Word: huxleys
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...cover story and your speculation as to "how real can movies be" [TiME, June 8], you neglect a mention of the "feelies," [Aldous] Huxley's prophetic description [in Brave New World) of what civilization will be satiating itself on in some future popcorn bazaar. The feelies could not only be seen, smelt and heard but they could be "felt" with the aid of knobs attached to the arms of the viewer's chair. Thus a passionate kiss will become a personal sensation and a painful blow will become a source of masochistic satisfaction...
...Aldous Huxley-The Devils of Loudun...
...critical point in the evolution of man . . . " says Huxley, " was when he . . . could organize his experience in a common pool. It was this which made human life different ... Animal types have limited possibilities, and sooner or later exhaust them. Man has an unlimited field of possibilities ... He has developed a new method of evolution: the transmission of organized experience ... which supplements and largely overrides the automatic process of natural selection ..." As soon as man acquired the ability to accumulate and transmit knowledge, he bested all his rivals and possible rivals on earth...
Viewed against such a long future, man's current problems seem to Huxley to be temporary. He does not ignore forces he believes tend to check human improvement. He denounces Communist attempts to control or stifle free scientific research, "not merely because . . . the promising unity of world science has been disrupted, but because a political party has imposed its own dogmatic view of what must be correct . . . " In the next paragraph he denounces "official Catholic pronouncements on birth control and sex relations," not only because they mean frustration and misery and ill-health and ignorance ... for thousands of millions...
...Huxley, such contemporary issues are passing trifles. "Once life had become organized in human form, it was impelled forward, not merely by the blind forces of natural selection, but by mental and spiritual forces as well ... Man can now see himself as the sole agent of further evolutionary advance on this planet, and one of the few possible instruments of progress in the universe at large. He need no longer regard himself as insignificant in relation to the cosmos. He is intensely significant...