Biosophy 
6. The scope of Biosophy is as extensive as its aim. 
It calls on the sciences for description of the Present 
and for elucidation of the Past; above all, it plans action 
for the Future. The highest achievement of every 
science and every art lies in its contribution to Biosophy: | 
and in return Biosophy will be the inspiration of conduct, 
economics and politics, and the dominant consideration 
in our education and in the planning of our libraries 
and museums. Can it be denied that there is urgent 
need of such a unifying science and art and that such 
may best be developed under a new name? No similar 
movement, under whatever name, has yet made anything 
approaching the universality of appeal or the speed of 
progress which the conditions of our modern world call 
for and which Biosophy may fairly expect to make if it 
is developed with sincerity. In a few years the use of 
scientific inventions spreads throughout the world—for 
example, motor cars, aeroplanes, wireless—why should 
not the influence of scientific investigation into human 
conduct be spread with equal rapidity? 
7. Of all men’ who have influenced the present 
generation in the direction of Biosophy the name of H. 
G. Wells comes first to mind. Mr. Wells, indeed, 
might object to being labelled as a Biosopher, and in 
one respect I would not claim him as being one; if he 
should see this instalment of an “Outline of Biosophy" 
I shall be greatly interested in having his opinion and 
comments thereon. His books will certainly be on the 
shelves of every Biosopher, as they are on mine, ana 
his great trilogy, the “Outline of History," “Science of 
Life,” and “Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind" 
goes far towards the dissemination of our science. There 
is one side of Biosophy to which I think Wells has not 
yet given much attention, viz., atomic physics: and one 
would welcome his treatment of this and related sub- 
jects. In connection with his economic and political 
surveys I have an impression that Wells is to some extent 
under the influence of his city environment oí cen- 
tralisation and elaborated, specialised culture, and that 
he hardly appreciates the importance and the poten- 
tialities of life in the more open spaces, life which in 
the aggregate is of equal importance with that of the 
great centres: if this is so Wells is not alone in being 
under such influence, for nearly all literature and 
publicity and nearly all political and financial control 
emanates to an ever-increasing degree from the" great 
centres of population, with adverse effects on the well- 
being of outlying peoples which it will be one of the 
purposes of Biosophy to investigate and remedy. But 
the main reason which would make me hesitate definitely 
to claim Wells at present as a Biosopher is the streak 
of supernaturalism in his mental make-up. His 
“fantastic and imaginative romances” are 3 remarkable 
and very readable blend of science and the supernatural; 
stories of this kind, for example, Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyl 
and Mr. Hyde,” and Barham’s “Leech of Folkestone,” 
are favorites of most of us, and such stories of Wells 
as “The Door in the Wall” and “The Magic Shop” have 
an eerie beauty which takes us willy nilly out of the 
world of reality; but one has to keep a firm hold on 
oneself to avoid confusing fiction with reality, and 
however lovely and desirable a fiction may be, that gives 
it no shadow of a claim to actual truth. 
8. In “God the Invisible King’ Wells seems to me 
to have definitely confused fiction and fact; had he 
given the reader any hint that God the Invisible King 
was a fiction, an allegorical personification of a unifying 
and progressive purpose in humanity, the book would 
have been excellent, and it is still excellent if the reader 
takes Wells’ God as an allegory. But Wells’ God is no 
allegory; he is “a god of salvation, a spirit, a person, a 
strangely marked and knowable personality, loving, 
inspiring and lovable, who exists or strives to exist in 
every human soul.” “He is a Being, not us but dealing 
with us and through us, he has an aim; and that means 
he has a past and future.” “God comes we know not 
whence, into the conflict of life. He works in men 
and through men. He is a spirit, a single spirit and a 
single person; he has begun and he will never end. He 
is the immortal part and leader of mankind. He has 
motives, he has characteristics, he has an aim. He is 
by our poor scales of measurement boundless love, 
boundless courage, bouridless generosity. He is thought 
and a steadfast will. He is our friend and brother and 
the light of the world." Wells bases his belief in the 
reality of his God on the sole fact that a conviction of 
this has come to him as well as to some other people 
he has known; he says, “In the case of all those of the 
new faith with whose personal experience I have any 
intimacy, the idea of God has remained for some time 
simply as an idea floating about in a mind still dis- 
satisfied. God is not believed in, but it is realised that 
if there were such a being he would supply the needed 
consolation and direction, his continuing purpose would 
knit together the scattered effort of life, his immortality 
would take the sting from death. Under this realisation 
the idea is pursued and elaborated. For a time there is 
a curious resistance to the suggestion that God is truly 
a person; he is spoken of preferably by such phrases 
as the Purpose in Things, as the Racial Consciousness, 
as the Collective Mind." “Then suddenly, in a little 
while, in his own time, God comes.” Wells regards his 
creed as spreading irresistibly. “It is a Mountain of 
Light, growing and increasing." “It overleaps all 
barriers; it breaks out in despite of every enclosure. 
It will compel all things to orient themselves to it." “It 
is the Kingdom of God at hand.” 
9. In a chapter of his book headed *The Religion 
of Atheists’ Wells quarrels with Metchnikoff, Joseph 
McCabe, Chalmers Mitchell, Gilbert Murray, and Sir 
Harry Johnston, apparently because they have not found 
his “God the Invisible King." Wells’ auto-conversion 
to his new creed seems to have taken place between 
1908, when he published “First and Last Things,” and 
1917, the date of “God the Invisible King.” The period 
of the war and after has been one of such insensate 
folly in human affairs that one can almost understand 
a man feeling the hopelessness of trusting to human 
reason, longing for supernatural guidance, and slipping 
insensibly from the creation of a pleasing fiction to 
37 
