THE HUXLEY-HEARD PARADISE
157
ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic
process, still less in running away from it, but in combatting it."
Aldous Huxley, three decades later, was trying to solve the
problem of immorality by an enthusiastic participation in the ways
of nature. Evil, as he-saw it in his socieLy, was evil because it was
the expression of an arbitrarily selected
part
of nature. Good was
the
~xpression
of
all
of nature. In
Point Counterpoint
he contrasted
the pan-emotional and instinctual Rampion with such fragmen–
tarily instinctual characters as Lucy Tantamount and Spandrell.
In
Brave New World
the complete natural man emerges from the
cosmos to criticize a depraved society.
When Thomas Huxley warned of the Buddhist way of escupe,
it must have seemed to his listeners even at that late hour of the
century that no consequential Englishman would ever seriously
entertain such a thought. But it is this way out, as we have seen,
that Aldous Huxley has taken. And in doing.so he has already left
us a classic record of the aberrations of the learned and ingenious
but utterly unpragmatic mind in our time.
It
is small wonder that
such a mind believes the evils of the world to be attributable to a
"fissured psyche" and evolution to be a series of "psychological
mutations."
Yet T. H. Huxley, for all his rationalist's fear of religious
mysticism (like Gibbon's in the eighteenth century and Frazer's in
the twentieth), could scarcely imagine the vigor of its recurrence
in his grandson's day. We ourselves have not yet understood the
force of this "etherialization," as Toynbee calls it, this full-blown
expansion, this inspired exhilaration of the mind suddenly released
from what is felt to be the dungeon of materialism and organic
evolution. Nor is this recrudescence of mysticism a triviality of
the weary European mind, or nothing but a literate version of
charlatan religions like Theosophy and Spiritualism. For besides
the work of Bergson and the considerably lesser works of Huxley,
Heard, Sorokin and others, it has nurtured Toynbee's
Study of
History.
And this is a work which, though still unfinished, is
already one of the great philosophical visions of society, the vision
of
a myth-making intellect which makes other historical syntheses
aeem both parochial and philistine. But what image arises from
Toynbee's superb mythical biology
if
not the psychic Superman
