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from the abstract back to the concrete, from the objective datum to the inner experience.The perfection of any artistic form is rarely achieved by its first inventor. To this rule Montaigne is thegreat and marvelous exception. By the time he had written his way into the Third Book, he had reached the limitsof his newly discovered art. "What are these essays," he had asked at the beginning of his career, "but grotesquebodies pieced together of different members, without any definite shape, without any order, coherence, orproportion, except they be accidental." But a few years later the patchwork grotesques had turned into livingorganisms, into multiform hybrids like those beautiful monsters of the old mythologies, the mermaids, the manheaded bulls with wings, the centaurs, the Anubises, the seraphim -- impossibilities compounded of incompatibles,but compounded from within, by a process akin to growth, so that the human trunk seems to spring quite naturallyfrom between the horse's shoulders, the fish modulates into the full-breasted Siren as easily and inevitably as amusical theme modulates from one key to another. Free association artistically controlled -- this is the paradoxicalsecret of Montaigne's best essays. One damned thing after another -- but in a sequence that in some almostmiraculous way develops a central theme and relates it to the rest of human experience. And how beautifullyMontaigne combines the generalization with the anecdote, the homily with the autobiographical reminiscence!How skilfully he makes use of the concrete particular, the chose vue, to express some universal truth, and toexpress it more powerfully and penetratingly than it can be expressed by even the most oracular of the dealers ingeneralities! Here, for example, is what a great oracle, Dr. Johnson, has to say about the human situation and theuses of adversity. "Affliction is inseparable from our present state; it adheres to all the inhabitants of this world, indifferent proportions indeed, but with an allotment which seems very little regulated by our own conduct. It hasbeen the boast of some swelling moralists that every man's fortune was in his own power, that prudence suppliedthe place of all other divinities, and that happiness is the unfailing consequence of virtue. But, surely, the quiver ofOmnipotence is stored with arrows, against which the shield of human virtue, however adamantine it has beenboasted, is held up in vain; we do not always suffer by our crimes, we are not always protected by our innocence. . Nothing confers so much ability to resist the temptations that perpetually surround us, as an habitual considerationof the shortness of life, and the uncertainty of those pleasures that solicit our pursuit; and this consideration can beinculcated only by affliction." This is altogether admirable; but there are other and, I would say, better ways ofapproaching the subject. "J'ay veu en mon temps cent artisans, cent laboureurs, plus sages et plus heureux que desRecteurs de l'Universite." (I have seen in my time hundreds of artisans and laborers, wiser and happier thanuniversity presidents.) Again, "Look at poor working people sitting on the ground with drooping heads after theirday's toil. They know neither Aristotle nor Cato, neither example nor precept; and yet from them Nature drawseffects of constancy and patience purer and more unconquerable than any of those we study so curiously in theschools." Add to one touch of nature one touch of irony, and you have a comment on life more profound, in spiteof its casualness, its seeming levity, than the most eloquent rumblings of the oracles. "It is not our follies that makeme laugh," says Montaigne, "it is our sapiences." And why should our sapiences provoke a wise man to laughter?Among other reasons, because the professional sages tend to express themselves in a language of highestabstraction and widest generality -- a language that, for all its gnomic solemnity is apt, in a tight corner, to revealitself as ludicrously inappropriate to the facts of life as it is really and tragically lived.In the course of the last forty years I have written essays of every size and shape and color. Essays almostas short as Gracian's and, on occasion, longer even than Macaulay's. Essays autobiographical. Essays about thingsseen and places visited. Essays in criticism of all kinds of works of art, literary, plastic, musical. Essays aboutphilosophy and religion, some of them couched in abstract terms, others in the form of an anthology withcomments, others again in which general ideas are approached through the concrete facts of history and biography.Essays, finally, in which, following Montaigne, I have tried to make the best of all the essay's three worlds, havetried to say everything at once in as near an approach to contrapuntal simultaneity as the nature of literary art willallow of.Sometimes, it seems to me, I have succeeded fairly well in doing what, in one field or another, I had set outto do. Sometimes, alas, I know that I have not succeeded. But "please do not shoot the pianist; he is doing his best."Doing his best, selon ses quelques doigts perclus, to make his cottage upright say as much as the great orchestra ofthe novel, doing his best to "give all things full play." For the writer at least, and perhaps also for the reader, it isbetter to have tried and failed to achieve perfection than never to have tried at all.ALDOUS HUXLEY3

ContentsPrefaceSECTION 1p.5NatureWordsworth in the TropicsThe Olive TreeThe Desertp.5TravelThe Palio at SienaSabbionetaBetween Peshawar and LahoreJaipurAtitlanSololàCopanIn a Tunisian OasisMiracle in 6Love, Sex, and Physical BeautyBeauty in 1920Fashions in LoveSermons in CatsAppendixp.39p.40p.44p.46SECTION IIp.51LiteratureSubject-Matter of PoetryTragedy and the Whole TruthVulgarity in LiteratureD. H. LawrenceFamagusta or Paphosp.53p.57p.63p.70PaintingBreughelMeditation on El GrecoForm and Spirit in ArtVariations on GoyaLandscape Painting as a Vision-Inducing Artp.73p.78p.81p.84p.89Musicp.92Popular MusicMusic at NightGesualdo: Variations on a Musical Themep.94p.964

Matters of Taste and StyleVariations on a Baroque TombFaith, Taste, and Historyp.103p.108SECTION IIIp.114HistoryMaine de Biran: The Philosopher in HistoryUsually Destroyedp.123PoliticsWords and BehaviorDecentralization and Self-GovernmentPolitics and ReligionThe Scientist's RoleTomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrowp.128p.133p.140p.148p.150SECTION IVp.155PsychologyMadness, Badness, SadnessA Case of Voluntary IgnoranceThe Oddest Sciencep.159p.164Rx for Sense and PsycheThe Doors of PerceptionDrugs That Shape Men's Mindsp.169p.173Way of LifeHoly FacePascalBeliefsKnowledge and Understandingp.179p.181p.186p.1945

SECTION INATUREWordsworth in the TropicsIn the neighborhood of latitude fifty north, and for the last hundred years or thereabouts, it has been anaxiom that Nature is divine and morally uplifting. For good Wordsworthians -- and most serious-minded people arenow Wordsworthians, either by direct inspiration or at second hand -- a walk in the country is the equivalent ofgoing to church, a tour through Westmorland is as good as a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. To commune with the fieldsand waters, the woodlands and the hills, is to commune, according to our modern and northern ideas, with thevisible manifestations of the "Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe."The Wordsworthian who exports this pantheistic worship of Nature to the tropics is liable to have hisreligious convictions somewhat rudely disturbed. Nature, under a vertical sun, and nourished by the equatorialrains, is not at all like that chaste, mild deity who presides over the Gemüthlichkeit, the prettiness, the cozysublimities of the Lake District. The worst that Wordsworth's goddess ever did to him was to make him hearLow breathings coming after me, and soundsOf undistinguishable motion, stepsAlmost as silent as the turf they trod;was to make him realize, in the shape of "a huge peak, black and huge," the existence of "unknown modes ofbeing." He seems to have imagined that this was the worst Nature could do. A few weeks in Malaya or Borneowould have undeceived him. Wandering in the hothouse darkness of the jungle, he would not have felt so serenelycertain of those "Presences of Nature," those "Souls of Lonely Places," which he was in the habit of worshippingon the shores of Windermere and Rydal. The sparse inhabitants of the equatorial forest are all believers in devils.When one has visited, in even the most superficial manner, the places where they live, it is difficult not to sharetheir faith. The jungle is marvelous, fantastic, beautiful; but it is also terrifying, it is also profoundly sinister. Thereis something in what, for lack of a better word, we must call the character of great forests -- even in those oftemperate lands -- which is foreign, appalling, fundamentally and utterly inimical to intruding man. The life ofthose vast masses of swarming vegetation is alien to the human spirit and hostile to it. Meredith, in his "Woods ofWestermaine," has tried reassuringly to persuade us that our terrors are unnecessary, that the hostility of thesevegetable forces is more apparent than real, and that if we will but trust Nature we shall find our fears transformedinto serenity, joy, and rapture. This may be sound philosophy in the neighborhood of Dorking; but it begins to bedubious even in the forests of Germany -- there is too much of them for a human being to feel himself at easewithin their enormous glooms; and when the woods of Borneo are substituted for those of Westermaine, Meredith'scomforting doctrine becomes frankly ridiculous.It is not the sense of solitude that distresses the wanderer in equatorial jungles. Loneliness is bearableenough -- for a time, at any rate. There is something actually rather stimulating and exciting about being in anempty place where there is no life but one's own. Taken in reasonably small doses, the Sahara exhilarates, likealcohol. Too much of it, however (I speak, at any rate, for myself), has the depressing effect of the second bottle ofBurgundy. But in any case it is not loneliness that oppresses the equatorial traveller: it is too much company; it isthe uneasy feeling that he is an alien in the midst of an innumerable throng of hostile beings. To us who livebeneath a temperate sky and in the age of Henry Ford, the worship of Nature comes almost naturally. It is easy tolove a feeble and already conquered enemy. But an enemy with whom one is still at war, an unconquered,unconquerable, ceaselessly active enemy -- no; one does not, one should not, love him. One respects him, perhaps;one has a salutary fear of him; and one goes on fighting. In our latitudes the hosts of Nature have mostly beenvanquished and enslaved. Some few detachments, it is true, still hold the field against us. There are wild woods andmountains, marshes and heaths, even in England. But they are there only on sufferance, because we have chosen,6

out of our good pleasure, to leave them their freedom. It has not been worth our while to reduce them to slavery.We love them because we are the masters, because we know that at any moment we can overcome them as weovercame their fellows. The inhabitants of the tropics have no such comforting reasons for adoring the sinisterforces which hem them in on every side. For us, the notion "river" implies (how obviously!) the notion "bridge."When we think of a plain, we think of agriculture, towns, and good roads. The corollary of mountain is tunnel; ofswamp, an embankment; of distance, a railway. At latitude zero, however, the obvious is not the same as with us.Rivers imply wading, swimming, alligators. Plains mean swamps, forests, fevers. Mountains are either dangerousor impassable. To travel is to hack one's way laboriously through a tangled, prickly, and venomous darkness. "Godmade the country," said Cowper, in his rather too blank verse. In New Guinea he would have had his doubts; hewould have longed for the man-made town.The Wordsworthian adoration of Nature has two principal defects. The first, as we have seen, is that it isonly possible in a country where Nature has been nearly or quite enslaved to man. The second is that it is onlypossible for those who are prepared to falsify their immediate intuitions of Nature. For Nature, even in thetemperate zone, is always alien and inhuman, and occasionally diabolic. Meredith explicitly invites us to explainany unpleasant experiences away. We are to interpret them, Pangloss fashion, in terms of a preconceivedphilosophy; after which, all will surely be for the best in the best of all possible Westermaines. Less openly,Wordsworth asks us to make the same falsification of immediate experience. It is only very occasionally that headmits the existence in the world around him of those "unknown modes of being" of which our immediateintuitions of things make us so disquietingly aware. Normally what he does is to pump the dangerous Unknown outof Nature and refill the emptied forms of hills and woods, flowers and waters, with something more reassuringlyfamiliar -- with humanity, with Anglicanism. He will not admit that a yellow primrose is simply a yellow primrose-- beautiful, but essentially strange, having its own alien life apart. He wants it to possess some sort of soul, to existhumanly, not simply flowerily. He wants the earth to be more than earthy, to be a divine person. But the life ofvegetation is radically unlike the life of man: the earth has a mode of being that is certainly not the mode of beingof a person. "Let Nature be your teacher," says Wordsworth. The advice is excellent. But how strangely he himselfputs it into practice! Instead of listening humbly to what the teacher says, he shuts his ears and himself dictates thelesson he desires to hear. The pupil knows better than his master; the worshipper substitutes his own oracles forthose of the god. Instead of accepting the lesson as it is given to his immediate intuitions, he distorts itrationalistically into the likeness of a parson's sermon or a professorial lecture. Our direct intuitions of Nature tellus that the world is bottomlessly strange: alien, even when it is kind and beautiful; having innumerable modes ofbeing that are not our modes; always mysteriously not personal, not conscious, not moral; often hostile and sinister;sometimes even unimaginably, because inhumanly, evil. In his youth, it would seem, Wordsworth left his directintuitions of the world unwarped.The sounding cataractHaunted me like a passion: the tall rock,The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,Their colors and their forms, were then to meAn appetite; a feeling and a love,That had no need of a remoter charm,By thought supplied, nor any interestUnborrowed from the eye.As the years passed, however, he began to interpret them in terms of a preconceived philosophy. Procrustes-like,he tortured his feelings and perceptions until they fitted his system. By the time he was thirty,The immeasurable heightOf woods decaying, never to be decayed,The stationary blasts of waterfalls -The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,Black drizzling crags that spake by the waysideAs if a voice were in them, the sick sightAnd giddy prospect of the raving stream,7

The unfettered clouds and regions of the heavens,Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light -Were all like workings of one mind, the featuresOf the same face, blossoms upon one tree,Characters of the great Apocalypse,The types and symbols of eternity,Of first, and last, and midst, and without end."Something far more deeply interfused" had made its appearance on the Wordsworthian scene. The god ofAnglicanism had crept under the skin of things, and all the stimulatingly inhuman strangeness of Nature hadbecome as flatly familiar as a page from a textbook of metaphysics or theology. As familiar and as safely simple.Pantheistically interpreted, our intuitions of Nature's endless varieties of impersonal mysteriousness lose all theirexciting and disturbing quality. It makes the world seem delightfully cozy, if you can pretend that all the manyalien things about you are really only manifestations of one person. It is fear of the labyrinthine flux andcomplexity of phenomena that has driven men to philosophy, to science, to theology -- fear of the complex realitydriving them to invent a simpler, more manageable, and, therefore, consoling fiction. For simple, in comparisonwith the external reality of which we have direct intuitions, childishly simple is even the most elaborate and subtlesystem devised by the human mind. Most of the philosophical systems hitherto popular have not been subtle andelaborate even by human standards. Even by human standards they have been crude, bald, preposterouslystraightforward. Hence their popularity. Their simplicity has rendered them instantly comprehensible. Weary withmuch wandering in the maze of phenomena, frightened by the inhospitable strangeness of the world, men haverushed into the systems prepared for them by philosophers and founders of religions, as they would rush from adark jungle into the haven of a well-lit, commodious house. With a sigh of relief and a thankful feeling that here atlast is their true home, they settle down in their snug metaphysical villa and go to sleep. And how furious they arewhen any one comes rudely knocking at the door to tell them that their villa is jerry-built, dilapidated, unfit forhuman habitation, even non-existent! Men have been burnt at the stake for even venturing to criticize the color ofthe front door or the shape of the third-floor windows.That man must build himself some sort of metphysical shelter in the midst of the jungle of immediatelyapprehended reality is obvious. No practical activity, no scientific research, no speculation is possible withoutsome preliminary hypothesis about the nature and the purpose of things. The human mind cannot deal with theuniverse directly, nor even with its own immediate intuitions of the universe. Whenever it is a question of thinkingabout the world or of practically modifying it, men can only work on a symbolic plan of the universe, only asimplified, two-dimensional map of things abstracted by the mind out of the complex and multifarious reality ofimmediate intuition. History shows that these hypotheses about the nature of things are valuable even when, aslater experience reveals, they are false. Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.Confronted by the strange complexity of things, he invents, quite arbitrarily, a simple hypothesis to explain andjustify the world. Having invented, he proceeds to act and think in terms of this hypothesis, as though it werecorrect. Experience gradually shows him where his hypothesis is unsatisfactory and how it should be modified.Thus, great scientific discoveries have been made by men seeking to verify quite erroneous theories about thenature of things. The discoveries have necessitated a modification of the original hypotheses, and furtherdiscoveries have been made in the effort to verify the modifications -- discoveries which, in their turn, have led toyet further modifications. And so on, indefinitely. Philosophical and religious hypotheses, being less susceptible ofexperimental verification than the hypotheses of science, have undergone far less modification. For example, thepantheistic hypothesis of Wordsworth is an ancient doctrine, which human experience has hardly modifiedthroughout history. And rightly, no doubt. For it is obvious that there must be some sort of unity underlying thediversity of phenomena; for if there were not, the world would be quite unknowable. Indeed, it is precisely in theknowableness of things, in the very fact that they are known, that their fundamental unity consists. The worldwhich we know, and which our minds have fabricated out of goodness knows what mysterious things inthemselves, possesses the unity which our minds have imposed upon it. It is part of our thought, hencefundamentally homogeneous. Yes, the world is obviously one. But at the same time it is no less obviously diverse.For if the world were absolutely one, it would no longer be knowable, it would cease to exist. Thought must bedivided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself. Absolute oneness is absolute nothingness:8

homogeneous perfection, as the Hindus perceived and courageously recognized, is equivalent to non-existence, isnirvana. The Christian idea of a perfect heaven that is something other than a non-existence is a contradiction interms. The world in which we live may be fundamentally one, but it is a unity divided up into a great many diversefragments. A tree, a table, a newspaper, a piece of artificial silk are all made of wood. But they are, none the less,distinct and separate objects. It is the same with the world at large. Our immediate intuitions are of diversity. Wehave only to open our eyes to recognize a multitude of different phenomena. These intuitions of diversity are ascorrect, as well justified, as is our intellectual conviction of the fundamental homogeneity of the various parts ofthe world with one another and with ourselves. Circumstances have led humanity to set an ever-increasingpremium on the conscious and intellectual comprehension of things. Modern man's besetting temptation is tosacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned reflections; to prefer in all circumstancesthe verdict of his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions. "L'homme est visiblement fait pour penser," saysPascal; "c'est toute sa dignité et

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