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.Five years older than Huxley, Heardwas the son of an honorary canon of the Church of England.Educated at Cambridge, with adegree in history, he had spent the First World War in Ireland, helping Sir Horace Plunkettin his attempt to organize the Irish farmers into agricultural cooperatives, a scheme thatfoundered when a bomb placed by Irish freedom fighters destroyed Sir Horace's residenceand very nearly destroyed Gerald, who had been working in the house alone.Concludingthat a civil service career was uncongenial to his health and his nature.Heard decided toconcentrate on writing, and in the mid-Twenties published an eccentric but erudite littletome called Narcissus: An Anatomy of Clothes, which traced the historical relationshipbetween architecture and clothing.Anyone wishing to dip into the yellowing pages of Narcissus will discover the donnishGerald, the one who could stun everyone to silence with his ability to remember everythinghe had ever read about everything and his willingness to explain it all to you in great detail.It was a recipe for a boorish windbag, and that might have been Hoard's fate had he notalso been one of those classically racy English eccentrics who pen mysteries in whichAnglican clerics use Arabian spells (authentic, of course) to destroy their rivals.To onesegment of the reading public he was Gerald Heard, mystic and philosopher, the author ofPain, Sex and Time, Is God Evident, A Preface to Prayer; while to another, less exaltedgroup of readers he was H.F.Heard, creator of such macabre entertainments as The BlackFox, the Great Fog, and Doppelgangers, a book which the Saturday Review described as"strange and terrible & as repellently fascinating as the discovery of a cobra in one's bed."16Perhaps it was the actor in Gerald who made the intellectual such a compelling presence,but an astonishing number of people considered Heard to be the most brilliant man theyhad ever met, outshining even Huxley, who himself gave Heard the compliment of "knowingmore than anyone I know."17 A typical Heard soliloquy rambled "like a river over a vast areaof knowledge & past the shores of pre-history, anthropology, astronomy, physics,parapsychology, mythology and much else."18 Christopher Isherwood, who knew himslightly in London and became better acquainted after both emigrated to Los Angeles in thelate Thirties, once described Gerald's life as "an artistic performance expressed in alanguage of metaphors and analogies."32Unfortunately, the brilliant Heard, the voluble Heard, was missing from the written Heard.His writing tended to be pedantic, "practically unreadable" according to Huxley.19Heard met Huxley in 1928, when he was working as editor of the Realist, a literarymagazine whose contributors included H.G.Wells, Rebecca West, Arnold Bennett, and thetwo Huxleys, Julian and Aldous.Heard began accompanying the successful young noveliston nocturnal strolls across London, from which he deduced that his young friend wassuffering from a routine literary affliction:The style is formed, the specific frame of reference and interpretation of life isclear, and a public has gathered to buy the wares this craftsman knows howto produce in steady supply.And then suddenly the formula seems false, theangle hopelessly inaccurate, the analyses contemptibly shallow.Huxley'sfamily mores and his ancestral genii were challenging his own personalgenius.Satire could entertain; it could not assure.The sardonic, to keep itsedge, must sharpen on the whetstone or the full truth of man man, the oneunfinished animal; man the incomparably teachable; untaught, less than abeast; ill-taught, worse than a beast; well-taught, the one creature of infinitepromise, of superhuman potential.20Those last sentences are classic Heard, and they point us toward the real significance ofHuxley's affection for this potentially rival polymath.Because what was about to happenbetween the two men was a form of intellectual seduction, and an ironic one at that, as T.H.Huxley's grandson was seduced by a deviant form of the evolutionary argument.Without bogging down in a lengthy discussion of scientific politics in the late nineteenthcentury, it is important to understand that there were two interpretations of evolution.Thefirst, following Darwin, believed that natural selection was directionless, the product ofrandom mutations; man was a biological fluke.The second interpretation, deriving fromLamarck and championed by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, smuggled teleologyback into the evolutionary drama.Bergson called his philosophy vitalism, and argued thatevolution was not directionless but was controlled by a creative lifeforce, an élan vital,which sought ever higher expressions of complexity and competence.In the insect world,for example, this élan vital achieved its highest state with ants and bees, while amongmammals it was that ever-curious, ever-experimenting species Homo sapiens who bestexpressed this upward drive.Of course once it had been decided that there was a pot of gold at the end of theevolutionary rainbow, it was hard not to speculate about the nature of this treasure.Friedrich Nietzsche meditated on the élan vital and came up with the Übermensch, theoverman, a race of supermen who, depending on the luck of the variables, would either bemystic-saints or tyrant-creators.For Bergson only the first was a possibility: the universewas "a machine for the production of gods," he wrote.2133But how was man going to become like unto gods? Further physical transformation wasdoubtful and pretty much beside the point, but what about further mental development?The growth of psychology in the late nineteenth century, with its emphasis on theunconscious, prompted a number of intellectuals to theorize that consciousness was theprobable area of emergent evolution.Just as man had gone from simple consciousness toself-consciousness, perhaps at some point he would jump from self-consciousness to &cosmic consciousness? At least that's what a Canadian psychologist named Richard Buckeproposed in 1901.From a state of "mere vitality without perception," Homo sapiens hadevolved to simple consciousness, which was characterized by perception, and thence to self-consciousness, whose distinguishing feature was the ability to image thoughts usinglanguage, and that refinement of language, mathematics.Bucke believed that Homosapiens, having attained self-consciousness some three hundred thousand years ago, wasnow at a point where his ability to process concepts was such that he was about to pushthrough to a new level, to the cosmic level [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]