A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (i have read the book txt) đź“–
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Out beyond Sirius, far in the deeps of space, beyond the flight of a
cannon-ball flying for a billion years, beyond the range of unaided
vision, blazes the star that is our Utopia’s sun. To those who
know where to look, with a good opera-glass aiding good eyes, it
and three fellows that seem in a cluster with it—though they are
incredible billions of miles nearer—make just the faintest speck
of light. About it go planets, even as our planets, but weaving a
different fate, and in its place among them is Utopia, with its
sister mate, the Moon. It is a planet like our planet, the same
continents, the same islands, the same oceans and seas, another
Fuji-Yama is beautiful there dominating another Yokohama—and
another Matterhorn overlooks the icy disorder of another Theodule.
It is so like our planet that a terrestrial botanist might find his
every species there, even to the meanest pondweed or the remotest
Alpine blossom….
Only when he had gathered that last and turned about to find his inn
again, perhaps he would not find his inn!
Suppose now that two of us were actually to turn about in just that
fashion. Two, I think, for to face a strange planet, even though it
be a wholly civilised one, without some other familiar backing,
dashes the courage overmuch. Suppose that we were indeed so
translated even as we stood. You figure us upon some high pass in
the Alps, and though I—being one easily made giddy by stooping—am
no botanist myself, if my companion were to have a specimen tin
under his arm—so long as it is not painted that abominable popular
Swiss apple green—I would make it no occasion for quarrel! We have
tramped and botanised and come to a rest, and, sitting among rocks,
we have eaten our lunch and finished our bottle of Yvorne, and
fallen into a talk of Utopias, and said such things as I have been
saying. I could figure it myself upon that little neck of the
Lucendro Pass, upon the shoulder of the Piz Lucendro, for there once
I lunched and talked very pleasantly, and we are looking down upon
the Val Bedretto, and Villa and Fontana and Airolo try to hide from
us under the mountain side—three-quarters of a mile they are
vertically below. (Lantern.) With that absurd nearness of effect
one gets in the Alps, we see the little train a dozen miles away,
running down the Biaschina to Italy, and the Lukmanier Pass beyond
Piora left of us, and the San Giacomo right, mere footpaths under
our feet….
And behold! in the twinkling of an eye we are in that other
world!
We should scarcely note the change. Not a cloud would have gone from
the sky. It might be the remote town below would take a different
air, and my companion the botanist, with his educated observation,
might almost see as much, and the train, perhaps, would be gone out
of the picture, and the embanked straightness of the Ticino in the
Ambri-Piotta meadows—that might be altered, but that would be all
the visible change. Yet I have an idea that in some obscure manner
we should come to feel at once a difference in things.
The botanist’s glance would, under a subtle attraction, float back
to Airolo. “It’s queer,” he would say quite idly, “but I never
noticed that building there to the right before.”
“Which building?”
“That to the right—with a queer sort of thing–-”
“I see now. Yes. Yes, it’s certainly an odd-looking affair…. And
big, you know! Handsome! I wonder–-”
That would interrupt our Utopian speculations. We should both
discover that the little towns below had changed—but how, we should
not have marked them well enough to know. It would be indefinable, a
change in the quality of their grouping, a change in the quality of
their remote, small shapes.
I should flick a few crumbs from my knee, perhaps. “It’s odd,” I
should say, for the tenth or eleventh time, with a motion to rise,
and we should get up and stretch ourselves, and, still a little
puzzled, turn our faces towards the path that clambers down over
the tumbled rocks and runs round by the still clear lake and down
towards the Hospice of St. Gotthard—if perchance we could still
find that path.
Long before we got to that, before even we got to the great high
road, we should have hints from the stone cabin in the nape of the
pass—it would be gone or wonderfully changed—from the very goats
upon the rocks, from the little hut by the rough bridge of stone,
that a mighty difference had come to the world of men.
And presently, amazed and amazing, we should happen on a man—no
Swiss—dressed in unfamiliar clothing and speaking an unfamiliar
speech….
Section 4
Before nightfall we should be drenched in wonders, but still we
should have wonder left for the thing my companion, with his
scientific training, would no doubt be the first to see. He would
glance up, with that proprietary eye of the man who knows his
constellations down to the little Greek letters. I imagine his
exclamation. He would at first doubt his eyes. I should inquire the
cause of his consternation, and it would be hard to explain. He
would ask me with a certain singularity of manner for “Orion,” and I
should not find him; for the Great Bear, and it would have vanished.
“Where?” I should ask, and “where?” seeking among that scattered
starriness, and slowly I should acquire the wonder that possessed
him.
Then, for the first time, perhaps, we should realise from
this unfamiliar heaven that not the world had changed, but
ourselves—that we had come into the uttermost deeps of space.
Section 5
We need suppose no linguistic impediments to intercourse. The whole
world will surely have a common language, that is quite elementarily
Utopian, and since we are free of the trammels of convincing
story-telling, we may suppose that language to be sufficiently our
own to understand. Indeed, should we be in Utopia at all, if we
could not talk to everyone? That accursed bar of language, that
hostile inscription in the foreigner’s eyes, “deaf and dumb to you,
sir, and so—your enemy,” is the very first of the defects and
complications one has fled the earth to escape.
But what sort of language would we have the world speak, if we were
told the miracle of Babel was presently to be reversed?
If I may take a daring image, a mediaeval liberty, I would suppose
that in this lonely place the Spirit of Creation spoke to us on this
matter. “You are wise men,” that Spirit might say—and I, being a
suspicious, touchy, over-earnest man for all my predisposition to
plumpness, would instantly scent the irony (while my companion, I
fancy, might even plume himself), “and to beget your wisdom is
chiefly why the world was made. You are so good as to propose an
acceleration of that tedious multitudinous evolution upon which I am
engaged. I gather, a universal tongue would serve you there. While I
sit here among these mountains—I have been filing away at them for
this last aeon or so, just to attract your hotels, you know—will
you be so kind–-? A few hints–-?”
Then the Spirit of Creation might transiently smile, a smile that
would be like the passing of a cloud. All the mountain wilderness
about us would be radiantly lit. (You know those swift moments, when
warmth and brightness drift by, in lonely and desolate places.)
Yet, after all, why should two men be smiled into apathy by the
Infinite? Here we are, with our knobby little heads, our eyes and
hands and feet and stout hearts, and if not us or ours, still the
endless multitudes about us and in our loins are to come at last to
the World State and a greater fellowship and the universal tongue.
Let us to the extent of our ability, if not answer that question, at
any rate try to think ourselves within sight of the best thing
possible. That, after all, is our purpose, to imagine our best and
strive for it, and it is a worse folly and a worse sin than
presumption, to abandon striving because the best of all our bests
looks mean amidst the suns.
Now you as a botanist would, I suppose, incline to something as
they say, “scientific.” You wince under that most offensive
epithet—and I am able to give you my intelligent sympathy—though
“pseudo-scientific” and “quasi-scientific” are worse by far for the
skin. You would begin to talk of scientific languages, of Esperanto,
La Langue Bleue, New Latin, Volapuk, and Lord Lytton, of the
philosophical language of Archbishop Whateley, Lady Welby’s work
upon Significs and the like. You would tell me of the remarkable
precisions, the encyclopaedic quality of chemical terminology, and
at the word terminology I should insinuate a comment on that eminent
American biologist, Professor Mark Baldwin, who has carried the
language biological to such heights of expressive clearness as to be
triumphantly and invincibly unreadable. (Which foreshadows the line
of my defence.)
You make your ideal clear, a scientific language you demand, without
ambiguity, as precise as mathematical formulae, and with every term
in relations of exact logical consistency with every other. It will
be a language with all the inflexions of verbs and nouns regular and
all its constructions inevitable, each word clearly distinguishable
from every other word in sound as well as spelling.
That, at any rate, is the sort of thing one hears demanded, and if
only because the demand rests upon implications that reach far
beyond the region of language, it is worth considering here. It
implies, indeed, almost everything that we are endeavouring to
repudiate in this particular work. It implies that the whole
intellectual basis of mankind is established, that the rules of
logic, the systems of counting and measurement, the general
categories and schemes of resemblance and difference, are
established for the human mind for ever—blank Comte-ism, in fact,
of the blankest description. But, indeed, the science of logic and
the whole framework of philosophical thought men have kept since the
days of Plato and Aristotle, has no more essential permanence as
a final expression of the human mind, than the Scottish Longer
Catechism. Amidst the welter of modern thought, a philosophy long
lost to men rises again into being, like some blind and almost
formless embryo, that must presently develop sight, and form, and
power, a philosophy in which this assumption is denied. [Footnote:
The serious reader may refer at leisure to Sidgwick’s Use of Words
in Reasoning (particularly), and to Bosanquet’s Essentials of Logic,
Bradley’s Principles of Logic, and Sigwart’s Logik; the lighter
minded may read and mark the temper of Professor Case in the British
Encyclopaedia, article Logic (Vol. XXX.). I have appended to his
book a rude sketch of a philosophy upon new lines, originally read
by me to the Oxford Phil. Soc. in 1903.]
All through this Utopian excursion, I must warn you, you shall feel
the thrust and disturbance of that insurgent movement. In the
reiterated use of “Unique,” you will, as it were, get the gleam of
its integument; in the insistence upon individuality, and the
individual difference as the significance of life, you will feel the
texture of its shaping body. Nothing endures, nothing is precise and
certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere
repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the
mysterious inmost quality of Being. Being, indeed!—there is no
being, but a universal becoming of individualities, and Plato turned
his back on truth when he turned towards his museum of specific
ideals. Heraclitus,
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