Samuel Butler: A Literary Venture into Atheism and Beyond

Samuel Butler's life‐long endeavour to come to terms with the problems of faith and reason, Christianity and iconoclasms is to be considered an integral part of his literary work, of which the two “Erewhons” are but two outstanding examples. On the basis of his major works, the present paper makes an attempt to view Butler's religious peregrination from orthodox theism to atheism and ultimately toward a transcendental vision of polytheism. At the same time, it strives to show the development of Butler's thought against the background of what later became known as the philosophy of pragmatism.