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"psychological mutation." This displacement of the love object,
through repression and the mystic experience, seems so imperative
to Heard and Huxley that, like Comte, they are willing to do almost
any sort of intellectual violence to attain it. Thus their departure
from the Western tradition of empirical thought has a quality of
amnesia similar to that found in Comte. Even when they use the
familiar terms of social science, the "tone" which we have come
to associate with them has been dissipated and forgotten. This is
apparent in Huxley's recent book,
Grey Eminence,
a study of the
part played by Father Joseph in the power politics of the Thirty
Years War. "No attempt has been made," says Huxley, "to depict
in any detail the political and social background to Father Joseph's
career." The book betrays, in fact, very scanty recognition that
there
was
anything political, social or economic about this outburst
of French nationalism which resulted in the death of eight million
Germans.
F~ther
Joseph was a religious mystic, who might have
been a "theocentric saint." In his moments of trance he seems to
find the answer to his quest: " 'Let there be love,' he repeated,
modulating his orison out of Meditation into Affection, transform·
ing it from an act of the discursive intellect into an act of loving,
self.renouncing will. 'Let there be love.' And taking his own
lovelessness, taking the malignantly active nothing that was him·
self, he offered it up as a sacrifice, as a burnt offering to be con·
sumed in the fire of God's love." But Father Joseph is also a ruth·
less power politician and collaborator with Richelieu. His failure
to remain the benevolent mystic and refrain from the immoral
activity of the politician is ascribed to the fact that his
technique
of mysticism
was at fault, that he never quite succeeded in mutat·
ing himself into the psychic saint. And this is intended not only to
show why one man allowed himself the practice of evil, but also
to explain the bloody upheavals of the modern world from the
Thirty Years War down to the present.
When Aeneas entered Carthage, Venus, the cruel goddess of
false images, saw fit to cloak him with obscure airs so that he
might go unnoticed. The obscurities that shroud social phenomena
in the works of Heard and Huxley make their Utopia nearly as
invisible as was Aeneas to the Carthaginians. Heard tells us that
it will be a "psychological communism" rather than an economic
communism. The egalitarian implications of that "psychological
