24 Mr. E. G. Wells [Jan. 24, 



something — something, perhaps, cold-blooded and with a clammy 

 skin, that lurked between air and Avater, and fled before the mightier 

 fishes and amphibia of those days. 



For all the folly, blindness, and pain of our lives, we have come 

 some way from that. And the distance we have travelled gives us 

 some earnest of the way we have yet to go. 



Why should things cease at man ? Why should not this rising 

 curve rise yet more steeply and swiftly ? There are many things to 

 suggest that we are now in a phase of rapid and unprecedented 

 development. The conditions under which men live are changing 

 with an ever increasing rapidity, and so far as our knowledge goes, 

 no sort of creatures have ever lived under changing conditions with- 

 out undergoing the profoundest changes themselves. In the past 

 century there was more change in the conditions of human life than 

 there had been in the previous thousand years. A hundred years 

 ago inventors and investigators were rare, scattered men, and now 

 invention and inquiry is the work of an organised army. This 

 century will see changes that will dwarf those of the nineteenth 

 century as those of the nineteenth dwarf those of the eighteenth. 

 One can see no sign anywhere that this rush of change will be over 

 presently, that the dream of a new static culture phase will ever be 

 realised. Human society never has been quite static, and it will 

 presently cease to attempt to be static. Everything seems pointing 

 to the belief that we are entering upon a progress that will go on 

 with an ever widening and ever more confident stride for ever. The 

 reorganisation of society that is going on now beneath the traditional 

 appearances of things is a kinetic reorganisation. We are getting 

 into marching order. We have struck our camp for ever, and we 

 are out upon the roads. 



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 — and 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 pre- 

 sently a deliberate improvement of the blood and character of the 

 race. And what we can see and im;igine 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, 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 



