Aldous Huxley: Intelligent Enough
on Thursday, November 23, 2023Meaning of Aldous Huxley Money Quote: saying animals never fret over magic or religion so they don’t pay the price of such foolishness. Aldous Huxley said:
“You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough” — Aldous Huxley
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Aldous Huxley is making an observation about human behavior compared to animals. He notes that animals do not engage in ‘magic and religion’ or similar ‘fooleries’ in the way that humans do. Huxley suggests that this is because humans possess intelligence, but our intelligence is not perfect or complete – we are ‘not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.’
Because of this incomplete or imperfect intelligence, humans are more prone to irrational beliefs and behaviors like magic, religion, and other cultural practices without clear purpose. Overall, Huxley seems to be implying that religion and similar cultural phenomena arise from a gap between our level of intelligence and the intelligence needed to understand the world fully without such beliefs.
Birthday: July 26, 1894 – Death: November 27, 1963