a Darwinian, but he was neither." His influence on literature, such as it was, came through The Way of All Flesh, which Butler completed in the 1880s, but left unpublished to protect his family, yet the novel, "begun in 1870 and not touched after 1885, was so modern when it was published in 1903, that it may be said to have started a new school," particularly for its use of psychoanalysis in fiction, which "his treatment of Ernest Pontifex [the hero] foreshadows." Sue Zemka writes that "Among science fiction writers, The Book of the Machines has a canonical status, for it originates the conceit by which machines develop intelligent capacities and enslave mankind." For example, in Frank Herbert's Dune the "Butlerian Jihad" - "in-universe ancient revolt against 'thinking machines' that resulted in their prohibition" - is named after Butler. Philosophy and personal thought Whether in his satire and fiction, Butler's studies on the evidences for Christianity, his works on evolutionary thought, or in his miscellaneous other writings, a consistent theme runs through, stemming largely from his personal struggle against the stifling of his own nature by his parents, which led him to seek more general principles of growth, development, and purpose: "What concerned him was to establish his nature, his aspirations, and their fulfillment upon a philosophic basis, to identify them with the nature, the aspirations, the fulfillment of all humanity – and, more than that, with the fulfillment of the universe.... His struggle became generalized, symbolic, tremendous." The form that this search took was principally philosophical and – given the interests of the day – biological: "Satirist, novelist, artist, and critic that he was, he was primarily a philosopher," and in particular, a philosopher who looked for biological foundations for his work: "His biology was a bridge to a philosophy of life, which sought a scientific basis for religion, and endowed a naturalistically conceived universe with a soul." Indeed, "philosophical writer" was ultimately the self-description Butler chose as most fitting to his work. Theology In a book of essays published after his death, entitled God the Known and God the Unknown, Samuel Butler argued for the existence of a single, corporeal deity, declaring belief in an incorporeal deity to be essentially the same as atheism. He asserted that this "body" of God was, in fact, composed of the bodies of all living things on earth, a belief that may