Abstract

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Contents Updated: Wednesday, 20 February, 2008

Julian Huxley

Julian Huxley (1887-1975) was educated at Eton and at Balliol College, Oxford. He has held many posts as lecturer, and later as professor of zoology, and was secretary of the London Zoological Society from 1935 to 1942. He took part in the Oxford University expedition to Spitsbergen in 1921, and was a member of the committee which carried out Lord Hailey's African survey of 1933-8. The wide range of his scientific interests may be gauged from a selection of the titles of his numerous books. He has passed from a study of evolution in the past to the quest of where it wi11 lead in the future. His grandfather was T ,H Huxley.

The Modern Humanist

The Humanist is one whose real faith is in the possibilities of human experience and achievement, rather than in a supernatural being or a revealed religion. There were humanists in the Renaissance, and also among the Ancient Greeks. But modem humanism has a distinctive character, which derives in general from the growth of science. The science of astronomy long ago debunked the idea that man’s home is at the centre of the physical universe, but evolutionary biology, after first destroying the idea of man as lord of creation, has restored him to a central position—central not in space but in significance.

So far as our knowledge goes, man is the highest product to which the universe has given rise. By far the greater part of the universe is lifeless matter, dissipated in space, or aggregated into the great meaningless masses we call stars. On our tiny earth lifeless matter, it seems, has evolved into living matter. This itself was a great advance, but it was followed up by further spectacular progress. Living matter became capable of dealing more efficiently with the forces of nature. In its original dark abode the senses became windows of knowledge, it evolved self regulating mechanisms compared with which man’s most complicated machines are simple, it became capable of rich and varied emotions, and even of self sacrifice. Through evolution the living matter has been steadily introduced to new possibilities of experience and knowledge of achievement and control.

But this progress has not been universal. First one branch of life and then another has come to a dead end in its evolution, until finally only one stock is left which can continue the trend of advance into the future. That stock is our own species. So much for the biological aspect. When we come to human history, we find a similar trend. The life of prehistoric man, in Hobbes’ words, was “nasty, brutish, and short”. The history of civilization is a record of new inventions and achievements from agriculture, writing, and stone building, to anaesthetics, radio, and the symphony orchestra, and is marked by a notable lengthening of life and a general rise in standards of living.

There has been advance in the moral as well as in the material sphere, as the abolition of slavery and the rise of humanitarian movements bear witness. There have been ups and downs, terrible bloodshed and misery by the way, but the general trend has been upwards. If sometimes in periods like our own the volume of suffering and the temporary backsliding loom so large that we are tempted to despair, yet science again steps in to comfort us, with the reminder that the human species is by any evolutionary standards extremely young, and with immense stretches of time before it.

Only now is man even beginning to approach his problems as a species, instead of as a collection of competing units, only now is he beginning to have at his disposal the means for real control over his destiny. So scientific humanism can provide a real and lively basis for faith in the business of living, and also a spur to effort by reminding man that he is now the sole trustee for any further progress to be made by life.

If the blind forces of variation and selection could bring about the progress from submicroscopic life to conscious man, then human will and purpose can, if they set themselves to it, bring about equally great and far more rapid progress in the future.

The scientific humanist cannot help also being a rationalist, for reason, when tested against fact and experience, becomes science, and in the modern world science alone can provide the necessary basis for further advance. Knowledge is an essential tool as well as a goal in itself. Only the truth can set us free of our limitations. Thus any humanist religion must insist on respect for truth and knowledge, and this, since truth and knowledge are always incomplete, means a respect for science and research also.

Religious Attitude

In his general religious attitude, the scientific humanist is bound to take account of the particular science known as comparative religion—the comparative study of different religions to try to discover how they have evolved. He sees that man tends to advance in religion as he does in science or in social organization. Religion is an almost universal human function. It always involves a feeling of holiness or sacredness, a faith that certain things are of special or transcendent importance, and a search for some creed, or intellectual support for religious feelings and beliefs.

The worship of supernatural beings is by no means a necessary ingredient in religion. The religions of primitive man, like those of many primitive societies today, appear to have been based on the idea, not of gods, but of some sort of magical sacred force, and one of the high religions of the world—Buddhism in its pure form—is atheistic. But gradually man began to personify the forces of nature—first as spirits, then as gods.

In religious thought, the idea of a single God replaced a multiplicity of minor deities. An equally important step on the moral side was the universalizing of ethics. Moral duties were conceived of as extending beyond the tribe or the nation and as applying to all mankind. This was, alas, too often a matter of theory only, just as was the idea of a single God. In practice, the single Gods of the different sects of Islam and of Christianity were in competition, just as the so called universal ethics of Christianity were not in practice applied to heretics or pagans or any enemies.

At any rate, the comparative study of religion in action has demonstrated clearly enough that the character and qualities ascribed to God change and develop with the growth of human knowledge and human social institutions. Much of what men mean by the word God is man made. The theologian will tell you that this is due to the imperfection of the human mind, which is gradually learning to understand more about the real nature of God. However, the scientific humanist pushes on to what he regards as the logical conclusion—that the idea of God is entirely man made, resulting from man’s tendency to ascribe something like human personality to things and forces which he does not understand.

God, the Personification of Nature

So for him God is in part a personification of the forces of nature, partly of the psychological forces within us—moral imperatives and spiritual ideals—and in part of concrete human nature at its highest, as incarnating something of the Divine by bridging the gulf between the material and the ideal. To interpret these various aspects of religious experience in terms of a single personal God has been of immense value in man’s upward progress. But scientific humanism can no longer regard this interpretation as the most satisfactory one. Indeed, many humanists have found relief of mind and soul in dropping the idea of a personal God altogether.

So, many agonizing questions no longer need to be asked, much less answered. Why a loving God should permit cruelty and evil, why an omniscient Creator should produce a universe which is in the main as meaningless as the astronomers have shown it to be, why, even in those few places where life exists, Omnipotence should tolerate such a slow and wasteful process as evolution? No longer does the scientific humanist have to maintain that pain and evil have a cosmic purpose behind them, or that the chaos of war and social misery is part of a divine Providence too deep for us to understand. The problems remain, but the scientific humanist can approach them in a new way.

Existence itself remains a problem, but he does not attempt to solve the mystery by saying that a God created the universe out of nothing. He knows that the origin of the universe is now and probably for ever will be beyond the range of our knowledge, he is content to accept existence as a fact. Then, instead of having to find purpose in everything, he is content to find out how things work. Biological evolution he finds is not in itself purposeful, though it has prevented human purpose, but it has sometimes resulted in true advance or progress.

Pain was a necessary accompaniment of biological advance, evil is a necessary result of human nature being what it is—the nature of an animal which had evolved the power of conscious thought. Sin can be interpreted in the light of modern psychology, instead of as the result of the Fall of Man.

Enhancement of Life

And the humanist, however scientific, can still have a religious attitude to life. If existence is a fact to be accepted, he must still acknowledge it as a mystery. He can be reverent in face of natural beauty and high morality. He is not dispensed from feeling awe when confronted with the hidden depths of Nature. He can have ideals which he feels to be of transcendent importance, and aims which he pursues with a truly religious fervour, and he must have his equivalent of theological creeds and dogmas—an intellectual framework to support his beliefs and his personality. He is sure that some things are of value in and for themselves—human decency and human dignity, experiences of beauty and of love, inner peace and reconcilement, true knowledge and noble expression. He knows that he can ally himself with the psychological forces that we may best call the spirit of righteousness, of truth, of love.

They are to him nothing mystical or supernatural, but hard facts of our daily experience. These forces have a hard battle, but in the long run they make headway, and in any case to fight the battle on their side is also of value in and for itself. Above all, the humanist can believe in an overriding goal—the enhancement of life and the fullest possible realization of its possibilities, both now and in the future.

He also perceives that the goal can only be realized by means of social advance. Newton and Beethoven, Jesus and Socrates, Michelangelo and Dante—the great men of the past show the richness and the heights of which human nature is capable. But to bring out the immense latent possibilities of the common man and woman everywhere both of achievement and of enjoyment, a proper organization of social and economic life is needed. Thus the overriding aim is the building of a better human society.

He knows also that man’s burning ideals are both a product of past evolution and an agency for its further advance, and supported by the long vista of life’s progress in the past, he can soberly and reverently accept the fact that on man’s shoulders, and still more on his brains, lies the responsibility for seeing that that progress shall be continued into the future. That seems to me to be a truly religious point of view, and one which, when time and place and the right men combine, could become the basis for a definite organized religion.