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Science, Alternative Spirituality and Psychical Research

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Science, Alternative Spirituality and Psychical Research Chapter 2 Science, Alternative Spirituality and Psychical Research Huxley’s mantra, in his later years, was that we must make the “best of both worlds”, the “world of science and the world of religion and metaphysics”.1 But during the 1920s, his attitude to science, much like his attitude to religion and metaphysics, vacillated between aversion and attraction. Huxley’s ambiva- lence is perhaps understandable when seen in light of his family background: on the one hand, his grandfather T.H. Huxley was an outspoken advocate of evolutionary theory, and championed the necessity of scientific education; on the other hand, his granduncle was the poet and essayist Matthew Arnold, who defined culture as “the best that has been thought and known” and pitted its “sweetness and light” against the “mechanical and material civilisation” he regarded as its enemy.2 In fact, T.H. Huxley took issue with Arnold’s parochial conception of culture and argued that a classical education was no longer able to furnish a “complete theory of life”, as Arnold contended. Furthermore, sci- ence “appeals not to authority, nor to what anybody may have thought or said, but to nature […] and bids the learner seek for truth not among words but among things”.3 While T.H. Huxley was an agnostic and asserted that “noth- ing interferes” in the order of the world,4 Arnold’s speaker in the poem “Dover Beach” (1867) laments the “long, withdrawing roar” of the “sea of Faith” and describes the industrial world as containing “neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain”, and portrays humanity as stranded on “a darkling plain”.5 For Aldous Huxley, there was no question of disavowing the scientific legacy of his grandfather or the more spiritual culture of his granduncle, but there was, at least in the 1920s and 30s, a discernible tension between the two. In what follows, I analyse Huxley’s brief adoption of an idealist worldview, pri- marily as the result of his friend J.W.N. Sullivan’s interpretation of the “new 1 Huxley, “Mother”, in ce 5: 345. 2 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), 49, 70. 3 T.H. Huxley, “Science and Culture”, in Science and Culture and Other Essays (New York: D. Appelton, 1882), 15, 21–22. 4 Ibid., 21. 5 Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”, in Dover Beach and Other Poems (New York: Dover Thrift, 1994), 86. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:�0.��63/978900440690�_004 <UN> 42 chapter 2 physics”, and connect this to the creation of Huxley’s first mystical seeker, Calamy in Those Barren Leaves (1925). I contest Lothar Fietz’s assertion that Huxley’s development of perspectivism in Point Counter Point (1928) and his philosophy of life worship was inspired by the much later multiverse theory associated with Erwin Schrödinger. I examine the influence of D.H. Lawrence and William Blake on the philosophy of life worship that Huxley propounded in Do What You Will (1929). I contest David Bradshaw’s thesis that Huxley was a Wellsian fellow traveller when he wrote Brave New World (1932) and that the novel represents Huxley’s endorsement of a scientific world state. Finally, I in- vestigate the influence of psychical research on Huxley’s work, and how he envisaged it as a possible bridge between science and spirituality. Idealism, the New Physics and Perspectivism In his early work, Huxley impartially satirised scientists, artists and would-be mystics. For instance, in Antic Hay (1923), the physiologist Shearwater is so pre- occupied with his study of the kidneys that he refuses to take an interest in the subject of love, and is consequently cuckolded by Gumbril and Coleman. Lypiatt, on the other hand, is an apostle of culture, a poet and painter whose epic pretensions Huxley lampoons. Then there is Gumbril Junior, who craves the “crystal quiet” behind the uproar of contemporary life and seeks a sort of nature mysticism in the Sussex countryside, but fears that he is but a “dingy Romain Rolland, hopelessly trying to pretend” that he has the “great spiritual experiences, which the really important people do feel and have”.6 David Brad- shaw opines that at this time Huxley was eager to “slough an intellectual in- heritance which he found oppressive”, and claims that the opening chapter of Crome Yellow (1921) is “a clear satire on the Einstein craze”.7 But the evidence he advances is a little tenuous, the gist being that trains were often used in illustrations of relativity theory, and Denis takes a train to Crome, frets about the time it takes, and “construe[s] space old-fashionedly as a kind of etherial permanent way”, as opposed to the bent space-time of Einstein.8 It was not until Those Barren Leaves (1925) that Huxley began to take a sus- tained interest in science and mysticism.9 Bradshaw notes that J.W.N. Sullivan 6 Huxley, Antic Hay, 226. 7 Bradshaw, “The Best of Companions” (May 1996), 195–196. 8 Ibid., 196. 9 There are briefer mentions of both in Huxley’s Little Mexican (1924) collection, especially the novella “Uncle Spencer”, in which the narrator notes, “Now it is possible – it is, indeed, almost <UN>.
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