Anticipations

H. G. Wells

• Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9783849641580
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Ensayos en sociología

This is the annotated edition including the rare biographical essay by Edwin E. Slosson called "H. G. Wells - A Major Prophet Of His Time". Mr. Wells's book is brilliant and interesting. The author's social forecast claims to be descriptive of society as it is to be, rather than of society as it ought to be, and it is not, therefore, to be judged as an embodiment of his ideals; but none the less the nature of his ideals is almost constantly in evidence, and is responsible for the hard, forbidding, and sometimes repulsive character of the society he anticipates. The only light with which his future is to be illumined is that of mechanical science. Mechanical science is the fountain light of all his day, the master-light of all his seeing —not only as regards the future, but largely as regards the past. The triumphs of democracy during the past two centuries he attributes to the advances in mechanics which have given a new industrial order— utterly ignoring the fact that the democratic advance was led by the American colonies, in which the new industrial order had no foothold save in a few cities, and these cities the strongholds of the opponents of the democratic movement.

Anticipations

Of The Reaction Of Mechanical And Scientific Progress Upon Human Life And Thought

H. G. Wells

Contents:

H. G. Wells – A Major Prophet Of His Time

Anticipations

I - Locomotion in the Twentieth Century

II - The Probable Diffusion of Great Cities

III - Developing Social Elements

IV - Certain Social Reactions

V - The Life-History of Democracy

VI - War

VII - The Conflict of Languages

VIII - The Larger Synthesis

IX - The Faith, Morals, and Public Policy of the New Republic

Anticipations, H. G. Wells

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H. G. Wells – A Major Prophet Of His Time

By Edwin E. Slosson

We are in the beginning of the greatest change that humanity has ever undergone. There is no shock, no epoch-making incident—but then there is no shock at a cloudy daybreak. At no point can we say, "Here it commences, now; last minute was night and this is morning." But insensibly we are in the day. If we care to look, we can foresee growing knowledge, growing order and presently a deliberate improvement of the blood and character of the race. And what we can see and imagine gives us a measure and gives us faith for what surpasses the imagination. It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all that the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening. We cannot see for there is no need for us to see, what this world will be like when the day has fully come. We are creatures of the twilight. But it is out of our race and lineage that minds will spring that will reach back to us in our littleness to know us better than we know ourselves, and that will reach forward fearlessly to comprehend this future that defeats our eyes. All this world is heavy with the promise of greater things, and a day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when beings, beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amid the stars.—The Discovery of the Future.

IS Wells also among the prophets ? Surely, and none with better right, even though we use the word "prophet" in its narrowest and most ordinary sense as one who foretells the future. He has foretold many futures for us, some utterly abhorrent, others more or less attractive. If we shudder at the thought of humanity on a freezing world fighting a losing battle with gigantic crustaceans as in The Time Machine, or being suffocated on a blazing world as in The Star, or being crushed under the tyranny of an omnipotent trust as in When the Sleeper Wakes—if none of these please us, then we have the option of a businesslike and efficient organization of society under the domination of the engineer as in Anticipations, or a socialistic state under the beneficent sway of the Samurai as in A Modern Utopia, or an instantaneous amelioration of human nature as In me Bays of the Comet. In thus presenting various solutions to the world problem Wells is not inconsistent. Every complicated equation has several roots, some of them imaginary. In solving a physical problem the scientist begins by disentangling the forces involved and then taking them one at a time, calculates what would be the effect if the other forces did not act.

So Wells is applying the scientific method to sociology when he attempts to isolate social forces and deal with them singly. If nothing intervenes to divert it, says the hydraulic engineer, the water of this mountain stream will develop such a momentum on reaching the valley. If no limitations are placed upon the consolidation of capital, says Mr. Wells, we may have a handful of directors ruling the world, as depicted in When the Sleeper Wakes. In its power to forecast the future science finds both its validation and justification. By this alone it tests its conclusions and demonstrates its usefulness. In fact, the sole object of science is prophecy, as Ostwald and Poincare make plain. The mind of the scientific man is directed forward and he has no use for history except as it gives him data by which to draw a curve that he may project into the future. It is, therefore, not a chance direction of his fancy that so many of Wells's books, both romances and studies, deal with the future. It is the natural result of his scientific training, which not only led him to a rich unworked field of fictional motives, but made him consider the problems of life from a novel and very illuminative point of view. He gave definite expression to this philosophy in a remarkable address on "The Discovery of the Future," delivered at the Royal Institution of London, January 24, 1902. Here he shows that there is a growing tendency in modern times to shift the center of gravity from the past to the future and to determine the moral value of an act by its consequences rather than by its relation to some precedent. The justification of a war, for instance, may either be by reference to the past or to the future; that is, it may be based either upon some supposititious claim and violated treaty, or upon the assumed advantage to one or both parties. This idea, that in the moral evaluation of an act its results should be taken into consideration, has been popularly ascribed to the Jesuits, but since they have repeatedly and indignantly denied that it ever formed part of their teaching, it is questionable whether they could claim it now when it is becoming fashionable.

At any rate, it is interesting to note that Wells gave very clear expression to this pragmatic principle five years before the publication of Pragmatism, by James. Wells defines two divergent types of mind by the relative importance they attach to things past or things to come. The former type he calls the legal or submissive mind, "because the business, the practice and the training of a lawyer dispose him toward it; he of all men must most constantly refer to the law made, the right established, the precedent set, and most consistently ignore or condemn the thing that is only seeking to establish itself." In opposition to this is "the legislative, creative, organizing, masterful type," which is perpetually attacking and altering the established order of things; it is constructive and "interprets the present and gives value to this or that entirely in relation to things designed or foreseen." The use of the term "legislative" for this latter type is confusing, at least to an American, because unfortunately most of our legislators are lawyers and have minds of the legal or conventional type. "Scientific" would be a better term than 'legislative," because most of our real revolutions in thought and industry originate in the laboratory.

In his Modern Utopia Wells introduces a more complete classification of mankind into (1) the Poetic, that is, the creative and original genius, often erratic or abnormal; (2) the Kinetic, that is, the efficient, energetic, "business man" type; (3) the Dull, "the people who never seem to learn thoroughly or hear distinctly or think clearly," and (4) the Base, those deficient in moral sense. The first two categories of Wells, the Poetic and Kinetic, correspond roughly to Ostwald's Romanticist and Classicist types of scientific men. I have laid stress upon Wells's point of view and classification of temperaments because it seems to me that it gives the clue to his literary work. This is voluminous and remarkably varied, yet thru all its forms can be traced certain simple leading motives. Indeed I am unable to resist the temptation to formulate his favorite theme as: The reaction of society against a disturbing force.

This certainly is the basic idea of much of his work and most of the best of it. He hit upon it early and he has repeated it in endless variations since. The disturbing force may be an individual of the creative or poetic type, an overpowering passion, a new idea, a social organization or a material change in the conditions of life. Whatever it may be, the natural inertia of society causes it to resist the foreign influence, to enforce compliance upon the aberrant individual, or to meet the new conditions by as little readjustment as possible. Usually the social organism is successful in overpowering the intruder or rebel, and on the whole we must admit that this is necessary, even though it sometimes does involve the sacrifice of genius and the retardation of progress. Certainly no one is good enough or wise enough to be trusted with irresponsible power. This is the lesson of The Invisible Man. We all have been struck, probably, by a thought of the advantages which personal invisibility would confer. It is one of the most valued of fairy gifts. But perhaps only Wells has thought of the disadvantages of invisibility, how demoralizing such a condition would be to the individual, and yet how powerless he would be against the mass of ordinary people. Assuming that a man had discovered a way to become invisible by altering the refractive power of his body, as broken glass becomes invisible in water, in what situation would he be? He would be naked, of course, and he could not carry anything in his hands or eat in public. If it were winter he would leave tracks and would catch cold and sneeze. So the invisible man who starts to rob and murder at his own sweet will is soon run down by boys, dogs and villagers as ignominiously as any common thief.

A more artistic expression to the same theme is given in The Country of the Blind. A young man tumbled into an isolated valley of the Andes where lived a community which had thru some hereditary disease lost many generations ago the power of sight. The stranger first thought of the proverb, "In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king," but when he tried to demonstrate his superiority he found it impossible. His talk about "seeing" the natives held to be the ravings of a madman and his clumsiness in their dark houses as proof of defective senses. He was as much at a disadvantage in a community where everything is adapted to the sightless as a blind man is in ours. He falls in love with a girl, but before he is allowed to marry her he must be cured of his hallucinations; a simple surgical operation, the removal of the two irritable bodies protuberant from his brain, will restore him to normality, say the blind surgeons, and make a sane and useful citizen of him. The entreaties of his lady love are added to the coercion of public opinion to induce him to consent. The exceptional man is beaten, he must either conform to the community or leave it. No matter how the story ends. The true novelist and dramatist, like the true mathematician, finds his satisfaction in correctly stating a problem, not in working it out.

The theme of these parables, the comparative powerlessness of the individual, however exceptionally endowed, against the coercive force of environment, Wells has developed at length in his novels; The New Machiavelli, for instance, where a statesman at the height of his public usefulness is overthrown and banished because he had succumbed to selfish passion and violated the moral code. Parnell is popularly supposed to be the model for this character rather more than the original Machiavelli, but it is, unfortunately, a type not rare either in history or fiction. Indeed this may be called the common plot of tragedy from the time when it began to be written, the vulnerable heel of Achilles, the little defect of character or ability that precipitates the catastrophe. In Wells's hands this motif takes most fantastic forms. There was, for example, The Man Who Could Work Miracles; "his name was George McWhirter Fotheringay—not the sort of name by any means to lead to any expectation of miracles—and he was clerk at Gomshott's"; "he was a little man and had eyes of a hot brown, very erect red hair, a mustache with ends he twisted up and freckles." This unpromising looking individual, and he was a blatant skeptic, too, becomes suddenly possessed of the power to make anything happen that he willed, but he finds the use of this mysterious gift by no means to his advantage. It brings him and others into all sorts of trouble, and only his renunciation of it saves the world from destruction. Mr. Fotheringay lived in Church Row, and since Mr. Wells lives in the same street he perhaps knew him personally. In The War of Worlds the earth is invaded by Martians, who are not in the least like those of Du Maurier or Professor Flournoy, but octopus like creatures as far above mankind in intellect and command of machinery as we are above the animals, supermen surpassing the imagination of Nietzsche. They stride over the earth in machines of impregnable armor and devastate town and country with searchlights projecting rays more destructive than those of radium and much like Bulwer-Lytton's "vril." They feed on human blood and, if humanity is not to perish or become as sheep to these invaders, men and women must take to sewers and such like hiding places and wage incessant warfare against overwhelming odds.

In a passage that is to me the most gripping of anything Wells has written a few unconquerable spirits plan the life that mankind must lead under these terrible conditions, but they are relieved from the necessity of putting it into execution by the interposition of an unexpected ally in the form of the most minute of creatures, the microbe. The men from Mars not being immune to terrestrial diseases were annihilated by one of them. The formula remains the same although conditions are reversed in The First Men in the Moon, for men being naturally larger than the lunar people might be supposed to dominate them, but, on the contrary, the ant-like inhabitants of the moon conquer the earthly invaders.

In The Wonderful Visit a curate goes out hunting for rare birds and shoots an angel on the wing. But the heavenly visitant does not play the role of the angel in Jerome's The Passing of the Third Floor Back and transform the character of all he meets. Wells's angel does not fit into the parish life and everybody is relieved when he disappears. The same idea, the reaction of c...