THE HUXLEY-HEARD PARADISE
149
of
these in a new and higher unity." The solution of the conflict,
which
now reaches its utmost intensity, the method by which civil–
ization will complete the dialectic movement of group through
!fOUp-vs.-individuality to a higher integration-all this is to be
found in the new synthesis of Heard and Huxley, "Here," says
Heard, "is the door passing through which the individual returns
to
society, society becomes the race, the race is reunited with life
and life becomes one with the universe."
The human traveler, in other words, went astray when, as he
passed through the quiet shadows of the first stretch of road, he
came upon a crossways and was tempted to take the divergent path.
This was the path of the lust of the self, and it led into a world of
light and noise which, at first but dim.ly perceived in the distance,
gradually fettered the traveller to its rigid mechanism. The world,
turning like a wheel faster and faster, and gradually losing its grip
on the center of gravity, finally threatened to disintegrate from its
own
centrifugal force. The Huxley-Heard way of escape from this
world is, in a sense, the way of D. H. Lawrence.
If
we are to save
ourselves, we must recapture the original "central Mystery," as
Lawrence's Paul Morel gives up his fight with the world to seek
his
dead mother. "Finally," in the words of Spengler, "the soul
turns weary, listless and cold; she loses the appetite for existence;
and all her longing is to.leave the light ... and to sink back into
the darkness of primitive mysticism, into the womb, into the
pve." The peace which Lawrence sought, his "pure adventure,"
was not to be found in this world, and when he plunged into the
primitive and the irrational, it was in search of "the pure and
IICI'ed
readjustment of death." And indeed how else is life to be
made, as Heard says, "one with the universe"? But Lawrence told
us that he knew of a good life, and it is not surprising that Heard
and
Huxley tell us the same thing, though in different words.
Heard proceeds to the problem of establishing a new Golden
Age by regenerating the psyche--by means of a "psychological
mutation." Human evolution, to Heard and Huxley, is not biologi–
cal;
it is mental; it is the gradual emergence and extension of
CCIIBCiousness, the gradual vaporization of matter into mind. Heard
teizes
upon the still obscure genetic factor of mutation and con-
