“Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.”

Source: Point Counter Point

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Aldous Huxley 290
English writer 1894–1963

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“Human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.”

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“There is no object to life. To nature nothing matters but the continuation of the species.”

W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British playwright, novelist, short story writer

Source: A Writer's Notebook (1946), p. 38. Maugham says something similar in The Summing up, Ch 22: "Love was only the dirty trick nature played on us to achieve the continuation of the species"

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“Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man.”

East of Eden (1952)
Context: Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in art, in music, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning blows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.
And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for it is the one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.

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