A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (i have read the book txt) 📖
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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 INSTRUMENTA 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
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