Essays of a Biologist

by Julian Huxley

Religio peparit scelerosa atque impia facta.”

Many another thinker and reformer has felt the same.

There are those who, like Jung, believe that religion is an illusion but also a necessity to the bulk of mankind, and therefore should be encouraged. But the broader and truer view, I believe, is the one we have adopted. We have seen that, in man, evolution has reached a new plane, on which not only have new aims and values appeared, but the possibility of new and better evolutionary methods has arisen. These new methods are only possible, however, in so far as life, in man, uses her new gifts. The progress of civilization is a constant conflict between that part of man which he shares with the beasts and that part which is his alone—between man as no more than a new kind of animal and man as a rational and spiritual being. In so far as religion is irrational, it is no more than a dog baying the moon, no higher activity than the nocturnal concerts of Howler monkeys, no more and no less moral than the nobility of birds or beasts to a strangely-marked or unusually-built member of their species, or the sense of being a trespasser so often shown by a bird that has ventured upon the nesting-territory of another. Recall the “Natural Religion” of Robert Browning’s Caliban; on which plane did that grow? But when we have discovered its real bases, and subordinated its impulsive promptings to the control of reason and of the new, higher values in which reason must always share—then it becomes an instrument for helping in the conquest of the new regions which lie open to man as individual and as species. And in this it resembles every other human activity without exception.

In religion the danger has always been that analogy and symbolism be taken for more than they are—for scientific knowledge, or even for an absolute certainty of some still higher order—and conclusions then drawn from it. The conclusions follow with full syllogistic majesty: but their feet are of clay—their premisses are false.

If we find that this is the case to-day, we not only may but we must endeavour to make our formulation correspond more closely with reality, must not be content to take one thing in place of another, the familiar for the unfamiliar, must set about destroying the old false formulation for fear of the further harm that it will do by its hold upon man’s incurable habit of drawing conclusions.

Nor does this in any way interfere with or detract from the private and unique experiences that in the long run are religion. They remain; but they are thus hindered from becoming draped with delusion, from leading their possessor into false courses.

We may put it in another way. Too often in the past, religious experience has been one-sided—one-or-other-sided instead of two-sided. The intellectually-inclined, the theologians, frame more or less adequate ideas of external reality, but fail in the majority of cases to set their own house in order, to organize the inner reality to react with the outer; they have theory without practice, are Dry-as-dusts. On the other hand, the emotionally-minded who are gifted besides with organizing and intuitive power, the mystics—they build up their own souls into a desired and lovely edifice, in which too they have constructed a spiritual machinery capable of viewing external realities on a new plane, under a more highly synthesized aspect; but they neglect the precise analysis of that outer reality, and so can only speak in the barest symbols and metaphors, and cannot put their hard-won knowledge into a form available for others. They have that non-communicable skill which is that of the craftsman alone as opposed to the craftsman who is also in some degree a scientist. We know good mysticism from bad, as we know good art from bad—as definitely and as personally. And we are sure that good mysticism, like good art, is somehow of supreme, transcendent importance; but almost always it has remained like a purely symbolic art, not having for others the value which it should have or did have for the mystic himself, because not properly enchained, as the French say, with stern and immutable fact. And of the theologian we feel that he gives us the grammar, not the spirit, that he does not help us toward the supremely important act of experiencing, but only to understanding experience if we chance to have had it.

One word on the problem of transcendence. The mystic will tell us that transcendence is a hall-mark of religion at its highest. His mode of experience transcends normal experience; things of everyday life become surcharged with new, transcendent values; he has transcended from a plane of disharmony to one of harmony. But the mystic is not alone in this. Familiar examples are best examples: and the transcendence of the lover’s experience is so familiar that all mankind is divided into those who have it, those who long for it, and those who laugh at it. But the great philosopher too must mediate between the transcendent and mankind, and the true artist also, and the moralist worthy of the name.

What goes under this technical name of transcendence, therefore, is the product of some special psychological mechanism which may be at work in the most diverse spheres. It we wish to substitute one technical phrase for another, we can say that it consists in the successful attachment of what we have called absolute value to some human activity, so as to make it for the time at least unitary, dominant, and all-embracing. But psychologically speaking the genesis of “absolute values” depends upon the generalizing of particular values; the raising of them to the highest possible pitch; and the putting of them and the rest of the mental organization into a relation in which they are permanently or temporarily the dominating head and front, and are connected with and gain strength and support from all the rest of the mind.

The problem of transcendence, in other words, is not one of divine inspiration, of wholly mysterious experience, but one special case of the problem of sublimation; and as such it is to be investigated by psychological science, to be understood, to be democratized, to be made more available to all who wish for it.