113-525: Grey Eminence: A Study in Religion and Politics is a book by Aldous Huxley published in 1941. It is a biography of François Leclerc du Tremblay , the French monk who served as advisor to Cardinal de Richelieu and was referred to by others as l'éminence grise . As the subtitle indicates Huxley is asking "What is religion?", "What is politics?" and "How are religion and politics related?" Huxley depicts
226-423: A Summer (1939). The novel won Huxley a British literary award, the 1939 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Huxley also incorporated Bird into the novel. During this period, Huxley earned a substantial income as a Hollywood screenwriter; Christopher Isherwood, in his autobiography My Guru and His Disciple , states that Huxley earned more than $ 3,000 per week (approximately $ 50,000 in 2020 dollars) as
339-674: A bad way." Huxley's engagement with Eastern wisdom traditions was entirely compatible with a strong appreciation of modern science . Biographer Milton Birnbaum wrote that Huxley "ended by embracing both science and Eastern religion". In his last book, Literature and Science , Huxley wrote that "The ethical and philosophical implications of modern science are more Buddhist than Christian...." In "A Philosopher's Visionary Prediction", published one month before he died, Huxley endorsed training in general semantics and "the nonverbal world of culturally uncontaminated consciousness", writing that "We must learn how to be mentally silent, we must cultivate
452-416: A biographical or autobiographical book on a French politician is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Aldous Huxley Aldous Leonard Huxley ( / ˈ ɔː l d ə s / AWL -dəs ; 26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including non-fiction works , as well as essays, narratives , and poems. Born into
565-409: A detailed account for Darwin, a letter which does not survive; however, a letter to his friend Frederick Daniel Dyster does survive with an account just three months after the event. One effect of the debate was to hugely increase Huxley's visibility amongst educated people, through the accounts in newspapers and periodicals. Another consequence was to alert him to the importance of public debate:
678-533: A dystopian London, Huxley portrays a society operating on the principles of mass production and Pavlovian conditioning . Huxley was strongly influenced by F. Matthias Alexander , on whom he based a character in Eyeless in Gaza . During this period, Huxley began to write and edit non-fiction works on pacifist issues, including Ends and Means (1937), An Encyclopedia of Pacifism , and Pacifism and Philosophy , and
791-445: A growing degree of popular controversy about Huxley's eyesight. Thomas Henry Huxley Thomas Henry Huxley (4 May 1825 – 29 June 1895) was an English biologist and anthropologist who specialized in comparative anatomy . He has become known as " Darwin's Bulldog " for his advocacy of Charles Darwin 's theory of evolution . The stories regarding Huxley's famous 1860 Oxford evolution debate with Samuel Wilberforce were
904-478: A hypothesis which was a good working basis. Logically speaking, the prior question was whether evolution had taken place at all. It is to this question that much of Darwin's On the Origin of Species was devoted. Its publication in 1859 completely convinced Huxley of evolution and it was this and no doubt his admiration of Darwin's way of amassing and using evidence that formed the basis of his support for Darwin in
1017-497: A key moment in the wider acceptance of evolution and in his own career, although some historians think that the surviving story of the debate is a later fabrication. Huxley had been planning to leave Oxford on the previous day, but, after an encounter with Robert Chambers , the author of Vestiges , he changed his mind and decided to join the debate. Wilberforce was coached by Richard Owen , against whom Huxley also debated about whether humans were closely related to apes. Huxley
1130-476: A leading advocate of the Perennial Philosophy , which holds that the same metaphysical truths are found in all the major religions of the world. In the 1920s, Huxley was skeptical of religion, "Earlier in his career he had rejected mysticism, often poking fun at it in his novels [...]" Gerald Heard became an influential friend of Huxley, and since the mid-1920s had been exploring Vedanta, as
1243-416: A lesson he never forgot. A third effect was to serve notice that Darwinian ideas could not be easily dismissed: on the contrary, they would be vigorously defended against orthodox authority. A fourth effect was to promote professionalism in science, with its implied need for scientific education. A fifth consequence was indirect: as Wilberforce had feared, a defence of evolution did undermine literal belief in
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#17327732298451356-454: A man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty.” Aldous Huxley's agnosticism, together with his speculative propensity, made it difficult for him fully embrace any form of institutionalised religion. Over the last 30 years of his life, he accepted and wrote about concepts found in Vedanta and was
1469-524: A nominal assistant-surgeon, so he might work on the specimens he collected and the observations he made during the voyage of the Rattlesnake . He solved the problem of Appendicularia , whose place in the animal kingdom Johannes Peter Müller had found himself wholly unable to assign. It and the Ascidians are both, as Huxley showed, tunicates , today regarded as a sister group to the vertebrates in
1582-657: A palaeontologist is marked by a rather strange predilection for 'persistent types', in which he seemed to argue that evolutionary advancement (in the sense of major new groups of animals and plants) was rare or absent in the Phanerozoic . In the same vein, he tended to push the origin of major groups such as birds and mammals back into the Palaeozoic era, and to claim that no order of plants had ever gone extinct. Much paper has been consumed by historians of science ruminating on this strange and somewhat unclear idea. Huxley
1695-448: A screenwriter, and that he used much of it to transport Jewish and left-wing writer and artist refugees from Hitler's Germany to the US. In March 1938, Huxley's friend Anita Loos , a novelist and screenwriter, put him in touch with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), which hired him for Madame Curie which was originally to star Greta Garbo and be directed by George Cukor . (Eventually, the film
1808-497: A silver medal prize in the Apothecaries' yearly competition, Huxley was admitted to study at Charing Cross Hospital , where he obtained a small scholarship. At Charing Cross, he was taught by Thomas Wharton Jones , Professor of Ophthalmic Medicine and Surgery at University College London . Jones had been Robert Knox 's assistant when Knox bought cadavers from Burke and Hare . The young Wharton Jones, who acted as go-between,
1921-643: A street in the Bronx , New York was named in his honor (Huxley Avenue). As recognition of his many public services, he was appointed Privy Councillor in 1892. Despite his many achievements, he was given no award by the British state until late in life. In this, he did better than Darwin, who got no award of any kind from the state. (Darwin's proposed knighthood was vetoed by ecclesiastical advisers, including Wilberforce.) Perhaps Huxley had commented too often on his dislike of honours, or perhaps his many assaults on
2034-594: A track record against evolution as far back as the previous Oxford B.A. meeting in 1847 when he attacked Chambers' Vestiges . For the more challenging task of opposing the Origin , and the implication that man descended from apes, he had been assiduously coached by Richard Owen —Owen stayed with him the night before the debate. On the day, Wilberforce repeated some of the arguments from his Quarterly Review article (written but not yet published), then ventured onto slippery ground. His famous jibe at Huxley (as to whether Huxley
2147-514: A view now held by modern biologists. The tendency has been for this fine anatomical work to be overshadowed by his energetic and controversial activity in favour of evolution, and by his extensive public work on scientific education, both of which had significant effects on society in Britain and elsewhere. Huxley's 1893 Romanes Lecture , "Evolution and Ethics", is exceedingly influential in China;
2260-454: A way of understanding individual human life and the individual's relationship to the universe. Heard and Huxley both saw the political implications of Vedanta, which could help bring about peace, specifically that there is an underlying reality that all humans and the universe are a part of. In the 1930s, Huxley and Gerald Heard both became active in the effort to avoid another world war, writing essays and eventually publicly speaking in support of
2373-539: A wealth of intimate detail. Never have the casual and unstudied utterances of a great religious teacher been set down with so minute a fidelity." In 1944, Huxley wrote the introduction to the Bhagavad Gita – The Song of God , translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, which was published by the Vedanta Society of Southern California. As an advocate of the perennial philosophy, Huxley
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#17327732298452486-471: A writer and broadcaster, philosopher and interpreter of contemporary science. Heard was nearly five years older than Huxley, and introduced him to a variety of profound ideas, subtle interconnections, and various emerging spiritual and psychotherapy methods. Works of this period included novels about the dehumanising aspects of scientific progress , (his magnum opus Brave New World ), and on pacifist themes ( Eyeless in Gaza ). In Brave New World , set in
2599-407: Is attached to the shoulder or pelvis by a single bone, the humerus or femur. His interest in these fish brought him close to the origin of tetrapods , one of the most important areas of vertebrate palaeontology. The study of fossil reptiles led to his demonstrating the fundamental affinity of birds and reptiles, which he united under the title of Sauropsida . His papers on Archaeopteryx and
2712-500: Is doubly valuable; it is valuable because it gives the experiencer a better understanding of himself and the world and because it may help him to lead a less self-centered and more creative life." Having tried LSD in the 1950s, he became an advisor to Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert in their early-1960s research work with psychedelic drugs at Harvard. Personality differences led Huxley to distance himself from Leary, when Huxley grew concerned that Leary had become too keen on promoting
2825-496: Is knowable and what is not. Huxley had little formal schooling and was virtually self-taught. He became perhaps the finest comparative anatomist of the later 19th century. He worked on invertebrates , clarifying relationships between groups previously little understood. Later, he worked on vertebrates , especially on the relationship between apes and humans. After comparing Archaeopteryx with Compsognathus , he concluded that birds evolved from small carnivorous dinosaurs ,
2938-521: Is reprobated as "utterly dishonourable to Natural Science." If I confine my retrospect of the reception of the Origin of Species to a twelvemonth, or thereabouts, from the time of its publication, I do not recollect anything quite so foolish and unmannerly as the Quarterly Review article... Since his death, Huxley has become known as "Darwin's Bulldog", taken to refer to his pluck and courage in debate, and to his perceived role in protecting
3051-600: Is the unmanifested principle of all manifestations. That the Ground is at once transcendent and immanent. That it is possible for human beings to love, know and, from virtually, to become actually identical with the divine Ground. That to achieve this unitive knowledge of the Godhead is the final end and purpose of human existence. That there is a Law or Dharma which must be obeyed, a Tao or Way which must be followed, if men are to achieve their final end. For Huxley, one of
3164-548: The Quarterly Review , running to 17,000 words. The authorship of this latter review was not known for sure until Wilberforce's son wrote his biography. So it can be said that, just as Darwin groomed Huxley, so Owen groomed Wilberforce; and both the proxies fought public battles on behalf of their principals as much as themselves. Though we do not know the exact words of the Oxford debate, we do know what Huxley thought of
3277-915: The Copley Medal in 1888 and the Darwin Medal in 1894; the Geological Society awarded him the Wollaston Medal in 1876; the Linnean Society awarded him the Linnean Medal in 1890. There were many other elections and appointments to eminent scientific bodies; these and his many academic awards are listed in the Life and Letters . He turned down many other appointments, notably the Linacre chair in zoology at Oxford and
3390-552: The McCarran Act , the judge had to adjourn the proceedings. He withdrew his application. Nevertheless, he remained in the U.S. In 1959, Huxley turned down an offer to be made a Knight Bachelor by the Macmillan government without giving a reason; his brother Julian had been knighted in 1958, while his brother Andrew would be knighted in 1974. In the fall semester of 1960 Huxley was invited by Professor Huston Smith to be
3503-663: The Peace Pledge Union . But, they remained frustrated by the conflicting goals of the political left – some favoring pacifism (as did Huxley and Heard), while other wanting to take up arms against fascism in the Spanish Civil War . After joining the PPU, Huxley expressed his frustration with politics in a letter from 1935, “…the thing finally resolves itself into a religious problem — an uncomfortable fact which one must be prepared to face and which I have come during
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3616-604: The University of London , winning the gold medal for anatomy and physiology . However, he did not present himself for the final (Second M.B.) exams and consequently did not qualify for a university degree. His apprenticeships and exam results formed a sufficient basis for his application to the Royal Navy . Aged 20, Huxley was too young to apply to the Royal College of Surgeons for a licence to practise, yet he
3729-672: The Vedanta Society of Southern California , founded and headed by Swami Prabhavananda . Together with Gerald Heard, Christopher Isherwood and other followers, he was initiated by the Swami and was taught meditation and spiritual practices. From 1941 until 1960, Huxley contributed 48 articles to Vedanta and the West , published by the society. He also served on the editorial board with Isherwood, Heard, and playwright John Van Druten from 1951 through 1962. In 1942 The Gospel of Ramakrishna
3842-554: The evolution of the horse has many other members, and the overall appearance of the tree of descent is more like a bush than a straight line. The horse series also strongly suggested that the process was gradual, and that the origin of the modern horse lay in North America, not in Eurasia. If so, then something must have happened to horses in North America, since none were there when Europeans arrived. The experience with Marsh
3955-457: The origin of birds were of great interest then and still are. Apart from his interest in persuading the world that man was a primate and had descended from the same stock as the apes, Huxley did little work on mammals, with one exception. On his tour of America Huxley was shown the remarkable series of fossil horses, discovered by O. C. Marsh , in Yale 's Peabody Museum . An Easterner, Marsh
4068-403: The 1930s, connected with him again in the U.S. in the early 1960s and wrote that "the enormous intellect, the beautifully modulated voice, the gentle objectivity, all were unchanged. He was one of the most highly civilized human beings I had ever met." Biographer Harold H. Watts wrote that Huxley's writings in the "final and extended period of his life" are "the work of a man who is meditating on
4181-923: The Advancement of Science 1869–1870; president of the Quekett Microscopical Club 1878; president of the Royal Society 1883–1885; Inspector of Fisheries 1881–1885; and president of the Marine Biological Association 1884–1890. He was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1869. The thirty-one years during which Huxley occupied the chair of natural history at the Royal School of Mines included work on vertebrate palaeontology and on many projects to advance
4294-541: The Bates method and the extreme and pure natural lighting of the southwestern American desert. He reported that, for the first time in more than 25 years, he was able to read without glasses and without strain. He even tried driving a car along the dirt road beside the ranch. He wrote a book about his experiences with the Bates method, The Art of Seeing , which was published in 1942 (U.S.), 1943 (UK). The book contained some generally disputed theories, and its publication created
4407-726: The Carnegie Visiting professor of humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As part of the MIT centennial program of events organised by the Department of Humanities, Huxley presented a series of lectures titled, "What a Piece of Work is a Man" which concerned history, language, and art. Robert S. de Ropp (scientist, humanitarian, and author), who had spent time with Huxley in England in
4520-624: The Chinese translation of Huxley's lecture even transformed the Chinese translation of Darwin's Origin of Species . Thomas Henry Huxley was born in Ealing , then a village in Middlesex . He was the second youngest of eight children of George Huxley and Rachel Withers. His parents were members of the Church of England, but he sympathized with nonconformists . Like some other British scientists of
4633-915: The Garsington lifestyle. Jobs were very scarce, but in 1919, John Middleton Murry was reorganising the Athenaeum and invited Huxley to join the staff. He accepted immediately, and quickly married the Belgian refugee Maria Nys (1899–1955), also at Garsington. They lived with their young son in Italy part of the time during the 1920s, where Huxley would visit his friend D. H. Lawrence . Following Lawrence's death in 1930 (he and Maria were present at his death in Provence), Huxley edited Lawrence's letters (1932). Very early in 1929, in London, Huxley met Gerald Heard ,
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4746-751: The Mastership of University College, Oxford . In 1873 the King of Sweden made Huxley, Hooker and Tyndall Knights of the Order of the Polar Star : they could wear the insignia but not use the title in Britain. Huxley collected many honorary memberships of foreign societies, academic awards and honorary doctorates from Britain and Germany. He also became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1892. In 1916,
4859-543: The Natural History of Creation , a book which contained some quite pertinent arguments in favour of evolution. Huxley had also rejected Lamarck's theory of transmutation, on the basis that there was insufficient evidence to support it. All this scepticism was brought together in a lecture to the Royal Institution, which made Darwin anxious enough to set about an effort to change young Huxley's mind. It
4972-590: The Royal Society, persuaded government about science, and established scientific education in British schools and universities. He was awarded the highest honours then open to British men of science. The Royal Society , who had elected him as Fellow when he was 25 (1851), awarded him the Royal Medal the next year (1852), a year before Charles Darwin got the same award. He was the youngest biologist to receive such recognition. Then later in life he received
5085-628: The U.S., mainly southern California , until his death, and for a time in Taos, New Mexico , where he wrote Ends and Means (1937). The book contains tracts on war , inequality , religion and ethics . Heard introduced Huxley to Vedanta ( Upanishad-centered philosophy ), meditation , and vegetarianism through the principle of ahimsa . In 1938, Huxley befriended Jiddu Krishnamurti , whose teachings he greatly admired. Huxley and Krishnamurti entered into an enduring exchange (sometimes edging on debate) over many years, with Krishnamurti representing
5198-409: The art of pure receptivity.... [T]he individual must learn to decondition himself, must be able to cut holes in the fence of verbalized symbols that hems him in." Huxley described himself as agnostic, a word coined by his grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley , a scientist who championed the scientific method and was a major supporter of Darwin's theories. This is the definition he gave, “…it is wrong for
5311-465: The article: For those of us who are not congenitally the members of an organized church, who have found that humanism and nature-worship are not enough, who are not content to remain in the darkness of ignorance, the squalor of vice or the other squalor of respectability, the minimum working hypothesis would seem to run to about this: That there is a Godhead, Ground, Brahman, Clear Light of the Void, which
5424-419: The attractive features of Vedanta is that it provided a historic and established philosophy and practice that embraced the Perennial Philosophy ; that there is a commonality of experiences across all the mystical branches of the world's religions. Huxley wrote in the introduction of his book The Perennial Philosophy : The Perennial Philosophy is primarily concerned with the one, divine Reality substantial to
5537-437: The career of Tremblay as an example of what can happen when a person's powerful spiritual energies are channelled in the wrong direction. Huxley praises his early preaching and ministering to the sick and poor, his reflections and writings on a life of prayer through which, Huxley thinks, he came close to sanctity: "'at peace and happy in the conviction that his true vocation had been revealed to him" (p.86). However, Huxley argues,
5650-430: The central problems of many modern men". Huxley had deeply felt apprehensions about the future the developed world might make for itself. From these, he made some warnings in his writings and talks. In a 1958 televised interview conducted by journalist Mike Wallace , Huxley outlined several major concerns: the difficulties and dangers of world overpopulation; the tendency towards distinctly hierarchical social organisation;
5763-494: The circle. Not long afterwards, Huxley wrote his book on widely held spiritual values and ideas, The Perennial Philosophy , which discussed the teachings of renowned mystics of the world. Huxley became a close friend of Remsen Bird, president of Occidental College . He spent much time at the college in the Eagle Rock neighbourhood of Los Angeles. The college appears as "Tarzana College" in his satirical novel After Many
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#17327732298455876-409: The criticism to Huxley's widow, Laura: [December 11, 1963, a few weeks after Aldous Huxley’s death] The publisher had suggested John Lehmann should write the biography. Laura [Huxley] asked me what I thought of the idea, so I had to tell her that John disbelieves in, and is aggressive toward, the metaphysical beliefs that Aldous held. All he would describe would be a clever young intellectual who later
5989-537: The crucial importance of evaluating the use of technology in mass societies susceptible to persuasion; the tendency to promote modern politicians to a naive public as well-marketed commodities. In a December 1962 letter to brother Julian, summarizing a paper he had presented in Santa Barbara , he wrote, "What I said was that if we didn't pretty quickly start thinking of human problems in ecological terms rather than in terms of power politics we should very soon be in
6102-408: The death of his eldest son Noel, who died of scarlet fever in 1860; Huxley's wife Henrietta Anne née Heathorn and son Noel are also buried there. Huxley and his wife had five daughters and three sons: From 1870 onwards, Huxley was to some extent drawn away from scientific research by the claims of public duty. He served on eight Royal Commissions , from 1862 to 1884. From 1871 to 1880 he
6215-621: The debate at the British Association meeting, on Saturday 30 June 1860 at the Oxford University Museum. Huxley's presence there had been encouraged on the previous evening when he met Robert Chambers, the Scottish publisher and author of Vestiges , who was walking the streets of Oxford in a dispirited state, and begged for assistance. The debate followed the presentation of a paper by John William Draper , and
6328-463: The debate, and written less than a month afterwards. Other eyewitnesses, with one or two exceptions (Hooker especially thought he had made the best points), give similar accounts, at varying dates after the event. The general view was and still is that Huxley got much the better of the exchange, though Wilberforce himself thought he had done quite well. In the absence of a verbatim report, differing perceptions are difficult to judge fairly; Huxley wrote
6441-704: The debates that followed the book's publication. Huxley's support started with his anonymous favourable review of the Origin in the Times for 26 December 1859, and continued with articles in several periodicals, and in a lecture at the Royal Institution in February 1860. At the same time, Richard Owen , whilst writing an extremely hostile anonymous review of the Origin in the Edinburgh Review , also primed Samuel Wilberforce who wrote one in
6554-434: The discipline itself, developed. Huxley's detailed anatomical work was, as always, first-rate and productive. His work on fossil fish shows his distinctive approach: Whereas pre-Darwinian naturalists collected, identified, and classified, Huxley worked mainly to reveal the evolutionary relationships between groups. The lobe-finned fish (such as coelacanths and lungfish ) have paired appendages whose internal skeleton
6667-582: The drugs rather indiscriminately, even playing the rebel with a fondness for publicity. Differing accounts exist about the details of the quality of Huxley's eyesight at specific points in his life. Circa 1939, Huxley encountered the Bates method , in which he was instructed by Margaret Darst Corbett . In 1940, Huxley relocated from Hollywood to a 40-acre (16 ha) ranchito in the high desert hamlet of Llano, California , in northern Los Angeles County . Huxley then said that his sight improved dramatically with
6780-918: The end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times, and was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962. Huxley was a pacifist . He grew interested in philosophical mysticism , as well as universalism , addressing these subjects in his works such as The Perennial Philosophy (1945), which illustrates commonalities between Western and Eastern mysticism, and The Doors of Perception (1954), which interprets his own psychedelic experience with mescaline . In his most famous novel Brave New World (1932) and his final novel Island (1962), he presented his visions of dystopia and utopia , respectively. Huxley
6893-497: The experience he had there of "an ordered universe in a world of planless incoherence" was an important source for the novel. Huxley completed his first (unpublished) novel at the age of 17 and began writing seriously in his early twenties, establishing himself as a successful writer and social satirist. His first published novels were social satires, Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925), and Point Counter Point (1928). Brave New World (1932)
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#17327732298457006-420: The first time indicated the direct line of descent of an existing animal. With the generosity of true greatness, he gave up his own opinions in the face of new truth, and took my conclusions as the basis of his famous New York lecture on the horse." Huxley was originally not persuaded by "development theory", as evolution was once called. This can be seen in his savage review of Robert Chambers ' Vestiges of
7119-469: The horse fossils were really special. After a week with Marsh and his fossils, Huxley wrote excitedly, "The collection of fossils is the most wonderful thing I ever saw." The collection at that time went from the small four-toed forest-dwelling Orohippus from the Eocene through three-toed species such as Miohippus to species more like the modern horse. By looking at their teeth he could see that, as
7232-409: The influence of Benet of Canfield , led Tremblay to abandon the traditional Christian mystical tradition, whereby the imagination was to be set aside once it had initiated a process of mystical ascent. Instead, Benet's followers developed a way whereby image and will came to impede spiritual enlightenment and "direct mystical experience" was subordinated to a personalised theology. This article about
7345-657: The last year to find it easier to face.” Huxley and Heard turned their attention to addressing the big problems of the world through transforming the individual, "[...] a forest is only as green as the individual trees of the forest is green [...]" This was the genesis of the Human Potential Movement , that gained traction in the 1960s. In the late 1930s, Huxley and Heard immigrated to the United States, and beginning in 1939 and continuing until his death in 1963, Huxley had an extensive association with
7458-415: The lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." In 1953, Huxley and Maria applied for United States citizenship and presented themselves for examination. When Huxley refused to bear arms for the U.S. and would not state that his objections were based on religious ideals, the only excuse allowed under
7571-678: The manifold world of things and lives and minds. But the nature of this one Reality is such that it cannot be directly and immediately apprehended except by those who have chosen to fulfill certain conditions, making themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit. Huxley also occasionally lectured at the Hollywood and Santa Barbara Vedanta temples. Two of those lectures have been released on CD: Knowledge and Understanding and Who Are We? from 1955. Many of Huxley's contemporaries and critics were disappointed by Huxley's turn to mysticism; Isherwood describes in his diary how he had to explain
7684-405: The more rarefied, detached, ivory-tower perspective and Huxley, with his pragmatic concerns, the more socially and historically informed position. Huxley wrote a foreword to Krishnamurti's quintessential statement, The First and Last Freedom (1954). Huxley and Heard became Vedantists in the group formed around Hindu Swami Prabhavananda , and subsequently introduced Christopher Isherwood to
7797-454: The name of Hydrozoa . The connection he made was that all the members of the class consisted of two cell layers, enclosing a central cavity or stomach. This is characteristic of the phylum now called the Cnidaria . He compared this feature to the serous and mucous structures of embryos of higher animals. When at last he got a grant from the Royal Society for the printing of plates, Huxley
7910-598: The navy by refusing to return to active service, and in July 1854 he became professor of natural history at the Royal School of Mines and naturalist to the British Geological Survey in the following year. In addition, he was Fullerian Professor at the Royal Institution 1855–1858 and 1865–1867; Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons 1863–1869; president of the British Association for
8023-412: The nineteenth century such as Alfred Russel Wallace , Huxley was brought up in a literate middle-class family which had fallen on hard times. His father was a mathematics teacher at Great Ealing School until it closed, putting the family into financial difficulties. As a result, Thomas left school at the age of 10, after only two years of formal schooling. Despite this lack of formal schooling, Huxley
8136-466: The older man. The sobriquet appears to be Huxley's own invention, although of unknown date, and it was not current in his lifetime. While the second half of Darwin's life was lived mainly within his family, the younger and combative Huxley operated mainly out in the world at large. A letter from Huxley to Ernst Haeckel (2 November 1871) states: "The dogs have been snapping at [Darwin's] heels too much of late." Famously, Huxley responded to Wilberforce in
8249-491: The only road of escape from the self–imposed necessity of self–destruction. As a means of personally realizing the "divine Reality", he described a "Minimum Working Hypothesis" in the Introduction to Swami Prabhavananda's and Christopher Isherwood's translation of the Bhagavad Gita and in a free-standing essay in Vedanta and the West , a publication of Vedanta Press . This is the outline, that Huxley elaborates on in
8362-661: The original. Later on, as a young adult, he made himself an expert, first teaching himself about invertebrates , and later on vertebrates . He did many of the illustrations for his publications on marine invertebrates. In his later debates and writing on science and religion, his grasp of theology was better than many of his clerical opponents. He was apprenticed for short periods to several medical practitioners: at 13 to his brother-in-law John Cooke in Coventry, who passed him on to Thomas Chandler, notable for his experiments using mesmerism for medical purposes. Chandler's practice
8475-485: The phylum Chordata . Other papers on the morphology of the cephalopods and on brachiopods and rotifers are also noteworthy. Following a lecture at the Royal Institution on 30 April 1852 Huxley indicated that it remained difficult to earn a living as a scientist alone. This was demonstrated in a letter written on 3 May 1852, where he states "Science in England does everything—but PAY. You may earn praise but not pudding". However, Huxley effectively resigned from
8588-503: The place of science in British life. Huxley retired in 1885, after a bout of depressive illness which started in 1884. He resigned the presidency of the Royal Society in mid-term, the Inspectorship of Fisheries, and his chair (as soon as he decently could) and took six months' leave. His pension was £1200 a year. Huxley's London home, in which he wrote many of his works, was at 4 Marlborough Place , St John's Wood . The house
8701-525: The posthumous publication of J. D. Unwin 's 1940 book Hopousia or The Sexual and Economic Foundations of a New Society . On 21 October 1949, Huxley wrote to George Orwell, author of Nineteen Eighty-Four , congratulating him on "how fine and how profoundly important the book is". In his letter, he predicted: "Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narcohypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that
8814-522: The prominent Huxley family , he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford , with a degree in English literature . Early in his career, he published short stories and poetry and edited the literary magazine Oxford Poetry , before going on to publish travel writing , satire, and screenplays. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. By
8927-592: The publication of The Doors of Perception , in which he recounted this experience, Huxley and Swami Prabhavananda disagreed about the meaning and importance of the psychedelic drug experience, which may have caused the relationship to cool, but Huxley continued to write articles for the society's journal, lecture at the temple, and attend social functions. Huxley later had an experience on mescaline that he considered more profound than those detailed in The Doors of Perception . Huxley wrote that "The mystical experience
9040-606: The remains of Pithecanthropus erectus (now known as Homo erectus ). He died of a heart attack (after contracting influenza and pneumonia) in 1895 in Eastbourne, and was buried in London at East Finchley Cemetery . No invitations were sent out but two hundred people turned up for the funeral; they included Joseph Dalton Hooker , William Henry Flower , Mulford B. Foster , Edwin Lankester , Joseph Lister , and apparently Henry James . The family plot had been purchased upon
9153-609: The review in the Quarterly : Since Lord Brougham assailed Dr Young , the world has seen no such specimen of the insolence of a shallow pretender to a Master in Science as this remarkable production, in which one of the most exact of observers, most cautious of reasoners, and most candid of expositors, of this or any other age, is held up to scorn as a "flighty" person, who endeavours "to prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation," and whose "mode of dealing with nature"
9266-560: The size grew larger and the toes reduced, the teeth changed from those of a browser to those of a grazer. All such changes could be explained by a general alteration in habitat from forest to grassland. And, it is now known, that is what did happen over large areas of North America from the Eocene to the Pleistocene : The ultimate causative agent was global temperature reduction (see Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum ). The modern account of
9379-478: The traditional beliefs of organised religion made enemies in the establishment – he had vigorous debates in print with Benjamin Disraeli , William Ewart Gladstone , and Arthur Balfour , and his relationship with Lord Salisbury was less than tranquil. Huxley was for about thirty years evolution's most effective advocate, and for some Huxley was " the premier advocate of science in the nineteenth century [for]
9492-452: The whole English-speaking world". Though he had many admirers and disciples, his retirement and later death left British zoology somewhat bereft of leadership. He had, directly or indirectly, guided the careers and appointments of the next generation. Huxley thought he was "the only man who can carry out my work": The deaths of Balfour and W.K. Clifford were "the greatest losses to science in our time". The first half of Huxley's career as
9605-605: Was "deep in debt". So, at a friend's suggestion, he applied for an appointment in the Royal Navy . He had references on character and certificates showing the time spent on his apprenticeship and on requirements such as dissection and pharmacy. William Burnett , the Physician General of the Navy, interviewed him and arranged for the College of Surgeons to test his competence (by means of a viva voce ). Finally, Huxley
9718-873: Was 14 (his father later remarried). He contracted the eye disease keratitis punctata in 1911; this "left [him] practically blind for two to three years" and "ended his early dreams of becoming a doctor". In October 1913, Huxley entered Balliol College, Oxford , where he studied English literature. He volunteered for the British Army in January 1916, for the Great War ; however, he was rejected on health grounds, being half-blind in one eye. His eyesight later partly recovered. He edited Oxford Poetry in 1916, and in June of that year graduated BA with first class honours . His brother Julian wrote: I believe his blindness
9831-477: Was America's first professor of palaeontology, but also one who had come west into hostile Indian territory in search of fossils, hunted buffalo, and met Red Cloud (in 1874). Funded by his uncle George Peabody , Marsh had made some remarkable discoveries: the huge Cretaceous aquatic bird Hesperornis , and the dinosaur footprints along the Connecticut River were worth the trip by themselves, but
9944-426: Was a Secretary of the Royal Society and from 1883 to 1885 he was president. He was president of the Geological Society from 1868 to 1870. In 1870, he was president of the British Association at Liverpool and, in the same year was elected a member of the newly constituted London School Board . He was president of the Quekett Microscopical Club from 1877 to 1879. He was the leading person amongst those who reformed
10057-474: Was a blessing in disguise. For one thing, it put paid to his idea of taking up medicine as a career ... His uniqueness lay in his universalism. He was able to take all knowledge for his province. Following his years at Balliol, Huxley, being financially indebted to his father, decided to find employment. He taught French for a year at Eton College , where Eric Blair (who was to take the pen name George Orwell ) and Steven Runciman were among his pupils. He
10170-731: Was able to summarise this work in The Oceanic Hydrozoa , published by the Ray Society in 1859. The value of Huxley's work was recognised and, on returning to England in 1850, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In the following year, at the age of twenty-six, he not only received the Royal Society Medal but was also elected to the Council. He met Joseph Dalton Hooker and John Tyndall , who remained his lifelong friends. The Admiralty retained him as
10283-410: Was an active member of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) . In 1937, Huxley moved to Hollywood with his wife Maria, son Matthew Huxley , and friend Gerald Heard. Cyril Connolly wrote, of the two intellectuals (Huxley and Heard) in the late 1930s, "all European avenues had been exhausted in the search for a way forward – politics, art, science – pitching them both toward the US in 1937." Huxley lived in
10396-532: Was arranged by Edward Forbes FRS (who had also been a pupil of Knox). Both before and after the voyage Forbes was something of a mentor to Huxley. Huxley's paper "On the anatomy and the affinities of the family of Medusae" was published in 1849 by the Royal Society in its Philosophical Transactions . Huxley united the Hydroid and Sertularian polyps with the Medusae to form a class to which he subsequently gave
10509-472: Was born in Godalming , Surrey, England, on 26 July 1894. He was the third son of the writer and schoolmaster Leonard Huxley , who edited The Cornhill Magazine , and his first wife, Julia Arnold , who founded Prior's Field School . Julia was the niece of poet and critic Matthew Arnold and the sister of Mrs. Humphry Ward . Julia named him Aldous after a character in one of her sister's novels. Aldous
10622-464: Was chaired by Darwin's former botany tutor John Stevens Henslow . Darwin's theory was opposed by the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce , and those supporting Darwin included Huxley and their mutual friends Hooker and Lubbock . The platform featured Brodie and Professor Beale, and Robert FitzRoy , who had been captain of HMS Beagle during Darwin's voyage, spoke against Darwin. Wilberforce had
10735-511: Was completed by MGM in 1943 with a different director and cast.) Huxley received screen credit for Pride and Prejudice (1940) and was paid for his work on a number of other films, including Jane Eyre (1944). He was commissioned by Walt Disney in 1945 to write a script based on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the biography of the story's author, Lewis Carroll . The script was not used, however. Huxley wrote an introduction to
10848-409: Was corrupted by Hollywood and went astray after spooks. In early 1953, Huxley had his first experience with the psychedelic drug mescaline . Huxley had initiated a correspondence with Doctor Humphry Osmond , a British psychiatrist then employed in a Canadian institution, and eventually asked him to supply a dose of mescaline; Osmond obliged and supervised Huxley's session in southern California. After
10961-427: Was descended from an ape on his mother's side or his father's side) was probably unplanned, and certainly unwise. Huxley's reply to the effect that he would rather be descended from an ape than a man who misused his great talents to suppress debate—the exact wording is not certain—was widely recounted in pamphlets and a spoof play. The letters of Alfred Newton include one to his brother giving an eyewitness account of
11074-509: Was described by his brother, Julian, as someone who frequently contemplated "the strangeness of things". According to his cousin and contemporary Gervas Huxley, he had an early interest in drawing . Huxley's education began in his father's well-equipped botanical laboratory, after which he enrolled at Hillside School near Godalming. He was taught there by his own mother for several years until she became terminally ill. After Hillside he went on to Eton College . His mother died in 1908, when he
11187-452: Was determined to educate himself. He became one of the great autodidacts of the nineteenth century. At first he read Thomas Carlyle , James Hutton 's Geology , and Hamilton 's Logic . In his teens, he taught himself German , eventually becoming fluent and used by Charles Darwin as a translator of scientific material in German. He learned Latin , and enough Greek to read Aristotle in
11300-565: Was drawn to the Gita , as he explained in the Introduction, written during WWII, when it was still not clear who would win: The Bhagavad Gita is perhaps the most systematic scriptural statement of the Perennial Philosophy. To a world at war, a world that, because it lacks the intellectual and spiritual prerequisites to peace, can only hope to patch up some kind of precarious armed truce, it stands pointing, clearly and unmistakably, to
11413-424: Was enough for Huxley to give credence to Darwin's gradualism, and to introduce the story of the horse into his lecture series. Marsh's and Huxley's conclusions were initially quite different. However, Marsh carefully showed Huxley his complete sequence of fossils. As Marsh put it, Huxley "then informed me that all this was new to him and that my facts demonstrated the evolution of the horse beyond question, and for
11526-407: Was exonerated of crime, but thought it best to leave Scotland. In 1845, under Wharton Jones' guidance, Huxley published his first scientific paper demonstrating the existence of a hitherto unrecognised layer in the inner sheath of hairs, a layer that has been known since as Huxley's layer . Later in life, Huxley organised a pension for his old mentor. At twenty he passed his First M.B. examination at
11639-552: Was extended in the early 1870s to include a large drawing and dining room at which he held informal Sunday gatherings. In 1890, he moved from London to Eastbourne , where he had purchased land in the Staveley Road upon which a house was built, 'Hodeslea', under the supervision of his son-in-law F. Waller. Here Huxley edited the nine volumes of his Collected Essays . In 1894 he heard of Eugene Dubois ' discovery in Java of
11752-658: Was his fifth novel and first dystopian work. In the 1920s, he was also a contributor to Vanity Fair and British Vogue magazines. During the First World War , Huxley spent much of his time at Garsington Manor near Oxford, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell , working as a farm labourer. While at the Manor, he met several Bloomsbury Group figures, including Bertrand Russell , Alfred North Whitehead , and Clive Bell . Later, in Crome Yellow (1921), he caricatured
11865-504: Was in London's Rotherhithe amidst the squalor endured by the Dickensian poor. Afterward, another brother-in-law took him on: John Salt, his eldest sister's husband. Now aged 16, Huxley entered Sydenham College (behind University College Hospital ), a cut-price anatomy school. All this time Huxley continued his programme of reading, which more than made up for his lack of formal schooling. A year later, buoyed by excellent results and
11978-433: Was made Assistant Surgeon ('surgeon's mate', but in practice marine naturalist) to HMS Rattlesnake , about to set sail on a voyage of discovery and surveying to New Guinea and Australia. The Rattlesnake left England on 3 December 1846 and, once it arrived in the southern hemisphere, Huxley devoted his time to the study of marine invertebrates. He began to send details of his discoveries back to England, where publication
12091-531: Was mainly remembered as being an incompetent schoolmaster unable to keep order in class. Nevertheless, Blair and others spoke highly of his excellent command of language. Huxley also worked for a time during the 1920s at Brunner and Mond , an advanced chemical plant in Billingham in County Durham, northeast England. According to an introduction to his science fiction novel Brave New World (1932),
12204-402: Was presented by Lyell and Hooker to the Linnean Society in 1858 alongside excerpts from Darwin's notebook and a Darwin letter to Asa Gray . Huxley's famous response to the idea of natural selection was "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!" However, he never conclusively made up his mind about whether natural selection was the main method for evolution, though he did admit it was
12317-564: Was published by the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center in New York. The book was translated by Swami Nikhilananda , with help from Joseph Campbell and Margaret Woodrow Wilson , daughter of US president Woodrow Wilson. Aldous Huxley wrote in the foreword, "...a book unique, so far as my knowledge goes, in the literature of hagiography. Never have the small events of a contemplative's daily life been described with such
12430-433: Was slow to accept some of Darwin's ideas, such as gradualism , and was undecided about natural selection , but despite this, he was wholehearted in his public support of Darwin. Instrumental in developing scientific education in Britain, he fought against the more extreme versions of religious tradition. Huxley coined the term " agnosticism " in 1869 and elaborated on it in 1889 to frame the nature of claims in terms of what
12543-429: Was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley , the zoologist , agnostic , and controversialist who had often been called "Darwin's Bulldog". His brother Julian Huxley and half-brother Andrew Huxley also became outstanding biologists. Aldous had another brother, Noel Trevenen Huxley (1889–1914), who took his own life after a period of clinical depression . As a child, Huxley's nickname was "Ogie", short for "Ogre". He
12656-490: Was the kind of thing Darwin did with his closest scientific friends, but he must have had some particular intuition about Huxley, who was by all accounts a most impressive person even as a young man. Huxley was therefore one of the small group who knew about Darwin's ideas before they were published (the group included Joseph Dalton Hooker and Charles Lyell ). The first publication by Darwin of his ideas came when Wallace sent Darwin his famous paper on natural selection, which
12769-513: Was wrong to pitch the loss of orders in the Phanerozoic as low as 7%, and he did not estimate the number of new orders which evolved. Persistent types sat rather uncomfortably next to Darwin's more fluid ideas; despite his intelligence, it took Huxley a surprisingly long time to appreciate some of the implications of evolution. However, gradually Huxley moved away from this conservative style of thinking as his understanding of palaeontology, and
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