Wyndham Lewis, founder of the Vorticist art movement, was always controversial, but I’ve been reading more about him lately and some of his ideas were truly demented and horrible – in books such as The Art of Being Ruled (1926), Time and Western Man (1928) and Men Without Art (1934). He was elitist, proto-fascist (admired Hitler and Mussolini), racist (anti-black, anti-Semitic), hated popular culture and all democracy and would happily have contemplated the extinction of millions of the deprived and uneducated in favour of rule by the intelligent few who might breed a superior breed of human beings.

If you, like me, admire H. G. Wells’s futurist novels, you may not be aware of his advocacy of genocide and selective breeding in his “utopian” New Republic. He warned that “whole masses of human population are inferior in their claim upon the future”. “Base and servile types” would be euthanised, including criminals, insane, physically disabled or genetically diseased. “Swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not meet the new needs of efficiency, will have to go”

[Anticipations, 1901]

” Man must go steeply up or down and the odds seem to be all in favour of his going down and out. If he goes up, then so great is the adaptation demanded of him that he must cease to be a man. Ordinary man is at the end of his tether. Only a small, highly adaptable minority of the species can possibly survive” .

H. G. Wells, Mind at the End of its Tether (1945)

” Adapt or perish, that is and always has been the implacable law of life for mankind. Either the human imagination and the will to live rises to the plain necessity of our case, and a renascent Homo sapiens struggles on to a new, a harder and happier world dominion, or he blunders down the slopes of failure through a series of unhappy phases, in the wake of all the monster reptiles and beasts that have flourished and lorded it on the earth before him, to his ultimate extinction”

The Fate of Homo Sapiens [1939]

H. G’s early science fiction and futurist writings were gloom laden, even predicting atomic warfare (1913) and the end of the world, But he could also be super optimistic, writing 1in 1902:

“All that the human mind has accomplished is but the dream before the awakening. A day will come when beings now in our thoughts and hidden in our loins will stand upon the earth as one stands upon a footstool, and laugh, and reach out their hands amid the stars” [Anticipations].

In 1957 Julian Huxley supported conservationism in these words: “The enjoyment of the beauty and strange variety of the natural world …is one of the indispensable modes of human fulfillment …involving something essentially religious or sacred…To exterminate a living species, be it lion or lammergeier, to desecrate the landscape, to wipe out wildflowers or birds over great tracts of country, is to diminish the wonder, the interest, and the beauty of nature”:

New Bottles for New Wine

In the current debate over the federal government’s proposed freedom of religion bill, people have been asking “how do you even define religion?”.

Here is Julian Huxley’s definition, proposed in 1924:

“Religion is the response of human personality to the outer universe of experience”.

Observers at the time liked this definition. The “Dismal Dean”of St Pauls, W. R. Inge, pronounced it to be one of the best he knew. It may be too wise and inclusive for lawyers and politicians!

In 1923 the famous biologist Julian Huxley wrote of humans and their hopes that they did not stand isolated, “a feeble candle flickering with pathetic bravado in the midst of an appalling and alien universe, but are the culmination and condensation of a long age of travail that has gone before. Here biology becomes of profound importance to religion, for here it gives to man firm ground for his faith, and tangible assurance that the belief which is in him is not in vain, not mere delusion”

“The Outlook in Biology”, 1923.

“Mysticism stands for that type of religion in which there is an immediate apprehension of and communion with the ultimate reality, or God… in its purest form it involves an  intense and vivid appreciation of the unseen world, and an absorption of the self into it. This carries with it a special form of consciousness in which the usual object-subject distinction is obliterated and all is resolved into a oneness. This self, thus identified with its object, is capable of a vast range of vision and can become acquainted with ineffable things”:

W. B. Selbie, The Psychology of Religion (1924), p. 245.

“There have been religious geniuses in all ages and in all countries who have had experiences of spiritual expansion. They have been made aware of a Realm of Reality on a higher level than that revealed through their senses. They have sometimes felt invaded by the inrush of larger Life: sometimes they have seemed to,push a door inward into a larger range of being with vastly heightened energy. The experience is … always one of joy and rapture: in fact it is probably the highest joy a mortal ever feels”:

Rufus Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion