Essays of a Biologist

by Julian Huxley

Now when the idea which man makes for himself of outer reality is organized after the same general pattern as a personality, it too will be able to act in this same sort of way.

When man in perplexity interrogates the idea he has of external reality, he is anxious to put his little individual self in harmonious relation with the whole of reality that he knows. Therefore he should organize that reality as a whole, and in such a way that it can all be brought to bear through any single point. The relation between the self and the idea of outer reality is, for any one problem, that of two pyramids touching by their points only; but the points of contact can shift as by miracle over their surfaces as the problem is changed.

But another power of personalities is their power of interpenetration. The purely material cannot do this. One portion of matter cannot occupy the same space as a second portion. It is another of the great differences between the psychozoic and all previous stages of evolution, between man and all else that we know in the universe, that the discrete units reached at this level of organization, the individual human beings, can achieve interpenetration by means of their minds. When you expound a new idea to me, and I grasp it, our minds have obviously interpenetrated. This is a simple case; but there may be an intimate union of mind with mind which is the basis of the highest spiritual achievement and the greatest happiness. If mind and matter are two properties of the same world-substance, then the rise of mind to dominance has enabled this basic substance to escape from some of the imprisoning limitations which confined it at lower levels of its development; do we not all know that despair at being boxed up, that craving for communion? Using our previous line of argument, we see that the interpenetration of personalities is right, implies a further step in progress, must be part of the basis on which future advance in evolution is to build.

But to apply this to our present point. By organizing our knowledge of outer reality after the pattern of a personality, we make it possible for it to interpenetrate our private personality. If, therefore, we have, in any true sense of the word, “found religion,” it means that we shall so have organized our minds that, for flashes at least, we attain to a sense of interpenetration with the reality around us—that reality which includes not only the celestial bodies, or the rocks and waters, not only evolving life, but also other human beings, also ideas, also ideals.

This, to my mind, is what actually happens when men speak of communion with God. It is a setting, an organizing of our experiences of the universe in relation with the driving forces of our soul or mental being, so that the two are united and harmonized. There is a resolution of conflicts, an attainment of a profound serenity, a conviction that the experience is of the utmost value and importance.

Up till now, we have been defining and analysing: here we see religion in operation. It is a relation of the personality as a unit to external reality as a unit—and a relation of harmony. First, the inner structure of the mind must be organized into a harmonious unit, then our knowledge of outer reality organized similarly, and finally, in religious experience, the two must be harmonized in interpenetrating union.

Once this harmony has been achieved, it is for one thing so precious in itself that it will be sought for again; the knowledge that we have once reached the stage at which difficulties and doubts are resolved in what the philosophers would perhaps call a higher unity, but which I should prefer to call an organic harmony, is always there to fall back upon in times of discouragement; and finally the harmony is actually woven into the tissue of our mind, just as the amazing physical harmony revealed by physiology has, in the course of evolution, been woven into the structure and working of living bodies; and it can remain there as the dominant idea to which the rest of our ideas, and consequently our actions, are brought into subordinate relation. In other words, it becomes the dominant sublimating principle. Once more, however, the subordination is not forced, but free—we find that what we once thought obstacles are aids, what once seemed sin is now the willing and efficient handmaid of good. That is the fundamental fact in all genuine and valuable religious experience as such—the resolution of conflict and the losing, or enlarging as you will, of the private personality, the mere “self.” You will find this set out more fully, though in different terminology, in Miss Underhill’s books on mysticism, or in William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, or in Thouless’s Psychology of Religion.

One side-issue. Such experience, if not absolute in the philosophical sense, is absolute for us. If I may be Irish, its absoluteness is relative to our organization and to reality as we perceive it. We cannot perceive anything fuller, more absolute—until perhaps one day, with the growth of our minds, we come to have some still richer and more complete experience. As William James was so fond of reminding the world, we have no right to assume that our minds are, much less that they must be, the highest type of mind realized in the universe—no more right than our domestic animals have, although our minds to them could only be measured by their own standards.

What is more, owing to our power of framing general concepts and ideals, and of accumulating past and future in our present, we can focus a vast deal to one point. In such experiences, whether they come through religion, or love, or art, we may say that although we are but a system of relations, we touch the Absolute—although we are mortal, we mount to the Eternal for a moment. Only, to guard against error, we must remember that it is obviously not in reality the Absolute or the Eternal that we attain to, but only the nearest approximation to them of which we are capable.