Ape and Essence: A Novel

by Aldous Huxley

Conscience, custom—the first makes cowards, Makes saints of us sometimes, makes human beings. The other makes Patriots, Papists, Protestants, Makes Babbitts, Sadists, Swedes or Slovaks, Makes killers of Kulaks, chlorinators of Jews, Makes all who mangle, for lofty motives, Quivering flesh, without qualm or question To mar their certainty of Supreme Service.

From breakfast to bedtime you may be doing everything in your power to outrage Nature and deny the fact of your Glassy Essence. But even the angriest ape at last grows weary of his tricks and has to sleep. And, while he sleeps, the indwelling Compassion preserves him, willy nilly, from the suicide which, in his waking hours, he has tried so frantically hard to commit. Then the sun rises again, and our ape wakes up once more to his own self and the freedom of his personal will—to yet another day of trick playing or, if he chooses, to the beginnings of self-knowledge, to the first steps toward his liberation.

And so, by the dialectic of sentiment, these two have rediscovered for themselves that synthesis of the chemical and the personal, to which we give the names of monogamy and romantic love. In her case it was the hormone that excluded the person; in his, the person that could not come to terms with the hormone. But now there is the beginning of a larger wholeness.

There are times, and this is one of them, when the world seems purposefully beautiful, when it is as though some mind in things had suddenly chosen to make manifest, for all who choose to see, the supernatural reality that underlies all appearances.