Each aspect may have been somewhat over-simplified in the exposition but these successive over-simplifications add up to a picture that, I hope, gives some hint of the vastness and complexity of the original.

The subject of freedom and its enemies is enormous, and what I have written is certainly too short to do it full justice but at least I have touched on many aspects of the problem. In this way he may be able to tell, not indeed the whole truth (for the whole truth about almost any important subject is incompatible with brevity), but considerably more than the dangerous quarter-truths and half-truths which have always been the current coin of thought. He must learn to concentrate upon the essentials of a situation, but without ignoring too many of reality's qualifying side issues. He must learn to simplify, but not to the point of falsification. Abbreviation is a necessary evil and the abbreviator's business is to make the best of a job which, though intrinsically bad, is still better than nothing. In practice we are generally forced to choose between an unduly brief exposition and no exposition at all.

Omission and simplification help us to understand - but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.īut life is short and information endless: nobody has time for everything. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification.

However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situation. The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth.

Huxley brave new world online