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Course Project, Part 1: Project Topic
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Part 1: Project Topic
Choose a technology to question in your final project in
preparation for your presentation at the Online Technology

Conference and answer the following questions about it:
· What is it?
· Why did you choose it?
· At this point, very briefly state what you think the answers to
the six questions below will be? Why?
1. What is the problem for which this technology is the
solution?
2. Whose problem is it?
3. Which people and what institutions might be most seriously
harmed by a technological solution?
4. What new problems might be created because we have solved
this problem?
5. What sort of people and institutions might acquire special
economic and political power because of technological change?
6. What changes in language are being enforced by new
technologies, and what is being gained and lost by such
changes?
· What steps will you take to answer the questions?
· What obstacles (if any) do you see in your way to answering
the questions?
Please hand in a list of these questions with your answers in
complete sentences that use conventional written English. You
should write around 300-500 words, not counting the questions.
Due Date for Part 1: This submission is due during Week 2,
with the final day of submission being the Tuesday of the two
week (11:30pm ET). Please see the Course Schedule for the
exact final due date for this submission.
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2/25/2021 How AI is revolutionising the role of the literary
critic | Aeon Essays
https://aeon.co/essays/how-ai-is-revolutionising-the-role-of-the-

literary-critic 1/15
Detail from The Knifegrinder Principle of Glittering 1912-13 by
Kazimir Malevich. Courtesy Yale University/Wikipedia
https://aeon.co/
When robots read booksArtificial intelligence sheds new light
on classic
texts. Literary theorists who don’t embrace it face
obsolescence
Inderjeet Mani
Where do witches come from, and what do those places have in
common? While
browsing a large collection of traditional Danish folktales, the
folklorist Timothy
Tangherlini and his colleague Peter Broadwell, both at the
University of California,
Los Angeles, decided to find out. Armed with a geographical
index and some 30,000
stories, they developed WitchHunter, an interactive ‘geo-
semantic’ map of Denmark
that highlights the hotspots for witchcraft.
�e system used artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to unearth
a trove of surprising
insights. For example, they found that evil sorcery often took
place close to Catholic

monasteries. �is made a certain amount of sense, since Catholic
sites in Denmark
were tarred with diabolical associations after the Protestant
Reformation in the 16th
century. By plotting the distance and direction of witchcraft
relative to the storyteller’s
location, WitchHunter also showed that enchantresses tend to be
found within the
local community, much closer to home than other kinds of
threats. ‘Witches and
robbers are human threats to the economic stability of the
community,’ the
researchers write. ‘Yet, while witches threaten from within,
robbers are generally
http://etkspace.scandinavian.ucla.edu/maps/witchhunter.html
situated at a remove from the well-described village, often
living in woods, forests, or
the heath … it seems that no matter how far one goes, nor where
one turns, one is in
danger of encountering a witch.’
Such ‘computational folkloristics’ raise a big question: what
can algorithms tell us
about the stories we love to read? Any proposed answer seems
to point to as many
uncertainties as it resolves, especially as AI technologies grow
in power. Can literature

really be sliced up into computable bits of ‘information’, or is
there something about
the experience of reading that is irreducible? Could AI enhance
literary
interpretation, or will it alter the field of literary criticism
beyond recognition? And
could algorithms ever derive meaning from books in the way
humans do, or even
produce literature themselves?
omputer science isn’t as far removed from the study of
literature as you might
think. Most contemporary applications of AI consist of
sophisticated methods
for learning patterns, often through the creation of labels for
large, unwieldy data-sets
based on structures that emerge from within the data itself.
Similarly, not so long ago,
examining the form and structure of a work was a central focus
of literary scholarship.
�e ‘structuralist’ strand of literary theory tends to deploy close
– sometimes
microscopic – readings of a text to see how it functions, almost
like a closed system.
�is is broadly known as a ‘formal’ mode of literary
interpretation, in contrast to more
historical or contextual ways of reading.
�e so-called ‘cultural’ turn in literary studies since the 1970s,
with its debt to
postmodern understandings of the relationship between power
and narrative, has
pushed the field away from such systematic, semi-mechanistic
ways of analysing

C
texts. AI remains concerned with formal patterns, but can
nonetheless illuminate key
aspects of narrative, including time, space, characters and plot.
Consider the opening sentence of Gabriel García Márquez’s One
Hundred Years of
Solitude (1967): ‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad,
Colonel Aureliano
Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father
took him to discover
ice.’ �e complex way in which Márquez represents the passage
of time is a staple of
modern fiction. �e time corresponding to ‘Many years later’
includes the fateful time
of ‘facing’ the firing squad, which in turn is simultaneous with
that final ‘remember’-
ing, which is years after ‘that distant afternoon’. In a single
sentence, Márquez paints
a picture of events in the fleeting present, memories of the past
and visions for the
future.
According to numerous psychological studies, when we read
such stories, we
construct timelines. We represent to ourselves whether events
are mentioned before,

after or simultaneous with each other, and how far apart they
are in time. Likewise, AI
systems have also been able to learn timelines for a variety of
narrative texts in
different languages, including news, fables, short stories and
clinical narratives.
In most cases, this analysis involves what’s known as
‘supervised’ machine learning,
in which algorithms train themselves from collections of texts
that a human has
laboriously labelled. Timeframes in narratives can be
represented using a widely used
annotation standard called TimeML (which I helped to develop).
Once a collection
(or ‘corpus’) of texts is annotated and fed into an AI program,
the system can learn
rules that let it accurately identify the timeline in other new
texts, including the
passage from Márquez. TimeML can also measure the tempo or
pace of the narrative,
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8685900_Representing
_a_Described_Sequence_of_Events_A_Dynamic_View_of_Narr
ative_Comprehension
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12109767
http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P09-1046.pdf
http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/S10-1010
http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/C12-1179
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl
=en&user=7ySorPIAAAAJ&citation_for_view=7ySorPIAAAAJ:
d1gkVwhDpl0C
http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P12-1010
http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.01696
=en&user=sXM8J5EAAAAJ&citation_for_view=sXM8J5EAAA

AJ:qjMakFHDy7sC
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S15320464130
01512
http://timeml.org/
by analysing the relationship between events in the text and the
time intervals
between them.
AI annotation schemes are versatile and expressive, but
they’re not foolproof
�e presence of narrative ‘zigzag’ movements in fiction is one
of the intriguing
insights to emerge from this kind of analysis. It’s evident in this
passage from Marcel
Proust’s posthumously published novel Jean Santeuil (1952),
the precursor to his
magnum opus In Search of Lost Time (1913-27):
Sometimes passing in front of the hotel he remembered the
rainy days when
he used to bring his nursemaid that far, on a pilgrimage. But he
remembered them without the melancholy that he then thought
he would
surely some day savour on feeling that he no longer loved her.
�e narrative here oscillates between two poles, as the French
structuralist critic

Gérard Genette observed in Narrative Discourse (1983): the
‘now’ of the recurring
events of remembering while passing in front of the hotel, and
the ‘once’ or ‘then’ of
the thoughts remembered, involving those rainy days with his
nursemaid.
Even though AI annotation schemes are versatile and
expressive, they’re not
foolproof. Longer, book-length texts are prohibitively expensive
to annotate, so the
power of the algorithms is restricted by the quantity of data
available for training
them. Even if this tagging were more economical, machine-
learning systems tend to
fare better on simpler narratives and on relating events that are
mentioned closer
together in the text. �e algorithms can be foxed by scene-
setting descriptive prose,
as in this sentence from Honoré de Balzac’s novella Sarrasine
(1831), in which the
four states being described should (arguably) overlap with each
other:
�e trees, being partly covered with snow, were outlined
indistinctly against
the greyish background formed by a cloudy sky, barely

whitened by the
moon.
AI criticism is also limited by the accuracy of human labellers,
who must carry out a
close reading of the ‘training’ texts before the AI can kick in.
Experiments show that
readers tend to take longer to process events that are distant in
time or separated by a
time shift (such as ‘a day later’). Such processing creates room
for error, although
distributing standard annotation guidelines to users can reduce
it. People also have a
hard time imagining temporally complex situations, such as the
mind-bending ones
described in Alan Lightman’s novel Einstein’s Dreams (1992):
For in this world, time has three dimensions, like space. …
Each future
moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real. At
every point of
decision, whether to visit a woman in Fribourg or to buy a new
coat, the
world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but
different fates
for those people. In time, there are an infinity of worlds.
potting temporal patterns might be fun and informative, but
isn’t literature more
than the sum of the information lurking in its patterns? Of
course, there might be
phenomenological aspects of storytelling that remain ineffable,
including the totality
S

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2667942/pdf/ni
hms-106359.pdf
=en&user=XdcULRkAAAAJ&citation_for_view=XdcULRkAAA
AJ:W7OEmFMy1HYC
of the work itself. Even so, literary interpretation is often an
inferential process. It
requires sifting through and comparing chunks of information
about literature’s form
and context – from the text itself, from its historical and
cultural background, from
authorial biographies, critiques and social-media reactions, and
from the reader’s
prior experience. All of this is data, and eminently minable.
I don’t think it’s too outlandish to suggest that an automaton
might one day be able
to simulate, for itself, the feelings we have when we read a
story. At the moment, AI
systems are notoriously bad at an important aspect of how
humans make meaning
from words: the ability to discern the context in which
statements occur. But they’re
getting better. Automatic sentiment and irony detectors are
exposing some of the
hidden associations lurking below the surface of texts.
Meanwhile, social robots are
also starting to improve their emotional intelligence.

Like many other AI practitioners, I’m a philosophical
functionalist: I believe that a
cognitive state, such as one derived from reading, should not be
defined by what it is
made of in terms of hardware or biology, but instead by how it
functions, in relation to
inputs, outputs and other cognitive states. (Opponents of
functionalism include
behaviourists – who insist that mental states are nothing other
than dispositions to
behave in certain ways – and mind-brain identity theorists –
who argue that mental
states are identical with particular neural states, and are tied to
specific biological
‘hardware’.)
Whether we like it or not, slicing up a text into comparable
bits is already an undeniable part of our critical repertoire
http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/s00416ed1v01
y201204hlt016
http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W14-2609
Machines, in the functionalist view, can therefore be said to
‘experience’ certain basic
cognitive states. ‘Siri understood my request,’ in relation to the
iPhone, means that
Siri processed my request to achieve a desired functional

outcome. Similarly, ‘�e
system understands temporal relations’, in relation to an
algorithm for analysing text,
simply means that it digested and produced a functional
timeline that is similar to a
human one. A functionalist stance also allows for a comparison
of qualitative
experiences or ‘qualia’. I have my own subjective experience of
the translation of the
last haiku written by Matsuo Bashō, a 17th-century Japanese
poet:
Sick on a journey –
over parched fields
dreams wander on.
While my experience of reading these lines is private and
different from anyone else’s,
it can be compared with yours – or a computer’s – by
experimentally testing how
similar our reactions are.
�is empirical kind of analysis might strike the sensitive reader
of fiction or poetry as
rather strange. Algorithms are still very far off being able to
produce the full range of
functional outputs that a human can upon digesting a text. But if
it weren’t possible
to compare the effects of different subjective experiences of
reading, it would make
no sense to talk of literature resonating among different people,
either between the
writer and the reader or among multiple readers. Yet that’s
exactly what literature
does. Whether we like it or not, slicing up a text into
comparable bits is already an

undeniable part of our critical repertoire. And, as research into
machine intelligence
http://www.fflch.usp.br/df/opessoa/Dennett-Quining-Qualia.pdf
progresses, such functional, computational analysis promises to
become only more
significant.
lgorithms might be poor at grasping context, but they excel at
sifting through
large amounts of data. �is means they’re well-suited to what
Franco Moretti at
the Stanford Literary Lab calls ‘distant reading’ – a zoomed-
out, macroscopic literary
analysis of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of texts. By
crunching through this ‘big
data’, Moretti and his followers hope to discover aspects of
literature that are invisible
to scholars who go about merely reading books.
Conversation is one area where computational methodology has
been shown to
trump the claims of literary scholars – even scientifically
inclined ones. In his Atlas of
the European Novel (1999), Moretti suggested that the bustling
urban setting of much
19th-century fiction tends to involve more characters but less

dialogue, compared
with narratives set within the confines of the family in the
village or the countryside. A
group of computational linguists and literary scholars at
Columbia University decided
to investigate this claim, using software that built a
conversational social network
from a corpus of 60 novels from the 19th century.
�e software parsed each sentence in terms of its syntax, and
then found references
to people. It also flagged stretches of quoted speech and
attributed the quotes to
speakers. �is allowed the system to discern who was talking to
whom. Although
Moretti’s theory predicted an inverse correlation between the
amount of dialogue and
the number of characters, these scholars found no such
statistically significant effect.
Instead, they discovered that narrative voice, such as first- or
third-person narration,
was more relevant than the setting in urban or rural
environments.
A
https://www.versobooks.com/books/1421-distant-reading
http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~delson/pubs/ACL2010-
ElsonDamesMcKeown.pdf

Characters are another area ripe for empirical re-examination.
Readers often have
strong intuitions about fictional figures. We recognise the
imprint of an individual
author, seeing characters as, say, Dickensian or Kafkaesque. We
are also aware that
characters can fall into certain functional classes across
different works. It’s clear that
a villain such as Lord Voldemort resembles Count Dracula more
than he does his
antagonist, the hero Harry Potter.
�e computational linguist David Bamman, now at the
University of California,
Berkeley, and colleagues, mined a database of more than 15,000
novels to produce a
Bayesian statistical model that could predict different character
types. �ey used
features such as the actions that a person participates in, the
objects they possess,
and their attributes. �e system was able to identify cases where
two characters by the
same author happen to be more similar to each other than to a
closely related
character by a different author. So the system discovered that
Wickham in Jane
Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) resembles Willoughby in
her Sense and Sensibility
(1811), more than either character resembles Mr Rochester in
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane
Eyre (1847).
They can discover trajectories from a database of 1,300
novels – this would take literary scholars a huge amount of
time

�e computer could also tell when protagonists by the same
author are distinguished,
for example, by being more thoughtful. �eir system infers that
Elizabeth Bennet in
http://acl2014.org/acl2014/P14-1/pdf/P14-1035.pdf
Pride and Prejudice, one of Austen’s most popular characters,
resembles Elinor
Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility more than either character
resembles Elizabeth’s
foolish, marriage-obsessed mother, Mrs Bennet. Having a
human specify what
underlies these scholarly intuitions is hard, but the computer
has little difficulty
spotting and testing them.
Algorithms are also becoming adept at unpicking the knotty
entanglements of
characters’ relationships. For example, the computer scientist
Mohit Iyyer and
colleagues at the University of Maryland have developed a
system that discovers, from
reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the correct trajectory of
the relationship
between Arthur and Lucy, which starts with love and ends with
murder. �eir method
can correctly discover numerous other trajectories from a

database of more than
1,300 novels – inferences that would take literary scholars a
huge amount of time to
detect.
It’s not hard to imagine a near-term scenario where a character
such as Robin Hood
could be tracked through time across multiple texts. He starts
out as a cut-throat,
anti-clerical outlaw who robs the rich to help the poor; moves to
his 19th-century
incarnation as a regional hero battling the Norman nobles; and
ends up as a fox in a
Disney film. To a scholar attuned to the cultural turn in literary
studies, the details of
Robin Hood’s transformation through time could reveal facts
about class conflict, the
interactions of literature and power, and the constraints and
pressures of mass
entertainment.
n 1928, the Russian structuralist Vladimir Propp published an
inventory of 31
narrative archetypes or ‘functions’ that underpin common
Russian folktales. In theI
https://cs.umd.edu/~miyyer/pubs/2016_naacl_relationships.pdf
http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/propp.pdf

narrative function of ‘Villainy’, for example, a villain abducts
someone, while in
‘Receipt of a Magical Agent’, a character can place himself at
the disposal of the hero.
Could an algorithm today generate and improve upon Propp’s
narrative functions? In
his AI dissertation at MIT, the computer scientist Mark
Finlayson built a system that
drew on an annotated English translation of Propp’s Russian
corpus. He discovered
several new narrative plot structures – finding, for example, that
kidnapping, seizing
and tormenting are the hallmarks of Proppian villainy.
Until this sort of analysis came along, finding and examining
the morphologies of
folklore took years of careful reading and analysis. �ough
structuralism is no longer
in fashion among literary scholars, computational embodiments
of these insights have
led to intriguing results. Using Propp’s narrative functions, a
group of AI researchers
at the Complutense University of Madrid have developed a
system known as
PropperWryter, which automatically generates Russian-style
fairy tales. �e results
are still rudimentary, but intriguing all the same:
Once upon a time there was a princess. �e princess said not to
go outside.
�e princess went outside. �e princess heard about the lioness.
�e lioness
scared the princess. �e lioness kidnapped the princess. �e
knight
departured. �e knight and the lioness fought. �e knight won the

fight. �e
knight solved the problem of the princess. �e knight returned.
A big
treasure to the knight.
�e team have since extended the tool to create plot lines for
musical theatre –
including Beyond the Fence, the first ever computer-generated
musical, which ran for
http://users.cis.fiu.edu/~markaf/doc/finlayson.2012.thesis.mit.p
hd.pdf
several weeks at the Arts �eatre in London this year.
Such experiments raise the tantalising possibility that AI
systems could be literary
creators themselves one day. Several years ago, Marc Cavazza
and his colleagues at
Teesside University in Middlesbrough built an immersive
interactive storytelling
system in virtual reality, using excerpts of Gustave Flaubert’s
novel Madame Bovary
(1857). Human users took on the role of a character and
interacted with Emma
Bovary to influence the plot outcomes. �e developers created
an inventory of
character feelings based on Flaubert’s preliminary studies for
the novel.

Without algorithmic assistance, researchers would be hard-
pressed to make such intriguing findings
In one path through the system, by the time her affair has been
going on for a while,
Emma is comfortable with the risk of adultery, and also swayed
by Rodolphe’s power
over her. �ese states are preconditions for her expressing her
feelings to Rodolphe,
causing her to tell him: ‘�ere are times when I long to see you
again!’ At this
juncture, the user (in the role of Rodolphe) could reply: ‘I will
leave you and never see
you again.’ �is response will make Emma angry and trigger a
chain of events,
including regret for falling for Rodolphe, and discovery of
happiness in family life (an
outcome that might have upset Flaubert). On other occasions,
users ended up
drastically curtailing the story by providing excessive
‘emotional input’ to an already
overwrought Emma.
http://tees.openrepository.com/tees/bitstream/10149/58296/4/58
296.pdf
https://ive.scm.tees.ac.uk/data/media/lugrin-vrst2010.pdf
Inderjeet Mani

More recently, these researchers have focused on generating
animated medical soap
operas involving virtual characters such as doctors, nurses and
patients. Participants
can specify certain social relations between characters, such as
extreme antagonism
between a pair. �ese choices produce unpredictable narrative
actions, such as the
spreading of malicious gossip, and result in the creation of an
episode that users can
watch.
Computational analysis and ‘traditional’ literary interpretation
need not be a winner-
takes-all scenario. Digital technology has already started to blur
the line between
creators and critics. In a similar way, literary critics should
start combining their deep
expertise with ingenuity in their use of AI tools, as Broadwell
and Tangherlini did with
WitchHunter. Without algorithmic assistance, researchers would
be hard-pressed to
make such supernaturally intriguing findings, especially as the
quantity and diversity
of writing proliferates online.
In the future, scholars who lean on digital helpmates are likely
to dominate the rest,
enriching our literary culture and changing the kinds of
questions that can be
explored. �ose who resist the temptation to unleash the
capabilities of machines will
have to content themselves with the pleasures afforded by
smaller-scale, and fewer,
discoveries. While critics and book reviewers may continue to

be an essential part of
public cultural life, literary theorists who do not embrace AI
will be at risk of
becoming an exotic species – like the librarians who once used
index cards to search
for information.
https://ive.scm.tees.ac.uk/data/media/aamas13-porteous-full.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=102&v=enMzP
0kvNH8
aeon.co
is a computational linguist based in �ailand. He is a retired
former associate professor
of linguistics at Georgetown University, and also formerly a
principal scientist at Yahoo
Labs. His books include �e Imagined Moment (2010)
and Computational Modeling of
Narrative (2012), and he has also published numerous papers
and short stories.
6 December 2016
2/25/2021 Gregory Heyworth: How I'm discovering the secrets
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2/25/2021 Scientists Fallen Among Poets

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Scientists Fallen Among Poets
What the Romantics learned from scientists, and vice versa
Algis Valiunas
W hen one mentions the Romantics, poetry and not science is
the first thing that comes to mind. The iconicRomantic image of
the scientist is William Blake’s highly unflattering Newton
(1795), a color print finished
in watercolor, hanging in London’s Tate Gallery. The scientist
appears as a heroic nude, imposingly muscled like a
triumphant warrior. However, the figure’s pose is a far cry from
the virile address of Michelangelo’s David or
Cellini’s Perseus. Newton sits on a rock ledge, folded over so
that his chest rests on his knees — an attitude that,
assumed for more than thirty seconds, would serve as an acute
stress position under enhanced interrogation.
With a geometrician’s compass he is inscribing a semicircle
within a triangle, and he embodies the mathematical
order in which he is rapt. The muscles outlining his back ribs
form a perfect row of rhomboids; an equilateral
triangle set on its vertex and a larger triangle that caps the first
define the junction of his hip and lower back; his
left hand drops from his wrist at a right angle, quite
uncomfortably, it would seem, and the fingers of that hand

are bent to form a triangle along with one leg of the compass
that they hold, so that the hand appears to be of a
piece with the instrument; his left foot protrudes from beneath
the ledge he is sitting on, as though he were
riveted to matter; and he is clearly oblivious to everything but
the figure he is drawing, the calculations he is
making. What Newton cannot see is the spectacular iridescence
of the immense rock he is perched on, and the
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tremulous darkness of the night sky that one would expect to
entrance a natural philosopher, as it clearly does the
artist. The appropriate amazement at nature’s magnificence is
far beyond poor Newton. He is a grind, without
imagination, without insight, without a chance of ever
understanding what he is supposed to be doing on this
earth.
Newton, William Blake (1795)
Tate Gallery / Wikimedia

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This Newton is a consummate specimen of a particular human
type, and it is a type that Blake despises. Indeed,
Newton’s long, hunched torso can only be a deliberate
recollection of Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar (also 1795), which
shows the Babylonian king on all fours, reduced to beastliness
and insanity by a vengeful God sick of his
monstrous sinfulness (Daniel 4:33). The mathematical
physicist’s universe, Blake teaches, with a vengeance, is a
form of pernicious unreality, akin to the moral dementia of the
downright vicious. Science, as exemplified by its
preeminent genius to that time, had no more determined
antagonist than this visionary poet and painter, who
when he looked at the sun saw not a round disc of fire
resembling a gold coin, but rather “an Innumerable
company of the heavenly host crying ‛Holy, Holy, Holy is the
Lord God Almighty.’” It’s hard for even the highest
mechanics to argue with that.
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Nebuchadnezzar, William Blake (1795)
Tate Gallery / Wikimedia
Not every Romantic poet shared Blake’s animus toward science
in general or Newton in particular. In the revised
version of The Prelude, William Wordsworth recalls the
inspiring proximity of his student rooms at St. John’s
College, Cambridge, to the Trinity College chapel just over the
wall, where the most distinguished intelligence the
university had ever produced was memorialized.
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And from my pillow, looking forth by light
Of Moon or favouring stars, I could behold
The Antechapel where the Statue stood

Of Newton, with his prism and his silent face,
The marble index of a Mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.
Wordsworth believed that poets and scientists ought to voyage
together through the strangest seas of thought,
and thereby discover new worlds where modern men could
fulfill their need for astonishment and eventually
learn their true place in this enchanted universe.
Reviewed in this article
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered
the Beauty and Terror of Science
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Richard Holmes
Richard Holmes, the much-honored biographer of the Romantic
poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, has now written The Age of Wonder: How the

Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of
Science, and he demonstrates what certain poets, scientists, and
adventurers of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries in Britain had in common: amazement that
the world and the human mind’s capacity to
understand it should be such a congenial fit, and hope that the
enriched mind would transform the world for
human benefit. Holmes has produced a Romantic history of
Romantic science, with an expert biographer’s
emphasis on the passionate lives that gave rise to feats of daring
and flights of genius: he treats such figures as
Joseph Banks, sailor with Captain Cook, botanist, pioneer
anthropologist, and scientific impresario; William and
Caroline Herschel, brother and sister astronomers peerless in
their day; Mungo Park, the African explorer
superbly doomed; Humphry Davy, master chemist, heroic
inventor, and sometime poet; John Abernethy and
William Lawrence, the medical men who instigated the vitalism
debate as to whether human life was animated by
a God-given soul or propelled by random electrical discharges;
and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who made the
most famous contribution to that debate, the novel Frankenstein.
Their erotic lives, sometimes flamboyant and
disorderly, get considerable play — they may be scientists, but
they are Romantics after all — yet it is their

consuming intellectual fire that deservedly blazes throughout
Holmes’s eloquent pages. Theirs is the forgotten, or
at least neglected, generation of scientists, consigned to
inconsequence in the shadow of the illustrious poets who
were sometimes their friends and admirers, but whom history
has pretty well declared their triumphant rivals.
Holmes’s outstanding study, scholarly with a popular touch,
fervently begins to make amends for this gross
injustice to our rightful intellectual forebears.
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H
Teasing out the implications of Wordsworth’s reverence for
Newton, Holmes identifies certain aspects of the
Romantic idea of science that remain an essential part of our
own beliefs, whether these happen to be quite true
or not. Thus scientific genius works in sublime solitude, driven
by impulses of imperious ferocity, indifferent to

ordinary human needs and moral strictures, defying Heaven
itself in the quest for knowledge, enjoying ecstatic
moments of revelatory apprehension in which the great
questions receive their answer. The poets have had more
to do with promoting this image than have actual scientists.
Frankenstein and Goethe’s Faust have profoundly
shaped the modern view of the scientist who will stop at nothing
to lay bare the secrets of the universe. But on a
closer look, this image of scientists plainly resembles Romantic
poets’ understanding of themselves; and some of
the poets have derived this self-image from their admiration for
scientists of genius — genius that even poets in
all their vanity acknowledge to rival their own. This
complicated relation between poetry and science is a theme
that Holmes continually retrieves and reexamines, and it forms
a principal interest of this fascinating book.
umphry Davy (1778-1829) was the foremost chemist of his day,
and his day saw the ascent of chemistry to
the very pinnacle of scientific prestige. In his early twenties he
conducted perilous experiments inhaling
gases of unknown properties, almost killing himself on
occasion, but thereby discovering the anesthetic quality of
nitrous oxide, which he was known to employ for purposes of
conviviality and frolic, though he failed to follow

through on exploring its surgical potential. He studied
galvanism; he invented electro-chemical analysis; he
devised a coal-miner’s safety lamp that vastly reduced the
incidence of horrific underground explosions; he served
as president of the Royal Society. And he wrote poetry all his
life, publishing his youthful efforts in the Annual
Anthology edited by Robert Southey, and after 1800 scribbling
tirelessly in his laboratory notebooks, for private
viewing only; his brother would gather some of these later
poems in a posthumous memoir. Southey, for his part,
was a less than sterling poet — Byron said he would be read
after Virgil was forgotten, and not till then — best
known for his biography of Lord Nelson and the tale
“Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” which just might be read
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after Virgil is forgotten. Southey sucked down laughing gas
with Davy, and the pair of highbrow huffers became
fast friends in Bristol in 1799, conversing with the delectable
abandon of fledgling polymaths.
Coleridge, already on his way to becoming an opium fiend,
joined them for a dose of the gas, and he coined the

word psychosomatic to evoke its combined effect on body and
mind. When Davy came up to London for the first
time in his life in November 1799, Coleridge introduced him at
dinner to William Godwin, Charles Lamb, and
other artistic types, who all thought Davy would be doing a
disservice to his extraordinary gifts by confining
himself to chemistry. Coleridge daydreamed of establishing a
“little colony” for joint poetic and scientific
endeavor, comprising himself, Davy, and Wordsworth — though
the latter two had not yet met. Godwin tried to
disabuse Coleridge of his mostly ignorant passion for chemistry,
but, as Coleridge boasted to Davy about his
retort to the philosopher, the besotted poet “affirmed that
[chemistry] united the opposite advantages of
immaterialising the mind without destroying the definiteness of
the Ideas — nay even while it gave clearness to
them.”
Clearness was a virtue that Coleridge reserved for special
occasions; he did deploy it, however, when he went on
to tell Davy of his surpassing esteem for science: “being
necessarily performed with the passion of Hope, it was
poetical.” Poets were to join scientists in realizing the highest
aspirations of the new era. To penetrate the laws of

nature was necessarily to discern and promulgate the moral law,
and poets and scientists alike were seeing to it
that the moral law was ever more refined and amenable to
human need. As Holmes writes, science and poetry
focused “moral energy and imaginative longing” on a happy and
fulfilling future for humanity. Davy shared
Coleridge’s ardent belief in the leading social and political role
they were to play, “and ‛Hope’ became one of his
watchwords.” Lightning bolts of expectation flashed in their
correspondence. In November 1800, Davy wrote, “I
have made some important galvanic discoveries which seem to
lead to the door of the temple of life.” Coleridge
pressed accolades and exhortations upon the young wizard, and
in his own notebooks began to display a flair for
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precise natural description that could be called scientific. “He
felt that the new poetry and the new science were
so closely entwined that they must somehow merge, and invited
Davy to move north and establish a chemistry
laboratory in the Lake District. Coleridge announced: ‛I shall
attack Chemistry, like a Shark.’”

However, while Coleridge was becoming ever more enthusiastic
over the prospect of a united front of genius that
would transform the world, Southey was becoming convinced
that science disabled its practitioners for poetry,
and that the example of Davy proved his point. In February
1800 Southey dismissed Davy’s chances of ever
developing into an excellent poet: to make himself a first-rate
chemist required all of Davy’s powers, and the
talents he was cultivating were in any case incompatible with a
poet’s soul. In August 1801 Southey wrote to
Coleridge, “I wish it were not true, but it unfortunately is, that
experimental philosophy always deadens the
feelings; and these men who ‛botanize upon their mothers’
graves,’ may retort and say, that cherished feelings
deaden our usefulness; — and so we are all well in our way.”
The animus here is as sharp as in Blake’s picture of
Newton. Science in Southey’s view extinguishes wonder, to
which poetry has exclusive rights. That Southey is a
mediocrity, Goldilocks notwithstanding, makes him Holmes’s
ideal foil for the undeniable genius of Coleridge
and Davy. (Blake is a tougher case, and Holmes circumspectly
avoids taking him head-on.)
Coleridge of course resisted Southey’s animadversions. In
January 1802 Coleridge attended Davy’s remarkably
popular lectures on agricultural chemistry, which ranged

exhilaratingly beyond their putative subject, hailing
chemistry as the foundation of scientific advance; trumpeting
the ascent of man from superstition and moral
torpor to genuine knowledge of himself and his world; and
predicting the striking improvement of ordinary life in
the near future, “a bright day of which we already behold the
dawn.” Later that year Coleridge collaborated with
Wordsworth on the Preface to the third edition of their Lyrical
Ballads, and there Davy could be seen striding
before them into a future glorious for science, for poetry, and
for humanity pure and simple:
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If the labours of Men of science should ever create any material
revolution, direct or indirect, in our
condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive,
the Poet will sleep no more than at present;
he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of science, not
only in those general indirect effects, but he
will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the

objects of science itself. The remotest discoveries of
the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper
objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it
can be employed.
Here science marches in the vanguard, and poetry follows its
heroic lead, certainly not without a heroism all its
own, but nevertheless admitting its subordinate role — although
such subordination evidently does not sit
comfortably with poets of the highest rank, for in the same
sentence poetry goes from being a follower to taking
its place right beside science, so Coleridge and Wordsworth do
not concede all primacy to Davy and his
profession. In any event, poetry needs science, which lifts the
veil from nature, and science needs poetry, which
elaborates for public appreciation the beauty of the secrets that
have been unveiled.
In 1807 Davy raised his magniloquent voice in praise of the
seekers of truth and beauty, which are so nearly allied:
The perception of truth is almost as simple a feeling as the
perception of beauty; and the genius of Newton,
of Shakespeare, of Michael Angelo, and of Handel, are not very
remote in character from each other.
Imagination, as well as the reason, is necessary to perfection in
the philosophic mind. A rapidity of combination, a

power of perceiving analogies, and of comparing them by facts,
is the creative source of discovery. Discrimination
and delicacy of sensation, so important in physical research, are
other words for taste; and love of nature is
the same passion, as the love of the magnificent, the sublime,
and the beautiful.
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S
As John Keats would later write in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in
Romantic poetry’s most famous lines, “‛Beauty is
truth, truth beauty,’ — that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye
need to know.” The scientist of genius would have
agreed with the poet on this point, at least in part — although
the scientist would have insisted that there is
always more you need to know.
ometimes the truth is not so beautiful, however. That men and
women who consecrate their lives to
knowledge will risk all in its pursuit is another tenet of
Romanticism, and the example of Mungo Park (1771-
1806) testifies to the bitter fate that knowledge sometimes holds

in store. Not that there weren’t moments of high
adventure and rare insight along the way. In 1794 Park set out
on an expedition to explore the territory of the
River Niger, with only two African servants to accompany him.
He hoped to reach the legendary city of
Timbuctoo, but eventualities intervened. A Moorish chieftain
abducted the servants, and held Park captive; the
chieftain’s wife and her female retinue inspected him to
determine “whether the rite of circumcision extended to
the Nazarenes, as well as the followers of Mahomet … I thought
it best to treat the business jocularly.”
In due course Park made his escape, and one evening a woman
who had been working in the fields by the river
took him in. She and several other women of her family fed him
and sang him to sleep — a plaintive extemporized
lullaby whose subject was Park himself. The song told of the
African women’s compassion for this lone white man
buffeted by winds and pelted by rain, exhausted and forlorn,
with neither wife nor mother to care for him. As
Holmes writes, “The women reversed all Park’s assumptions
about his travels in Africa.” He was not the intrepid
bearer of civilization to the pitiable natives, but was himself
pitiable, an importunate stranger. “It was he who
came and sat under their tree, and drank at their river.”

Park was to find out just how pitiable and importunate he was
— and then how splendid. Having turned back
from his attempt to reach Timbuctoo, he was waylaid by
Moorish marauders, who robbed him of nearly
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everything — horse, compass, all his clothing but his trousers,
boots, and hat, where his travel journal was stuck in
the band. Leaving him to waste away slowly in the wilderness
was evidently richer Moorish amusement than
butchering him on the spot. Five hundred miles from the nearest
European outpost, Park resigned himself to
death. But then, as he records in Travels in the Interior of
Africa (1799), scientific wonder and its concomitant
religious hope saved him from despair:
At this moment, painful as my reflections were, the
extraordinary beauty of a small moss in fructification,
irresistibly caught my eye. I mention this to show from what
trifling circumstances the mind will
sometimes derive consolation; for though the whole plant was
not larger than the top of one of my fingers,

I could not contemplate the delicate conformation of its roots,
leaves, and capsula, without admiration.
If God could lavish such care upon so apparently insignificant a
plant, would He abandon indifferently a noble
creature made in His own image? You bet He wouldn’t: and
thus inspired, Park got up and kept going, soon
coming upon two amicable shepherds, and eventually making
his way home, paying for food and shelter by
writing Koranic phrases on bits of paper from his journal that he
sold as talismans.
Park’s Travels made him famous and well-off; he married his
childhood sweetheart and tried to settle into a quiet
life as a country doctor in Scotland. Boredom and wanderlust,
however, got the better of him, and he was off to
West Africa again in 1805, this time under the auspices of the
Colonial Office, which in the midst of the
Napoleonic wars was determined to stake out an imperial trade
route down the Niger. Forty British volunteer
troops set out under Park’s leadership; five hundred miles later,
when the expedition made it to the river, only
twelve were left alive, the rest taken by malaria and dysentery,
Park himself tormented by illness.
Improvising a so-called schooner from two native canoes
knocked together, Park and his depleted crew took off

downriver. His strange refusal to pay tribute money to the tribal
chiefs along the way apparently maddened the
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locals, who attacked them at every turn. At last, some five
hundred miles downstream of Timbuctoo — which
Park never did enter, for fear of the natives — Tuareg tribesmen
ambushed the boat, and Park met his end. The
sole survivor of the attack, an African slave, said that when
everyone else on board was dead or dying, Park leapt
into the water, holding another white man in his arms. That was
the last sight of him.
Park’s exploits captivated the public, and naturally the poets
too, as Holmes details. In an early version of The
Prelude, Wordsworth envisioned the explorer “alone and in the
heart of Africa,” prostrated by the desert sun and
expecting to die, only to recover his senses and find his horse
waiting patiently beside him, as the sun was
forgivingly setting. In the end Wordsworth cut this section,

deferring to Southey, who in his epic poem Thalaba
the Destroyer (1801) had leaned heavily on Park’s harrowing
adventures. Southey’s long note to the poem makes
the connection explicit: “Perhaps no traveller but Mr. Park ever
survived to relate similar sufferings.” Here
Southey came up short as usual, Holmes avers, inserting the
needle: “But this is a case where the historical fact is
more powerful than the fiction based upon it. Park’s quiet,
fresh, limpid prose has easily outlasted Southey’s
gaudy, melodramatic poem.”
Percy Shelley, however, made something lasting of his
imaginative response to Park’s ordeals, the epic Alastor, or
the Spirit of Solitude (1815), which in Holmes’s description
“deeply reflects the spiritual loneliness of the desert
traveller who pursues a perilous river, and knows he will
probably never return.” Romantic poets loved the lone
wanderer probing the dark places of the earth, braving death,
and often finding it; and poetry like Shelley’s
elevated the scientific or the commercial undertakings of an
explorer like Park into “an unearthly Miltonic quest
for the strange and magnificent limits of the known world.”
Romantic poetry at its best made Romantic
exploration even more wondrous than it already was.
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W
illiam Herschel (1738-1822), an émigré from Germany to
England, a composer and professional musician, and a
self-taught astronomer of uncanny abilities who built his own
reflector telescopes, more powerful than
any others of that time, discovered the seventh planet in the
solar system, Uranus, in 1781 — the first such
discovery in over a thousand years, since Ptolemy. Scanning the
heavens on March 13, Herschel noted “a
curious either nebulous star or perhaps a Comet.” On the 17th
he decided the heavenly being must be a comet, for
it had moved across the sky. He tried to measure the comet with
a micrometer of his own recent devising, and on
the 28th observed that its diameter had increased, so that it must
be coming nearer. But on April 6 he remarked
that the object did not have a tail or “coma” and therefore could

not be a comet after all. The only thing it could
be was a “wanderer” — a planet.
His more distinguished colleagues, including the Astronomer
Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, initially doubted Herschel’s
report. Not only was Herschel lacking in credentials, but the
previous year he had published a paper in the Royal
Society’s Philosophical Transactions of staggering eccentricity,
declaring that his nonpareil homemade telescope
had made him privy to a visionary’s knowledge: he had seen
forests on the moon, and believed that “in all
probability” lunar creatures dwelled there. But Maskelyne
looked at the supposed new planet himself, and after
some hesitation, pronounced himself in agreement with
Herschel. During the spring and summer, French,
German, Italian, and Swedish astronomers joined in assent. In
October the Russian mathematical virtuoso Anders
Lexell computed the planet’s orbit, and placed the huge planet
at an incredible distance from the sun, doubling
the span of the known solar system. Seven months after
Herschel’s sighting, the French Académie des Sciences
officially acknowledged the planet’s existence, based on the
orbital calculation of Jérôme Lalande. Lalande
believed “Herschel” would be the appropriate name for the
planet. His suggestion never caught on.

The gradual and painstaking confirmation process, which
involved the combined efforts of the international
scientific community, did not suit the Romantic notions that
Herschel had of his own momentous discovery. In
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an autobiographical sketch Herschel wrote in 1809, he insisted
that on first sight of the planet he had known
what he was looking at: “the goodness of my telescope was such
that I perceived its planetary disk as soon as I
looked at it; and by application of my micrometer, I determined
its motion in a few hours.” Holmes is forgiving of
Herschel’s tall tale about this “Eureka moment,” which in fact
required weeks of observation for him and months
of verification by his far-flung colleagues: “It is hardly
surprising that over the years he continued romantically to
refine the story, and compressed his discovery into a single
wondrous night, the inspired work of a glorious ‛few
hours.’” This after all was the way Romantic science was
supposed to be done — by the solitary genius intoxicated
with astonishment, taking vast gulps of the night sky, singing
his findings like an ancient bard.

Holmes points out that Keats sang of Herschel, if without
naming him, in his sonnet “On First Looking into
Chapman’s Homer,” written in a four-hour burst of inspiration
early one morning in October 1816. The ancient
bard, the astronomer, and the explorer Cortez (whom the poet
confuses with Balboa) flame in Keats’s mind as
heroes for the ages, and he believes that to commemorate their
genius in a Romantic poem of genius gives them
some slight portion of the glory they deserve:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like …
2/25/2021 'Brave New World,' Plato's 'Republic,' and Our
Scientific Regime
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Brave New World, Plato’s Republic, and Our Scientific Regime
To govern science, we must step out of the cave.
Matthew J. Franck
F or much of the Cold War, George Orwell’s novel 1984
eclipsed Aldous Huxley’s earlier work Brave NewWorld.
Orwell’s book, published in 1949, seemed to many readers the

more apt dystopia for understanding
the challenge of totalitarianism, since it could be said to capture
the essential character of the regimes on the
other side of the Iron Curtain. With the Cold War now long
over, and with that era’s public preoccupation with
space, military technology, and the physical sciences redirected
toward the biological and behavioral sciences and
their potential to reshape human beings and society, Huxley’s
dark tale has seemed “relevant” again. This is a
judgment that would not have surprised its author. Huxley’s
latest biographer, Nicholas Murray, explains that
when Orwell sent Huxley an early copy of 1984, Huxley wrote
back to say “that he had enjoyed it but believed his
book [Brave New World] was better prophecy,” with its portrait
of a gentler but more effective totalitarianism than
Orwell’s “boot smashing down on the face.”
Though Huxley clearly intended his 1932 book as a dystopia,
Murray reports that the novel was “popular with
American college students in the 1950s” for its portents of
sexual liberation, and that the contemporary French
novelist Michel Houellebecq, in the words of one of his
characters, treats Brave New World as “exactly the sort of
world we’re trying to create, the world we want to live in.”
Murray himself, whose strong suit is Huxley’s personal

life rather than his literary production, plays up the respects in
which the novel is a “critique of modern
consumerism.” To be sure, there are the planned obsolescence
of consumer goods, the conditioned desire for
empty recreations, and the replacement of God with the shade of
Henry Ford. But this is superficial. A more
penetrating view was taken by Rebecca West, who in a 1932
review of the book in the Daily Telegraph called it “the
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Scientific Regime

most serious religious work written for some years,” and
remarked that in one pivotal scene Huxley had
“rewritten in terms of our age the chapter called ‘The Grand
Inquisitor’ in The Brothers Karamazov.” (West’s
comparison was discussed at length in these pages in Caitrin
Nicol’s essay “Brave New World at 75,” Spring 2007.)
But an even more telling comparison can be made — that Brave
New World is a modern counterpart to the “city in
speech” built by Socrates and his young interlocutors in Plato’s
Republic. Whether Huxley saw the similarities
himself is far from clear. In neither the “Foreword” added to the
1946 edition nor his lengthy 1958 essay Brave New
World Revisited, which is published together with the novel in
some editions, does he indicate any consciousness
of a parallel. Nor do his Complete Essays (published 2000 –
2002) shed light on this. His biographer Murray
mentions no such connection in Huxley’s mind either; nor does
his earlier biographer Sybille Bedford. Yet it may
not be necessary to confirm any precise authorial intention on
Huxley’s part to imitate Plato. Whereas Huxley’s
other novels are largely forgotten today by the general public,
and his later visits to the themes of Brave New World
are those of a crank whose imaginative gifts have deserted him,

in writing his greatest work he seems to have been
in the grip of an idea larger than himself. Plato’s Socrates tells
us in the Apology that when he “went to the poets”
to “ask them thoroughly what they meant” in their greatest
poems, he found to his surprise that “almost everyone
present, so to speak, would have spoken better than the poets
did about the poetry that they themselves had
made.” For as Socrates said (not without some biting irony) in
Plato’s Ion, “all the good epic poets speak all their
fine poems not from art but by being inspired and possessed,
and it is the same for the good lyric poets.” Perhaps
during the mere four months it took Huxley to write Brave New
World, he was “possessed” in this way and
remained forever unconscious of his debt to Plato.
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Scientific Regime
F
The Structure of Huxley’s World State
rom the first paragraph of the novel, we learn the motto of the
World State of Huxley’s imagination:
“Community, Identity, Stability.” This brings to mind Socrates’
question to Glaucon in The Republic: “Have
we any greater evil for a city than what splits it and makes it
many instead of one? Or a greater good than what
binds it together and makes it one?” Socrates and Glaucon agree
that “that city [is] best governed which is most
like a single human being.” In the same vein, the individual in
the World State is “just a cell in the social body.” As
for stability, described by one of Huxley’s chief characters as
“the primal and the ultimate need,” this is something
Socrates cannot guarantee regarding his city in speech: he tells
his young friends that their city is “so composed”

as to be “hard to be moved,” but that “since for everything that
has come into being there is decay,” even it will not
“remain for all time.” At the end of Brave New World, we have
no reason to believe that Huxley’s World
Controllers have not conquered the problem of decay. They
appear to have achieved a perfectly static perfect
justice. But then, unlike the rulers in Socrates’ city — unlike
Socrates himself — they have wholly mastered a
science that is (in Socrates’ words) “sovereign of better and
worse begettings.” For the need to conquer human
nature by eugenics is only the most obvious matter where Plato
and Huxley meet on common ground. (All
quotations from the Republic in this essay are drawn from Allan
Bloom’s translation.)
The necessity of eugenics is driven by another principle the two
polities have in common: “one man, one art.”
Each cell in the social body has its peculiar work to do. As
Plato’s Socrates divides his city into three classes — the
golden guardians, the silver auxiliaries, and the iron or bronze
farmers and artisans — Huxley’s World State has
the five classes of Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon.
Socrates recognizes that he cannot keep his classes
differentiated — hence he cannot keep the city stable — without
keeping a “careful … watch” over the children

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Scientific Regime
born to the parents in each class, transferring up and down the
social scale those children who are better fitted to
be reared in another class than the one into which they were
born. Ultimately, with respect to the gold class,
Socrates opts for a concerted eugenics program that involves the
destruction of marriage and the family and the
concealment of every child’s peculiar parentage, with
childrearing handed over to a common nursery.
But Huxley does Socrates one better. The World State has
completely severed sexual intercourse from
procreation. No more viviparous reproduction; instead, the
Hatchery and Conditioning Centre has taken over the
whole work of producing each generation of citizens. Babies are
made there on the assembly line by strictly
selected in vitro fertilization and gestation, and their
conditioning for their role in life begun even before they are

“decanted.” Special lines of “plus” and “minus” models of each
class are manufactured, from “Alpha-Plus” to
“Epsilon-Minus Semi-Moron.” Descending to even more
particularity, they are prepared for their precise adult
jobs by doses of chemicals, exposure to heat and cold and other
stimuli, and — after decanting — by early-
childhood conditioning to like or dislike objects like books a nd
flowers or experiences like darkness or sunshine.
But will not the State need many workers identically made to do
certain low-class jobs requiring mass manpower?
That is solved in part by Bokanovsky’s Process, a method akin
to in vitro cloning that can produce as many as
ninety-six copies of a single embryo.
In Plato’s city, the sexes are generally equal in their
participation in public life and work — but not quite. As
Glaucon says to Socrates, they will assign “everything in
common” to both sexes, “except that we use the females
as weaker and the males as stronger.” Soon thereafter they agree
that while there is no art “practiced by human
beings in which the class of men doesn’t excel that of women,”
yet because there is “no practice relevant to the
government of a city that is peculiar to woman,” and “the
natures are scattered alike among both” sexes, the
women must be educated as the men are and assigned the same

duties. Socrates blithely leads Glaucon to neglect
even the possibility that there is an art of mothering, and to
agree to the joint exercise of the sexes, naked, in their
Scientific Regime
gymnastic training. Conditioning over time, they say, will
accustom the male and female guardians to this
immodesty. Somehow love of the city will be all they think of
when they see what would normally be other
objects of their affection.
So also in Huxley’s book, the sexes are in almost entire equality
with one another. If with the banishment of
viviparous reproduction the word “mother” is now an obscenity,
why not? And yet, the equality is not quite
complete — we never hear of a female World Controller or
other high official. But the bad joke of Socrates’ naked
unisex gymnastics is retold in Huxley’s early conditioning of
both sexes to treat intercourse as play. Children at
the Conditioning Centre, “naked in the warm June sunshine,”
engage in “ordinary erotic play.” No need to

restrain the natural sexual urges and channel them for eugenic
purposes, as Socrates had to do. With
reproduction cordoned off from sex — with every woman who
is not hormonally engineered to be a sterile
“freemartin” always going about equipped with her “Malthusian
belt” of contraceptives, and strategically located
Abortion Centres ready in case of accident — a wholly
indiscriminate recreational sexuality can be unleashed,
indeed encouraged, in both sexes.
Paramount for maintaining the basic structure of both Huxley’s
World State and Plato’s city are their educational
regimes. Socrates has his “noble lie” — a false tale about the
creation of the city and its people that, if believed to
be true, would guarantee citizens’ loyalty to the city and at the
same time contentedness about their fixed place in
it — all shored up by a strict censorship of poetry to inculcate
the most politically unifying opinions. Similarly, the
World State has its regime of “hypnopædia” (sleep teaching), in
which nocturnal repetitions of moral maxims
drone into the ears of the children until their conditioned
responses to virtually every social situation are
automatic. Like Socrates’ citizens who are schooled that they
are “brothers and born of the earth” but fashioned
by “the god” with the different metals in their natures, Huxley’s

are taught over and over that “every one belongs
to every one else,” that “all men are physico-chemically equal,”
yet steadily conditioned to be unthinkingly
Scientific Regime
content with their own station in life: “I’m really awfully glad
I’m a Beta…. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta
children.”
As they grow up, the children of the World State “learn to take
dying as a matter of course,” undergoing “death
conditioning” from an early age on field trips to the Hospital
for the Dying, where men and women of sixty go to
end lives that have been productive and pleasurable to the very
end — sixty apparently being the upper limit at
which all the powers of work and play can go on undimmed.
Socrates too insists that his city’s young charges
must “be told things that will make them fear death least,” so
that “a decent man” will believe that for his fallen
comrade “being dead is not a terrible thing.” But Socrates’ aim
is to inculcate courage among warriors, a virtue of

which there is no need in the World State, the scene of universal
peace. Where there are no enemies, there is no
need of soldiers, hence no need of physical courage in the face
of violent death. Death comes peacefully, by
prearrangement at a fixed age, in the World State. But the
mystery of death is still frightening in itself, and so a
kind of moral courage is still required, in the form (as Socrates
puts it) of an “opinion produced by law through
education about what — and what sort of thing — is terrible.”
Scientific Regime
T
The Mastery of Eros
he ideal society needs more than political organization and
proper education toward love of the state; it also
requires that citizens’ private pleasures be rightly directed.
Socrates defines moderation as “a certain kind of
order and mastery of certain kinds of pleasures and desires.”
Later in the Republic, he argues that there are three
kinds of pleasures, corresponding to “three primary classes of
human beings …: wisdom-loving, victory-loving,

gain-loving.” This describes a clear hierarchy of pleasures and
of people. In Brave New World, this hierarchy is
flattened (with the possible exception of the World Controllers,
about whom more anon). All the World State’s
citizens appear to be gain-loving, seekers of the lowest
pleasures. They play Obstacle Golf (their sports are as close
as they come to being victory-loving); they go to full-sensory
movie theaters, the “feelies” (in Huxley’s day the
“talkies” were still new); they flit about in their helicopters
from one empty entertainment to another. In the case
of Alphas, for whom this endless round of pleasures might
begin to pall, it is especially important that they
conform to “their duty to be infantile, even against their
inclination,” that they be adults at work and children at
play. Perverse though it may be, this too is a certain kind of
mastery of desire.
Yet there is an undercurrent of discontent in the World State.
Despite all the planned breeding and conditioning,
further steps are needed to keep a lid on potentially explosive
passions — or to vent them safely. Most famously,
there is soma, a narcotic that can be used daily, in moderate
doses, to take a “holiday” from reality, with no
hangover, depression, or withdrawal symptoms afterward. But
soma is still not enough. The World State’s citizens

need a monthly Violent Passion Surrogate, a hormonal treatment
designed to produce in the person the
“complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage,” but
“without any of the inconveniences.” Likewise, women
may need a Pregnancy Substitute now and then. And all citizens
are expected to attend a regular Solidarity
Scientific Regime
Service, a mockery of religious ritual culminating in a soma-
induced orgy that is supposed to reinforce the
individual’s total submersion in the community.
And it is just here, in the sacrifice of individuality, that
Huxley’s leading characters display the World State’s rare
failures. For eros is naturally directed toward the attainment of
something or someone that is one’s own, uniquely
— one’s own things, one’s own thoughts, one’s own
accomplishments, one’s own lover. Lenina Crowne, a young
worker at the Hatchery, finds she must struggle to be
conventionally promiscuous. Something in her yearns for
attachment to one man alone, but she cannot conquer her

conditioning and see her way clearly to that desire, or
articulate its object. When she meets John, the displaced son of
civilization from the New Mexico Savage
Reservation, she discovers the object of her desire. Is it merely
his strange restraint and unattainability? Or is it
something more? She cannot tell. She copes with her confusion,
and with the anguish of his rejection of her, by
doping up on soma, but still she is drawn to John at the very
end.
One of Huxley’s central characters, Bernard Marx, is a misfit.
In this uniform world, he stands out like a sore
thumb: “He stood eight centimetres short of the standard Alpha
height and was slender in proportion.” By the
standards of his world, he is as misshapen and homely as
Socrates was said to be. His physical inferiority has
turned him inward, made him thoughtful. He has become a
loner, a lover of solitude — something quite against
the grain. He cannot endure the idle banter of his fellow men
about sex and sports, he is embarrassed and
inadequate around women, and he is made emptier rather than
sated by the Solidarity Service. Bernard too has a
problem with eros, in fact a bundle of problems. He wants an
idealized Lenina but finds that the real Lenina
leaves him empty when he has her. He wants to live his own

life, think his own thoughts, wallow in his own
broodings. Working in hypnopædia at the Conditioning Centre,
he is aware of the behavior modification to
which everyone including himself has been subjected, and in
some respects he is free of it by virtue of his deep
Scientific Regime
knowledge of it. He has taken one step out of the cave of the
World State. Hence he can look back and see the
superficiality of life inside it, and he knows the value of true
friendship.
Fortunately, Bernard has one true friend, Helmholtz Watson, a
writer and teacher in the College of Emotional
Engineering. Helmholtz seems to be Bernard’s polar opposite:
tall, strikingly handsome, with many conquests
among women, and a complete social success. But for all his
apparent well-adjustedness, Helmholtz, like Bernard,
“had also become aware of his difference from the people who
surrounded him.” In Bernard he finds a kindred
spirit. The one with a “physical shortcoming,” the other with a
“mental excess,” they spend many hours together,

talking about thoughts and feelings that are bottled up inside
them and that no one else will understand.
Helmholtz has “a feeling that I’ve got something important to
say and the power to say it — only I don’t know
what it is, and I can’t make any use of the power.” As it turns
out, Helmholtz has the eros of a poet in a society
that has no need of poetry beyond the most banal slogans,
jingles, and feelie screenplays.
Bernard and Helmholtz are risking great danger, and they are
dangerous themselves. In a world that condemns
privacy and stifles private thinking, they are loners. The society
proclaims that “every one belongs to every one
else,” but they belong to each other, each enjoying the other’s
uniqueness as a person in a society that treats the
individual as fungible. While the State insists on their being
infantile and unquestioningly parroting what they
have been taught — much as the people in Plato’s famous
allegory of the cave maintain that the shadows on the
wall are reality — Bernard and Helmholtz struggle to be adults,
to stake a claim to their own thoughts and
actions. Rebelling against the ethic of play, they seek the life of
leisure, mind to mind. They are the proto-
philosopher and the proto-poet, waiting to be born anew and
having more in common than Socrates lets on in

the Republic. They are free men, or almost so, struggling to be
so. Like Lenina, but even more than she, they
cannot live down to the World State’s notion of moderation.
Scientific Regime
T
The Poet Meets the Ruling Philosopher
he world of these three characters — Bernard, Helmholtz, and
Lenina — is turned inside out by Bernard’s
discovery of John, “the Savage,” on his visit with Lenina to the
Savage Reservation in New Mexico. John is the
son of a “civilized” Beta woman, Linda, who became lost on a
visit years earlier with Bernard’s superior, the
Director of the London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre.
Marooned with the Indians on the reservation, she
discovers she is pregnant, and, far from an Abortion Centre, she
suffers the shame of giving birth to the baby who
grows up to be John. She cannot go back to civilization, and
raises her son amidst the savages. Linda never adjusts
to the “uncivilized” life, with its monogamous marriage,

primitive amenities, and syncretic mix of Christianity and
native American religion. Promiscuous as ever, she is branded a
whore by the Indian women, even beaten and
ostracized by them.
John suffers much the same ostracism, but manages to half-
insinuate himself into the savage culture, with the
help of one or two sympathetic adults. His mother teaches him
to read English with a pamphlet she had with her
when she was lost — an instruction manual for Beta workers in
the Hatchery. But when her Indian boyfriend
turns up a decayed copy of Shakespeare’s complete works, John
is introduced to the formative experience of his
life. The book becomes his constant companion, and he commits
much of it to memory.
Bernard, who has feared his superior will punish his
nonconformity with a transfer to Iceland, sees in John an
opportunity to take preemptive revenge, as soon as he discovers
that his boss is the young man’s father. He
arranges to take the Savage and his mother back to London as
an anthropological curiosity. Linda is ecstatic to be
back in the world of unlimited soma, though there is no longer
any place there for her, and after the initial shock

Scientific Regime
of disgust she engenders due to her “decay” after twenty years
among the savages, no one really takes an interest
in her.
John, on the other hand, is a celebrity, and causes a tremendous
(albeit temporary) inflation of the reputation of
Bernard, who at first controls access to him. Part of the
society’s fascination with John is that he is so mysterious.
The “civilized” have been bred, conditioned, drugged, and
entertained until strong emotions have become strange
to them — as the World Controller tells a group of young
pupils, “No pains have been spared to make your lives
emotionally easy — to preserve you, so far as that is possible,
from having emotions at all.” But John is a creature
of passion who yearns for romantic love. The “civilized” sate
every appetite the moment they feel it; John’s
religious sensibility and Shakespearean moral vocabulary
produce a strong sense of sin and temptation, and
impose an ethic of honor and restraint upon him.
John rebels against Bernard’s exploitation of him, befriends the
poetic Helmholtz, and trembles with desire for

Lenina, only to react with revulsion when she throws herself at
him. He watches his mother die of an
overconsumption of soma in the Hospital for the Dying. This is
the final straw, as he is maddened by a troupe of
young “twins” brought in to watch her die for the sake of their
“death conditioning,” violating — in John’s eyes —
the dignity of his mother’s passing. His reaction is to disrupt
the distribution of the daily soma ration to the
hospital’s Delta workers, first out of pity for them and then out
of anger, proclaiming that “I’ll make you be free
whether you want to or not.” He only succeeds in causing a riot
that brings Bernard and Helmholtz to the scene,
as well as the police (who specialize, naturally, in nonviolent
crowd control).
This is the rupture that brings John to the attention of the
Resident World Controller for Western Europe,
Mustapha Mond. Mond has appeared in several earlier scenes,
but now he takes center stage for two chapters (16
Scientific Regime

and 17) that contain a pivotal scene (the part of the book
praised by Rebecca West as reminiscent of Dostoyevsky).
What ensues is a kind of Platonic dialogue between John and
Mond, the poet and the philosopher-king.
In the Republic, following the allegory of the cave, Socrates
tells Glaucon that “those who are without education
and experience of truth would never be adequate stewards of a
city, nor would those who have been allowed to
spend their time in education continuously to the end.”
Therefore, in their city in speech, they will “compel the
best natures” to take up philosophy, but they will conjure them
in the name of justice to return from their studies
to rule the city, for “you we have …

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