Ravens and Writing Desks

Being Some Reflections by an English Novelist and Critic on the Riddle of the Universe

ALDOUS HUXLEY

IT WAS with discussions of "fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute" that the devils in hell were wont to amuse their endless and uneasy leisures. So Milton assures us, at any rate. And surely Milton should know; for Milton, as Blake judiciously pointed out long since, "was of the devil's party without knowing it"—a full-blown devil himself, very nearly. Quite full-blown, his wives and daughters would doubtless have said.

Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute—the subject is an admirable one for those who have eternity on their hands. For predestination is one of those problems about which one can go on arguing for ever without any hope of reaching a conclusion. Is the will free? Or is every event, every thought and act preordained from the beginning of things? The questions, I remember, disturbed my schooldays. They have probably disturbed the schooldays of most of my readers. If they do not disturb our adult lives, that is chiefly due to the fact that we are too busy ever to think of them. Those whose profession it is to ponder over such questions—the theologians and the metaphysicians—remain disturbed to the end of their lives—to the end of eternity even, if Milton is to be believed. The argument is potentially everlasting.

PREDESTINATION is only one of the main Riddles of the Universe. There are plenty of others quite as difficult of solution. When the devils got tired of discussing fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, they might begin to argue, for example, about the Existence of God, the Nature of Evil, the Meaning of Life. These topics would provide diversion for many millions of sultry afternoons in the infernal regions. At any rate, they have kept the philosophical leisures of humanity well occupied for thirty centuries. From Aeschylus to Thomas Hardy, from the author of Job to the author of the Brothers Karamazov, all the poets and all the sages have asked and diversely answered the cosmic riddles. The only point on which all are agreed is that "God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform." After that they part company—some to justify the ways of God to man, some to denounce them, some to deny the existence of God. Has life a meaning? No, reply the deniers. There is no God, or none at any rate who takes any interest in any of the things that men hold valuable; the world came into existence by some sort of mechanical fluke, is governed by blind chance and will disappear as pointlessly as it appeared and existed. All our aspirations are, so to speak, mere accidental overtones of biologically necessary aptitudes. We needed a certain amount of wit to enable us to survive in the struggle for existence; natural selection gave it to us, but gave us a little too much, so that we have consciousness and ideals over and above the cunning necessary to secure food and outwit enemies. So say the deniers.

For the denouncers, on the other hand, life has a meaning—but a very unpleasant one; God exists—but he happens to be a hostile devil. Among the heretics of the early centuries of our era were many denouncers. If the fortunes of war had been slightly different, we should now be officially believing that the affairs of men were governed by a malignant demon called Jehovah. Finally there are the justifiers, those who believe that the ways of God are mysterious and not like the ways of men, but who do their best to find an explanation for them in terms of our human ethics. The most popular explanations are the following. First, the Hindu-Buddhist explanation in terms of metempsychosis. We have all lived before, and all suffering is in the nature of a compensatory punishment for offences committed in a previous life. This is one way of accounting for the apparently quite gratuitous tortures inflicted on the innocent, on children, on the weak and defenceless by an apparently sadistic universe. The second most popular explanation is that of the Christian theologians, who postulate a mysterious Original Sin inhering in every human being. The apparently innocent—for as Dostoievsky rightly insists, the gratuitous suffering of children and the defenceless is the crux of the whole cosmic problem—are not really innocent. They have inherited sin and it is for this inherited sin that they are paying. The doctrine of Original Sin is not only highly speculative; it is also a harsh and ferocious doctrine. Too harsh and ferocious at any rate for our Modernists and Broad Churchmen and humanitarian philosophers. Moreover it does not fit very satisfactorily into the scheme of orthodox scientific Evolution. The typical modernist explanation is no longer in terms of the past, but of the future. The Golden Age is not irreparably over; it is to come and our sufferings are somehow contributing to humanity's progress toward perfection. God exists, but is in a state of becoming. He is evolving with us. When he has completely evolved, there will be no more gratuitous torturing of children. Meanwhile we may derive such comfort as we may from the thought that these tortures are inevitable and perhaps salutary and beautiful. (Ivan Karamazov, it may be remarked, got so little comfort out of these considerations that he wanted "to return God his ticket"; he did not wish to have any place in a world where children are tortured, even though the tortures could be justified by the ultimate happiness of all humanity.)

SUCH, then, in crude outline are the principal answers which men have given to the interrelated questions which constitute the Riddle of the Universe. Which of these answers is the correct one? I am not, of course, in a position to say. Nor for that matter is anybody else. But like everybody else I have my little hypothesis and that is that all the answers hitherto proposed are equally right and equally wrong. God is, but at the same time God also is not. The Universe is governed by blind chance and at the same time by a providence with ethical preoccupations. Suffering is gratuitous and pointless, but also valuable and necessary. The universe is an imbecile sadist, but also, simultaneously, the most benevolent of parents. Everything is rigidly predetermined, but the will is perfectly free. This list of contradictions could be lengthened so as to include all problems that have ever vexed the philosopher and the theologian. Nominalism is just as true as Realism. The materialists are as right as the Subjective idealists and the Pyrrhonists who deny the possibility of all philosophizing are just as correct as both of them. And so on.

Is this mere nonsense and parodox-mongering? All I can say is that it is not meant to be. It is meant to be a sober statement of what I believe to be the truth—that most of the apparent contradictions of philosophy are not real contradictions at all. They seem contradictory because they are answers to questions which we have framed in such a way that they can only be answered affirmatively or negatively. Is a equal to b, or is it not? There are only two possible answers and to say that a simultaneously is and is not equal to b is nonsensical. It is nonsensical, that is to say, that the question is sensible.

BUT if the question is itself nonsensical? Why, then the case is different. For to a nonsensical question one can make almost any answer one likes and they are all simultaneously true or untrue, whichever you please. If I ask, for example, why a raven is like a writing desk, I can either reply: because there's a b in both, or else: because there's an n in neither. It really makes no difference. Each answer is equally true and equally false. My own belief is that all the Riddles of the Universe, in the form in which philosophical tradition has presented them to us, belong to the Why-is-a-raven-like-a-writing-desk category. They are nonsensical riddles, questions asked not about reality but about words. The devils whiled away their time discussing fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute; Job and Dostoievsky rack their brains over the wherefore of human sufferings. But they really might just as well have spent their time and energy over the question: "why is a mouse when it spins?"

The fundamental trouble with all theological and metaphysical speculation is the fact that, in the very process of becoming speculation, it almost inevitably becomes nonsensical. For philosophical speculation is not one of the primary products of the human soul, like anger, or sexual desire, or fear or the sensation of blueness. It is, so to say, a manufactured article. Philosophical speculation is articulate and verbal rationalization, after the fact, of what I have called the primary products of the human mind. Thus, the God in whose existence we are asked to believe or disbelieve is almost elaborate traditional rationalization of a whole gamut of very varied direct experiences common to the majority of human beings. "God" is an intellectual concept distilled out of emotions of awe, of rapture, of exultation, of ineffable repose, of remorse and so forth. The emotional experiences are the stuff out of which the god is made —are what a modern theologian has called the "theoplasm." Those who have had the "theoplasmic" experiences can genuinely say that god exists, for them. Those who have not had such experiences can equally well affirm that he does not exist. But the affirmation and denial must be made in words and in terms of a logical system. The experiences are rationalized, logically developed and finally a pair of philosophical systems confront one another, each claiming the world's allegiance. In the process of being turned into systems the original theoplasmic experiences have been falsified out of all recognition and finally forgotten. And yet the only facts on which these great structures of metaphysics are reared are the facts of certain experiences felt or not felt— experiences which, it is easy to imagine, might have been rationalized into systems utterly unlike any of the already very diverse philosophies already concocted to account for the primary theoplasmic emotions.

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What is true of the cosmic riddle which we call the Existence of God is true of all the other riddles of the same kind. Our views about the significance or meaninglessness of life will finally depend upon the events of our own personal existences and on the way our temperaments react to these events. And so on; I need not labour the point. The difference between metaphysical and scientific hypotheses is this. Scientific hypotheses can be brought to experimental tests by the senses; metaphysical hypotheses cannot. We believe or disbelieve in a philosophy because we either do or do not feel as the philosopher felt about the world at large. Now, the senses are fairly uniform throughout the human race and variations from the statistically ascertained normal can easily be taken into account. Hence the cogency of scientific hypotheses that can be experimentally tested. But men's feelings about the world at large are not at all uniform. There is no single norm of such experiences. Hence there can be no single universally satisfying philosophy. What seems the highest wisdom to one man strikes another with a different temperament and a different career behind him as nonsensical. One man, for example, declares that life is providentially arranged. Another, whose way has not been through such pleasant places, whose temperament is more gloomy, whose reading has been Haeckel rather than Paley, will declare no less positively that the world is governed blindly and senselessly by chance. And each, so far as he himself is concerned, is right. Given the question, both answers are true. But this question of providence, along with all the other cosmic riddles, is almost undoubtedly wrongly posed. The traditional method of rationalizing our experiences is faulty. Our experiences are real, but our rationalizations of them are fantastic.

How the experiences should be rationalized and what less nonsensical form the cosmic riddles should take I do not know. Science itself has pondered long and gravely over problems as hopeless of solution as the why of spinning mice and the wherefore of the resemblance between ravens and writing desks. Heavy bodies fall. Why? Because the centre of the earth is the natural home of heavy bodies; because the earth is a lodestone; because there is a certain Force called gravitation. And now the Force has taken its place among the charming myths of the past and we are told that stones fall and the earth describes an ellipse round the sun for the simple reason that the geometry of space-time happens to be such that they can't help falling and elliptically revolving. Similarly a brick was once a piece of matter, then a collection of chemical molecules and atoms, then an arrangement of electrons revolving round nuclei. Now, apparently, it has been reduced to a series of wave-like disturbances existing in an unknown medium. The structure of modern physics is airy and fantastic; but its foundations are our everyday human experience of stones falling and bricks being pink, hard, square and scratchy. It is the same with philosophy. The most subtle and rarefied of our metaphysical theories is based on everyday feelings and sensations and qualitative judgments. The technique of rationalizing these experiences is still very crude when compared with the technique evolved by scientists for the rationalization of sense experiences. The time will no doubt come when our present philosophies will seem as preposterous as the mediaeval schoolmen's speculations about the nature of matter now seem to us. Meanwhile let us beware of taking any of the Riddles of the Universe too painfully to heart. They are in all probability bogus problems. And in any case the important thing is always life, not thoughts about life. That is a truth of which, in this age of disproportionate intellectual specialization, we all continuously need reminding.