A Modern Utopia - H. G. Wells (best color ebook reader txt) 📗

travel further than that.

 

Out beyond Sirius, far in the deeps of space, beyond the flight of a

cannon-ball flying for a billion years, beyond the range of unaided

vision, blazes the star that is our Utopia’s sun. To those who

know where to look, with a good opera-glass aiding good eyes, it

and three fellows that seem in a cluster with it—though they are

incredible billions of miles nearer—make just the faintest speck

of light. About it go planets, even as our planets, but weaving a

different fate, and in its place among them is Utopia, with its

sister mate, the Moon. It is a planet like our planet, the same

continents, the same islands, the same oceans and seas, another

Fuji-Yama is beautiful there dominating another Yokohama—and

another Matterhorn overlooks the icy disorder of another Theodule.

It is so like our planet that a terrestrial botanist might find his

every species there, even to the meanest pondweed or the remotest

Alpine blossom….

 

Only when he had gathered that last and turned about to find his inn

again, perhaps he would not find his inn!

 

Suppose now that two of us were actually to turn about in just that

fashion. Two, I think, for to face a strange planet, even though it

be a wholly civilised one, without some other familiar backing,

dashes the courage overmuch. Suppose that we were indeed so

translated even as we stood. You figure us upon some high pass in

the Alps, and though I—being one easily made giddy by stooping—am

no botanist myself, if my companion were to have a specimen tin

under his arm—so long as it is not painted that abominable popular

Swiss apple green—I would make it no occasion for quarrel! We have

tramped and botanised and come to a rest, and, sitting among rocks,

we have eaten our lunch and finished our bottle of Yvorne, and

fallen into a talk of Utopias, and said such things as I have been

saying. I could figure it myself upon that little neck of the

Lucendro Pass, upon the shoulder of the Piz Lucendro, for there once

I lunched and talked very pleasantly, and we are looking down upon

the Val Bedretto, and Villa and Fontana and Airolo try to hide from

us under the mountain side—three-quarters of a mile they are

vertically below. (Lantern.) With that absurd nearness of effect

one gets in the Alps, we see the little train a dozen miles away,

running down the Biaschina to Italy, and the Lukmanier Pass beyond

Piora left of us, and the San Giacomo right, mere footpaths under

our feet….

 

And behold! in the twinkling of an eye we are in that other

world!

 

We should scarcely note the change. Not a cloud would have gone from

the sky. It might be the remote town below would take a different

air, and my companion the botanist, with his educated observation,

might almost see as much, and the train, perhaps, would be gone out

of the picture, and the embanked straightness of the Ticino in the

Ambri-Piotta meadows—that might be altered, but that would be all

the visible change. Yet I have an idea that in some obscure manner

we should come to feel at once a difference in things.

 

The botanist’s glance would, under a subtle attraction, float back

to Airolo. “It’s queer,” he would say quite idly, “but I never

noticed that building there to the right before.”

 

“Which building?”

 

“That to the right—with a queer sort of thing–-”

 

“I see now. Yes. Yes, it’s certainly an odd-looking affair…. And

big, you know! Handsome! I wonder–-”

 

That would interrupt our Utopian speculations. We should both

discover that the little towns below had changed—but how, we should

not have marked them well enough to know. It would be indefinable, a

change in the quality of their grouping, a change in the quality of

their remote, small shapes.

 

I should flick a few crumbs from my knee, perhaps. “It’s odd,” I

should say, for the tenth or eleventh time, with a motion to rise,

and we should get up and stretch ourselves, and, still a little

puzzled, turn our faces towards the path that clambers down over

the tumbled rocks and runs round by the still clear lake and down

towards the Hospice of St. Gotthard—if perchance we could still

find that path.

 

Long before we got to that, before even we got to the great high

road, we should have hints from the stone cabin in the nape of the

pass—it would be gone or wonderfully changed—from the very goats

upon the rocks, from the little hut by the rough bridge of stone,

that a mighty difference had come to the world of men.

 

And presently, amazed and amazing, we should happen on a man—no

Swiss—dressed in unfamiliar clothing and speaking an unfamiliar

speech….

 

Section 4

 

Before nightfall we should be drenched in wonders, but still we

should have wonder left for the thing my companion, with his

scientific training, would no doubt be the first to see. He would

glance up, with that proprietary eye of the man who knows his

constellations down to the little Greek letters. I imagine his

exclamation. He would at first doubt his eyes. I should inquire the

cause of his consternation, and it would be hard to explain. He

would ask me with a certain singularity of manner for “Orion,” and I

should not find him; for the Great Bear, and it would have vanished.

“Where?” I should ask, and “where?” seeking among that scattered

starriness, and slowly I should acquire the wonder that possessed

him.

 

Then, for the first time, perhaps, we should realise from

this unfamiliar heaven that not the world had changed, but

ourselves—that we had come into the uttermost deeps of space.

 

Section 5

 

We need suppose no linguistic impediments to intercourse. The whole

world will surely have a common language, that is quite elementarily

Utopian, and since we are free of the trammels of convincing

story-telling, we may suppose that language to be sufficiently our

own to understand. Indeed, should we be in Utopia at all, if we

could not talk to everyone? That accursed bar of language, that

hostile inscription in the foreigner’s eyes, “deaf and dumb to you,

sir, and so—your enemy,” is the very first of the defects and

complications one has fled the earth to escape.

 

But what sort of language would we have the world speak, if we were

told the miracle of Babel was presently to be reversed?

 

If I may take a daring image, a mediaeval liberty, I would suppose

that in this lonely place the Spirit of Creation spoke to us on this

matter. “You are wise men,” that Spirit might say—and I, being a

suspicious, touchy, over-earnest man for all my predisposition to

plumpness, would instantly scent the irony (while my companion, I

fancy, might even plume himself), “and to beget your wisdom is

chiefly why the world was made. You are so good as to propose an

acceleration of that tedious multitudinous evolution upon which I am

engaged. I gather, a universal tongue would serve you there. While I

sit here among these mountains—I have been filing away at them for

this last aeon or so, just to attract your hotels, you know—will

you be so kind–-? A few hints–-?”

 

Then the Spirit of Creation might transiently smile, a smile that

would be like the passing of a cloud. All the mountain wilderness

about us would be radiantly lit. (You know those swift moments, when

warmth and brightness drift by, in lonely and desolate places.)

 

Yet, after all, why should two men be smiled into apathy by the

Infinite? Here we are, with our knobby little heads, our eyes and

hands and feet and stout hearts, and if not us or ours, still the

endless multitudes about us and in our loins are to come at last to

the World State and a greater fellowship and the universal tongue.

Let us to the extent of our ability, if not answer that question, at

any rate try to think ourselves within sight of the best thing

possible. That, after all, is our purpose, to imagine our best and

strive for it, and it is a worse folly and a worse sin than

presumption, to abandon striving because the best of all our bests

looks mean amidst the suns.

 

Now you as a botanist would, I suppose, incline to something as

they say, “scientific.” You wince under that most offensive

epithet—and I am able to give you my intelligent sympathy—though

“pseudo-scientific” and “quasi-scientific” are worse by far for the

skin. You would begin to talk of scientific languages, of Esperanto,

La Langue Bleue, New Latin, Volapuk, and Lord Lytton, of the

philosophical language of Archbishop Whateley, Lady Welby’s work

upon Significs and the like. You would tell me of the remarkable

precisions, the encyclopaedic quality of chemical terminology, and

at the word terminology I should insinuate a comment on that eminent

American biologist, Professor Mark Baldwin, who has carried the

language biological to such heights of expressive clearness as to be

triumphantly and invincibly unreadable. (Which foreshadows the line

of my defence.)

 

You make your ideal clear, a scientific language you demand, without

ambiguity, as precise as mathematical formulae, and with every term

in relations of exact logical consistency with every other. It will

be a language with all the inflexions of verbs and nouns regular and

all its constructions inevitable, each word clearly distinguishable

from every other word in sound as well as spelling.

 

That, at any rate, is the sort of thing one hears demanded, and if

only because the demand rests upon implications that reach far

beyond the region of language, it is worth considering here. It

implies, indeed, almost everything that we are endeavouring to

repudiate in this particular work. It implies that the whole

intellectual basis of mankind is established, that the rules of

logic, the systems of counting and measurement, the general

categories and schemes of resemblance and difference, are

established for the human mind for ever—blank Comte-ism, in fact,

of the blankest description. But, indeed, the science of logic and

the whole framework of philosophical thought men have kept since the

days of Plato and Aristotle, has no more essential permanence as

a final expression of the human mind, than the Scottish Longer

Catechism. Amidst the welter of modern thought, a philosophy long

lost to men rises again into being, like some blind and almost

formless embryo, that must presently develop sight, and form, and

power, a philosophy in which this assumption is denied. [Footnote:

The serious reader may refer at leisure to Sidgwick’s Use of Words

in Reasoning (particularly), and to Bosanquet’s Essentials of Logic,

Bradley’s Principles of Logic, and Sigwart’s Logik; the lighter

minded may read and mark the temper of Professor Case in the British

Encyclopaedia, article Logic (Vol. XXX.). I have appended to his

book a rude sketch of a philosophy upon new lines, originally read

by me to the Oxford Phil. Soc. in 1903.]

 

All through this Utopian excursion, I must warn you, you shall feel

the thrust and disturbance of that insurgent movement. In the

reiterated use of “Unique,” you will, as it were, get the gleam of

its integument; in the insistence upon individuality, and the

individual difference as the significance of life, you will feel the

texture of its shaping body. Nothing endures, nothing is precise and

certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere

repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the

mysterious inmost quality of Being. Being, indeed!—there is no

being, but a universal becoming of individualities, and Plato turned

his back on truth when he turned towards his museum of specific

ideals. Heraclitus,