Butler belonged to no school, and spawned no followers during his lifetime. A serious but amateur student of the subjects he undertook, especially religious orthodoxy and evolutionary thought, his controversial assertions effectively shut him out from both of the opposing factions of Church and science which played such a large role in late Victorian cultural life: In those days one was either a religionist or 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on literature, such as it was, came through The Way of All Flesh, which Butler completed in the 1880s but left unpublished in order to protect his family. And 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 in the use of psychoanalytical modes of thought in fiction, which "his treatment of Ernest Pontifex [ the hero of Butler's novel] foreshadows."
