Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.

Huxley frames “civilization” less as a set of monuments or technologies than as a social technology for managing human drives. “Domesticating the passions” suggests channeling raw impulses—sexual desire, aggression, ambition, fear—into stable patterns compatible with communal life. The second clause, “setting them to do useful work,” implies that societies do not merely repress passion; they harness it, converting energy that might be destructive into productivity, art, loyalty, or moral commitment. The remark fits Huxley’s recurring interest in how institutions shape consciousness and behavior, and it invites a double reading: civilization as necessary discipline, but also as a potentially coercive system that instrumentalizes inner life for collective ends.