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  • Aldous Huxley and the Mysticism of Science *
  • George M. O’Har (bio)
Aldous Huxley and the Mysticism of Science. By June Deery. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Pp. xi+231; notes, bibliography, index. $49.95.

The familiar story of the scientific revolution provides the backdrop for this tale of one writer’s attempt to bridge the gap between what C. P. Snow labeled the separate cultures of science and literature. Aldous Huxley believed that the “most profoundly important sociological factor of modern times was the growth of technology and what may be called the technicization of every aspect of human life” (p. 2), a view he dramatized in his dystopian classic, Brave New World. Huxley spent much of his career exploring the relationship between science, technology, and the culture at large; his work is filled with hundreds of references to science and technology. But what are the “epistemological and ontological consequences” (p. 26) of these references in Huxley’s fiction? This is the question June Deery sets out to answer. The first, more satisfying part of her book is an analysis of the role that Huxley’s beliefs about science and technology played in his writing. The second half of the book, largely an explanation of Huxley’s efforts to “reconcile religion and science” (p. 154)—Huxley as link between Lotus Eaters and New Agers—is discursive, and less effective.

Deery begins with a digest of signal events in twentieth-century physics, most notably the uncertainty principle, the understanding that the very process of subatomic observation is capable of affecting the particle under scrutiny. To Huxley, who was almost blinded at sixteen from an inflammation of the cornea, the discovery had the force of revelation. The uncertainty [End Page 825] principle told Huxley that limited vision was “the human condition” (p. 16). His realization that the subject-object dichotomy at the core of Western science was more a rickety construct than an eternal truth worked as a lodestone for Huxley. He decided to spend his life seeking new truths. Unfortunately, the inquiry led him to mysticism.

Huxley tried establishing a “dialogue” between “art and science” (p. 1). He believed literary artists to be “under an intellectual and moral obligation to engage with science and explicitly refer to its ideas in their writing in order to heal the division” between the two cultures (p. 2). Deery claims that Huxley’s work is significant because of this. I would agree. Deery chooses not to evaluate Huxley as a writer per se but rather to estimate his place in letters according to how well he succeeded in making science and technology a part of his discourse. Like Snow, Huxley regarded the “literature-science polarity as crucial because he believed it reinforced other basic dualisms, such as the organic/mechanical, . . . emotional/intellectual, which he felt it imperative to heal” (p. 24). As a writer, Huxley insisted that literature function as a palace in whose rooms that much-needed new unity could be fashioned.

Huxley sought to “contextualize human experience in relation to the Whole Truth, to emulate the inclusiveness of a writer like Chaucer, who omitted nothing, not even scientific fact” (p. 44). Of course, it was easier for Chaucer to work into his writing the science of his day than it was for Huxley, who lived at the dawn of a great burst of knowledge in the natural sciences. Sometimes Huxley indulged in casual idea-dropping; other times, as in Brave New World, his attempt to place science and technology at the heart of a cautionary tale succeeded quite well. While many of Huxley’s attempts at arranging a “marriage between science and literature” tended to be “awkward,” or “shot-gun” affairs (p. 47), Deery maintains that he “identified an absence in literature and . . . attempted to fill it” (p. 47).

Huxley worried that our increase in scientific knowledge came “at the expense of a different, more intuitive understanding” and that science provided only a “wider rather than a deeper knowledge” (p. 95). He found that science, like art, was limited in what truth it might reveal, a notion that prompted him to “embrace religious belief,” something he thought he...

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