Early Life and Intellectual Heritage
Aldous Leonard Huxley was born on 26 July 1894 in Godalming, Surrey, England, into one of the most distinguished intellectual families in Britain. His grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, the zoologist and polemicist known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his fierce public defence of evolutionary theory. His mother, Julia Arnold, founded Prior's Field School; his father, Leonard Huxley, was a writer and editor of The Cornhill Magazine. His brother Julian became a renowned evolutionary biologist and the first Director-General of UNESCO; his half-brother Andrew won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1963.
Huxley was educated at Eton College, but at age sixteen he contracted keratitis punctata, an inflammatory eye disease that left him nearly blind for two to three years and destroyed his early ambitions of becoming a doctor. His sight partially recovered, and he read English literature at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1916. The experience of near-blindness profoundly shaped his intellectual life, fostering what he later described as an intense inward attentiveness and a lifelong fascination with the nature of perception itself.
