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

bad and even annoying it was in manner—a

thing I have long known—but also how remarkably bad it was in

expression. I have good reason for doubting whether my powers of

expression in these uses have very perceptibly improved, but at any

rate I am doing my best now with that previous failure before

me.

 

That unfortunate paper, among other oversights I can no longer

regard as trivial, disregarded quite completely the fact that a

whole literature upon the antagonism of the one and the many, of the

specific ideal and the individual reality, was already in existence.

It defined no relations to other thought or thinkers. I understand

now, what I did not understand then, why it was totally ignored. But

the idea underlying that paper I cling to to-day. I consider it an

idea that will ultimately be regarded as one of primary importance

to human thought, and I will try and present the substance of that

early paper again now very briefly, as the best opening of my

general case. My opening scepticism is essentially a doubt of the

objective reality of classification. I have no hesitation in saying

that is the first and primary proposition of my philosophy.

 

I have it in my mind that classification is a necessary condition of

the working of the mental implement, but that it is a departure from

the objective truth of things, that classification is very

serviceable for the practical purposes of life but a very doubtful

preliminary to those fine penetrations the philosophical purpose, in

its more arrogant moods, demands. All the peculiarities of my way of

thinking derive from that.

 

A mind nourished upon anatomical study is of course permeated with

the suggestion of the vagueness and instability of biological

species. A biological species is quite obviously a great number of

unique individuals which is separable from other biological species

only by the fact that an enormous number of other linking

individuals are inaccessible in time—are in other words dead and

gone—and each new individual in that species does, in the

distinction of its own individuality, break away in however

infinitesimal degree from the previous average properties of the

species. There is no property of any species, even the properties

that constitute the specific definition, that is not a matter of

more or less. If, for example, a species be distinguished by a

single large red spot on the back, you will find if you go over a

great number of specimens that red spot shrinking here to nothing,

expanding there to a more general redness, weakening to pink,

deepening to russet and brown, shading into crimson, and so on, and

so on. And this is true not only of biological species. It is true

of the mineral specimens constituting a mineral species, and I

remember as a constant refrain in the lectures of Prof. Judd upon

rock classification, the words “they pass into one another by

insensible gradations.” That is true, I hold, of all things.

 

You will think perhaps of atoms of the elements as instances of

identically similar things, but these are things not of experience

but of theory, and there is not a phenomenon in chemistry that is

not equally well explained on the supposition that it is merely the

immense quantities of atoms necessarily taken in any experiment that

mask by the operation of the law of averages the fact that each atom

also has its unique quality, its special individual difference. This

idea of uniqueness in all individuals is not only true of the

classifications of material science; it is true, and still more

evidently true, of the species of common thought, it is true of

common terms. Take the word chair. When one says chair, one thinks

vaguely of an average chair. But collect individual instances, think

of armchairs and reading chairs, and dining-room chairs and kitchen

chairs, chairs that pass into benches, chairs that cross the

boundary and become settees, dentists’ chairs, thrones, opera

stalls, seats of all sorts, those miraculous fungoid growths that

cumber the floor of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition, and you will

perceive what a lax bundle in fact is this simple straightforward

term. In co-operation with an intelligent joiner I would undertake

to defeat any definition of chair or chairishness that you gave me.

Chairs just as much as individual organisms, just as much as mineral

and rock specimens, are unique things—if you know them well enough

you will find an individual difference even in a set of machine-made

chairs—and it is only because we do not possess minds of unlimited

capacity, because our brain has only a limited number of

pigeon-holes for our correspondence with an unlimited universe of

objective uniques, that we have to delude ourselves into the belief

that there is a chairishness in this species common to and

distinctive of all chairs.

 

Let me repeat; this is of the very smallest importance in all the

practical affairs of life, or indeed in relation to anything but

philosophy and wide generalisations. But in philosophy it matters

profoundly. If I order two new-laid eggs for breakfast, up come two

unhatched but still unique avian individuals, and the chances are

they serve my rude physiological purpose. I can afford to ignore the

hens’ eggs of the past that were not quite so nearly this sort of

thing, and the hens’ eggs of the future that will accumulate

modification age by age; I can venture to ignore the rare chance of

an abnormality in chemical composition and of any startling

aberration in my physiological reaction; I can, with a confidence

that is practically perfect, say with unqualified simplicity “two

eggs,” but not if my concern is not my morning’s breakfast but the

utmost possible truth.

 

Now let me go on to point out whither this idea of uniqueness tends.

I submit to you that syllogism is based on classification, that

all hard logical reasoning tends to imply and is apt to imply a

confidence in the objective reality of classification. Consequently

in denying that I deny the absolute validity of logic. Classification

and number, which in truth ignore the fine differences of objective

realities, have in the past of human thought been imposed upon

things. Let me for clearness’ sake take a liberty here—commit, as

you may perhaps think, an unpardonable insolence. Hindoo thought

and Greek thought alike impress me as being overmuch obsessed by

an objective treatment of certain necessary preliminary conditions

of human thought—number and definition and class and abstract

form. But these things, number, definition, class and abstract

form, I hold, are merely unavoidable conditions of mental

activity—regrettable conditions rather than essential facts. The

forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a

little in taking hold of it.

 

It was about this difficulty that the mind of Plato played a little

inconclusively all his life. For the most part he tended to regard

the idea as the something behind reality, whereas it seems to me

that the idea is the more proximate and less perfect thing, the

thing by which the mind, by ignoring individual differences,

attempts to comprehend an otherwise unmanageable number of unique

realities.

 

Let me give you a rough figure of what I am trying to convey in this

first attack upon the philosophical validity of general terms. You

have seen the results of those various methods of black and white

reproduction that involve the use of a rectangular net. You know the

sort of process picture I mean—it used to be employed very

frequently in reproducing photographs. At a little distance you

really seem to have a faithful reproduction of the original picture,

but when you peer closely you find not the unique form and masses of

the original, but a multitude of little rectangles, uniform in shape

and size. The more earnestly you go into the thing, the closer you

look, the more the picture is lost in reticulations. I submit the

world of reasoned inquiry has a very similar relation to the world I

call objectively real. For the rough purposes of every day the

net-work picture will do, but the finer your purpose the less it

will serve, and for an ideally fine purpose, for absolute and

general knowledge that will be as true for a man at a distance with

a telescope as for a man with a microscope it will not serve at

all.

 

It is true you can make your net of logical interpretation finer and

finer, you can fine your classification more and more—up to a

certain limit. But essentially you are working in limits, and as you

come closer, as you look at finer and subtler things, as you leave

the practical purpose for which the method exists, the element of

error increases. Every species is vague, every term goes cloudy at

its edges, and so in my way of thinking, relentless logic is only

another phrase for a stupidity,—for a sort of intellectual

pigheadedness. If you push a philosophical or metaphysical inquiry

through a series of valid syllogisms—never committing any generally

recognised fallacy—you nevertheless leave a certain rubbing and

marginal loss of objective truth and you get deflections that are

difficult to trace, at each phase in the process. Every species

waggles about in its definition, every tool is a little loose in its

handle, every scale has its individual error. So long as you are

reasoning for practical purposes about the finite things of

experience, you can every now and then check your process, and

correct your adjustments. But not when you make what are called

philosophical and theological inquiries, when you turn your

implement towards the final absolute truth of things. Doing that is

like firing at an inaccessible, unmarkable and indestructible target

at an unknown distance, with a defective rifle and variable

cartridges. Even if by chance you hit, you cannot know that you hit,

and so it will matter nothing at all.

 

This assertion of the necessary untrustworthiness of all reasoning

processes arising out of the fallacy of classification in what is

quite conceivably a universe of uniques, forms only one introductory

aspect of my general scepticism of the Instrument of Thought.

 

I have now to tell you of another aspect of this scepticism of the

instrument which concerns negative terms.

 

Classes in logic are not only represented by circles with a hard

firm outline, whereas they have no such definite limits, but also

there is a constant disposition to think of negative terms as if

they represented positive classes. With words just as with numbers

and abstract forms there are definite phases of human development.

There is, you know, with regard to number, the phase when man can

barely count at all, or counts in perfect good faith and sanity upon

his fingers. Then there is the phase when he is struggling with the

development of number, when he begins to elaborate all sorts of

ideas about numbers, until at last he develops complex superstitions

about perfect numbers and imperfect numbers, about threes and sevens

and the like. The same is the case with abstracted forms, and even

to-day we are scarcely more than heads out of the vast subtle muddle

of thinking about spheres and ideally perfect forms and so on, that

was the price of this little necessary step to clear thinking. You

know better than I do how large a part numerical and geometrical

magic, numerical and geometrical philosophy has played in the

history of the mind. And the whole apparatus of language and mental

communication is beset with like dangers. The language of the savage

is, I suppose, purely positive; the thing has a name, the name has a

thing. This indeed is the tradition of language, and to-day even,

we, when we hear a name, are predisposed—and sometimes it is a very

vicious disposition—to imagine forthwith something answering to the

name.