: May 5, 1923] 
NATURE 
593 

be Olympus: but as short of perfection as Olympus 
_ seems to have been. The men and women there are 
often discontented and restless ; criticism is abundant. 
_ Mr. Wells knows that intellectual and esthetic achieve- 
ment opens the door to the highest known happiness of 
the present ; he keeps them so, with all conditions and 
limitations of their being, in Utopia. 
Let us go back and try to see how much of Mr. 
Wells’s speculations fall within the bounds of possi- 
bility. All Utopias must suffer from lack of familiar 
associations, for it is by familiar associations, especially 
_ with things of youth and childhood, that emotional 
appeal is made and real assent gained. Thus, whatever 
stores of loved memories a Utopian may have, whatever 
driving force he may draw from the sight of familiar 
places and objects, we can only see his emotional life 
from outside, as an Englishman on his first visit to the 
United States notices the differences from England 
rather than the resemblances. But if we remember 
that they must have each their private growth of life, 
and that this must be in many ways like ours, we get 
over the first stile. 
We have already dealt with Mr. Wells’s applied 
physics and chemistry and his applied biology of lower 
organisms. That in a sense is commonplace—common- 
place made surprising ; none the less, it is good to have 
it so well done, to have people reminded that the rate 
of this sort of change not only need not slow down, but 
can continue, and continue to be accelerated, for a very 
long time. What of his applied biology of man? 
Minor criticisms are easy to make. The Utopians, for 
example, go either almost naked, or else clothed in 
garb of the indeterminate simplicity that seems to be 
fashionable in all Utopias. Mr. Wells is perhaps so 





















underestimates the amount by which dress enlarges 
the human horizon, giving us a hundred extra varia- 
tions of personality, raising the possibilities realised 
‘in the courtship-decorations of lower animals to an 
infinitude of permutations. 
With the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws and their 
recent working out, we are introduced to the theo- 
retical possibility of an analysis of the hereditary 
constitution similar to the chemist’s analysis of a com- 
pound ; and so, presumably, in the long run to its 
control. There are great technical difficulties in higher 
organisms, and application to man presents yet further 
difficulties. Still, the fact remains that the theoretical 
possibility exists for us to-day, and did not exist twenty- 
five years ago. We must|further remember that all 
discoveries concerning the history of man remind us 
that we must think, not in centuries as heretofore, but 
in ten-thousand-year periods when envisaging stages 
_ in human development. 
NO. 2792, VOL. 111] 
revolted by the dulness of modern male attire that he . 
We must further recall the lessons of evolutionary 
biology. These teach us that, however ignorant we 
may be regarding the details of the process, life is 
essentially plastic and has in the past been moulded 
into an extraordinary variety of forms. Further, that 
the attributes of living things have almost all been 
developed in relation to the environment—even their 
mental attributes. There is a causal relation between 
the absence of X-rays in the normal environment and 
the absence in organisms of sense-organs capable of 
detecting X-rays, between the habits of lions and their 
fierceness, of doves and their timidity. There is, 
thirdly, no reason whatever to suppose that the mind of 
man represents the highest development possible to 
mind, any more than there was to suppose it of the 
mind of monkeys when they were the highest organisms. 
We must squarely recognise that, in spite of proverbs 
to the contrary, it is probable that “ human nature ” 
could be considerably changed and improved. 
Next, we have the recent rise of psychology. Much 
nonsense doubtless masquerades under the name of 
psycho-analysis or “‘ modern” psychology. None the 
less, as so shrewd a critic as the late W. H. R. Rivers 
at once saw, and as has been put to such practical uses 
in therapeutic treatment, there is not only something 
in it, but a great deal. Repression, suppression, 
sublimation, and the rest are realities; and we are 
finding out how our minds do work, ought not to work, 
and might be made to work. It is clear that the 
average mind is as distorted and stunted as a much- 
below-average body ; and that, by just so much as a 
great mind is more different from an average one than 
great from average bodily capacity, by so much would 
proper training be more efficient with mind than even 
with bodies. Here the extravagances of some eugenists 
find their corrective ; Mr. Wells’s imagination is 
pursuing to its logical end the line taken by such 
authorities as Mr. Carr Saunders in his ‘“ Population 
Problem.” 
Again, Mr. Wells, being a major prophet, perceives 
without difficulty that the substitution of some new 
dominant idea for the current ideas of commercialism, 
nationalism, and sectarianism (better not beg the 
question by saying industry, patriotism, and religion) 
is the most needed change of all. Here, again, he is in 
reality only adopting the method of Lyell and Darwin— 
uniformitarianism—and seeking the key of the future, 
as of the past, in the present. There is to-day a slowly 
growing minority of people who not only profoundly dis- 
believe in the current conceptions and valuations of the 
world and human life, but also, however gropingly, are 
trying to put scientifically-grounded ideas in their place. 
Belief is the parent of action; and so long as the 
majority of men refuse to believe that they need not 
SI 
