Huxley's Sour Wine
FITCH, ROBERT E.
Huxley's Sour Wine New Bottles for New Wine. By Julian Huxley. Harper. 312 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Robert E. Fitch Department of religion, University of Hawaii "OUR OLD BOTTLES are bursting or...
...As for those of us who, following Darwin and Dewev, abominate all "systematists," cherish freedom, variety and individuality in a pluralistic society, about all that is left now is the choice of who is to gobble us up...
...Already with Herbert Spencer it was hardening into a dogma...
...Basic to this achievement is the rounding out of a sound noosystem...
...The outcome for each one of us ought to be a "unitary and comprehensive pattern of intellectual organization...
...We get closer to this as science gradually displaces myth, and as we establish views that are complete, coherent and comprehensive...
...The goal is simply that man should become "the managing director of the business of evolution...
...But the middle third is an extraordinary miscellany on heredity, the population explosion, life's improbable likenesses, love and natural history in Iceland...
...I like the way he looks you straight in the face and disobeys you...
...For the most part the prophets and the proclaimed of this gospel have been philosophers and social scientists...
...Here we find fascinating tid-hits about polygenes and plasmagenes, about the reversed butterfly trick, about the Heigi crab, the puffin, the little auk, what DDT did to malaria in Ceylon, the sex life of Mahatma Gandhi, the poetry of Donne and Wordsworth and potygamous-promiscuous habits of the ruff and the sagegrouse...
...At any rate he was unable to manage it in this book...
...There was a time when the vision had a power and a glory in Diderot and the Encyclopedists...
...Actually, Huxley s gossip holds our attention better than his sermonizing: but what these essays have to do with the rest of the book, I wouldn't know...
...This is the sum of the mentifacts and the way they are organized...
...For as we make our way through the absurd pontificatings of the author, with his complacent peddling of banalities, the most striking thing about his gospel is its almost total irrelevance to anything significant that goes on today...
...Maybe we'll choose Huxley and his scientific unification for the simple reason that it still seems to be a long way off...
...but natural scientists have usually shunned it as superstition...
...The mere pretenders to the throne are the Catholics, the Calvinists and the Communists, Thinking of the first two, Huxley makes plain his disapproval of "the claim to complete or absolute truth, whether of revelation, dogma, righteousness, or anything else...
...It is with a similar charming candor that the mature Julian now looks the farts of life in the face and flouts them...
...Huxley does admit that the saints, sages and mysties have had this concern for a few centuries...
...This is the faith that final truth is found in scientific doctrine and that final salvation is obtained through scientific method...
...As for the new vintage now brewing, it is the "belief in human possibilities...
...Both this book and the one Huxley issued just before it illustrate how a certain kind of religious humanism can serve as the opiate of an intelligentsia...
...It has been too long exposed...
...The wine is old stuff and was poured out long ago...
...There is a story, which I get from William Irvine's Apes, Angeh, and Victorians, that Thomas Huxley once remarked of his grandson Julian...
...The bottles—noosystem, noetic integrators, mentifacts—are clearly cracked...
...But now at last we have "the first picture of human destiny in its true outlines," and the ideal can come to ''fuller fruition...
...But of course the absolute truth of science, and the privilege of being scientifically unified is another affair...
...One might have thought that there had been some talk of this in Christ and Confucius, in Aristotle and Gotama...
...Already it is sour...
...Reviewed by Robert E. Fitch Department of religion, University of Hawaii "OUR OLD BOTTLES are bursting or have already burst: we need new containers for the potent new vintages now brewing...
...With their help we straighten out the arts, purify prayer, integrate authors and philosophers, rectify religion and eventually overcome the antinomy of the individual and society...
...So it is that Huxley takes his place with the Unifiers who today assault us from all sides...
...New wine in new bottles...
...The really curious thing about Huxlev is that he is a scientist who believes in scientism...
...As Huxley himself records, in one of his more profoundly intuitive moments, "when an ideology of escape becomes escapism, it is clearly bad...
...With Huxley it has become sterile, priestly, unctuous, inane...
...It was still touched with Messianic splendors in Auguste Comte...
...The main job is done by the noetic integrators...
...There may be some coherence between the first third and the last third of the volume...
...With such apocalyptic utterance does Julian Huxley announce his gospel...
Vol. 42 • February 1959 • No. 5
