ABSTRACT
However, if in Ape and Essence Mr. Huxley seems to have a flawed satiric novel, he has a potentially brilliant and penetrating satiric essay. And I wish he had written it,
September 1948, clxxxii, pp. 102-3
When Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932, it seemed to him that mankind was headed toward the soulless, mass-produced contentment of a scientific Utopia. His fable dramatized the choice between this 'death-without-tears' and a return to 'noble Savagery' which was both squalid and ignoble-a choice between 'insanity on the one hand and lunacy on the other.' Mr. Huxley has since sought to show that there exists-in the precept and practice of the mystics-a way to sanity. The
source of man's madness, he avers, is that the unregenerate Adam is an angry ape; he can cease to be one only through awareness of his Essence-of the spiritual reality underlying the world. Whence Huxley's new title, Ape and Essence. Brave New World envisaged the painless triumph of standardization, which Huxley then considered the logical end product of a science controlled by soulless rationalists. 'Our Ford' was the prophet. Ape and Essence depicts the miserable triumph of animal bestiality, which Huxley now suggests will be the logical end product of a science controlled by war-minded ape man. The prophet is Belial.
