NATURE 



537 



THURSDAY, 



sOClOl.OGlCAh SPECVLATIOXS. 

 A Modern Utopia. By H. G. \\>l!s. Pp. xi + 393. 

 (London : Chapman and Hall, Ltd., 1905.) Price 

 7i-. bd. 



IT is instructive to watch the growth, both in power 

 and in hopefulness, of Mr. Wells's criticism of 

 life. In the " Time Machine " his forecast of the 

 future of humanity was frankly appalling-; in " \\'hen 

 the Sleeper Wakes," more lurid (albeit far more 

 probable) than the worst imaginings of " reforming " 

 socialists. " Anticipations " was a most stimulating 

 book, but so deliberately confined itself to exalting 

 and exaggerating the prospects of a single aspect of 

 life, so exclusively devoted itself to glorifying 

 mechanical and materia! progress, that those sensitive 

 to our spiritual and aesthetic possibilities might be 

 pardoned for regarding the present order, with all 

 its cruelty, waste, sordidness, and grotesqueness, as 

 a golden age in comparison with Mr. Wells's world. 

 " Mankind in the Making " contained much vigorous 

 criticism and many sensible and practical suggestions. 

 In the present book Mr. Wells has become still, more 

 moderate and practicable and hopeful, without in the 

 least derogating from his ingenuitv and originalitv. 

 We sincerely hope, therefore, he will not, as he 

 threatens, stick henceforth to his " art or trade of 

 imaginative writing," but will continue from time to 

 time to regale and stimulate us with sociological 

 speculations. 



Stripping olT the romantic form — in which Mr. 

 Wells dreams himself and a companion, a botanist 

 suffering from a chronic affair of the heart, into a 

 distant planet which is an exact duplicate of our 

 earth, save that it has realised all the good which 

 is attainable with our present resources — his main 

 argument may be condensed as follows. 



As the philosophic foundation of his whole enter- 

 prise, Mr. Wells assumes what he calls the " meta- 

 physical heresy " (though it is rapidly forcing itself 

 upon the notice even of the most stagnantly 

 " orthodox " philosophers) that all classifications, 

 though convenient, are crude, and that whatever is 

 real and valuable in the world is individual, a thesis 

 he had expounded in the brilliant contribution to 

 Mind entitled the " Scepticism of the Instrument," 

 which he has now reprinted as an appendix to his 

 book. From this philosophy he infers that progress 

 depends on individual initiative and variation, lead- 

 ing to successful experiment. Hence the infinite 

 preciousiTess of freedom, which the Utopian World- 

 State must restrict only when and in so far as it would 

 oppress the freedom of others. Hence, too, there will 

 be extensive toleration of "cranks," while even 

 criminals would merely be segregated as failures and 

 condemned to work out their ideas of a good life in 

 a society of their likes, after a fashion charmingly 

 described in the account of the arrival of involuntarv 

 immigrants at the " Island of Incorrigible Cheats." 

 But though L'topia is strangely kind to the crankv, 

 the criminal and the inefficient, because it regards 

 NO. 1867, VOL. 72] 



their occurrence as the measure of the State's failure. 

 it does not allow them to reproduce their kind. 

 Parentage is a privilege, and the production of 

 superior offspring a service to the community for 

 which a wise State will handsomely reward its 

 women. 



But the efficiency and prosperity of the L'topian 

 order ultimately depend on the ruling class, which 

 Mr. Wells seems to have taken bodily out of the 

 Platonic Republic, and, with a fine compliment to the 

 unparalleled rise of Japan, entitled the "Samurai." 

 The Samurai are conceived as a " voluntary nobility " 

 which (like the mediaeval Church) all may enter who 

 are able and willing to lead the strenuous and some- 

 what ascetic life prescribed by the rules of the Order. 

 Among these the obligations to buy and i-ead every 

 month at least one book published in the last five 

 years, and every vear to go out into the wilderness 

 and to travel through it in silence and solitude for 

 at least seven days, are perhaps the most noticeable, 

 together with the prohibition of acting, singing and 

 reciting, and the playing of games in public. 



It is remarkable how Platonic is the general spirit 

 of these institutions in all save the high appreciation 

 of individual freedom, to the value of which Plato 

 showed such singular blindness. Nor is their general 

 aim hard to discover. At several points, however, 

 a critic will be disposed to doubt whether Mr. Wells's 

 means are adequate to his ends. He has seen, 

 indeed, what never seems to have occurred to Plato, 

 that if wisdom is to control the .State, elaborate pre- 

 cautions must be taken to keep learning progressive, 

 and to prevent it from fossilising into pedantry. The 

 Platonic State, if it could ever have come into exist- 

 ence, would systematically have suppressed origin- 

 ality, and simply ha\»e stereotyped the condition of 

 science and art prevailing at the date of its institu- 

 tion. If it could be conceived as surviving to the 

 present day, it would still be sending its heroic 

 hoplites against quick-firing guns, and still be punish- 

 ing a belief in evolution or metageometry as heresies 

 worthv of death. Mr. Wells seeks to guard against 

 the universal human tendency to fi.x in rigid forms 

 whatever man admires. But though he insists on the 

 importance of preserving the " poietic," i.e. origin- 

 ative, types of man and endowing their researches, 

 it may be doubted whether even under his laws they 

 would not be overpowered by the " kinetic," i.e. the 

 efficient administrators, who everywhere conserve the 

 established order. For these latter would control the 

 Order of the Samurai. 



.-\gain, Mr. Wells's distrust of eugenics, justified 

 as no doubt it is by the present state of our know- 

 ledge, seems unduly to disparage the prospects of 

 scientific discoverv in the future. It does not follow 

 that because now we know too little to entrust the 

 State with the function of controlling the reproduction 

 of the race, this will continue to be unsafe, and it 

 is easv to imagine circumstances in which such 

 control would become almost inevitable. For ex- 

 ample, if one of the many attempts to discover what 

 determines the sex of an embryo should chance to be 

 crowned with success, the numerical equality of the 



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