Essays of a Biologist

by Julian Huxley

If such possibilities are open to the empiricism of the hypnotist, what may we not await from any truly scientific knowledge of mind, comparable even in low degree to our knowledge of, say, electricity?

But these in a sense are all details, relevant in a way, and yet only details. There is something still more fundamental in the biologist’s attitude. He has to study evolution, and in that study there is brought home to him, more vividly than to any one to whom the facts are not so familiar, that in spite of all appearances to the contrary there has been, throughout the whole of evolution, and most markedly in the rise of man from his pre-human forbears, a real advance, a progress.

He sees further that the most remarkable single feature in that progress has been the evolution of self-consciousness in the development of man. That has made possible not only innumerable single changes, but a change in the very method of change itself; for it substituted the possibility of conscious control of evolution for the previous mechanism of the blind chances of variation aided by the equally blind sifting process of natural selection, a mechanism in which consciousness had no part.

Most of mankind, now as in the past, close their eyes to this possibility. They seek to put off their responsibility on to the shoulders of various abstractions which they think can bear their burden well enough if only they are spelt with a capital letter:—Fate—God—Nature—Law—Eternal Justice—and such like. Men are educated to be self-reliant and enterprising in the details of life, but dependent, unreflective, laissez-faire about life itself. The idea that the basis of living could be really and radically altered is outside most people’s orbit; and if it is forced upon their notice, they as often as not find it in some way immoral.

Closely connected with this, in a sense its corollary, we have the fact that ninety-nine people out of a hundred are concerned with getting a living rather than with living, and that if for any reason they are liberated from this necessity, they generally have not the remotest idea how to employ their time with either pleasure or profit to themselves or to others.

There are two ways of living: a man may be casual and simply exist, or constructive and deliberately try to do something with his life. The constructive idea implies constructiveness not only about one’s own life, but about that of society, and the future possibilities of humanity.

In pre-human evolution, the blind chances of variation and the blind sifting of natural selection have directed the course of evolution and of progress. It is on survival and the production of offspring that the process has hinged; the machinery is in reality blind, but these emerge as its apparent ends or purposes. The realization of ever higher potentialities of living substance has happened, but only as a secondary result and slow by-product of the main process.

In human evolution up till the present, the apparent ends and aims have for the most part and in the bulk of men remained the same; it is only the methods of pursuing them that have changed. True or conscious purpose comes in and aids the unconscious biological forces already at work.

However, to most men at some time, and to some men at most times, these purely biological ends and purposes of life become altogether inadequate. They perceive the door opened to a thousand possibilities higher than this, all demanding to be satisfied. The realization of what for want of a better term we can call spiritual values becomes the true end of life, superposed on and dominating the previous biological values.