BOOKS

Northern Advocate, 27 July 1938, Page 2

BOOKS

The Foundation Of Confusion

Hamlet Without The Ghost j "Ends And Means,'* "by Aldous.. Huxley. Chatto and Windus. 1933 (13/6 New Zealand). "We are living now, not in the de« licious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in the rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends. In this condition of apprehensive sobriety we are able to see that the contents of literature, art, music—even in some measure of divinity and school metaphysics—are not sophistry and illusion, but simply those elements of experience which scientists chose to leave out of account, for the good reason that they had no intellectual ' methods for dealing with them. "In recent \ years, many men of science have come to realise that the scientific picture of the world is a partial one—the product of their special competence in mathematics and their special incompetence to deal systematically with aesthetic ---and moral values, religious experiences and intuitions of signifiance."

SIGNIFICANT FOR EVERYONE. This latest book by Aldous Huxley is a remarkable piece of writing, vitally significant for everyone who :\ feels an urge of mind to read, discuss, . investigate and think out some satisfying clue to the meaning of human v • life as he finds it today. It is not a book like his “Point Counterpoint,” a clinical study of after-war society, or like his “Brave New World” a rather •cruel satire upon the blind following ’ the blind, but a volume of intensely ■ suggestive and significant thinking on the major problems of our personal and social life. It is packed with thought provoking passages, of ;; which the two quoted above are not 2 selected because they are outstanding but because they lead to very important admissions. First, that a great change has taken * place in scientific circles. Science • has found something in the universe which it cannot resolve, a frontier it ' cannot cross' by scientific methods. _ About what there may be over that frontier it no longer assumes any authority. . Secondly, that most ordinary people are unaware of the present-day attitude of science. They haven’t caught up. The science they are using is . half a century old, the science that jumped the barriers and pontifically applied- to all the experiences of life what it had established in only a few. The Masses Lag Behind. "Sixty or seventy years ago the majority of scientists believed—and . the belief often caused them considerable distress—that the product of their , special competence was identical with reality as a whole. Today this belief •has begun to give way, in scientific ■ circles, to a different and obviously truer conception of the relation between science and total experience. The masses, on the contrary, have just reached {he point where the ancestors of today’s scientists were two generations back. They are convinced that the world is without meaning or value. But nobody likes living in such a world. To ■.satisfy their hunger for meaning ;,.and value, they turn to such declines as Nationalism. Fascism and ■■revolutionary Communism. Philoso- , phically and scientifically, these doctrines are absurd; but for the masses "in every community, they have this great merit; they attribute the meaning and value that have been taken away from the world as a whole to the particular part of the world in which the believers halppen to be ■jiving.” IS THE WORLD MEANINGLESS? Growing out of this comes the personal admission of the author. A few years ago. like so many of his contemporaries. lie would have taken it for granted that the world ns a whole had no meaning. “This was partly due to the fact that I shared th.e common belief that

the scientific picture of an abstraction from reality was a true picture of reality as a whole; partly also to other, non-intellectual reasons. I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had. none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption." “Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know. It is cm will that decides how and upon what subjects we shall use our intelligence. Those who detect no meaning in the world generally do so because for one reason or another, it suds their books that the world should bo meaningless.” MARQUIS BE SADE. Mr Huxley then reviews the stray.ge life and philosophy of the Marquis de Sade, “whose books, indeed, contain more philosophy than pornography.” De Sade’s philosophy was die philosophy of meaninglessness carried to its logical conclusion. Life j was without significance. “Values were illusory and ideals merely the inventions of cunning priests and kings. Sensations and animal pleasures alone possessed reality and were alone worth living for. There was no' reason why anyone should have the slightest consideration for anyone else. . . Sade was not afraid to be a revolutionary to the bitter end, denying the existence of any values, any idealism any binding moral imperatives whatsoever. The one completely j consistent and thoroughgoing revolu-j tionary of history.” * i NO BLOT NOR BLANK. Mr Huxley took the case of the un-1 savoury Marquis ‘because his madness illuminates the dark places of normal behaviour.” It looks likely, too, that he saw in the defiant sensual philosophy of the Marquis something similar to the recklessness and selfishness of certain modern tendencies. He does not mention Robert Browning, but. after the analysis of de Sade’s character and creed, it is not unnatural to rebound from that extreme to another and a more tonic example in Browning’s fine, upstanding, wholesome, courageous life, and his inspiring belief:— 1 This world’s no blot nor blank, to us, It means intensely and means good.

Mr Huxley discusses “Social Reform,” “Planned Society,” “Decentralisation,” “War,” “Reform,” “Education,” “Beliefs;” and “Ethics, 1 ” and the bewildering confusion that has overtaken our post-war world, , The foundation of that confusion is laid bare. The clue out of the labyrinth is put into our hands. It is not too much to say that the average reader will not be satisfied with reading this book one, or even twice. It is powerfully fascinating. It contains a wealth of illustrative references taken from a world-wide list of important authors. It never loses touch with the ordinarily intelligent reader, and it seems to see the future as Hamlet did his task of righting slate and family wrongs, a task without justification if it were not for some meaning in the universe, some divinity that shapes our ends. At all events he quotes more than once:— “All that we. are is the result of what we have thought,” and closes his last chapter with the summary:—“W« see then, that, through ethics, all the activities of individauls and societies are related to their fundamental beliefs about the nature of the world. In an age in which the fundamental beliefs of all or most members of a given society are the same, it is possible to discuss the problems of politics, or economics, or education, without making any explicit reference to these beliefs. It is possible, because it is assumed by the author that the cosmology of all his readers will be the same as ills own. But at the present time there are no axioms, no universally accepted postulates. In these circumstances a discussion of political, economic or educational problems containing no reference to fundamental beliefs., is Incomplete and even misleading. Such a discussion is like Hamlet, if not without the Prince of Denmark, at least without the Ghost/

- - Edited By “Caxton”

sympathy, and by one. of the most ac- f complished novelists of the younger j generation." I The Evening Standard "Book of the Month"' is "The, Running of The Deer," 1 a story of the Thrace family, and i their romance and social troubles one j Christmas. The author is Mr Dan ( Wickenden, who is but 24 years of i age, but is said to have written, an unusual story with outstanding qualities of sympathy, loving-kindness understanding, that invest a simple home and ordinary people with Life-mean-1 ings of good, not evil. A carol they sang gives the title: ''The rising of the sun and the running of the deer." "Utopias Old and New," by Harry Ross, published at 4/6 by Nicholson and Watson is said to be a small encyclopaedia of Utopias, from Plato's Republic to Huxley's "Brave New World." Mr Ross gives us a useful 1 book of reference, but not much be- j yond the outlines of what the Utopias were as their authors conceived them, j Howard Spring says a good word for. it. but adds: "The man who tells us where to place the next step in the present marsh is more useful than irhe one who speculates as to our wing beats in. the ether of an improbable tuture." This remark is supposed to be clever, but it misses the point. Utopias are the effort of men to do with pens' what they could not do with swords, create a model state of justice, tolerance, security and peace. They are written its idealised history. and their study may suggest to some alert practical man just the idea of where the next step will be safe in modern marsh. Bournville is a model village. So is Port Sunlight. Thousands of- people have travelled to see mem, and taken away new ideas for their own home.':. And Bournville and Port Sunlight were only Utopias on j paper once. [ Mr Stephen Haggard is a nephew of I Sir Rider Haggard. He is really an actor, but, wuti "Nya" as a first novel (Faber, 8/6) makes his bow as an author. It is reviewed as an undoubted success. The story is pure romance, between a girl of 14 and a young man of 26. The young man proves his sincerity by seeing the father's objection, and going away to America for some years, till she is old enough to be claimed in marriage.