ABSTRACT
And the reason is that Huxley is interested in the people only as ingredients in the philosophic pill he has been preparing for his own consumption. In Eyeless in Gaza he had been 'converted' to love and shown his hero Anthony Beavis rather bitterly searching for channels in which to benefit humanity with that emotion; in Ends and Means his analysis had found a startling paucity of ways in which humanity could be helped; now he has brought himself to the cheering conclusion that it cannot be. That is to say, it cannot be helped on the 'human' level of ideals and desires. Stoyte's terrified longing for youth, and Maunciple's periodical ticklings of sensuality and repentances, the raucous disillusion of Obispo, Pete Boone's touching faith in mechanical solutions for the world's evils, all these are merely forms of the same fundamental delusion: that any good may be achieved in time and that ideals, which are only images of desire, represent any real goods. Even love for one's fellow-men is only a snare, an enticement into personal feelings, destructive of the only real aim, 'liberation from personality . . . liberation into union with God.' Only in the timeless and impersonal contemplation of God sub specie aeternitatis is there true good, true love only in the amor intellectualis Dei.1
