Aphorisms and Reflections, cccxviii (1908, Henrietta Huxley, ed.)

"Teach a child what is wise, that is morality.  Teach him what is wise and beautiful, that is religion."

T. H. Huxley

from "Jesting Pilate" (1926)

"Our sense of values is intuitive. There is no proving the real existence of values in any way that will satisfy the logical intellect.  Our standards can be demolished by argumentation, but we are nonetheless right to cling to them.  Not blindly, of course, nor uncritically.  Convinced by practical experience of man's diversity, the traveller will not be tempted to cling to his own inherited national standard, as though it were necessarily the only true and unperverted one.  He will compare standards; he will search for what is common to them all; he will observe the ways in which each standard is perverted, he will try to create a standard of his own that shall be as far as possible free from distortion.  In one country, he will perceive, the true, fundamental standard is distorted by an excessive emphasizing of hierarchic and aristocratic principles; in another by an excess of democracy.  Here, too much is made of work and energy for their own sakes; there too much of mere being.  In certain parts of the world he will find spirituality run wild; in others a stupid materialism that would deny the very existence of values.  The traveller will observe these various distortions and will create for himself a standard that shall be, as far as possible, free from them---a standard of values that shall be as timeless, as uncontingent on circumstances, as nearly absolute as he can make them.  Understanding diversity and allowing for it, he will tolerate, but not without limit.  He will distinguish between harmless perversions and those which tend to actually deny or stultify fundamental values.  Towards the first he will be tolerant.  There can be no compromise with the second."

Aldous Huxley

from "Science and Religion" (1859)

"I have said that our faith in the results of the right working of the human mind rests on no mere testimony. But there is One that bears witness to it, and He the Highest. For, the winning of every new law by reasoning from ascertained facts; the verification by the event, of every scientific prediction is, if this world be governed by providential order, the direct testimony of that Providence to the sufficiency of the faculties with which man is endowed, to unravel, so far as is necessary for his welfare, the mysteries by which he is surrounded. Donati's comet lately blazing in the heavens above us at its appointed time; the first quiver which betrayed to the anxious watcher of the telegraphic needle on the other side of the Atlantic, that an electric current would follow, even under such strange conditions, the laws which man's wit and industry had discovered; the bone which, laid bare by Cuvier's chisel, justified his trust in the law of organic correlation which he had discovered; all these, and hundreds of other like cases which I might cite, are to my mind so many signs and wonders, whereby the Divine Governor signifies his approbation of the trust of poor and weak humanity, in the guide which he has given it."

T.H. Huxley

from "Evolutionary Humanism" (1953)

"There should  no longer be any talk of conflict between science and religion.  Between scientific knowledge and certain religious systems, yes: but between science as an increasing knowledge of nature and religion as a social organ concerned with destiny, no.  On the contrary, religion may ally itself wholeheartedly with science.  Science in the broad sense is indispensable as the chief instrument for increasing our store of organized knowledge and understanding.  Through evolutionary biology it has already indicated the nature of human destiny.  Scientific study is needed to give religion a fuller understanding of destiny and to help in devising methods for its detailed realization.  Meanwhile, science must not allow any ancient prejudices against certain aspects of previously established religions to hold it back from giving its aid when called upon."

Julian Huxley

from "Science, Liberty, and Peace" (1946)

"In the years ahead it seems that satyagraha may take root in the West---not primarily as the result of any "change of heart," but simply because it provides the masses, especially in the conquered countries, with their only practicable form of political action.  The Germans of the Ruhr and Palatinate resorted to satyagraha against the French in 1923. The movement was spontaneous; philosophically, ethically, and organizationally, it had not been prepared for.  It was for this reason that it finally broke down. But it lasted long enough to prove that a Western people---and a people more thoroughly indoctrinated in militarism than any other---was perfectly capable of non-violent direct action, involving the cheerful acceptance of sacrificial suffering.  Similar movements of satyagraha (more conscious of themselves this time, and better prepared for) may again be initiated among the masses of conquered Germany.  The impracticability of any other kind of political action makes it very possible that this will happen sooner or later.  It would be one of the happier ironies of history if the nation which produced Klausewitz and Bernhardi and Hitler were to be forced by history to be the first large-scale exponent in the West of that non-violent direct action which has become, in this age of scientific progress, humanity's only practical substitute for hopeless revolution and self-stultifying and suicidal war."

Aldous Huxley

from "Economists, Scientists, and Humanists" (1933)

"Our present troubles are not due to Nature.  They are entirely artificial, genuinely home-made. The very arts and sciences which we have used to conquer nature have turned on their creators and are now conquering us. The present crisis is of our own making; we have brought it on ourselves by allowing our mechanical and agricultural science to develop more rapidly than our economic science. We cannot buy what we produce and are therefore compelled to keep our factories idle and let our fields lie fallow. Millions are hungry, but wheat has to be thrown into the sea.  This is where, and the moment, science has brought us.

"What is the remedy?  Tolstoyans and Gandhi-ites tell us that we must 'return to Nature'---in other words,  abandon science altogether and live like primitives or, at best, in the style of our medieval ancestors.  The trouble with this advice is that it cannot be followed---or rather that it can only be followed if we are prepared to sacrifice at least eight or nine hundred million human lives.  Science, in the form of modern agricultural and industrial technique, has allowed the world's population to double itself in about three generations. If we abolish science and 'return to Nature,' the population will revert to what it was---and will revert, not in a hundred years, but in as many weeks.   Famine and pestilence will do their work with exemplary celerity.  Tolstoy and Gandhi are professed humanitarians; but they advocate a slaughter, compared with which the massacres of Tinur and Jinghiz Khan seem almost imperceptibly trivial.

"No, back to Nature is not practical politics. The only cure for science is more science, not less. We are suffering from the effects of a little science badly applied. The remedy is a lot of science, well applied."

Aldous Huxley

from "Man and Reality" (1933)

"Life may be a consciously planned experiment on the part of a divine mind----or it may not.  But in any case it is legitimate for us to say, on the basis of the known history of life, that mind has become the great progressive feature of life's evolutionary trend. So that, even if our art and religion and science are only our own ways of arranging the jumble of experience, yet in attempting these arrangements we carry on with the main trend of evolution. The biologist finds it exceedingly difficult to believe with the pessimists and sceptics  that human life means nothing. It is part of a larger whole, and of a whole with a main upward movement. To continue that trend is to fulfill our evolutionary destiny."

Julian Huxley