck (and hence I) am on a very mistaken track—and the matter must be fought out according to the rules of the game—then—I went through the earlier part of my book and cut out all support of “natural selection” & made it square in with a teleological view—for such I take it Lamarck’s is, and only different from Paley’s in so far as the design with Paley is from without, and with Lamarck from within⁹—and feeling that I was in for a penny and might as well be in for a pound I wrote about your father’s work exactly as I should have done about any one else’s bearing in mind his immense services and his age as compared with my own— In one passage only have I been disrespectful— that is when I say that “domestic productions” may mean anything from a baby to an apple dumpling¹⁰—but I could not resist it—and can only say that it was “not I that did it, but sin that waketh in me”—¹¹ In the other passages I have been exceedingly I hardly like to say “severe” but this is the word I should have used if I were your father’s equal in age and knowledge—but I have always frankly admitted, and in such way as to leave no sense of arriére pensée,¹² the inestimable boon which he has conferred upon us by teaching us to believe in evolution, though maintaining that he has led us to believe in it on grounds which I for my own part cannot accept. What I imagine I have added to Lamarck, (though I make no shadow of doubt that if it is true either Lamarck will be found to have said it, or else that some one else will have done so—still I don’t know where to find it) is that I have pointed out the bonâ fide character of the continued personality between successive generations, and the bonâ fide character of the memory on the part of the offspring, of its past existences in the persons of its forefathers, and have connected this with the vanishing tendency of consciousness and the phenomena of the abeyance and recurrence of memory.¹³ With these additions (if they are additions) I cannot see that Lamarck’s system is wrong. As for “natural selection” frankly to me it now seems a rope of sand as in any way accounting for the “origin of species.” Of course I am strengthened in my opinion by seeing that it reduces to a common source the sterility of hybrids, the sterility of many wild animals under domestication—all variation (as being only a phase of sterility itself—or rather the only alternative left to a creature under greatly changed conditions if the changes are not great enough to induce sterility), the phenomena of growth—& metagenesis—the phenomena of old age, and a lot more which I see at present too uncertainly to venture to commit myself on paper concerning them—

I was obliged to leave the pangenesis chapter out, as I was anxious to keep my book as short as possible and it grew very rapidly upon me towards the end—¹⁴ Moreover what you told me about the review in Nature determined me to “hurry up.”¹⁵

Well— I hope you will forgive the inordinate length of this letter

If you remember a few days after seeing you I wrote that I was afraid I should have to differ from your father not a little only but seriously & fundamentally— I had finished Mivart’s book between your visit and my letter— as I went on I felt that I could hardly again write and say “I am differing more seriously and more fundamentally”—in fact there was nothing for it but to go ahead— the only thing would be to explain to you that when I saw you I had not yet begun to write the last 5 chapters of my book and had only just begun to see that I might have to fall foul of “natural selection”. Also I should like to assure you, and your father through you—that I have been, and am, a good deal exercised in mind about the whole matter.

Nothing would surprise me less than to see something sprung upon me in reviews and answers which cuts the ground completely from under me—and of course I neither expect nor give quarter in a philosophical argument. We want to get on to the right side, and neither your father nor I take it myself care two straws how we get on to the right side so long as we get there—nor do we want half refutations nor beatings about the bush. we want to come to an understanding as to what is true and what false as soon as possible, & we know well that we score more for retracting after having been deeply committed than for keeping on to our original course when a new light has come upon us—so you must not be surprised if I am myself among the first to turn upon new book and send it, as I shall most assuredly do if I find, as I probably shall find, that it is naught.

Please excuse this erasure.¹⁶ Its purpose was to say how sorry I was that your father should have been at school under my grandfather in as much as I myself should dislike an attack from a son or grandson of Kennedy’s when I sh^d not care two pence about it from any one else.¹⁷

Believe me y^rs very truly | S. Butler.

I have written this in copying ink, & from a copy because I am sure I shall never again be at the pains of writing the steps by which my book came to be what is, but am not sorry to have a record of them.