from "Ideology and Scientific Knowledge" (1950)

"The scientific method of the working hypothesis, as the only gateway to the erection of comprehnsive theories, laws, and principles, to the establishment of further knowledge, and to the securing of more successful practice and better control of nature, can and should be utilized in other spheres---in morals, in politics, in social affairs, in religion.

"In other words, any new ideology must not be dogmatic, and must refrain from any claim to absoluteness or completeness; it must utilize scientific method, so as to be expansive, flexible and unitive instead of rigid and eventually restrictive and divisive. Tolerance, respect for cultural and individual variety, acceptance of difference---these are some of the counterparts to the scientific method in other fields. However, they themselves should not be employed rigidly or in any absolute sense, but in the same sort of way that the principle of the working hypothesis is applied in the natural sciences"

Julian Huxley

from "Time Must Have a Stop" (1944)

"To the surprise of Humanists and Liberal Churchmen, the abolition of God left a perceptible void. But Nature abhors vacuums. Nation, Class, and Party, Culture and Art have rushed in to fill the empty niche. For politicians and for those of us who happen to have been born with a talent, the new pseudo-religions have been, still are and (until they destroy the entire social structure) will continue to be very profitable superstitions. But regard them dispassionately, sub specie aeternitatis. How unutterably odd, silly and Satanic!"

Aldous Huxley

from T.H. Huxley's Autobiography (1889)

"My mother was a slender brunette, of an emotional and energetic temperament, and possessed of the most peircing black eyes I ever saw in a woman's head. With no more education than other women of the middle classes in her day, she had an excellent mental capacity. Her most distinguishing characteristic, however, was rapidity of thought. If one ventured to suggest she had not taken much time to arrive at a conclusion, she would say, "I cannot help it, things flash across me." That peculiarity has been passed on to me in full strength; it has often stood me in good stead; it has sometimes played me sad tricks, and it has always been a danger. But, after all, if my time were to come over again, there is nothing I would less willingly part with than my inheritence of mother wit."

T. H. Huxley

"The Art of Fiction" an interview with Aldous Huxley (Paris Review, 1960)

" . . . I think fiction, and biography and history, are the forms. . . And I must say I think that probably all philosophy ought to be written in this form; it would be much more profound and much more edifying. It’s awfully easy to write abstractly, without attaching much meaning to the big words. But the moment you have to express ideas in the light of a particular context, in a particular set of circumstances, although it’s a limitation in some ways, it’s also an invitation to go much further and much deeper. I think that fiction and, as I say, history and biography are immensely important, not only for their own sake, because they provide a picture of life now and of life in the past, but also as vehicles for the expression of general philosophic ideas, religious ideas, social ideas. My goodness, Dostoyevsky is six times as profound as Kierkegaard, because he writes fiction. In Kierkegaard you have this Abstract Man going on and on—like Coleridge—why, it’s nothing compared with the really profound Fictional Man, who has always to keep these tremendous ideas alive in a concrete form. In fiction you have the reconciliation of the absolute and the relative, so to speak, the expression of the general in the particular. And this, it seems to me, is the exciting thing—both in life and in art."

Aldous Huxley

from "The Ethics of Belief" (1877)

" . . . [N]o one man's belief is in any case a private matter which concerns himself alone. Our lives are guided by that general conception of the course of things which has been created by society for social purposes. Our words, our phrases, our forms and processes and modes of thought, are common property, fashioned and perfected from age to age; an heirloom which every succeeding generation inherits as a precious deposit and a sacred trust to be handled on to the next one, not unchanged but enlarged and purified, with some clear marks of its proper handiwork. Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of every man who has speech of his fellows. A awful privilege, and an awful responsibility, that we should help to create the world in which posterity will live."

William K. Clifford

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

"The most considerable difference I note among men is not their readiness to fall into error, but in their readiness to acknowledge these inevitable lapses."

T. H. Huxley

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

"Men can intoxicate themselves with ideas as effectively as with alcohol or with bang, and produce, by dint of intense thinking, mental conditions hardly distinguishable from monomania."

T. H. Huxley