Henry’s universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it...

Much of the geographical work of the past hundred years… has either explicitly or implicitly taken its inspiration from biology, and in particular Darwin. Many of the original Darwinians, such as Hooker, Wallace, Huxley, Bates,...

A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence...

When in 1863 Thomas Huxley coined the phrase ‘Man’s Place in Nature,’ it was to name a short collection of his essays applying to man Darwin’s theory of evolution. The Origin of Species had been...

Why do you love the woman you’re in love with? Because she is. And that, after all, is God’s own definition of Himself; I am that I am. The girl is who she is. Some...

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler...

On the morning of November 22nd, a Friday, it became clear the gap between living and dying was closing. Realizing that Aldous [Huxley] might not survive the day, Laura [Huxley’s wife] sent a telegram to...

The trouble with fiction,” said John Rivers, “is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.

Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.

In what appears to have been an unplanned quip, Wilberforce asked Huxley if he thought he was descended from an ape on his father’s or mother’s side. Huxley retorted that he would rather have simian...

God isn’t the son of Memory; He’s the son of Immediate Experience. You can’t worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it’s...

I know LSD; I don’t need to take it anymore. Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley.

Adam is fading out. It is on account of Darwin and that crowd. I can see that he is not going to last much longer. There’s a plenty of signs. He is getting belittled to...

There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.”…”There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality.”…”But they used to take morphia and...

But if one doesn’t really exist, one wonders why…” she hesitated.”Why one makes such a fuss about things,” Anthony suggested. “All that howling and hurrahing and gnashing of teeth. About the adventures of a self...

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had...

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.

They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn’t try too hard to be all men and no animal. That’s the mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced...

One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.

It would be pleasant to believe that the age of pessimism is now coming to a close, and that its end is marked by the same author who marked its beginning: Aldous Huxley. After thirty...

Her cheeks were flushed. She caught hold of the Savage’s arm and pressed it, limp, against her side. He looked down at her for a moment, pale, pained, desiring, and ashamed of his desire. He...

Obviously, if theism is a belief in a God and atheism is a lack of a belief in a God, no third position or middle ground is possible. A person can either believe or not...

Katy was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden. None of your superficial plating. A solid, twenty-two-carat silence all the way through. The Olympian’s...

What we are confronted with now is the problem posed by the economic and symbolic structure of television. Those who run television do not limit our access to information but in fact widen it. Our...

Shut lips, sleeping faces,Every stopped machine,The dumb and littered placesWhere crowds have been:.All silences rejoice,Weep (loudly or low),Speak-but with the voiceOf whom, I do not know.

Medals are great encouragement to young men and lead them to feel their work is of value, I remember how keenly I felt this when in the 1890s. I received the Darwin Medal and the...