We devoted our previous pill, to the devastating description that the writer Aldous Huxley dedicated to his egregious compatriot Isaac Newton. It happened in an interview with the journalist and science populariser J.W.N. Sullivan (1886-1937), which is included in Sullivan’s book Contemporary mind. Right after the devastating description of Newton’s misfortunes as a human being, Huxley came to blame them on Newton’s excessive zeal for mathematics – in fact, also for science, alchemy or the Bible. “I admit that mathematical science is a good thing,” Huxley acknowledged, and then went on to qualify: “But excessive devotion to it is a bad thing. In fact, it is a bad thing to have excessive, or even worse: exclusive, devotion to anything”. And when Huxley alluded to the Greek ideal of being balanced and harmonious, and not sacrificing some of your instincts and desires for excessive zeal for others, interviewer Sullivan dropped a pearl of irony in his next question:
Are you saying, for example, that to be complete a man should be both a bit of a drunk and a bit of a mathematician?
To which Huxley replied very consistently: “I see nothing inherently wrong with alcoholism. In fact, the only reason we disapprove of anyone being an alcoholic is because it prevents him from doing anything else but drinking”.
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