could to defend it by attacking his old enemy, Anglican Christianity. This new obsession was forcing out the old one: Charles Darwin stepped into the place hitherto occupied by his father. Erewhon did something, gave him at least some satisfaction but not enough. A Darwinian world would be too frightful to live in because no one would be able to laugh in it, and no one need be kind any more or even decent. A letter from Darwin to Butler is illuminating:
"Have you ever read Huxley's article or articles on 'Animal Automatism,' two or three years ago in The Contemporary? He tried to show that consciousness was something superadded to nervous mechanism, like the striking of a clock is added to the ordinary going parts. I mean that the consciousness as we know it has nothing to do with the act, which is a question of nerve-machinery.
"You seem to me to have gone on the reverse tack—instead of reducing consciousness to a passive looker-on, you have, I think, made consciousness into an active cause, a producer of energy."
That was precisely what Butler had done, though he was too excited and too much in earnest to be able to say so clearly. He felt more than he saw of the implications of the elevation of Darwin's scientific statement into a philosophy. He was brave enough to lose his head—in order to find it; and, refusing to side with either the Anglicans or the Darwinians, pleased no one and was left severely alone as a crank, which he was, though a crank blessed with a sense of humour and a belief that life knew its business better than men or the society of men did theirs. He was a crank in that he could not be fair to Darwin, nor to himself. In the intense excitement of seeing the world go slowly mad while he remained sane, he lost all sense of self-preservation and was inevitably forced into ruin. The work he had set himself in the writing of Life and Habit and its successors was work for which no one would pay him, and he could do no other. This was too absorbing and too urgent. For a moment he lost his sense of humour and was betrayed into the scandal of insulting Darwin, who, poor old gentleman, could not make out what this surprising adversary was driving at. Butler himself was not too clear about it. He could make his meaning clear but not the implications of his meaning. He had humour and common sense but no imagination, for to him that had meant Hell-fire and all that his father had stood for. A shocking dilemma this: if only Butler
