ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to broaden the scholarship on the reception of Lamarckian ideas in the late nineteenth century and to consider how they were put to use by Butler, unconsciously perhaps, across his entire oeuvre. It shows how key Lamarckian concepts were instrumental in Butler's iconoclasm, and makes a much more explicit link between these and his anti-professional stance than hitherto. Like many late nineteenth-century Lamarckians, Butler made limited use of Lamarck's ideas, the main ones being the effects of use and disuse in modifying organic structures and instincts, and the subsequent inheritance of these acquired characteristics by offspring. Butler's aesthetics arose out of his Lamarckian evolutionary theories and his harmonic conception of author and text led to an inseparable relationship between aesthetics and morality. The chapter outlines how this relationship extended to include his epistemology. It also provides an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
