time: the refreshing river 



to do, and flesh and blood would have been adapted to machinery 

 rather than machinery to flesh and blood. Nevertheless the converse 

 process is equally possible, i.e. a continually increasing automatism of 

 machine operations, and hence an increasing liberation of man from 

 the necessity of productive labour. With the increase of leisure would 

 come an enormous increase in the beneficial and pleasurable occupa- 

 tions available for the workers. This is what is meant by the readiness 

 to sacrifice the bourgeois liberty of to-day for the much greater liberty 

 of the classless State. And these two alternatives are even now offering 

 themselves to us, with capitalism on the one side and Christianity 

 and communism together on the other. It is a pity that Spengler's 

 aphorism is not more widely known: "Christian theology is the 

 grandmother of bolshevism." 



"Utopias," wrote Berdyaev, in a passage which Aldous Huxley 

 chose for the motto of Brave New World,'' appear to be much more 

 realisable than we used to think. We are finding ourselves face to 

 face with a far more awful question — how can we avoid their actuali- 

 sation.^ And perhaps a new period is beginning, a period when 

 intelligent men will be wondering how they can avoid these Utopias, 

 and return to a society non-Utopian, less perfect but more free." 

 Huxley's book was a brilliant commentary on this. 



His theme is twofold, one of its aspects being the power of auto- 

 cratic dictatorship, and the other, the possibilities of this power, 

 given the resources of a really advanced biological engineering. The 

 book opens with a long description of a human embryo factory, 

 where the eggs emitted by carefully-tended ovaries are brought up 

 in their development by mass-production methods on an endless 

 conveyor belt moving very slowly until at last the infants are "de- 

 canted" one by one into a remarkable world. The methods of education 

 by continual suggestion and all the possibilities of conditional reflexes 

 are brilliantly described, and we see a world where art and religion 

 no longer exist, but in which an absolutely stable form of society 

 has been achieved, first by sorting out the eggs into groups of known 

 inherited characteristics and then setting each group when adult to 

 do the work for which it is fitted; and secondly by allowing unlimited 

 sexual life (of course, sterile). This idea was based on the suggestion 

 of Kyrle^ that social discontent, which has always been an important 

 driving force in social change, is a manifestation of the Oedipus 

 complexes of the members of society and cannot be removed by 



^ R. M. Kyrle, Psyche, 193 1, 11, 48. 

 72 



