Agnostic Gospels: Divining Nature in the Work of Julian and Aldous Huxley

My paper "Agnostic Gospels: Divining Nature in the Work of Julian and Aldous Huxley" will explore the influence of the Huxley brothers on postwar environmentalism, and the religious dimensions of their environmental thought. The biologist Julian Huxley, who pioneered conservation efforts in colonial Africa and helped to found the IUCN and WWF, believed that it was part of his life's mission to help create a 'religion of science' that would fill the gap left by the apparent decline of traditional religion in modern times. A reverence for evolution was central to Julian Huxley's thinking, and he believed that human beings had a responsibility not only to preserve wilderness but to refine the process of human evolution through what he called its "psycho-social" phase. The novelist, screenwriter, and essayist Aldous Huxley shared his brother's fascination with nature (a family trait since the days of TH Huxley), but rejected his faith in progress through science and technology. The religious dimension of Aldous Huxley's thought stressed ideas of transcendence that he found in both eastern and western mysticism, but was founded on an essentially physiological approach to the mystical experience, informed by the thinking of such figures as Havelock Ellis (whose writings on hallucinogenic plants anticipated those of Aldous by half a century) and Henri Bergson. The very different ideas of the Huxley brothers led to very different strands of environmentalism in the postwar decades. For all their differences, however, both of the Huxley brothers were continuing the project inaugurated by TH Huxley in the Victorian era to find an adequate substitute for traditional religion in the wake of the Darwinian revolution. And both Julian and Aldous, in spite of their differences, looked to the natural world as the touchstone for their religious thought.