Incapable any longer of understanding what it is all about, the man of letters, we are told, has no choice but to ignore contemporary science altogether.

[5] For Eliot and others, Huxley writes, "From their writings you would be hard put to it to infer the simple historical fact that they are the contemporaries of Einstein and Heisenberg, of computers, electron microscopes and the discovery of the molecular basis of heredity...."[6] Huxley had written decades earlier in Along the Road that "If I could be born again and choose what I should be in my next existence, I should desire to be a man of science...."[7] But in Literature and Science, as scholars have noted, the later Huxley strongly qualified that earlier aspiration in his pursuit of a grand philosophical synthesis.

Milton Birnbaum wrote in 1971 that Huxley "never embraced science as a satisfactory way to gauge the nature of ultimate reality.

"[11] Although Huxley remains best known for his early novel Brave New World, scholars agree that the strength in his later writing belongs to his non-fiction prose.

"[12] Harold H. Watts notes that Huxley's books "...in this final and extended period of his life" are "the work of a man who is meditating on the central problems of many modern men.