Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [217]
‘Come, come,’ said Philip. ‘The picture’s a little lurid. And anyhow, even if it were accurate, the highbrows can’t be held responsible for the applications other people have made of their results.’
‘They are responsible. Because they brought the other people up in their own damned intellectualist tradition. After all, the other people are only highbrows on another plane. A business man is just a man of science who happens to be rather stupider than the real man of science. He’s living just as one-sidedly and intellectually, as far as his intellect goes, as the other one, And the fruit of that is inner psychological degeneration. For of course,’ he added parenthetically, ‘the fruits of your amusements aren’t merely the external apparatus of modern industrial life. They’re an inward decay; they’re infantilism and degeneracy and all sorts of madness and primitive reversion. No, no, I have no patience with your precious amusements of the mind. You’d be doing far less harm if you were playing golf.’
‘But truth?’ queried Burlap, who had been listening to the discussion without speaking. ‘What about truth?
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.