ABSTRACT
In spite of the inadequacies, Aldous Huxley has contributed significantly to the intellectual currents of twentieth-century life. Huxley's survey of the traditional sources of value was also axiological. Literature, music, and painting can be valuable if created by talented artists only and if they help one to apprehend the nature of the Godhead. He preferred the classicists and realists such as Homer, Chaucer, Mozart, and Goya to romanticists and ultramodernists; in the arts, at least, he advocated tradition over radical experimentation. Our judgment of his comments on the purposes of the arts, like our reaction to his preference of artists and the techniques they employ, will depend more on our own aesthetic tastes than on any objective criteria. Huxley never embraced science as a satisfactory way to gauge the nature of ultimate reality, he always favored the methodology of science in the attainment of a knowledge and mastery of the material universe.
