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Mankind in the Making by H. G. Wells

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MANKIND IN THE MAKING


BY

H. G. WELLS




PREFACE


It may save misunderstanding if a word or so be said here of the aim
and scope of this book. It is written in relation to a previous work,
_Anticipations_, [Footnote: Published by Harper Bros.] and
together with that and a small pamphlet, "The Discovery of the Future,"
[Footnote: Nature, vol. lxv. (1901-2), p. 326, and reprinted in the
Smithsonian Report for 1902] presents a general theory of social
development and of social and political conduct. It is an attempt to
deal with social and political questions in a new way and from a new
starting-point, viewing the whole social and political world as aspects
of one universal evolving scheme, and placing all social and political
activities in a defined relation to that; and to this general method
and trend it is that the attention of the reader is especially
directed. The two books and the pamphlet together are to be regarded as
an essay in presentation. It is a work that the writer admits he has
undertaken primarily for his own mental comfort. He is remarkably not
qualified to assume an authoritative tone in these matters, and he is
acutely aware of the many defects in detailed knowledge, in temper, and
in training these papers collectively display. He is aware that at such
points, for example, as the reference to authorities in the chapter on
the biological problem, and to books in the educational chapter, the
lacunar quality of his reading and knowledge is only too evident; to
fill in and complete his design--notably in the fourth paper--he has
had quite frankly to jerry-build here and there. Nevertheless, he
ventures to publish this book. There are phases in the development of
every science when an incautious outsider may think himself almost
necessary, when sketchiness ceases to be a sin, when the mere facts of
irresponsibility and an untrained interest may permit a freshness, a
freedom of mental gesture that would be inconvenient and compromising
for the specialist; and such a phase, it is submitted, has been reached
in this field of speculation. Moreover, the work attempted is not so
much special and technical as a work of reconciliation, the suggestion
of broad generalizations upon which divergent specialists may meet, a
business for non-technical expression, and in which a man who knows a
little of biology, a little of physical science, and a little in a
practical way of social stratification, who has concerned himself with
education and aspired to creative art, may claim in his very
amateurishness a special qualification. And in addition, it is
particularly a business for some irresponsible writer, outside the
complications of practical politics, some man who, politically,
"doesn't matter," to provide the first tentatives of a political
doctrine that shall be equally available for application in the British
Empire and in the United States. To that we must come, unless our talk
of co-operation, of reunion, is no more than sentimental dreaming. We
have to get into line, and that we cannot do while over here and over
there men hold themselves bound by old party formulae, by loyalties and
institutions, that are becoming, that have become, provincial in
proportion to our new and wider needs. My instances are commonly
British, but all the broad project of this book--the discussion of the
quality of the average birth and of the average home, the educational
scheme, the suggestions for the organization of literature and a common
language, the criticism of polling and the jury system, and the ideal
of a Republic with an apparatus of honour--is, I submit, addressed to,
and could be adopted by, any English-reading and English-speaking man.
No doubt the spirit of the inquiry is more British than American, that
the abandonment of Rousseau and anarchic democracy is more complete
than American thought is yet prepared for, but that is a difference not
of quality but of degree. And even the appendix, which at a hasty
glance may seem to be no more than the discussion of British parochial
boundaries, does indeed develop principles of primary importance in the
fundamental schism of American politics between the local State
government and the central power. So much of apology and explanation I
owe to the reader, to the contemporary specialist, and to myself.

These papers were first published in the British _Fortnightly
Review_ and in the American _Cosmopolitan_. In the latter
periodical they were, for the most part, printed from uncorrected
proofs set up from an early version. This periodical publication
produced a considerable correspondence, which has been of very great
service in the final revision. These papers have indeed been honoured
by letters from men and women of almost every profession, and by a
really very considerable amount of genuine criticism in the British
press. Nothing, I think, could witness more effectually to the demand
for such discussions of general principle, to the need felt for some
nuclear matter to crystallize upon at the present time, however poor
its quality, than this fact. Here I can only thank the writers
collectively, and call their attention to the more practical gratitude
of my frequently modified text.

I would, however, like to express my especial indebtedness to my
friend, Mr. Graham Wallas, who generously toiled through the whole of
my typewritten copy, and gave me much valuable advice, and to Mr. C. G.
Stuart Menteath for some valuable references.

H. G. WELLS.
SANDGATE, _July_, 1903.




CONTENTS


PREFACE

I. THE NEW REPUBLIC
II. THE PROBLEM OF THE BIRTH SUPPLY
III. CERTAIN WHOLESALE ASPECTS OF MAN-MAKING
IV. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE MIND AND LANGUAGE
V. THE MAN-MAKING FORCES OF THE MODERN STATE
VI. SCHOOLING
VII. POLITICAL AND SOCIAL INFLUENCES
VIII. THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION
IX. THE ORGANIZATION OF THE HIGHER EDUCATION
X. THOUGHT IN THE MODERN STATE
XI. THE MAN'S OWN SHARE


APPENDIX

A PAPER ON ADMINISTRATIVE AREAS READ BEFORE THE FABIAN SOCIETY


INDEX




MANKIND IN THE MAKING


I

THE NEW REPUBLIC


Toleration to-day is becoming a different thing from the toleration of
former times. The toleration of the past consisted very largely in
saying, "You are utterly wrong and totally accurst, there is no truth
but my truth and that you deny, but it is not my place to destroy you
and so I let you go." Nowadays there is a real disposition to accept
the qualified nature of one's private certainties. One may have arrived
at very definite views, one may have come to beliefs quite binding upon
one's self, without supposing them to be imperative upon other people.
To write "I believe" is not only less presumptuous and aggressive in
such matters than to write "it is true," but it is also nearer the
reality of the case. One knows what seems true to one's self, but we
are coming to realize that the world is great and complex, beyond the
utmost power of such minds as ours. Every day of life drives that
conviction further home. And it is possible to maintain that in perhaps
quite a great number of ethical, social, and political questions there
is no absolute "truth" at all--at least for finite beings. To one
intellectual temperament things may have a moral tint and aspect,
differing widely from that they present to another; and yet each may be
in its own way right. The wide differences in character and quality
between one human being and another may quite conceivably involve not
only differences in moral obligation, but differences in fundamental
moral aspect--we may act and react upon each other towards a universal
end, but without any universally applicable rule of conduct whatever.
In some greater vision than mine, my right and wrong may be no more
than hammer and anvil in the accomplishment of a design larger than I
can understand. So that these papers are not written primarily for all,
nor with the same intention towards all who read them. They are
designed first for those who are predisposed for their reception. Then
they are intended to display in an orderly manner a point of view, and
how things look from that point of view, to those who are not so
predisposed. These latter will either develop into adherents as they
read, or, what is more likely, they will exchange a vague disorderly
objection for a clearly defined and understood difference. To arrive at
such an understanding is often for practical purposes as good as
unanimity; for in narrowing down the issue to some central point or
principle, we develop just how far those who are divergent may go
together before separation or conflict become inevitable, and save
something of our time and of our lives from those misunderstandings,
and those secondary differences of no practical importance whatever,
which make such disastrous waste of human energy.

Now the point of view which will be displayed in relation to a number
of wide questions in these pages is primarily that of the writer's. But
he hopes and believes that among those who read what he has to say,
there will be found not only many to understand, but some to agree with
him. In many ways he is inclined to believe the development of his
views may be typical of the sort of development that has gone on to a
greater or lesser extent in the minds of many of the younger men during
the last twenty years, and it is in that belief that he is now
presenting them.

And the questions that will be dealt with in relation to this point of
view are all those questions outside a man's purely private self--if he
have a purely private self--in which he interacts with his fellow-man.
Our attempt will be to put in order, to reduce to principle, what is at
present in countless instances a mass of inconsistent proceedings, to
frame a general theory in accordance with modern conditions of social
and political activity.

This is one man's proposal, his attempt to supply a need that has
oppressed him for many years, a need that he has not only found in his
own schemes of conduct, but that he has observed in the thought of
numberless people about him, rendering their action fragmentary,
wasteful in the gross, and ineffective in the net result, the need for
some general principle, some leading idea, some standard, sufficiently
comprehensive to be of real guiding value in social and political
matters, in many doubtful issues of private conduct, and throughout the
business of dealing with one's fellow-men. No doubt there are many who
do not feel such a need at all, and with these we may part company
forthwith; there are, for example, those who profess the artistic
temperament and follow the impulse of the moment, and those who consult
an inner light in some entirely mystical manner. But neither of these I
believe is the most abundant type in the English-speaking communities.
My impression is that with most of the minds I have been able to
examine with any thoroughness, the attempt to systematize one's private
and public conduct alike, and to reduce it to spacious general rules,
to attempt, if not to succeed, in making it coherent, consistent, and
uniformly directed, is an almost instinctive proceeding.

There is an objection I may anticipate at this point. If I am to leave
this statement unqualified, it would certainly be objected that such a
need is no more nor less than the need of religion, that a properly
formulated religion does supply a trustworthy guide at every fork and
labyrinth in life. By my allusion to the failure of old formulae and
methods to satisfy now, I am afraid many people will choose to
understand that I refer to what is often spoken of as the conflict of
religion and science, and that I intend to propound some contribution
to the conflict. I will at any rate anticipate that objection here, in
order to mark out my boundaries with greater precision.

Taken in its completeness, I submit that it is a greater claim than
almost any religion can justifiably make, to satisfy the need I have
stated. No religion prescribes rules that can be immediately applied to
every eventuality. Between the general rules laid down and the
particular instance there is always a wide gap, into which doubts and
alternatives enter and the private judgment has play. No doubt upon
certain defined issues of every-day life some religions are absolutely
explicit; the Mahomedan religion, for example, is very uncompromising
upon the use of wine, and the law of the Ten Commandments completely
prohibits the making of graven images, and almost all the great variety
of creeds professed among us English-speaking peoples prescribe certain
general definitions of what is righteous and what constitutes sin. But
upon a thousand questions of great public importance, on the question
of forms of government, of social and educational necessities, of one's
course and attitude towards such great facts as the press, trusts,
housing, and the like, religion, as it is generally understood, gives
by itself no conclusive light. It may, no doubt, give a directing light
in some cases, but not a conclusive light. It leaves us inconsistent
and uncertain amidst these unavoidable problems. Yet upon these
questions most people feel that something more is needed than the mood
of the moment or the spin of a coin. Religious conviction may help us,
it may stimulate us to press for clearer light upon these matters, but
it certainly does not give us any decisions.

It is possible to be either intensely religious or utterly indifferent
to religious matters and yet care nothing for these things. One may be
a Pietist to whom the world is a fleeting show of no importance
whatever, or one may say, "Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-
morrow we die": the net result in regard to my need is the same. These
questions appear to be on a different plane from religion and religious
discussion; they look outward, while essentially religion looks inward
to the soul, and, given the necessary temperament, it is possible to
approach them in an unbiassed manner from almost any starting-point of
religious profession. One man may believe in the immortality of the
soul and another may not; one man may be a Swedenborgian, another a
Roman Catholic, another a Calvinistic Methodist, another an English
High Churchman, another a Positivist, or a Parsee, or a Jew; the fact
remains that they must go about doing all sorts of things in common
every day. They may derive their ultimate motives and sanctions from
the most various sources, they may worship in the most contrasted
temples and yet meet unanimously in the market-place with a desire to
shape their general activities to the form of a "public spirited" life,
and when at last the life of every day is summed up, "to leave the
world better than they found it." And it is from that most excellent
expression I would start, or rather from a sort of amplified
restatement of that expression--outside the province of religious
discussion altogether.

A man who will build on that expression _as his foundation_ in
political and social matters, has at least the possibility of agreement
in the scheme of action these papers will unfold. For though we
theorize it is at action that our speculations will aim. They will take
the shape of an organized political and social doctrine. It will be
convenient to give this doctrine a name, and for reasons that will be
clear enough to those who have read my book _Anticipations_ this
doctrine will be spoken of throughout as "New Republicanism," the
doctrine of the New Republic.

The central conception of this New Republicanism as it has shaped
itself in my mind, lies in attaching pre-eminent importance to certain
aspects of human life, and in subordinating systematically and always,
all other considerations to these cardinal aspects. It begins with a
way of looking at life. It insists upon that way, it will regard no
human concern at all except in that way. And the way, putting the thing
as compactly as possible, is to reject and set aside all abstract,
refined, and intellectualized ideas as starting propositions, such
ideas as Right, Liberty, Happiness, Duty or Beauty, and to hold fast to
the assertion of the fundamental nature of life as a tissue and
succession of births. These other things may be important, they may be
profoundly important, but they are not primary. We cannot build upon
any one of them and get a structure that will comprehend all the
aspects of life.

For the great majority of mankind at least it can be held that life
resolves itself quite simply and obviously into three cardinal phases.
There is a period of youth and preparation, a great insurgence of
emotion and enterprise centering about the passion of Love, and a third
period in which, arising amidst the warmth and stir of the second,
interweaving indeed with the second, the care and love of offspring
becomes the central interest in life. In the babble of the
grandchildren, with all the sons and daughters grown and secure, the
typical life of humanity ebbs and ends. Looked at thus with a primary
regard to its broadest aspect, life is seen as essentially a matter of
reproduction; first a growth and training to that end, then commonly
mating and actual physical reproduction, and finally the consummation
of these things in parental nurture and education. Love, Home and
Children, these are the heart-words of life. Not only is the general
outline of the normal healthy human life reproductive, but a vast
proportion of the infinitely complex and interwoven interests that fill
that outline with incessant interest can be shown by a careful analysis
to be more or less directly reproductive also. The toil of a man's
daily work is rarely for himself alone, it goes to feed, to clothe, to
educate those cardinal consequences of his being, his children; he
builds for them, he plants for them, he plans for them, his social
intercourse, his political interests, whatever his immediate motives,
tend finally to secure their welfare. Even more obviously is this the
case with his wife. Even in rest and recreation life still manifests
its quality; the books the ordinary man reads turn enormously on love-
making, his theatre has scarcely ever a play that has not primarily a
strong love interest, his art rises to its most consummate triumphs in
Venus and Madonna, and his music is saturated in love suggestions. Not
only is this so with the right and proper life, but the greater portion
of those acts we call vice draw their stimulus and pleasure from the
impulses that subserve this sustaining fact of our being, and they are
vicious only because they evade or spoil their proper end. This is
really no new discovery at all, only the stripping bare of it is new.
In nearly every religious and moral system in the world indeed, the
predominant mass of the exposition of sin and saving virtue positively
or negatively centres upon birth. Positively in the enormous stresses,
the sacramental values which are concentrated upon marriage and the
initial circumstances of being, and negatively in a thousand
significant repudiations. Even when the devotee most strenuously
renounces this world and all its works, when St. Anthony flees into the
desert or the pious Durtal wrestles in his cell, when the pale nun
prays in vigil and the hermit mounts his pillar, it is Celibacy, that
great denial of life, that sings through all their struggle, it is this
business of births as the central fact of life they still have most in
mind.

This is not human life merely, it is all life. This living world, as
the New Republican will see it, is no more than a great birth-place, an
incessant renewal, an undying fresh beginning and unfolding of life.
Take away this fact of birth and what is there remaining? A world
without flowers, without the singing of birds, without the freshness of
youth, with a spring that brings no seedlings and a year that bears no
harvest, without beginnings and without defeats, a vast stagnation, a
universe of inconsequent matter--Death. Not only does the substance of
life vanish if we eliminate births and all that is related to births,
but whatever remains, if anything remains, of aesthetic and
intellectual and spiritual experience, collapses utterly and falls
apart, when this essential substratum of all experience is withdrawn.
So at any rate the world presents itself in the view the New Republican
takes. And if it should chance that the reader finds this ring untrue
to him, then he may take it that he stands outside us, that the New
Republic is not for him.

It may be submitted that this statement that Life is a texture of
births may be accepted by minds of the most divergent religious and
philosophical profession. No fundamental or recondite admissions are
proposed here, but only that the every-day life for every-day purposes
has this shape and nature. The utter materialist may say that life to
him is a fortuitous concurrence of atoms, a chance kinking in the
universal fabric of matter. It is not our present business to confute
him. The fact remains this is the form the kinking has taken. The
believer, sedulous for his soul's welfare, may say that Life is to him
an arena of spiritual conflict, but this is the character of the
conflict, this is the business from which all the tests and exercises
of his soul are drawn. It matters not in this present discussion if
Life is no more than a dream; the dream is this.

And now one comes to another step. The reader may give his assent to
this statement as obvious or he may guard his assent with a
qualification or so, but I doubt if he will deny it. No one, I expect,
will categorically deny it. But although no one will do that, a great
number of people who have not clearly seen things in this light, do in
thought and in many details of their practice follow a line that is, in
effect, a flat denial of what is here proposed. Life no doubt is a
fabric woven of births and the struggle to maintain and develop and
multiply lives. It does not follow that life is _consciously_ a
fabric woven of births and the struggle to maintain and develop and
multiply lives. I do not suppose a cat or a savage sees it in that
light. A cat's standpoint is probably strictly individualistic. She
sees the whole universe as a scheme of more or less useful, pleasurable
and interesting things concentrated upon her sensitive and interesting
personality. With a sinuous determination she evades disagreeables and
pursues delights; life is to her quite clearly and simply a succession
of pleasures, sensations and interests, among which interests there
happen to be--kittens!

And this way of regarding life is by no means confined to animals and
savages. I would even go so far as to suggest that it is only within
the last hundred years that any considerable number of thoughtful
people have come to look at life steadily and consistently as being
shaped to this form, to the form of a series of births, growths and
births. The most general truths are those last apprehended. The
universal fact of gravitation, for example, which pervades all being,
received its complete recognition scarcely two hundred years ago. And
again children and savages live in air, breathe air, are saturated with
air, die for five minutes' need of it, and never definitely realize
there is such a thing as air at all. The vast mass of human expression
in act and art and literature takes a narrower view than we have here
formulated; it presents each man not only as isolated from and
antagonized with the world about him, but as cut off sharply and
definitely from the past before he lived and the future after he is
dead; it puts what is, in relation to the view we have taken, a
disproportionate amount of stress upon his egotism, upon the pursuit of
his self-interest and his personal virtue and his personal fancies, and
it ignores the fact, the familiar rediscovery which the nineteenth
century has achieved, that he is after all only the transitory
custodian of an undying gift of life, an inheritor under conditions,
the momentary voice and interpreter of a being that springs from the
dawn of time and lives in offspring and thought and material
consequence, for ever.

This over-accentuation in the past of man's egoistic individuality, or,
if one puts it in another way, this unsuspicious ignorance of the real
nature of life, becomes glaringly conspicuous in such weighed and
deliberate utterances as _The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius_.
Throughout these frank and fundamental discourses one traces a
predominant desire for a perfected inconsequent egotism. Body is
repudiated as a garment, position is an accident, the past that made us
exists not since it is past, the future exists not for we shall never
see it; at last nothing but the abstracted ego remains,--a sort of
complimentary Nirvana. One citation will serve to show the colour of
all his thought. "A man," he remarks, "is very devout to prevent the
loss of his son. But I would have you pray rather against the fear of
losing him. Let this be the rule for your devotions." [Footnote: _The
Meditations of M. A. Antoninus_, ix. 40.] That indeed is the rule
for all the devotions of that departing generation of wisdom. Rather
serenity and dignity than good ensuing. Rather a virtuous man than any
resultant whatever from his lifetime, for the future of the world. It
points this disregard of the sequence of life and birth in favour of an
abstract and fruitless virtue, it points it indeed with a barbed point
that the son of Marcus Aurelius was the unspeakable Commodus, and that
the Roman Empire fell from the temporizing detachment of his rule into
a century of disorder and misery.

Scottish book of the year goes to Kieron Smith, Boy by James Kelman

The barrister Constance Briscoe has won the libel case brought against her by her mother, Carmen Briscoe-Mitchell, over her bestselling misery memoir Ugly, in which she accused Briscoe-Mitchell of childhood cruelty and neglect.

Briscoe-Mitchell claimed the allegations were "a piece of fiction", and sued Briscoe and her publishers Hodder & Stoughton for libel.

A 10-day hearing at the high court in London concluded earlier today with a unanimous verdict from the jury after more than a day's deliberation. Speaking outside the court, Briscoe, a part-time judge, said she was "very happy" with the verdict.

"It is sad that my mother still feels the need to pursue me. Now I just want to get on with my career," she said. "I can quite understand why my family went into collective denial, but whilst child abuse may be committed behind closed doors, it should never be swept under the carpet."

The hearing saw Briscoe tell Mr Justice Tugendhat and a jury how her mother beat her with a stick for wetting the bed, called her a "dirty little whore" and drove her to attempt suicide by drinking bleach.

Briscoe's account of her upbringing was published in 2006 and has sold more than 400,000 copies in the UK.

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Would you have your ashes scattered in Jane Austen's garden?
American film producer to publish version of the Bible in which God says it is better to be gay than straight

The royal family doesn't need a poet

The power of Jane Austen never ceases to amaze: the myriad film and TV adaptations, the biopics, the spin-off self-help books, the novels about Austen book clubs and Austen obsessives and even, next spring, the publication of a book about "how Jane Austen conquered the world" (Jane's Fame, by Clare Harman). And now comes the just-too-weird story that deceased fans of Jane Austen have been banned from having their ashes scattered in her garden. In a letter to the Jane Austen Society, Louise West, the collections manager of Jane Austen's House Museum, wrote: "While we understand many admirers of Jane Austen would love to have ashes laid here, it is something we do not allow. It is distressing for visitors to see mounds of human ash, particularly so for our gardener. Also, it is of no benefit to the garden!" (Or is it? Surely a small quantity of fresh ashes judiciously placed beneath a hydrangea bush is just the ticket?)

Anyway, leaving aside the Gardeners' Question Time minutiae, what on earth is going on here? I like an Austen novel as much as the next person – I probably reread my way through the complete works every couple of years – but I am baffled as to why one would want to be laid to rest among the flowerbeds of Chawton. The only explanation is the currently unstoppable power of the Austen cult, fuelled by Colin Firth in a wet blouse, by Andrew Davies's adaptations, and by Hollywood. I'm all for enjoying books, but the cult of Austen has reached ridiculous proportions. In a post-feminist world that should know better, she seems to be adored as the comforting provider of romantic, happy-endings nonsense instead of the sharp and acerbic social satirist she deserves to be seen as.

(Does anyone actually believe her, by the way, when she foretells a happy marriage for Darcey and Elizabeth? I fear a woman as interesting as Elizabeth would be sorely disappointed with this standard-issue British Repressed Public-school Man - hopeless emotionally, and probably hopeless in bed.)

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