From this influential Huxley British family, several members have excelled in science, medicine, arts, and literature. The family also includes members who occupied senior positions in the public service of the United Kingdom.
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) was a biologist known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his defense of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Mostly a self-educated man, he had an extraordinary influence on the British educated public. He was instrumental in developing scientific education and opposed those Christian leaders who tried to stifle scientific debate. A noted unbeliever, he used the term "agnostic" to describe his attitude to theism.
Aldous Huxley (July26, 1894-November22, 1963) was a prominent member of the Huxley family and the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley. He was the son of a schoolmaster and writer, Leonard Huxley and his mother was Julia Arnold, niece of poet and critic Matthew Arnold and sister of Mrs Humphry Ward, a known writer. He was instructed by his own mother until she became terminally ill. His mother died when he was 14, in 1908. In 1911 Aldous contracted the eye disease (keratitis punctata) which left him practically blind for 3 years. In January 1916, he volunteered for the British Army in the World War I, however was rejected on health grounds, being half-blind in one eye. During the War he spent much of his time at Garsington Manor near Oxford, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, a society hostess, working as a farm laborer. There he met several Bloomsbury figures, including Bertrand Russel Alfred North Whitehead, and Clive Bell. He caricatured the Garsington lifestyle. At the time when jobs were very scarce, John Middleton Murry was reorganizing the literary magazine, The Athenaeum, and invited Huxley to join the staff. He accepted quickly and quickly married the Belgium refugee Maria Nys, also at Garsington.
Huxley used this time of his life to write as much as he could and became the author of nearly 50 books, He became best known for his novel Brave New World that shows the influence of drugs. The citizens of the future are nearly all hoped up on Soma, a powerful hallucinogen that allows "a holiday" from reality, imparts a tremendous feeling of well-being, softens up the mind and poisons the body. In the climactic scene in the book, when the character John the Savage rebels against the Fordist Society, his anger is concentrated on Soma, which has come to symbolize all that is rotten in this future-state.
Back in the 1930s, Huxley even described mescaline as a worse poison than Soma, rendering the poor character Linda as vomitous and even dumber than usual. And for nonfiction works The Doors of Perception recalls his experiences taking drugs whose primary action was to trigger experiences that altered the state of consciousness. He thought that he was expanding the fences of awareness momentarily like the opening aperture of a camera lens.
On Christmas Eve 1955, he took his first dose of LSD, an experience he was to repeat often and he claimed allowed him to plumb even greater depths than mescaline. Huxley's experimentation continued right through his death bed, when he asked his wife to inject him with multiple doses of uncut LSD. He died later that day, just hours after Kennedy's assassination. Three years later, LSD was officially banned in California.
In the late stage of his life before he died, Huxley became interested in paranormal and psychic phenomena, including telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, near-death experiences, reincarnation, and apparitional experiences. Also he became an universalist, a concept that emphasizes the universal principles of most religions and centered around the belief in an universal reconciliation between humanity and the divine.
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