The Perennial Philosophy

ONE cannot help wondering what the clear-headed Thomas Henry Huxley, Aldous Huxley’s grandfather, would have made of his grandson’s latter-day writings. It is not very hard to imagine what the young Aldous Huxley would have made of such ideas as he now in his middle years is producing. What a wonderful time the young Huxley, the author of Point Counterpoint or Antic Hay, would have writing the portrait of a man of letters living in the desert somewhere near Hollywood and recommending to the world as the only true or possible course of salvation the Perennial Philosophy!

How the young Huxley would have delighted to describe the tenets of this renouncer of action, this scorner of time, this dispraiser of the intellect, and this preacher of being “pure in heart" and “poor in spirit.” How he would have enjoyed citing passages from this latter-day mystic who insists that only the saintly virtues are true instruments of understanding Reality — Humility and Purity being to the knower of Reality what “the telescope and the microscope are to the physical scientist.”

Perhaps Huxley’s flight to Nirvana — or to Pure Being — ought not really to puzzle the reader of his early works. His skepticisms were always tinged with a passion to find something worth believing: his materialism, for example,

And so we sat in blissful calm,
Quietly sweating calm to calm,

was always shot through with a disgust at the material conditions of existence. His critique of intellectual society was always tinctured with a hunger for something simpler, sweeter, than the life of the thinker. His exposure of corruption was in part a hunger for the incorruptible.

In this book Mr. Huxley comes out with passion, energy, and occasionally with wit, as an exponent of what he calls the Perennial Philosophy. He cites Leibnitz as the inventor of the term. But the Perennial Philosophy to which Mr. Huxley refers is not the long tradition of rationalism: it is the age-old patrimony of mysticism. The book is in large part an anthology of the great mystics of all climes and in all ages. It is a delightful treasury of these utterances that are “delicate touches of the spirit” and read like the poetry that is nearest music. The rest is Mr. Huxley’s argument that only through such saintly intuitions of the “Ground of Being" can the world be saved. All action, he thinks, is corruption, and only in contemplation, in the mystic sense, is peace possible to the soul and to the world.

There was another age when intellectuals fied to such soft surcease. That was during the break-up of the GrecoRoman world. Mr. Huxley is a symptom, somewhat sad, of the failure of nerve of the intellectual class in times of crisis.

IRWIN EDMAN