I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition.. we have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world. John C. Eccles
About This Quote

This is an excerpt from a lecture by the author, Aldous Huxley, in which he gives a very passionate view of the spiritual implications of Darwinism. Huxley was a leading member of the English-speaking world’s intellectual elite and a key figure in the mid-twentieth century movement to create a unified humanistic science. In this lecture, he tries to explain how Darwinism undermines spirituality and religion by making humans view themselves as only material beings with no soul or spirit. In addition, he states that it is futile to seek knowledge about the spiritual world without first making an effort to understand the material world we live in. He says that we must first try and understand the secrets of the material world before we should even consider doing research on our spiritual existence.

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  1. I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition.. we have to...
  2. We regard promissory materialism as superstition without a rational foundation. The more we discover about the brain, the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena, and the more wonderful do both the brain events and the mental phenomena become....
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