592 
faculty might make of humanity in the space of a 
hundred generations, his romance has become a fit 
subject for biological dissection in these pages. 
Mr. Wells pictures a world where, in the first place, the 
advance of physico-chemical science and its application, 
to which we are already accustomed, has attained a far 
higher pitch of perfection. Further, machinery has 
become so self-regulating that it does not make man 
‘captive, as Samuel Butler prophesied, but is a real 
‘servant. Also, instead of machinery and mechanism 
occupying the foremost place in the life of the majority 
of men, as Bergson laments that they are tending to 
‘do to-day, they have apparently been rendered not 
only more efficient, but also more self-regulating, and 
are as subservient to the will of the community as a 
motor-car that never gets out of order is to its owner. 
In thesecond place, life has been subjected toa similar 
control. This is a process which the biologist sees 
so obviously on its way that it should excite no surprise. 
As our knowledge of genetics increases, our applica- 
tion of it must outstrip the past achievements of empiri- 
cal breeding as much as the application of scientific 
knowledge of principle in chemistry, say, or electricity, 
has outstripped the achievements of empiricism in those 
fields. Mr. Wells’s wonderful flowers and trees are 
almost there already: we will not worry about them. 
Even his domestic-minded leopards and tigers, more 
“kittenish and mild ” even than Mr. Belloc’s, should 
not be lightly dismissed after recent experiments on the 
inheritance of tameness and wildness in rats—not to 
mention our knowledge of many breeds of dog. 
Meanwhile, Mr. Wells also imagines a purging of the 
organic world. The triumphs of parasitology and the 
rise of ecology have set him thinking ; and he believes 
that, given real knowledge of the life-histories and 
inter-relations of organisms, man could proceed suc- 
cessfully to wholesale elimination of a multitude of 
noxious bacteria, parasitic worms, insects, and carni- 
vores. Here again we have no right to quarrel. Mr. 
Wells does not need to be reminded of the thistle in 
California or the rabbits in Australia: his Utopians 
proceed with exemplary precautions. All this is but 
an extension of what has already been begun. 
In the third place, however, human as well as non- 
human life has been subjected to this control; and this 
in two ways. First, by an extension of the methods 
previously used. The accidents and circumstances of 
life have been altered—there has been a further control 
of external machinery. This has been, of course, 
chiefly in the fields of social and political institutions. 
A great part of such change is only intelligible as a 
corollary of the other supposed change. But we may 
here direct attention to one idea which is imagined as 
at the root of much of it—the idea that man is master 
NO. 2792, VOL. 111] 

NATURE 

[May 5, 1923 
in his own house of Earth, as opposed to the idea which, 
with few exceptions, has until now dominated his 
history—the idea that he is the slave, sport, or servant 
of an arbitrary personal Power or Powers. 
Finally, we come to the most radical and inevitably 
the most provocative of our author’s imaginings—that 
which concerns not the alteration of things in relation 
to a constant human nature, but the alteration of that 
human nature itself. Here Mr. Wells is extremely 
interesting. He reduces the réle of eugenics to a 
minimum, exalts that of education, or, if you prefer it, 
environment, to a maximum. Eugenic change has 
been restricted to ‘“‘ breeding out’ (Mr. Wells does 
not initiate us into methods) certain temperamental 
qualities—habitual gloominess, petty inefficiency, ex- 
cess of that “sacrificial pity’ Mr. Wells dislikes so 
much, and so forth. 
The rest has been accomplished by proper education, 
and, above all, by a “‘ change of heart ” as regards the 
essential aims of life. Mr. Wells sums this up in a 
phrase (in which one recognises his devotion to the 
late headmaster of Oundle) as the substitution of the 
ideal of creative service for that of competition. 
The realisation of this ideal is made possible in the 
first instance by a proper application of psychology to 
early life, so that painful repression and stupid sup- 
pression shall not occur, and men and women shall grow 
up unridden by hags of sex or fear, and yet without 
separation of any important fragment of their mental 
organism from the rest. Education sensu restricto then 
steps in, and enlarges the capacities of the unhampered 
growing mind, while the substitution of a form of tele- 
pathy for speech reduces the time and energy needed for 
communication. Meanwhile, a rational birth-control 
provides a world not overcrowded and overstrained. 
By these means, Mr. Wells imagines, a race has been « 
produced of great beauty and physical strength, great 
intellectual and artistic capacities, interested primarily 
in two things—the understanding of Nature for its own 
sake, and its control for the sake of humanity. By 
control Mr. Wells means not only utilitarian control, 
but that which, as in a garden, is to please and delight, ~ 
and that highest control of material—artistic and 
scientific creation. : 
The Utopians, owing to their upbringing and social 
environment, come to think and act so that they need 
no central government, no law-courts, no police, no 
contracts. In this Mr. Wells is only telling us what we 
all knew already, that in most men it seems theo- 
retically possible to produce a “‘ change of heart ”—1.e. 
substitute new dominant ideas for old—and that if this 
is effected, restrictive measures gradually become un- 
necessary. He is careful not to make his Utopia too 
ideal. It is as ideal compared with this world as would 

