V
Now when the Kingdom of Heaven shall be coming on Earth (and for those who believe in it the Kingdom of Heaven is always coming within their lifetime or their children’s!) one of the most unmistakable signs will be the gradual cessation of all self‐assertive ragings on the part of the Wise, and the gradual abatement of exaggerated claims and denunciations on the part of the Holy. Philosophers will begin page: 368 to think not in opposition but in co‐operation, even as the Lion, we are told, will on a similar occasion lie down with the Lamb; and moralists will be full of understanding and respect towards human nature. Prophesying, in the fashion in which Carlyle and Ruskin, Tolstoi and Nietzsche, have carried on that calling, will cease; and most particularly prophesying against other prophets. Idols will no longer be publicly burnt by their former worshippers; and idols will be made only for strictly private devotion. Moral and intellectual health will be sufficient for each to choose how much he can accept of each set of views; intolerance, exaggeration and aggressiveness will no longer be needed to awaken torpid, or keep up vacillating, interest; the consciousness of being able to do but little will be an incentive to do the most; faith will move molehills because it no longer expects to move mountains; and the avowal of such a thing as a will to believe (in the sense of Professor William James) will be recognised as the sign of incapacity for any real belief at all.
If this is the change which Mr. Wells expects the twentieth century to inaugurate, why then deliberative planning‐out of the Future, Constructive Socialism, and Voluntary Service (of a Samurai type) of Coming Generations, may presently begin to be realised. But the sign of the Coming of Utopia will be the purging and re‐tempering of philosophical thought and ethical emotion in the furnace of responsibility.
Is this change really about to set in, even if it take almost a geological era to bring to maturity? I am unable to form an opinion; for I belong, alas, page: 369 to the generation of the Unreclaimed. But, for anything I can tell, it may be beginning already, with the appearance (if they have appeared!) of a small number of individuals belonging to the practical classes, like Mr. Wells’s “skilled mechanic” and Mr. Shaw’s immortal chauffeur ’Ennery, who will bring into abstract and ideal matters, into philosophy and ethics, some of the modesty of expectation and of the disciplined delicacy of handling without which they could not have perfected a bicycle and driven a motor‐car.
Accustomed to do their best for the sake of the smallest advantage; accustomed to distrust equally themselves and their material, and to test skill by results; accustomed to work in concert with their mates and keep an eye on the improvements of their rivals; accustomed especially to the chances of success and failure, such people may bring into the things of the Spirit a habit of fair play and self‐criticism, of respect for achievement and contempt for perfunctoriness, a sense of responsibility born of dealing with things which have immediate and indisputable consequences, with simple and relentless facts which no definitions and no rhetoric can alter. It may be that this is the case. The integration of ideal thought and aspiration with practical life may be about to begin, may in fact be beginning; the anarchy of idea‐less and impractical ideals may be drawing to a close. And the future at our hand, or at least within our sight, may show some application of that capacity for systematic thinking and impersonal emotion which has hitherto seemed little more than page: 370 a play instinct of the leisured portions of mankind. It may be. At any rate, Mr. Wells has a right to expect it; and we have a right to expect it when we consider Mr. Wells.
For in all his scientific books, but most of all in this latest one on America, Mr. Wells has given us something more valuable than even the most valuable ideas, and something more novel than the newest ones; and that is an example of what the attitude of the individual thinker might and (in my opinion) should be. The thing seems so simple and natural, now it is there, that it is almost unnecessary, and at any rate difficult, to describe it. Mr. Wells is not merely truthful in what he says—many people, including some impostors, have been that: he is truthful in his way of saying it. He does not dogmatise and he does not prophesy; he just thinks his own thoughts and asks us to listen to what he thinks. He does not imagine that he is come with a hammer to break idols and adversaries’ skulls; nor pretend, to himself any more than to others, that he is come as the exponent of consecrated wisdom. He is neither the prophetic I, nor the sacerdotal We. He is just himself, believing in his own thoughts because they are his own, and ready to allow other folk to believe in theirs for the same simple reason. He knows that he is not the Mind of the Universe nor the Conscience of the Centuries, but an individual, like and unlike other individuals, liable to error, but all the more determined to be as little mistaken as may be; unable to attain certainty for himself, but all the more unable to accept it from any one else. page: 371 In fact he is, in his manner of feeling himself and of presenting himself to others, absolutely true to the reality of the case. Hence he is modest and self‐reliant. And above all, knowing that he cannot give as much as is needed, he is generous in giving all he has. It never enters his head to ask anyone to be his follower; he seems never to have heard of those sublime sibylline manners with which prophets threaten to tell you nothing if you are not willing to accept all. What he says is said because it interests himself, and in the wish that it may also interest you; but he recognises that he himself is the person most interested. Similarly, he is no more proud than he is ashamed, of being an individual: he recognises it as the common lot and the sine qua non of activity, though the origin of some drawbacks. He does his best because it is all he can do.
It may be that such is a common attitude among scientific workers; I am too ignorant of their ways to tell. What I do know is that it is not the attitude of philosophers and of moralists, of sages and prophets and priests. What it is, undoubtedly, is human or humane, in the sense of being rational and well‐bred; giving much, taking much, and not claiming more than one’s own standing‐room; moreover that it answers to the reality of things. Hence it is an attitude which will work in with reality’s action. What is more, I feel convinced that this is the attitude of the Future; the one which the Future will require, without any doubt; the one which the future will furnish, I most ardently hope. And in this hope of page: 372 the gradual coming of intellectual self‐restraint and goodwill, I am happy to take leave of the prophets and gospels of the anarchical past and anarchical present.
