And humanity ought to be told to be recklessness itself.
For all the fundamental functions of a healthy man ought emphatically to be performed with pleasure and for pleasure; they emphatically ought not to be performed with precaution or for precaution.
A man ought to eat because he has a good appetite to satisfy, and emphatically not because he has a body to sustain. A man ought to take exercise not because he is too fat, but because he loves foils or horses or high mountains, and loves them for their own sake.
And a man ought to marry because he has fallen in love, and emphatically not because the world requires to be populated.
The food will really renovate his tissues as long as he is not thinking about his tissues. The exercise will really get him into training so long as he is thinking about something else. And the marriage will really stand some chance of producing a generous-blooded generation if it had its origin in its own natural and generous excitement.
It is the first law of health that our necessities should not be accepted as necessities; they should be accepted as luxuries.
Let us, then, be careful about the small things, such as a scratch or a slight illness, or anything that can be managed with care.
But in the name of all sanity, let us be careless about the important things, such as marriage, or the fountain of our very life will fail.
Mr. Wells, however, is not quite clear enough of the narrower scientific outlook to see that there are some things which actually ought not to be scientific. He is still slightly affected with the great scientific fallacy; I mean the habit of beginning not with the human soul, which is the first thing a man learns about, but with some such thing as protoplasm, which is about the last.
The one defect in his splendid mental equipment is that he does not sufficiently allow for the stuff or material of men.
In his new Utopia he says, for instance, that a chief point of the Utopia will be a disbelief in original sin. If he had begun with the human soul--that is, if he had begun on himself--he would have found original sin almost the first thing to be believed in.
He would have found, to put the matter shortly, that a permanent possibility of selfishness arises from the mere fact of having a self, and not from any accidents of education or ill-treatment. And the weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones.
They first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by motor-car or balloon. And an even stronger example of Mr. Wells's indifference to the human psychology can be found in his cosmopolitanism, the abolition in his Utopia of all patriotic boundaries. He says in his innocent way that Utopia must be a world-state, or else people might make war on it.
It does not seem to occur to him that, for a good many of us, if it were a world-state we should still make war on it to the end of the world.
For if we admit that there must be varieties in art or opinion what sense is there in thinking there will not be varieties in government?
The fact is very simple. Unless you are going deliberately to prevent a thing being good, you cannot prevent it being worth fighting for.
It is impossible to prevent a possible conflict of civilizations, because it is impossible to prevent a possible conflict between ideals.
If there were no longer our modern strife between nations, there would only be a strife between Utopias. For the highest thing does not tend to union only; the highest thing, tends also to differentiation.
You can often get men to fight for the union; but you can never prevent them from fighting also for the differentiation.
This variety in the highest thing is the meaning of the fierce patriotism, the fierce nationalism of the great European civilization.
It is also, incidentally, the meaning of the doctrine of the Trinity.
But I think the main mistake of Mr. Wells's philosophy is a somewhat deeper one, one that he expresses in a very entertaining manner in the introductory part of the new Utopia. His philosophy in some sense amounts to a denial of the possibility of philosophy itself.
At least, he maintains that there are no secure and reliable ideas upon which we can rest with a final mental satisfaction.
It will be both clearer, however, and more amusing to quote Mr. Wells himself.
He says, "Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant). . . . 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."Mr. Wells says, again, "There is no abiding thing in what we know.
We change from weaker to stronger lights, and each more powerful light pierces our hitherto opaque foundations and reveals fresh and different opacities below." Now, when Mr. Wells says things like this, I speak with all respect when I say that he does not observe an evident mental distinction.
It cannot be true that there is nothing abiding in what we know.
For if that were so we should not know it all and should not call it knowledge. Our mental state may be very different from that of somebody else some thousands of years back; but it cannot be entirely different, or else we should not be conscious of a difference.
Mr. Wells must surely realize the first and simplest of the paradoxes that sit by the springs of truth. He must surely see that the fact of two things being different implies that they are similar.
The hare and the tortoise may differ in the quality of swiftness, but they must agree in the quality of motion. The swiftest hare cannot be swifter than an isosceles triangle or the idea of pinkness.
When we say the hare moves faster, we say that the tortoise moves.
And when we say of a thing that it moves, we say, without need of other words, that there are things that do not move.
