r. R. A.
Streatfeild, his literary executor.

Soon after The Fair Haven Butler began to be aware that his letter
in the Press, "Darwin among the Machines," was descending with
further modifications and developing in his mind into a theory about
evolution which took shape as Life and Habit; but the writing of
this very remarkable and suggestive book was delayed and the
painting interrupted by absence from England on business in Canada.
He had been persuaded by a college friend, a member of one of the
great banking families, to call in his colonial mortgages and to put
the money into several new companies. He was going to make thirty
or forty per cent instead of only ten. One of these companies was a
Canadian undertaking, of which he became a director; it was
necessary for someone to go to headquarters and investigate its
affairs; he went, and was much occupied by the business for two or
three years. By the beginning of 1876 he had returned finally to
London, but most of his money was lost and his financial position
for the next ten years caused him very serious anxiety. His
personal expenditure was already so low that it was hardly possible
to reduce it, and he set to work at his profession more
industriously than ever, hoping to paint something that he could
sell, his spare time being occupied with Life and Habit, which was
the subject that really interested him more deeply than any other.

Following his letter in the Press, wherein he had seen machines as
in process of becoming animate, he went on to regard them as living
organs and limbs which we had made outside ourselves. What would
follow if we reversed this and regarded our limbs and organs as
machines which we had manufactured as parts of our bodies? In the
first place, how did we come to make them without knowing anything
about it? But then, how comes anybody to do anything unconsciously?
The answer usually would be: By habit. But can a man be said to do
a thing by habit when he has never done it before? His ancestors
have done it, but not he. Can the habit have been acquired by them
for his benefit? Not unless he and his ancestors are the same
person. Perhaps, then, they are the same person.

In February, 1876, partly to clear his mind and partly to tell
someone, he wrote down his thoughts in a letter to his namesake,
Thomas William Gale Butler, a fellow art-student who was then in New
Zealand; so much of the letter as concerns the growth of hi