Essays Upon Some Controverted QuestionsHuxley, Thomas Henry
Religion
Essays Upon Some Controverted Questions
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Science
But I ask in this case also, how is it conceivable that any man, in
possession of all his natural faculties, should hold such an opinion? I do
not suppose that I am exceptionally endowed because I have all my life
enjoyed a keen perception of the beauty offered us by nature and by art.
Now physical science may and probably will, some day, enable our posterity
to set forth the exact physical concomitants and conditions of the strange
rapture of beauty. But if ever that day arrives, the rapture will remain,
just as it is now, outside and beyond the physical world; and, even in the
mental world, something superadded to mere sensation. I do not wish to crow
unduly over my humble cousin the orang, but in the æsthetic province, as in
that of the intellect, I am afraid he is {215} nowhere. I doubt not he
would detect a fruit amidst a wilderness of leaves where I could see
nothing; but I am tolerably confident that he has never been awestruck, as
I have been, by the dim religious gloom, as of a temple devoted to the
earthgods, of the tropical forest which he inhabits. Yet I doubt not that
our poor long-armed and short-legged friend, as he sits meditatively
munching his durian fruit, has something behind that sad Socratic face of
his which is utterly "beyond the bounds of physical science." Physical
science may know all about his clutching the fruit and munching it and
digesting it, and how the physical titillation of his palate is transmitted
to some microscopic cells of the gray matter of his brain. But the feelings
of sweetness and of satisfaction which, for a moment, hang out their signal
lights in his melancholy eyes, are as utterly outside the bounds of physics
as is the "fine frenzy" of a human rhapsodist.
Does Mr. Lilly really believe that, putting me aside, there is any man with
the feeling of music in him who disbelieves in the reality of the delight
which he derives from it, because that delight lies outside the bounds of
physical science, not less than outside the region of the mere sense of
hearing? But, it may be, that he includes music, painting, and sculpture
under the head of physical science, and in that case I can only regret I am
unable to follow him in his ennoblement of my favourite pursuits.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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