Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [225]
Spandrell nodded approval. ‘Isn’t that worth looking for?’
‘Certainly,’ said Rampion. ‘But not where Philip and his scientific and scholarly friends are looking for it. After all, the only truth that can be of any interest to us, or that we can know, is a human truth. And to discover that, you must look for it with the whole being, not with a specialized part of it. What the scientists are trying to get at is nonhuman truth. Not that they can ever completely succeed; for not even a scientist can completely cease to be human. But they can go some way towards abstracting themselves from the human world of reality. By torturing their brains they can get a faint notion of the universe as it would seem if looked at through nonhuman eyes. What with their quantum theory, wave mechanics, relativity and all the rest of it, they do really seem to have got a little way outside humanity. Well, what the devil’s the good of that?’
‘Apart from the fun of the thing,’ said Philip, ‘the good may be some astonishing practical discovery, like the secret of disintegrating the atom and the liberation of endless supplies of energy.’
‘And the consequent reduction of human beings to absolute imbecility and absolute subservience to their machines,’ jeered Rampion. ‘I know your paradises. But the point for the moment is truth. This nonhuman truth that the scientists are trying to get at with their intellects—it’s utterly irrelevant to ordinary human living. Our truth, the relevant human truth is something you discover by living—living completely, with the whole man. The results of your amusements, Philip, all these famous theories about the cosmos and their practical applications—they’ve got nothing whatever to do with the only truth that matters. And the nonhuman truth isn’t merely irrelevant; it’s dangerous. It distracts people’s attention from the important human truth. It makes them falsify their experience in order that lived reality may fit in with abstract theory. For example, it’s an established nonhuman truth—or at least it was established in my young days—that secondary qualities have no real existence. The man who takes that seriously denies himself, destroys the whole fabric of his life as a human being. For human beings happen to be so arranged that secondary qualities are, for them, the only real ones. Deny them and you commit suicide.’
‘But in practice,’ said Philip, ‘nobody does deny them.’
‘Not completely,’ Rampion agreed. ‘Because it can’t be done. A man can’t abolish his sensations and feelings completely without physically killing himself. But he can disparage them after the event. And, in fact, that’s what a great number of intelligent and welleducated people do—disparage the human in the interests of the nonhuman. Their motive’s different from that of the Christians; but the result’s the same. A sort of self-destruction. Always the same,’ he went on with a sudden outburst of anger in his voice. ‘Every attempt at being something better than a man—the result’s always the same. Death, some sort of death. You try to be more than you are by nature and you kill something in yourself and become much less. I’m so tired of all this rubbish about the higher life and moral and intellectual progress and living for ideals and all the rest of it. It all leads to death. Just as surely as living for money. Christians and moralists and cultured aesthetes, and bright young scientists and Smilesian business men—all the poor little human frogs trying to blow themselves up into bulls of pure spirituality, pure idealism, pure efficiency, pure conscious intelligence, and just going pop, ceasing to be anything but the fragments of a little frog—decaying fragments at that. The whole thing’s a huge stupidity, a huge disgusting lie. Your little stink-pot of a St. Francis, for example.’ He turned to Burlap, who protested. ‘Just a little stink-pot,’ Rampion insisted. ‘A silly vain little man trying to blow himself up into a Jesus and only succeeding in killing whatever sense or decency there was in him, only succeeding in turning