The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

by Aldous Huxley

There has been published, in recent years, one of these great best sellers which is called The Power of Belief; and this is a very good title because belief is a very great source of power. It has power over the believer himself and permits the believing person to exercise power over others. It does, in a sense, move mountains. But this belief, like any other source of power, is in itself ethically neutral; it can be used just as well for evil as for good. We have in our own times this very fine spectacle of Hitler very nearly conquering the entire world through the power of belief in something which was not only manifestly untrue but also profoundly evil. We see then that this tremendous fact of belief, which is so constantly cultivated within the symbol-manipulating religions, is essentially ambivalent: it can be both good and bad. And the consequence is that religion as a system of beliefs has always, in point of history, been an ambivalent force which has given birth simultaneously to the Sister of Charity and to what the medieval poets called the Proud Prelate, the ecclesiastical tyrant.