Julian Huxley

“ In art, the operations by which an artist turns a collection of mean and commonplace objects into a beautiful and single whole, a poet invests failure and death with authentic tragedy, or drags every-day to a seat in eternity, are just as transcendent as that by which the mystic converts the relation between the warring passions of his soul and the infinite catalogue of differences which he finds around him into what he can only speak of as a divine communion, all-satisfying in itself, all-important for the conduct of his life. ”

“ From a period so short and so empirical it is impossible to deduce any general law of progress. In certain respects, as we shall see more in detail later, there has been advance; in others, the species has been stationary. But whether humanity in this or that particular has progressed is for the moment comparatively immaterial. Humanity is part of life, a product of life’s movement; and in life as a whole there is progress. [9]
What is more, there was progress before man ever appeared on the earth, and its reality would have been in no way impaired even if he had never come into being. ”

“ Whatever overstress and maladjustment the complexity of modern civilization has brought with it, it has certainly made it easier for more men and women to realize more of their potentialities now than a thousand years ago, and far more than a hundred thousand years ago.
There are, then, these facts to set on the credit side of Progress’ balance-sheet. It is easy enough to see items on the debit side, and indeed to be so horrifiedly fascinated by it as not to have eyes for anything else. Human history is in one view but a long record of suffering, oppression, and folly. ”

“ It is not only ritual, for you may have obviously non-religious ritual, as in a court ceremonial or a legal function: it is not merely morality, for men may practise morality, the most austere or the most terre à terre, uninspired by anything that could remotely be called religious: it is not belief, for we may have beliefs of all kinds, even to the most complex scientific beliefs concerning the universe, which have yet no connection with religion: it is neither communion in itself, nor ecstasy in itself, as many lovers and poets could tell you. ”

“ Life, for the animals, is a cinema, different for each individual, in which one event may be associated with another in the most diverse and haphazard ways. With the advent of the human type of brain, however, experience can be sorted out and properly docketed; the mere cinematographic record is converted into a drama full of significance, the diary into a card-index. By this means, and by tradition, it is possible for man to obtain a much more accurate and more complete grasp of the relationships of the objects that compose the outer world than is possible for any other animal. ”

“ Sir Charles Sherrington, with admirable lucidity, drew for us, in his recent address to the British Association, the problem of the relation between mind and matter as it presents itself to the biologist.
The great change that has come over science in the last half century, or so it seems to me, is the recognition that mind is not to be explained away as a mere epiphenomenon, but is to be studied as a phenomenon. From this point of view, biology will always be the connecting link between physico-chemical science on the one hand, and psychology on the other. ”

“ As space is limited, I am here only proposing to consider three of the chief contributions which biology can make to sociology—on the idea of progress, on the relation between individual and community, and on the applicability of the doctrine of the struggle for existence to man.
As regards the idea of progress, biology can make a clear and unequivocal contribution: whereas man is biologically so young, his evolution is yet so chaotic and divergently directed, that it is very hard to arrive at definite conclusions from the study of his history alone. ”

“ There are two ways of living: a man may be casual and simply exist, or constructive and deliberately try to do something with his life. The constructive idea implies constructiveness not only about one’s own life, but about that of society, and the future possibilities of humanity.
In pre-human evolution, the blind chances of variation and the blind sifting of natural selection have directed the course of evolution and of progress. It is on survival and the production of offspring that the process has hinged; the machinery is in reality blind, but these emerge as its apparent ends or purposes. ”

“ Intuition, if it shows us reality, can only show a reality capable in the long run of intellectual analysis; to deny this is to deny all our premisses. No: their intuition shows us that something akin to personality is perceived, but permits no pronouncement as to whether its resemblance to personality is given in its real nature, or introduced into it by their thought.
If we look into the history of religion, we find over and over again that man has taken something from his own mind and projected it into the external world. ”

“ The correlation of biology with sociology is important not only in itself, but also as part of a more general correlation of all the sciences. The correlation of the sciences is of particular importance to-day for a double set of reasons. The rise of evolutionary biology and of modern psychology have not only changed our outlook on specially human problems, but have altered the whole balance, if I may so put it, of science. There was a time when the basic studies of physics and chemistry seemed not only basic but somehow more essentially scientific than the sciences dealing with life. ”

“ With time, the divine personality became compounded more and more of man’s ideals instead of his everyday thoughts and attributes. And thus and that God remains. He has created everything; he is in some sense immanent in the world, in some sense apart from it as its ruler—you take your choice according to your philosophic preferences. Beyond that, organized religious thought has not gone; and now it finds itself fronting science in an impasse.
That, very briefly and roughly, is how man’s idea of God has developed. But how have man’s knowledge and ideas of the natural universe developed? ”

“ But even when we have made all possible discounts of this kind, evolved the smoothest-running machinery, converted the raw and meaty material of being into every conceivable kind of tidy sausage, the fact remains that there are feats beyond the power of our machine—beyond its power because of the very quality of its being.
We live at a certain rhythm in time, at a certain level of size and space; beyond certain limits, events in the outer world are not directly appreciable by the ordinary channels of sense, although a symbolic picture of them may be presented to us by the intellect. ”

“ The Crested Grebe is happily becoming more familiar to bird-lovers in England. Its brilliant white belly, protective grey-brown back, rippleless and effortless diving, long neck, and splendid ruff and ear-tufts of black, chestnut, and white, conspire to make it a marked bird. In the winter the crest is small, and even when fully grown in spring it is usually held close down against the head, so as to be not at all conspicuous. When it is spread, it is almost, without exception, in the service of courtship or love-making. ”

“ This, to my mind, is what actually happens when men speak of communion with God. It is a setting, an organizing of our experiences of the universe in relation with the driving forces of our soul or mental being, so that the two are united and harmonized. There is a resolution of conflicts, an attainment of a profound serenity, a conviction that the experience is of the utmost value and importance.
Up till now, we have been defining and analysing: here we see religion in operation. It is a relation of the personality as a unit to external reality as a unit—and a relation of harmony. ”

“ Here, as so often elsewhere, Bergson reveals himself as a good poet but a bad scientist. His intellectual vision of evolution as a fact, as something happening, something whole, to be apprehended in a unitary way—that is unsurpassed. He seems to see it as vividly as you or I might see a hundred yards race, holding its different incidents and movements all in his mind together to form one picture. But he then goes on to give a symbolic description of what he sees—and then thinks that his symbols will serve in place of analytic explanations. ”

“ What is more, owing to our power of framing general concepts and ideals, and of accumulating past and future in our present, we can focus a vast deal to one point. In such experiences, whether they come through religion, or love, or art, we may say that although we are but a system of relations, we touch the Absolute—although we are mortal, we mount to the Eternal for a moment. Only, to guard against error, we must remember that it is obviously not in reality the Absolute or the Eternal that we attain to, but only the nearest approximation to them of which we are capable. ”

“ I mean the unity of phenomena—not merely the unity of life, put on a firm footing for all time by Darwin, though that is for my purpose the most important, but the unity of living and non-living, demanding a monistic conception of the universe. For the present, the stellar host (possibly, as recent astronomy seems to assert, assembled not in one system but in a multiplicity of universes, floating through space like a shoal of jelly-fishes in a Mediterranean bay) —the stars seem alien from our life, alien or at best neutral. ”

“ That need has been felt by all those to whom life has been more than a problem of the unreflective satisfaction of instincts and desires—however pure those instincts, or beautiful those desires; it has been felt by all in whom the problem of existence has been apprehended by intellect and disinterested imagination.
I say all. There may be rare creatures who, secure in strength of body and mind and in unhampered unfolding of their faculties, possess a confidence by which this need is never felt. ”

“ There is another process at work in the human mind which is of the utmost importance for our problem. I mean the process of sublimation. If it is not easy to give a short and clear definition of sublimation, at least the process is familiar to all. The commonest example is “falling in love,” where the simple sex-instinct becomes intertwined with other instincts and with past emotional experience, and projects itself in wholly new guise upon its object. We may perhaps best say that a sublimated instinct has more and higher values attached to its satisfaction than one unsublimated. ”

“ Putting it summarily, we can say that, with the rise of mind to dominance, various activities of mind come to be pursued for their own sake, to have value in themselves. Our life is worth living not only for the sake of eating and drinking, sleeping, athletics, and sexual pleasure. There is a value attached to knowledge for its own sake, apart from the possible access of control that it may bring. But this is new, a property of man alone; not even Athena’s owl will exert itself through laborious years to understand celestial mechanics or physiology. ”

“ Transcendence is the experimental side of what we have been describing all along: it is the finding of unity in diversity, the synthesis of discord in harmony and in especial the finding of something of supreme value (and therefore dominant) which can be linked up with the whole extent of our mental being. Transcendence in religion differs from transcendence in art or love only in its objects. In love the discrepancy between the object and the ideal values hung round it is often so glaring as to provoke laughter from cynics, compassion from the rest. ”

“ But this is not all: the great power of association possessed by man, together with his faculty of generalization and of speech, makes it possible for him to learn his rôle in the community, instead of being born with it as are the bee and the ant. Great educability instead of differentiated instinct, infinite possibility, at the expense of the pains of learning, instead of an effortless but limited stock of inborn modes of behaviour—in this again man represents a qualitatively new organic type. ”

“ We have seen that, in man, evolution has reached a new plane, on which not only have new aims and values appeared, but the possibility of new and better evolutionary methods has arisen. These new methods are only possible, however, in so far as life, in man, uses her new gifts. The progress of civilization is a constant conflict between that part of man which he shares with the beasts and that part which is his alone—between man as no more than a new kind of animal and man [Pg 290] as a rational and spiritual being. ”

“ By organizing our knowledge of outer reality after the pattern of a personality, we make it possible for it to interpenetrate our private personality. If, therefore, we have, in any true sense of the word, “found religion,” it means that we shall so have organized our minds that, for flashes at least, we attain to a sense of interpenetration with the reality around us—that reality which includes not only the celestial bodies, or the rocks and waters, not only evolving life, but also other human beings, also ideas, also ideals. ”

“ This process of liberating matter from arbitrary and mysterious power, of perceiving it as orderly and endowed with regularity of natural law, of bringing it more and more beneath human control, was, on the other hand, accompanied by what may be called a combined condensation and sublimation of the spiritual forces accepted by human faith. They are built up from spirit to spirits, spirits to gods, gods to God. But now it seems as if this condensation had reached its limit, and the sublimation could only go farther by resolving the one God into an empty name or the vaguest unreality. ”

“ All that the biologist can do is to point out that neither the one-sided application of the principle of struggle nor of that of co-operation is biologically sound. But, as everywhere else in human conduct, after the broad principles have been grasped, success lies always in a delicate, continuous adjustment of conflicting claims, in what one may call a personal conscious effort. Struggle is universal: but by itself it can only lead to a certain stage of evolutionary progress. ”