A Modern Utopia Page 15 to 23

A Modern Utopia

Wells, H. G.

Published: 1905

Categorie(s): Fiction, Non-Fiction, Human Science, Philosophy,
Science Fiction

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Chapter 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.

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 Chapter5.

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 mediæval 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

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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
encyclopædic 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 formulæ, 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

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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 Encyclopædia, 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,
that lost and misinterpreted giant, may perhaps be coming to
his own… .
There is no abiding thing in what we know. We change from
weaker to stronger lights, and each more powerful light
pierces our hitherto opaque foundations and reveals fresh and
different opacities below. We can never foretell which of our
seemingly assured fundamentals the next change will not affect.
What folly, then, to dream of mapping out our minds in
however general terms, of providing for the endless mysteries
of the future a terminology and an idiom! We follow the vein,
we mine and accumulate our treasure, but who can tell which
way the vein may trend? Language is the nourishment of the
thought of man, that serves only as it undergoes metabolism,
and becomes thought and lives, and in its very living passes
away. You scientific people, with your fancy of a terrible exactitude
in language, of indestructible foundations built, as

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that Wordsworthian doggerel on the title-page of Nature says,
“for aye,” are marvellously without imagination!
The language of Utopia will no doubt be one and indivisible;
all mankind will, in the measure of their individual differences
in quality, be brought into the same phase, into a common resonance
of thought, but the language they will speak will still be
a living tongue, an animated system of imperfections, which
every individual man will infinitesimally modify. Through the
universal freedom of exchange and movement, the developing
change in its general spirit will be a world-wide change; that is
the quality of its universality. I fancy it will be a coalesced language,
a synthesis of many. Such a language as English is a coalesced
language; it is a coalescence of Anglo-Saxon and Norman
French and Scholar's Latin, welded into one speech more
ample and more powerful and beautiful than either. The Utopian
tongue might well present a more spacious coalescence,
and hold in the frame of such an uninflected or slightly inflected
idiom as English already presents, a profuse vocabulary into
which have been cast a dozen once separate tongues, superposed
and then welded together through bilingual and trilingual
compromises. [Footnote: Vide an excellent article, La
Langue Française en l'an 2003, par Leon Bollack, in La Revue,
15 Juillet, 1903.] In the past ingenious men have speculated on
the inquiry, “Which language will survive?” The question was
badly put. I think now that this wedding and survival of several
in a common offspring is a far more probable thing.

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Chapter 6.

This talk of languages, however, is a digression. We were
on our way along the faint path that runs round the rim of
the Lake of Lucendro, and we were just upon the point of coming
upon our first Utopian man. He was, I said, no Swiss. Yet
he would have been a Swiss on mother Earth, and here he
would have the same face, with some difference, maybe, in the
expression; the same physique, though a little better developed,
perhaps—the same complexion. He would have different
habits, different traditions, different knowledge, different
ideas, different clothing, and different appliances, but, except
for all that, he would be the same man. We very distinctly
provided at the outset that the modern Utopia must have
people inherently the same as those in the world.
There is more, perhaps, in that than appears at the first
suggestion.
That proposition gives one characteristic difference between
a modern Utopia and almost all its predecessors. It is to be a
world Utopia, we have agreed, no less; and so we must needs
face the fact that we are to have differences of race. Even the
lower class of Plato's Republic was not specifically of different
race. But this is a Utopia as wide as Christian charity, and
white and black, brown, red and yellow, all tints of skin, all
types of body and character, will be there. How we are to adjust
their differences is a master question, and the matter is
not even to be opened in this chapter. It will need a whole
chapter even to glance at its issues. But here we underline that
stipulation; every race of this planet earth is to be found in the
strictest parallelism there, in numbers the same—only, as I say,
with an entirely different set of traditions, ideals, ideas, and
purposes, and so moving under those different skies to an altogether
different destiny.
There follows a curious development of this to anyone clearly
impressed by the uniqueness and the unique significance of individualities.
Races are no hard and fast things, no crowd of
identically similar persons, but massed sub-races, and tribes
and families, each after its kind unique, and these again are
clusterings of still smaller uniques and so down to each several
person. So that our first convention works out to this, that not

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 only is every earthly mountain, river, plant, and beast in that
parallel planet beyond Sirius also, but every man, woman, and
child alive has a Utopian parallel. From now onward, of course,
the fates of these two planets will diverge, men will die here
whom wisdom will save there, and perhaps conversely here we
shall save men; children will be born to them and not to us, to
us and not to them, but this, this moment of reading, is the
starting moment, and for the first and last occasion the populations
of our planets are abreast.
We must in these days make some such supposition. The alternative
is a Utopia of dolls in the likeness of angels—imaginary
laws to fit incredible people, an unattractive undertaking.
For example, we must assume there is a man such as I might
have been, better informed, better disciplined, better employed,
thinner and more active—and I wonder what he is doing!—
and you, Sir or Madam, are in duplicate also, and all the
men and women that you know and I. I doubt if we shall meet
our doubles, or if it would be pleasant for us to do so; but as
we come down from these lonely mountains to the roads and
houses and living places of the Utopian world-state, we shall
certainly find, here and there, faces that will remind us singularly
of those who have lived under our eyes.
There are some you never wish to meet again, you say, and
some, I gather, you do. “And One?!”
It is strange, but this figure of the botanist will not keep in
place. It sprang up between us, dear reader, as a passing illustrative
invention. I do not know what put him into my head,
and for the moment, it fell in with my humour for a space to
foist the man's personality upon you as yours and call you scientific—
that most abusive word. But here he is, indisputably,
with me in Utopia, and lapsing from our high speculative
theme into halting but intimate confidences. He declares he
has not come to Utopia to meet again with his sorrows.
What sorrows?
I protest, even warmly, that neither he nor his sorrows were
in my intention.
He is a man, I should think, of thirty-nine, a man whose life
has been neither tragedy nor a joyous adventure, a man with
one of those faces that have gained interest rather than force
or nobility from their commerce with life. He is something

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 refined, with some knowledge, perhaps, of the minor pains and
all the civil self-controls; he has read more than he has
suffered, and suffered rather than done. He regards me with
his blue-grey eye, from which all interest in this Utopia has
faded.
“It is a trouble,” he says, “that has come into my life only for
a month or so—at least acutely again. I thought it was all over.
There was someone?”
It is an amazing story to hear upon a mountain crest in Utopia,
this Hampstead affair, this story of a Frognal heart. “Frognal,”
he says, is the place where they met, and it summons to
my memory the word on a board at the corner of a flint-dressed
new road, an estate development road, with a vista of villas up
a hill. He had known her before he got his professorship, and
neither her “people” nor his—he speaks that detestable middleclass
dialect in which aunts and things with money and the
right of intervention are called “people”!—approved of the affair.
“She was, I think, rather easily swayed,” he says. “But
that's not fair to her, perhaps. She thought too much of others.
If they seemed distressed, or if they seemed to think a course
right?” …
Have I come to Utopia to hear this sort of thing?

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 Chapter 7.

It is necessary to turn the botanist's thoughts into a worthier
channel. It is necessary to override these modest regrets,
this intrusive, petty love story. Does he realise this is indeed
Utopia? Turn your mind, I insist, to this Utopia of mine, and
leave these earthly troubles to their proper planet. Do you realise
just where the propositions necessary to a modern Utopia
are taking us? Everyone on earth will have to be here;—themselves,
but with a difference. Somewhere here in this world is,
for example, Mr. Chamberlain, and the King is here (no doubt
incognito), and all the Royal Academy, and Sandow, and Mr.
Arnold White.
But these famous names do not appeal to him.
My mind goes from this prominent and typical personage to
that, and for a time I forget my companion. I am distracted by
the curious side issues this general proposition trails after it.
There will be so-and-so, and so-and-so. The name and figure of
Mr. Roosevelt jerks into focus, and obliterates an attempt to
acclimatise the Emperor of the Germans. What, for instance,
will Utopia do with Mr. Roosevelt? There drifts across my inner
vision the image of a strenuous struggle with Utopian constables,
the voice that has thrilled terrestrial millions in eloquent
protest. The writ of arrest, drifting loose in the conflict,
comes to my feet; I impale the scrap of paper, and read—but
can it be?—“attempted disorganisation?… incitements to disarrange?…
the balance of population?”
The trend of my logic for once has led us into a facetious alley.
One might indeed keep in this key, and write an agreeable
little Utopia, that like the holy families of the mediæval artists
(or Michael Angelo's Last Judgement) should compliment one's
friends in various degrees. Or one might embark upon a speculative
treatment of the entire Almanach de Gotha, something
on the lines of Epistemon's vision of the damned great, when
“Xerxes was a crier of mustard.
Romulus was a salter and a patcher of patterns… .”
That incomparable catalogue! That incomparable catalogue!
Inspired by the Muse of Parody, we might go on to the pages of