A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (i have read the book txt) đź“–
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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.
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