THE HUXLEY-HEARD PARADISE
153
and Aldous Huxley, mysticism is the method of
thinking
or per–
haps of
feeling
a new society into being.
3.
Huxley's novels left little doubt about his preoccupation with
sex and his feeling that the civilized European had lost the mean–
ing of love. Lurking in nearly all of Huxley's lovers was the sense
of the pointless mechanism of sex and the enervation of never being
able to love anyone or anything. Love became, once again, an act
of the natural cosmos through the individual.
Auguste Comte seems to have been made suddenly aware of
his own overwhelming love-urge upon the death of his divine
Clothilde, a lady for whom he conceived a virtually unbelievable
infatuation. There is consequently a sharp break in his thought
almost approaching amnesia between his
Positive Philosophy,
which was an attempt to show how sociology might be made a
positive science, and his mystical
Positive Polity,
which in effect
denied all that he had previously done and was an attempt to
rationalize in a visionary polity his own immense preoccupation
with the problem of love. In the Utopia of Huxley
~nd
Heard, the
urgent need to find a love-object is satisfied by diffusing the drives
of the libido into a mystical love for society and also into what
amounts to an infatuation with the universe. (Comte advocated the
affectionate worship of Space.) They believe that sexual love
must be strictly controlled. Heard says that the sex act must be
performed exclusively for the sake of the diffusive before and
after stages, since the moment of orgasm is individualizing and
disruptive. Huxley, in
Ends
and
Means,
urges strict continence so
that the sublimation of the sex drive may supply the energy re–
quired for the enlargement of consciousness. The text behind this
idea is J.D. Unwin's
Sex
and
Culture
(1934), a somewhat labor–
ious book devoted to proving, with evidence from 80 savage and 6
civilized societies, the social efficacy of sex repression. The highest
stage of any given society, according to Unwin, follows the period
of its most stringent sex
more~.
At this high point "human entropy"
appears, impelling men who· have hitherto given their energies to
imperialism and technology to turn to intellectual refinement. It is
this "human entropy" which Huxley intends to use in making a
