Carolina QuotesOur psychological experiences are all equally facts. There is nothing to choose between them. No psychological experience is "truer," so far as we are concerned, than any other. For even if one should correspond more closely to things in themselves as perceived by some hypothetical non-human being, it would be impossible for us to discover which it was. Science is no "truer" than common sense, or lunacy, or art, or religion. It permits us to organize our experience profitably; but tells us nothing about the real nature of the world to which our experiences are supposed to refer. From the internal reality, by which I mean the totality of psychological experiences, it actually separates us. Art, for example, deals with many more aspects of this internal reality than does science, which confines itself deliberately and by convention to the study of one very limited class of experiences — the experiences of sense.
Aldous Huxley Connected to the Carolinas
Source
“One and Many”, pp. 5–6
- work
- Do What You Will (1928)
- year
- 1928
- locator
- pp. 5–6
Cite this record
“Our psychological experiences are all equally facts. There i…” Aldous Huxley. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-04DB26C246. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/04db26c246
More from Aldous Huxley
To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large — this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.
Our conviction that the world is meaningless is due in part to the fact (discussed in a later paragraph) that the philosophy of meaningless lends itself very effectively to furthering the ends of political and erotic passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error — the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning has deliberately been excluded, with ultimate reality.
When one individual comes into intimate contact with another, she — or he, of course, as the case may be — must almost inevitably receive or inflict suffering.