A Modern Utopia, H. G. Wells [i like reading books .txt] 📗

and fruitful World State, that will

only not be a Utopia because it will be this world. So surely it

must be–-

 

The policeman drops his hand. “Come up,” says the ‘bus driver, and

the horses strain; “Clitter, clatter, cluck, clak,” the line of

hurrying hansoms overtakes the omnibus going west. A dexterous lad

on a bicycle with a bale of newspapers on his back dodges nimbly

across the head of the column and vanishes up a side street.

 

The omnibus sways forward. Rapt and prophetic, his plump hands

clasped round the handle of his umbrella, his billycock hat a trifle

askew, this irascible little man of the Voice, this impatient

dreamer, this scolding Optimist, who has argued so rudely and

dogmatically about economics and philosophy and decoration, and

indeed about everything under the sun, who has been so hard on the

botanist and fashionable women, and so reluctant in the matter of

beer, is carried onward, dreaming dreams, dreams that with all the

inevitable ironies of difference, may be realities when you and I

are dreams.

 

He passes, and for a little space we are left with his egoisms and

idiosyncrasies more or less in suspense.

 

But why was he intruded? you ask. Why could not a modern Utopia be

discussed without this impersonation—impersonally? It has confused

the book, you say, made the argument hard to follow, and thrown

a quality of insincerity over the whole. Are we but mocking at

Utopias, you demand, using all these noble and generalised hopes

as the backcloth against which two bickering personalities jar and

squabble? Do I mean we are never to view the promised land again

except through a foreground of fellow-travellers? There is a common

notion that the reading of a Utopia should end with a swelling heart

and clear resolves, with lists of names, formation of committees,

and even the commencement of subscriptions. But this Utopia began

upon a philosophy of fragmentation, and ends, confusedly, amidst a

gross tumult of immediate realities, in dust and doubt, with, at the

best, one individual’s aspiration. Utopias were once in good faith,

projects for a fresh creation of the world and of a most unworldly

completeness; this so-called Modern Utopia is a mere story of

personal adventures among Utopian philosophies.

 

Indeed, that came about without the writer’s intention. So it was

the summoned vision came. For I see about me a great multitude of

little souls and groups of souls as darkened, as derivative as my

own; with the passage of years I understand more and more clearly

the quality of the motives that urge me and urge them to do whatever

we do…. Yet that is not all I see, and I am not altogether bounded

by my littleness. Ever and again, contrasting with this immediate

vision, come glimpses of a comprehensive scheme, in which these

personalities float, the scheme of a synthetic wider being, the

great State, mankind, in which we all move and go, like blood

corpuscles, like nerve cells, it may be at times like brain cells,

in the body of a man. But the two visions are not seen consistently

together, at least by me, and I do not surely know that they exist

consistently together. The motives needed for those wider issues

come not into the interplay of my vanities and wishes. That greater

scheme lies about the men and women I know, as I have tried to make

the vistas and spaces, the mountains, cities, laws, and order of

Utopia lie about my talking couple, too great for their sustained

comprehension. When one focuses upon these two that wide landscape

becomes indistinct and distant, and when one regards that then the

real persons one knows grow vague and unreal. Nevertheless, I cannot

separate these two aspects of human life, each commenting on the

other. In that incongruity between great and individual inheres the

incompatibility I could not resolve, and which, therefore, I have

had to present in this conflicting form. At times that great scheme

does seem to me to enter certain men’s lives as a passion, as a real

and living motive; there are those who know it almost as if it was a

thing of desire; even for me, upon occasion, the little lures of the

immediate life are seen small and vain, and the soul goes out to

that mighty Being, to apprehend it and serve it and possess. But

this is an illumination that passes as it comes, a rare transitory

lucidity, leaving the soul’s desire suddenly turned to presumption

and hypocrisy upon the lips. One grasps at the Universe and

attains—Bathos. The hungers, the jealousies, the prejudices and

habits have us again, and we are forced back to think that it is so,

and not otherwise, that we are meant to serve the mysteries; that in

these blinkers it is we are driven to an end we cannot understand.

And then, for measured moments in the night watches or as one walks

alone or while one sits in thought and speech with a friend, the

wider aspirations glow again with a sincere emotion, with the

colours of attainable desire….

 

That is my all about Utopia, and about the desire and need for

Utopia, and how that planet lies to this planet that bears the daily

lives of men.

APPENDIX SCEPTICISM OF THE INSTRUMENT

A Portion of a Paper read to the Oxford Philosophical Society,

November 8, 1903, and reprinted, with some Revision, from the

Version given in Mind, vol. xiii. (N.S.), No. 51.

 

(See also Chapter I., Section 6, and Chapter X., Sections 1 and 2.)

 

It seems to me that I may most propitiously attempt to interest you

this evening by describing very briefly the particular metaphysical

and philosophical system in which I do my thinking, and more

particularly by setting out for your consideration one or two points

in which I seem to myself to differ most widely from current

accepted philosophy.

 

You must be prepared for things that will strike you as crude, for a

certain difference of accent and dialect that you may not like, and

you must be prepared too to hear what may strike you as the clumsy

statement of my ignorant rediscovery of things already beautifully

thought out and said. But in the end you may incline to forgive me

some of this first offence…. It is quite unavoidable that, in

setting out these intellectual foundations of mine, I should lapse

for a moment or so towards autobiography.

 

A convergence of circumstances led to my having my knowledge of

concrete things quite extensively developed before I came to

philosophical examination at all. I have heard someone say that a

savage or an animal is mentally a purely objective being, and in

that respect I was like a savage or an animal until I was well over

twenty. I was extremely unaware of the subjective or introverted

element in my being. I was a Positivist without knowing it. My early

education was a feeble one; it was one in which my private

observation, inquiry and experiment were far more important factors

than any instruction, or rather perhaps the instruction I received

was less even than what I learnt for myself, and it terminated at

thirteen. I had come into pretty intimate contact with the harder

realities of life, with hunger in various forms, and many base and

disagreeable necessities, before I was fifteen. About that age,

following the indication of certain theological and speculative

curiosities, I began to learn something of what I will call

deliberately and justly, Elementary Science—stuff I got out of

Cassell’s Popular Educator and cheap text-books—and then, through

accidents and ambitions that do not matter in the least to us now, I

came to three years of illuminating and good scientific work. The

central fact of those three years was Huxley’s course in Comparative

Anatomy at the school in Exhibition Road. About that as a nucleus I

arranged a spacious digest of facts. At the end of that time I had

acquired what I still think to be a fairly clear, and complete and

ordered view of the ostensibly real universe. Let me try to give you

the chief things I had. I had man definitely placed in the great

scheme of space and time. I knew him incurably for what he was,

finite and not final, a being of compromises and adaptations. I had

traced his lungs, for example, from a swimming bladder, step by

step, with scalpel and probe, through a dozen types or more, I had

seen the ancestral caecum shrink to that disease nest, the appendix

of to-day, I had watched the gill slit patched slowly to the

purposes of the ear and the reptile jaw suspension utilised to eke

out the needs of a sense organ taken from its native and natural

water. I had worked out the development of those extraordinarily

unsatisfactory and untrustworthy instruments, man’s teeth, from the

skin scutes of the shark to their present function as a basis for

gold stoppings, and followed the slow unfolding of the complex and

painful process of gestation through which man comes into the world.

I had followed all these things and many kindred things by

dissection and in embryology—I had checked the whole theory of

development again in a year’s course of palaeontology, and I had

taken the dimensions of the whole process, by the scale of the

stars, in a course of astronomical physics. And all that amount of

objective elucidation came before I had reached the beginnings of

any philosophical or metaphysical inquiry, any inquiry as to why I

believed, how I believed, what I believed, or what the fundamental

stuff of things was.

 

Now following hard upon this interlude with knowledge, came a time

when I had to give myself to teaching, and it became advisable to

acquire one of those Teaching Diplomas that are so widely and so

foolishly despised, and that enterprise set me to a superficial, but

suggestive study of educational method, of educational theory, of

logic, of psychology, and so at last, when the little affair with

the diploma was settled, to philosophy. Now to come to logic over

the bracing uplands of comparative anatomy is to come to logic with

a lot of very natural preconceptions blown clean out of one’s mind.

It is, I submit, a way of taking logic in the flank. When you have

realised to the marrow, that all the physical organs of man and all

his physical structure are what they are through a series of

adaptations and approximations, and that they are kept up to a level

of practical efficiency only by the elimination of death, and that

this is true also of his brain and of his instincts and of many of

his mental predispositions, you are not going to take his thinking

apparatus unquestioningly as being in any way mysteriously different

and better. And I had read only a little logic before I became aware

of implications that I could not agree with, and assumptions that

seemed to me to be altogether at variance with the general scheme of

objective fact established in my mind.

 

I came to an examination of logical processes and of language with

the expectation that they would share the profoundly provisional

character, the character of irregular limitation and adaptation that

pervades the whole physical and animal being of man. And I found the

thing I had expected. And as a consequence I found a sort of

intellectual hardihood about the assumptions of logic, that at first

confused me and then roused all the latent scepticism in my

mind.

 

My first quarrel with the accepted logic I developed long ago in a

little paper that was printed in the Fortnightly Review in July

1891. It was called the “Rediscovery of the Unique,” and re-reading

it I perceive not only how