Life and Habit [Paperback]

Samuel Butler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2004

If such remarks as the above hold good at all, they do so with the words "personal identity." The least reflection will show that personal identity in any sort of strictness is an impossibility. The expression is one of the many ways in which we are obliged to scamp our thoughts through pressure of other business which pays us better. For surely all reasonable people will feel that an infant an hour before birth, when in the eye of the law he has no existence, and could not be called a peer for another sixty minutes, though his father were a peer, and already dead.

Editorial Reviews

Book Description

Best remembered today as the author of the novels Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh, Butler argues here that much of inheritance was based on habit making a feature ingrained, to the extent that it could pass between generations; but he was also a firm opponent of natural selection. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

Samuel Butler (1835-1902) is best known for his utopian satire Erewhon, his posthumous novel The Way of All Flesh, and his translations of Homer. His family background made a career in the Church inevitable, but, while serving a low-income parish in London, he began to question his faith. He lived in New Zealand for five years, and later in life spent time in Italy, where he developed a theory that Homer’s Odyssey was written by a young Sicilian woman and advanced this theory in his translations and prefaces. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Kessinger Publishing (June 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1419130161
• ISBN-13: 978-1419130168
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,887,562 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)