Section 8

After that I remember we fell talking of the discipline of the Rule,

of the Courts that try breaches of it, and interpret doubtful

cases--for, though a man may resign with due notice and be free

after a certain time to rejoin again, one deliberate breach may

exclude a man for ever--of the system of law that has grown up about

such trials, and of the triennial council that revises and alters

the Rule. From that we passed to the discussion of the general

constitution of this World State. Practically all political power

vests in the samurai. Not only are they the only administrators,

lawyers, practising doctors, and public officials of almost all

kinds, but they are the only voters. Yet, by a curious exception,

the supreme legislative assembly must have one-tenth, and may have

one-half of its members outside the order, because, it is alleged,

there is a sort of wisdom that comes of sin and laxness, which is

necessary to the perfect ruling of life. My double quoted me a verse

from the Canon on this matter that my unfortunate verbal memory did

not retain, but it was in the nature of a prayer to save the world

from "unfermented men." It would seem that Aristotle's idea of a

rotation of rulers, an idea that crops up again in Harrington's

Oceana, that first Utopia of "the sovereign people" (a Utopia that,

through Danton's readings in English, played a disastrous part in

the French Revolution), gets a little respect in Utopia. The

tendency is to give a practically permanent tenure to good men.

Every ruler and official, it is true, is put on his trial every

three years before a jury drawn by lot, according to the range of

his activities, either from the samurai of his municipal area or

from the general catalogue of the samurai, but the business of this

jury is merely to decide whether to continue him in office or order

a new election. In the majority of cases the verdict is

continuation. Even if it is not so the official may still appear as

a candidate before the second and separate jury which fills the

vacant post....

My double mentioned a few scattered details of the electoral

methods, but as at that time I believed we were to have a number of

further conversations, I did not exhaust my curiosities upon this

subject. Indeed, I was more than a little preoccupied and

inattentive. The religion of the samurai was after my heart, and it

had taken hold of me very strongly.... But presently I fell

questioning him upon the complications that arise in the Modern

Utopia through the differences between the races of men, and found

my attention returning. But the matter of that discussion I shall

put apart into a separate chapter. In the end we came back to the

particulars of this great Rule of Life that any man desiring of

joining the samurai must follow.

I remember how, after our third bout of talking, I walked back

through the streets of Utopian London to rejoin the botanist at our

hotel.

My double lived in an apartment in a great building--I should judge

about where, in our London, the Tate Gallery squats, and, as the day

was fine, and I had no reason for hurry, I went not by the covered

mechanical way, but on foot along the broad, tree-set terraces that

follow the river on either side.

It was afternoon, and the mellow Thames Valley sunlight, warm and

gentle, lit a clean and gracious world. There were many people

abroad, going to and fro, unhurrying, but not aimless, and I watched

them so attentively that were you to ask me for the most elementary

details of the buildings and terraces that lay back on either bank,

or of the pinnacles and towers and parapets that laced the sky, I

could not tell you them. But of the people I could tell a great

deal.

No Utopians wear black, and for all the frequency of the samurai

uniform along the London ways the general effect is of a

gaily-coloured population. You never see anyone noticeably ragged or

dirty; the police, who answer questions and keep order (and are

quite distinct from the organisation for the pursuit of criminals)

see to that; and shabby people are very infrequent. People who want

to save money for other purposes, or who do not want much bother

with their clothing, seem to wear costumes of rough woven cloth,

dyed an unobtrusive brown or green, over fine woollen underclothing,

and so achieve a decent comfort in its simplest form. Others outside

the Rule of the samurai range the spectrum for colour, and have

every variety of texture; the colours attained by the Utopian dyers

seem to me to be fuller and purer than the common range of stuffs on

earth; and the subtle folding of the woollen materials witness that

Utopian Bradford is no whit behind her earthly sister. White is

extraordinarily frequent; white woollen tunics and robes into which

are woven bands of brilliant colour, abound. Often these ape the cut

and purple edge that distinguishes the samurai. In Utopian London

the air is as clear and less dusty than it is among high mountains;

the roads are made of unbroken surfaces, and not of friable earth;

all heating is done by electricity, and no coal ever enters the

town; there are no horses or dogs, and so there is not a suspicion

of smoke and scarcely a particle of any sort of dirt to render white

impossible.

The radiated influence of the uniform of the samurai has been to

keep costume simple, and this, perhaps, emphasises the general

effect of vigorous health, of shapely bodies. Everyone is well grown

and well nourished; everyone seems in good condition; everyone walks

well, and has that clearness of eye that comes with cleanness of

blood. In London I am apt to consider myself of a passable size and

carriage; here I feel small and mean-looking. The faint suspicions

of spinal curvatures, skew feet, unequal legs, and ill-grown bones,

that haunt one in a London crowd, the plain intimations--in yellow

faces, puffy faces, spotted and irregular complexions, in nervous

movements and coughs and colds--of bad habits and an incompetent or

disregarded medical profession, do not appear here. I notice few old

people, but there seems to be a greater proportion of men and women

at or near the prime of life.

I hang upon that. I have seen one or two fat people here--they are

all the more noticeable because they are rare. But wrinkled age?

Have I yet in Utopia set eyes on a bald head?

The Utopians have brought a sounder physiological science than ours

to bear upon regimen. People know better what to do and what to

avoid, how to foresee and forestall coming trouble, and how to evade

and suppress the subtle poisons that blunt the edge of sensation.

They have put off the years of decay. They keep their teeth, they

keep their digestions, they ward off gout and rheumatism, neuralgia

and influenza and all those cognate decays that bend and wrinkle men

and women in the middle years of existence. They have extended the

level years far into the seventies, and age, when it comes, comes

swiftly and easily. The feverish hurry of our earth, the decay that

begins before growth has ceased, is replaced by a ripe prolonged

maturity. This modern Utopia is an adult world. The flushed romance,

the predominant eroticisms, the adventurous uncertainty of a world

in which youth prevails, gives place here to a grave deliberation,

to a fuller and more powerful emotion, to a broader handling of

life.

Yet youth is here.

Amidst the men whose faces have been made fine by thought and

steadfast living, among the serene-eyed women, comes youth,

gaily-coloured, buoyantly healthy, with challenging eyes, with fresh

and eager face....

For everyone in Utopia who is sane enough to benefit, study and

training last until twenty; then comes the travel year, and many are

still students until twenty-four or twenty-five. Most are still, in

a sense, students throughout life, but it is thought that, unless

responsible action is begun in some form in the early twenties, will

undergoes a partial atrophy. But the full swing of adult life is

hardly attained until thirty is reached. Men marry before the middle

thirties, and the women rather earlier, few are mothers before

five-and-twenty. The majority of those who become samurai do so

between twenty-seven and thirty-five. And, between seventeen and

thirty, the Utopians have their dealings with love, and the play and

excitement of love is a chief interest in life. Much freedom of act

is allowed them so that their wills may grow freely. For the most

part they end mated, and love gives place to some special and more

enduring interest, though, indeed, there is love between older men

and fresh girls, and between youths and maturer women. It is in

these most graceful and beautiful years of life that such freedoms

of dress as the atmosphere of Utopia permits are to be seen, and the

crude bright will and imagination of youth peeps out in ornament and

colour.

Figures come into my sight and possess me for a moment and pass, and

give place to others; there comes a dusky little Jewess, red-lipped

and amber-clad, with a deep crimson flower--I know not whether real

or sham--in the dull black of her hair. She passes me with an

unconscious disdain; and then I am looking at a brightly-smiling,

blue-eyed girl, tall, ruddy, and freckled warmly, clad like a stage

Rosalind, and talking gaily to a fair young man, a novice under the

Rule. A red-haired mother under the Lesser Rule goes by, green-gowned,

with dark green straps crossing between her breasts, and her two

shock-headed children, bare-legged and lightly shod, tug at her

hands on either side. Then a grave man in a long, fur-trimmed robe,

a merchant, maybe, debates some serious matter with a white-tunicked

clerk. And the clerk's face----? I turn to mark the straight,

blue-black hair. The man must be Chinese....

Then come two short-bearded men in careless indigo blue raiment,

both of them convulsed with laughter--men outside the Rule, who

practise, perhaps, some art--and then one of the samurai, in

cheerful altercation with a blue-robed girl of eight. "But you

_could_ have come back yesterday, Dadda," she persists. He is deeply

sunburnt, and suddenly there passes before my mind the picture of a

snowy mountain waste at night-fall and a solitary small figure under

the stars....

When I come back to the present thing again, my eye is caught

at once by a young negro, carrying books in his hand, a

prosperous-looking, self-respecting young negro, in a trimly-cut

coat of purple-blue and silver.

I am reminded of what my double said to me of race.

CHAPTER THE TENTH

Race in Utopia

Section 1

Above the sphere of the elemental cravings and necessities, the soul

of man is in a perpetual vacillation between two conflicting

impulses: the desire to assert his individual differences, the

desire for distinction, and his terror of isolation. He wants to

stand out, but not too far out, and, on the contrary, he wants

to merge himself with a group, with some larger body, but not

altogether. Through all the things of life runs this tortuous

compromise, men follow the fashions but resent ready-made uniforms

on every plane of their being. The disposition to form aggregations

and to imagine aggregations is part of the incurable nature of man;

it is one of the great natural forces the statesman must utilise,

and against which he must construct effectual defences. The study of

the aggregations and of the ideals of aggregations about which men's

sympathies will twine, and upon which they will base a large

proportion of their conduct and personal policy, is the legitimate

definition of sociology.

Now the sort of aggregation to which men and women will refer

themselves is determined partly by the strength and idiosyncrasy of

the individual imagination, and partly by the reek of ideas that

chances to be in the air at the time. Men and women may vary greatly

both in their innate and their acquired disposition towards this

sort of larger body or that, to which their social reference can be

made. The "natural" social reference of a man is probably to some

rather vaguely conceived tribe, as the "natural" social reference of

a dog is to a pack. But just as the social reference of a dog may be

educated until the reference to a pack is completely replaced by a

reference to an owner, so on his higher plane of educability the

social reference of the civilised man undergoes the most remarkable

transformations. But the power and scope of his imagination and the

need he has of response sets limits to this process. A highly

intellectualised mature mind may refer for its data very

consistently to ideas of a higher being so remote and indefinable as

God, so comprehensive as humanity, so far-reaching as the purpose in

things. I write "may," but I doubt if this exaltation of reference

is ever permanently sustained. Comte, in his Positive Polity,

exposes his soul with great freedom, and the curious may trace how,

while he professes and quite honestly intends to refer himself

always to his "Greater Being" Humanity, he narrows constantly to his

projected "Western Republic" of civilised men, and quite frequently

to the minute indefinite body of Positivist subscribers. And the

history of the Christian Church, with its development of orders and

cults, sects and dissents, the history of fashionable society with

its cliques and sets and every political history with its cabals and

inner cabinets, witness to the struggle that goes on in the minds of

men to adjust themselves to a body larger indeed than themselves,

but which still does not strain and escape their imaginative

grasp.

The statesman, both for himself and others, must recognise this

inadequacy of grasp, and the necessity for real and imaginary

aggregations to sustain men in their practical service of the order

of the world. He must be a sociologist; he must study the whole

science of aggregations in relation to that World State to which his

reason and his maturest thought direct him. He must lend himself to

the development of aggregatory ideas that favour the civilising

process, and he must do his best to promote the disintegration of

aggregations and the effacement of aggregatory ideas, that keep men

narrow and unreasonably prejudiced one against another.

He will, of course, know that few men are even rudely consistent in

such matters, that the same man in different moods and on different

occasions, is capable of referring himself in perfect good faith,

not only to different, but to contradictory larger beings, and that

the more important thing about an aggregatory idea from the State

maker's point of view is not so much what it explicitly involves as

what it implicitly repudiates. The natural man does not feel he is

aggregating at all, unless he aggregates _against something. He

refers himself to the tribe; he is loyal to the tribe, and quite

inseparably he fears or dislikes those others outside the tribe. The

tribe is always at least defensively hostile and usually actively

hostile to humanity beyond the aggregation. The Anti-idea, it would

seem, is inseparable from the aggregatory idea; it is a necessity of

the human mind. When we think of the class A as desirable, we think

of Not-A as undesirable. The two things are as inevitably connected

as the tendons of our hands, so that when we flatten down our little

fingers on our palms, the fourth digit, whether we want it or not,

comes down halfway. All real working gods, one may remark, all gods

that are worshipped emotionally, are tribal gods, and every attempt

to universalise the idea of God trails dualism and the devil after

it as a moral necessity.

When we inquire, as well as the unformed condition of terrestrial

sociology permits, into the aggregatory ideas that seem to satisfy

men, we find a remarkable complex, a disorderly complex, in the

minds of nearly all our civilised contemporaries. For example, all

sorts of aggregatory ideas come and go across the chameleon surfaces

of my botanist's mind. He has a strong feeling for systematic

botanists as against plant physiologists, whom he regards as lewd

and evil scoundrels in this relation, but he has a strong feeling

for all botanists, and, indeed, all biologists, as against

physicists, and those who profess the exact sciences, all of whom he

regards as dull, mechanical, ugly-minded scoundrels in this

relation; but he has a strong feeling for all who profess what is

called Science as against psychologists, sociologists, philosophers,

and literary men, whom he regards as wild, foolish, immoral

scoundrels in this relation; but he has a strong feeling for all

educated men as against the working man, whom he regards as a

cheating, lying, loafing, drunken, thievish, dirty scoundrel in this

relation; but so soon as the working man is comprehended together

with those others, as Englishmen--which includes, in this case, I

may remark, the Scottish and Welsh--he holds them superior to all

other sorts of European, whom he regards, &c....

Now one perceives in all these aggregatory ideas and rearrangements

of the sympathies one of the chief vices of human thought, due to

its obsession by classificatory suggestions. [Footnote: See Chapter

the First, section 5, and the Appendix.] The necessity for marking

our classes has brought with it a bias for false and excessive

contrast, and we never invent a term but we are at once cramming it

with implications beyond its legitimate content. There is no feat of

irrelevance that people will not perform quite easily in this way;

there is no class, however accidental, to which they will not at

once ascribe deeply distinctive qualities. The seventh sons of

seventh sons have remarkable powers of insight; people with a

certain sort of ear commit crimes of violence; people with red hair

have souls of fire; all democratic socialists are trustworthy

persons; all people born in Ireland have vivid imaginations and all

Englishmen are clods; all Hindoos are cowardly liars; all

curly-haired people are good-natured; all hunch-backs are energetic

and wicked, and all Frenchmen eat frogs. Such stupid generalisations

have been believed with the utmost readiness, and acted upon by

great numbers of sane, respectable people. And when the class is

one's own class, when it expresses one of the aggregations to which

one refers one's own activities, then the disposition to divide all

qualities between this class and its converse, and to cram one's own

class with every desirable distinction, becomes overwhelming.

It is part of the training of the philosopher to regard all such

generalisations with suspicion; it is part of the training of the

Utopist and statesman, and all good statesmen are Utopists, to

mingle something very like animosity with that suspicion. For crude

classifications and false generalisations are the curse of all

organised human life.

Section 2

Disregarding classes, cliques, sets, castes, and the like minor

aggregations, concerned for the most part with details and minor

aspects of life, one finds among the civilised peoples of the world

certain broad types of aggregatory idea. There are, firstly, the

national ideas, ideas which, in their perfection, require a

uniformity of physical and mental type, a common idiom, a common

religion, a distinctive style of costume, decoration, and thought,

and a compact organisation acting with complete external unity. Like

the Gothic cathedral, the national idea is never found complete with

all its parts; but one has in Russia, with her insistence on

political and religious orthodoxy, something approaching it pretty

closely, and again in the inland and typical provinces of China,

where even a strange pattern of hat arouses hostility. We had it in

vigorous struggle to exist in England under the earlier Georges in

the minds of those who supported the Established Church. The idea of

the fundamental nature of nationality is so ingrained in thought,

with all the usual exaggeration of implication, that no one laughs

at talk about Swedish painting or American literature. And I will

confess and point out that my own detachment from these delusions is

so imperfect and discontinuous that in another passage I have

committed myself to a short assertion of the exceptionally noble

quality of the English imagination. [Footnote: Chapter the Seventh,

section 6.] I am constantly gratified by flattering untruths about

English superiority which I should reject indignantly were the

application bluntly personal, and I am ever ready to believe the

scenery of England, the poetry of England, even the decoration and

music of England, in some mystic and impregnable way, the best. This

habit of intensifying all class definitions, and particularly those

in which one has a personal interest, is in the very constitution of

man's mind. It is part of the defect of that instrument. We may

watch against it and prevent it doing any great injustices, or

leading us into follies, but to eradicate it is an altogether

different matter. There it is, to be reckoned with, like the coccyx,

the pineal eye, and the vermiform appendix. And a too consistent

attack on it may lead simply to its inversion, to a vindictively

pro-foreigner attitude that is equally unwise.

The second sort of aggregatory ideas, running very often across the

boundaries of national ideas and in conflict with them, are

religious ideas. In Western Europe true national ideas only emerged

to their present hectic vigour after the shock of the Reformation

had liberated men from the great tradition of a Latin-speaking

Christendom, a tradition the Roman Catholic Church has sustained as

its modification of the old Latin-speaking Imperialism in the rule

of the pontifex maximus. There was, and there remains to this day, a

profound disregard of local dialect and race in the Roman Catholic

tradition, which has made that Church a persistently disintegrating

influence in national life. Equally spacious and equally regardless

of tongues and peoples is the great Arabic-speaking religion of

Mahomet. Both Christendom and Islam are indeed on their secular

sides imperfect realisations of a Utopian World State. But the

secular side was the weaker side of these cults; they produced no

sufficiently great statesmen to realise their spiritual forces, and

it is not in Rome under pontifical rule, nor in Munster under the

Anabaptists, but rather in Thomas a Kempis and Saint Augustin's City

of God that we must seek for the Utopias of Christianity.

In the last hundred years a novel development of material forces,

and especially of means of communication, has done very much to

break up the isolations in which nationality perfected its

prejudices and so to render possible the extension and consolidation

of such a world-wide culture as mediaeval Christendom and Islam

foreshadowed. The first onset of these expansive developments has

been marked in the world of mind by an expansion of political

ideals--Comte's "Western Republic" (1848) was the first Utopia that

involved the synthesis of numerous States--by the development of

"Imperialisms" in the place of national policies, and by the search

for a basis for wider political unions in racial traditions and

linguistic affinities. Anglo-Saxonism, Pan-Germanism, and the like

are such synthetic ideas. Until the eighties, the general tendency

of progressive thought was at one with the older Christian tradition

which ignored "race," and the aim of the expansive liberalism

movement, so far as it had a clear aim, was to Europeanise the

world, to extend the franchise to negroes, put Polynesians into

trousers, and train the teeming myriads of India to appreciate the

exquisite lilt of The Lady of the Lake. There is always some

absurdity mixed with human greatness, and we must not let the fact

that the middle Victorians counted Scott, the suffrage and

pantaloons among the supreme blessings of life, conceal from us the

very real nobility of their dream of England's mission to the

world....

We of this generation have seen a flood of reaction against such

universalism. The great intellectual developments that centre upon

the work of Darwin have exacerbated the realisation that life is a

conflict between superior and inferior types, it has underlined the

idea that specific survival rates are of primary significance in the

world's development, and a swarm of inferior intelligences has

applied to human problems elaborated and exaggerated versions of

these generalisations. These social and political followers of

Darwin have fallen into an obvious confusion between race and

nationality, and into the natural trap of patriotic conceit. The

dissent of the Indian and Colonial governing class to the first

crude applications of liberal propositions in India has found a

voice of unparalleled penetration in Mr. Kipling, whose want of

intellectual deliberation is only equalled by his poietic power. The

search for a basis for a new political synthesis in adaptable

sympathies based on linguistic affinities, was greatly influenced by

Max Muller's unaccountable assumption that language indicated

kindred, and led straight to wildly speculative ethnology, to the

discovery that there was a Keltic race, a Teutonic race, an

Indo-European race, and so forth. A book that has had enormous

influence in this matter, because of its use in teaching, is J. R.

Green's Short History of the English People, with its grotesque

insistence upon Anglo-Saxonism. And just now, the world is in a sort

of delirium about race and the racial struggle. The Briton

forgetting his Defoe, [Footnote: The True-born Englishman.] the Jew

forgetting the very word proselyte, the German forgetting his

anthropometric variations, and the Italian forgetting everything,

are obsessed by the singular purity of their blood, and the danger

of contamination the mere continuance of other races involves. True

to the law that all human aggregation involves the development of a

spirit of opposition to whatever is external to the aggregation,

extraordinary intensifications of racial definition are going on;

the vileness, the inhumanity, the incompatibility of alien races is

being steadily exaggerated. The natural tendency of every human

being towards a stupid conceit in himself and his kind, a stupid

depreciation of all unlikeness, is traded upon by this bastard

science. With the weakening of national references, and with the

pause before reconstruction in religious belief, these new arbitrary

and unsubstantial race prejudices become daily more formidable. They

are shaping policies and modifying laws, and they will certainly be

responsible for a large proportion of the wars, hardships, and

cruelties the immediate future holds in store for our earth.

No generalisations about race are too extravagant for the inflamed

credulity of the present time. No attempt is ever made to

distinguish differences in inherent quality--the true racial

differences--from artificial differences due to culture. No lesson

seems ever to be drawn from history of the fluctuating incidence of

the civilising process first upon this race and then upon that. The

politically ascendant peoples of the present phase are understood to

be the superior races, including such types as the Sussex farm

labourer, the Bowery tough, the London hooligan, and the Paris

apache; the races not at present prospering politically, such as the

Egyptians, the Greeks, the Spanish, the Moors, the Chinese, the

Hindoos, the Peruvians, and all uncivilised people are represented

as the inferior races, unfit to associate with the former on terms

of equality, unfit to intermarry with them on any terms, unfit for

any decisive voice in human affairs. In the popular imagination of

Western Europe, the Chinese are becoming bright gamboge in colour,

and unspeakably abominable in every respect; the people who are

black--the people who have fuzzy hair and flattish noses, and no

calves to speak of--are no longer held to be within the pale of

humanity. These superstitions work out along the obvious lines of

the popular logic. The depopulation of the Congo Free State by the

Belgians, the horrible massacres of Chinese by European soldiery

during the Pekin expedition, are condoned as a painful but necessary

part of the civilising process of the world. The world-wide

repudiation of slavery in the nineteenth century was done against a

vast sullen force of ignorant pride, which, reinvigorated by the

new delusions, swings back again to power.

"Science" is supposed to lend its sanction to race mania, but it is

only "science" as it is understood by very illiterate people that

does anything of the sort--"scientists'" science, in fact. What

science has to tell about "The Races of Man" will be found compactly

set forth by Doctor J. Deinker, in the book published under that

title. [Footnote: See also an excellent paper in the American

Journal of Sociology for March, 1904, The Psychology of Race

Prejudice, by W. I. Thomas.] From that book one may learn the

beginnings of race charity. Save for a few isolated pools of savage

humanity, there is probably no pure race in the whole world. The

great continental populations are all complex mixtures of numerous

and fluctuating types. Even the Jews present every kind of skull

that is supposed to be racially distinctive, a vast range of

complexion--from blackness in Goa, to extreme fairness in

Holland--and a vast mental and physical diversity. Were the Jews

to discontinue all intermarriage with "other races" henceforth

for ever, it would depend upon quite unknown laws of fecundity,

prepotency, and variability, what their final type would be, or,

indeed, whether any particular type would ever prevail over

diversity. And, without going beyond the natives of the British

Isles, one can discover an enormous range of types, tall and short,

straight-haired and curly, fair and dark, supremely intelligent and

unteachably stupid, straightforward, disingenuous, and what not. The

natural tendency is to forget all this range directly "race" comes

under discussion, to take either an average or some quite arbitrary

ideal as the type, and think only of that. The more difficult thing

to do, but the thing that must be done if we are to get just results

in this discussion, is to do one's best to bear the range in

mind.

Let us admit that the average Chinaman is probably different in

complexion, and, indeed, in all his physical and psychical

proportions, from the average Englishman. Does that render their

association upon terms of equality in a World State impossible? What

the average Chinaman or Englishman may be, is of no importance

whatever to our plan of a World State. It is not averages that

exist, but individuals. The average Chinaman will never meet the

average Englishman anywhere; only individual Chinamen will meet

individual Englishmen. Now among Chinamen will be found a range of

variety as extensive as among Englishmen, and there is no single

trait presented by all Chinamen and no Englishman, or vice versa.

Even the oblique eye is not universal in China, and there are

probably many Chinamen who might have been "changed at birth," taken

away and educated into quite passable Englishmen. Even after we have

separated out and allowed for the differences in carriage, physique,

moral prepossessions, and so forth, due to their entirely divergent

cultures, there remains, no doubt, a very great difference between

the average Chinaman and the average Englishman; but would that

amount to a wider difference than is to be found between extreme

types of Englishmen?

For my own part I do not think that it would. But it is evident that

any precise answer can be made only when anthropology has adopted

much more exact and exhaustive methods of inquiry, and a far more

precise analysis than its present resources permit.

Be it remembered how doubtful and tainted is the bulk of our

evidence in these matters. These are extraordinarily subtle

inquiries, from which few men succeed in disentangling the threads

of their personal associations--the curiously interwoven strands of

self-love and self-interest that affect their inquiries. One might

almost say that instinct fights against such investigations, as it

does undoubtedly against many necessary medical researches. But

while a long special training, a high tradition and the possibility

of reward and distinction, enable the medical student to face many

tasks that are at once undignified and physically repulsive, the

people from whom we get our anthropological information are rarely

men of more than average intelligence, and of no mental training at

all. And the problems are far more elusive. It surely needs at least

the gifts and training of a first-class novelist, combined with a

sedulous patience that probably cannot be hoped for in combination

with these, to gauge the all-round differences between man and man.

Even where there are no barriers of language and colour,

understanding may be nearly impossible. How few educated people seem

to understand the servant class in England, or the working men!

Except for Mr. Bart Kennedy's A Man Adrift, I know of scarcely any

book that shows a really sympathetic and living understanding of the

navvy, the longshore sailor man, the rough chap of our own race.

Caricatures, luridly tragic or gaily comic, in which the

misconceptions of the author blend with the preconceptions of the

reader and achieve success, are, of course, common enough. And then

consider the sort of people who pronounce judgments on the moral and

intellectual capacity of the negro, the Malay, or the Chinaman. You

have missionaries, native schoolmasters, employers of coolies,

traders, simple downright men, who scarcely suspect the existence

of any sources of error in their verdicts, who are incapable of

understanding the difference between what is innate and what is

acquired, much less of distinguishing them in their interplay. Now

and then one seems to have a glimpse of something really living--in

Mary Kingsley's buoyant work, for instance--and even that may be no

more than my illusion.

For my own part I am disposed to discount all adverse judgments and

all statements of insurmountable differences between race and race.

I talk upon racial qualities to all men who have had opportunities

of close observation, and I find that their insistence upon these

differences is usually in inverse proportion to their intelligence.

It may be the chance of my encounters, but that is my clear

impression. Common sailors will generalise in the profoundest way

about Irishmen, and Scotchmen, and Yankees, and Nova Scotians, and

"Dutchies," until one might think one talked of different species of

animal, but the educated explorer flings clear of all these

delusions. To him men present themselves individualised, and if they

classify it is by some skin-deep accident of tint, some trick of the

tongue, or habit of gesture, or such-like superficiality. And after

all there exists to-day available one kind at least of unbiassed

anthropological evidence. There are photographs. Let the reader turn

over the pages of some such copiously illustrated work as The Living

Races of Mankind, [Footnote: The Living Races of Mankind, by H. N.

Hutchinson, J. W. Gregory, and R. Lydekker. (Hutchinson.)] and look

into the eyes of one alien face after another. Are they not very

like the people one knows? For the most part, one finds it hard to

believe that, with a common language and common social traditions,

one would not get on very well with these people. Here or there is

a brutish or evil face, but you can find as brutish and evil in

the Strand on any afternoon. There are differences no doubt, but

fundamental incompatibilities--no! And very many of them send out

a ray of special resemblance and remind one more strongly of this

friend or that, than they do of their own kind. One notes with

surprise that one's good friend and neighbour X and an anonymous

naked Gold Coast negro belong to one type, as distinguished from

one's dear friend Y and a beaming individual from Somaliland, who

as certainly belong to another.

In one matter the careless and prejudiced nature of accepted racial

generalisations is particularly marked. A great and increasing

number of people are persuaded that "half-breeds" are peculiarly

evil creatures--as hunchbacks and bastards were supposed to be in

the middle ages. The full legend of the wickedness of the half-breed

is best to be learnt from a drunken mean white from Virginia or the

Cape. The half-breed, one hears, combines all the vices of either

parent, he is wretchedly poor in health and spirit, but vindictive,

powerful, and dangerous to an extreme degree, his morals--the mean

white has high and exacting standards--are indescribable even in

whispers in a saloon, and so on, and so on. There is really not an

atom of evidence an unprejudiced mind would accept to sustain any

belief of the sort. There is nothing to show that the children of

racial admixture are, as a class, inherently either better or worse

in any respect than either parent. There is an equally baseless

theory that they are better, a theory displayed to a fine degree of

foolishness in the article on Shakespeare in the Encyclopaedia

Britannica. Both theories belong to the vast edifice of sham science

that smothers the realities of modern knowledge. It may be that most

"half-breeds" are failures in life, but that proves nothing. They

are, in an enormous number of cases, illegitimate and outcast from

the normal education of either race; they are brought up in homes

that are the battle-grounds of conflicting cultures; they labour

under a heavy premium of disadvantage. There is, of course, a

passing suggestion of Darwin's to account for atavism that might go

to support the theory of the vileness of half-breeds, if it had ever

been proved. But, then, it never has been proved. There is no proof

in the matter at all.

Section 3

Suppose, now, there is such a thing as an all-round inferior race.

Is that any reason why we should propose to preserve it for ever in

a condition of tutelage? Whether there is a race so inferior I do

not know, but certainly there is no race so superior as to be

trusted with human charges. The true answer to Aristotle's plea for

slavery, that there are "natural slaves," lies in the fact that

there are no "natural" masters. Power is no more to be committed to

men without discipline and restriction than alcohol. The true

objection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but

that it corrupts the superior. There is only one sane and logical

thing to be done with a really inferior race, and that is to

exterminate it.

Now there are various ways of exterminating a race, and most of them

are cruel. You may end it with fire and sword after the old Hebrew

fashion; you may enslave it and work it to death, as the Spaniards

did the Caribs; you may set it boundaries and then poison it slowly

with deleterious commodities, as the Americans do with most of their

Indians; you may incite it to wear clothing to which it is not

accustomed and to live under new and strange conditions that will

expose it to infectious diseases to which you yourselves are immune,

as the missionaries do the Polynesians; you may resort to honest

simple murder, as we English did with the Tasmanians; or you can

maintain such conditions as conduce to "race suicide," as the

British administration does in Fiji. Suppose, then, for a moment,

that there is an all-round inferior race; a Modern Utopia is under

the hard logic of life, and it would have to exterminate such a race

as quickly as it could. On the whole, the Fijian device seems the

least cruel. But Utopia would do that without any clumsiness of race

distinction, in exactly the same manner, and by the same machinery,

as it exterminates all its own defective and inferior strains; that

is to say, as we have already discussed in Chapter the Fifth,

section 1, by its marriage laws, and by the laws of the minimum

wage. That extinction need never be discriminatory. If any of the

race did, after all, prove to be fit to survive, they would

survive--they would be picked out with a sure and automatic justice

from the over-ready condemnation of all their kind.

Is there, however, an all-round inferior race in the world? Even the

Australian black-fellow is, perhaps, not quite so entirely eligible

for extinction as a good, wholesome, horse-racing, sheep-farming

Australian white may think. These queer little races, the

black-fellows, the Pigmies, the Bushmen, may have their little

gifts, a greater keenness, a greater fineness of this sense or that,

a quaintness of the imagination or what not, that may serve as their

little unique addition to the totality of our Utopian civilisation.

We are supposing that every individual alive on earth is alive in

Utopia, and so all the surviving "black-fellows" are there. Every

one of them in Utopia has had what none have had on earth, a fair

education and fair treatment, justice, and opportunity. Suppose that

the common idea is right about the general inferiority of these

people, then it would follow that in Utopia most of them are

childless, and working at or about the minimum wage, and some will

have passed out of all possibility of offspring under the hand of

the offended law; but still--cannot we imagine some few of these

little people--whom you must suppose neither naked nor clothed in

the European style, but robed in the Utopian fashion--may have found

some delicate art to practise, some peculiar sort of carving, for

example, that justifies God in creating them? Utopia has sound

sanitary laws, sound social laws, sound economic laws; what harm are

these people going to do?

Some may be even prosperous and admired, may have married women of

their own or some other race, and so may be transmitting that

distinctive thin thread of excellence, to take its due place in the

great synthesis of the future.

And, indeed, coming along that terrace in Utopia, I see a little

figure, a little bright-eyed, bearded man, inky black, frizzy

haired, and clad in a white tunic and black hose, and with a mantle

of lemon yellow wrapped about his shoulders. He walks, as most

Utopians walk, as though he had reason to be proud of something, as

though he had no reason to be afraid of anything in the world. He

carries a portfolio in his hand. It is that, I suppose, as much as

his hair, that recalls the Quartier Latin to my mind.

Section 4

I had already discussed the question of race with the botanist at

Lucerne.

"But you would not like," he cried in horror, "your daughter to

marry a Chinaman or a negro?"

"Of course," said I, "when you say Chinaman, you think of a creature

with a pigtail, long nails, and insanitary habits, and when you say

negro you think of a filthy-headed, black creature in an old hat.

You do this because your imagination is too feeble to disentangle

the inherent qualities of a thing from its habitual associations."

"Insult isn't argument," said the botanist.

"Neither is unsound implication. You make a question of race into a

question of unequal cultures. You would not like your daughter to

marry the sort of negro who steals hens, but then you would also not

like your daughter to marry a pure English hunchback with a squint,

or a drunken cab tout of Norman blood. As a matter of fact, very few

well-bred English girls do commit that sort of indiscretion. But you

don't think it necessary to generalise against men of your own race

because there are drunken cab touts, and why should you generalise

against negroes? Because the proportion of undesirables is higher

among negroes, that does not justify a sweeping condemnation. You

may have to condemn most, but why _all_? There may be--neither of us

knows enough to deny--negroes who are handsome, capable,

courageous."

"Ugh!" said the botanist.

"How detestable you must find Othello!"

It is my Utopia, and for a moment I could almost find it in my heart

to spite the botanist by creating a modern Desdemona and her lover

sooty black to the lips, there before our eyes. But I am not so sure

of my case as that, and for the moment there shall come nothing more

than a swart-faced, dusky Burmese woman in the dress of the Greater

Rule, with her tall Englishman (as he might be on earth) at her

side. That, however, is a digression from my conversation with the

botanist.

"And the Chinaman?" said the botanist.

"I think we shall have all the buff and yellow peoples intermingling

pretty freely."

"Chinamen and white women, for example."

"Yes," I said, "you've got to swallow that, anyhow; you _shall_

swallow that."

He finds the idea too revolting for comment.

I try and make the thing seem easier for him. "Do try," I said, "to

grasp a Modern Utopian's conditions. The Chinaman will speak the

same language as his wife--whatever her race may be--he will wear

costume of the common civilised fashion, he will have much the same

education as his European rival, read the same literature, bow to

the same traditions. And you must remember a wife in Utopia is

singularly not subject to her husband...."

The botanist proclaims his invincible conclusion: "Everyone would

cut her!"

"This is Utopia," I said, and then sought once more to tranquillise

his mind. "No doubt among the vulgar, coarse-minded people outside

the Rule there may be something of the sort. Every earthly moral

blockhead, a little educated, perhaps, is to be found in Utopia. You

will, no doubt, find the 'cut' and the 'boycott,' and all those nice

little devices by which dull people get a keen edge on life, in

their place here, and their place here is somewhere----"

I turned a thumb earthward. "There!"

The botanist did not answer for a little while. Then he said, with

some temper and great emphasis: "Well, I'm jolly glad anyhow that

I'm not to be a permanent resident in this Utopia, if our daughters

are to be married to Hottentots by regulation. I'm jolly glad."

He turned his back on me.

Now did I say anything of the sort? ...

I had to bring him, I suppose; there's no getting away from him in

this life. But, as I have already observed, the happy ancients went

to their Utopias without this sort of company.

Section 5

What gives the botanist so great an advantage in all his

Anti-Utopian utterances is his unconsciousness of his own

limitations. He thinks in little pieces that lie about loose, and

nothing has any necessary link with anything else in his mind. So

that I cannot retort upon him by asking him, if he objects to this

synthesis of all nations, tongues and peoples in a World State, what

alternative ideal he proposes.

People of this sort do not even feel the need of alternatives.

Beyond the scope of a few personal projects, meeting Her again, and

things like that, they do not feel that there is a future. They are

unencumbered by any baggage of convictions whatever, in relation to

that. That, at least, is the only way in which I can explain our

friend's high intellectual mobility. Attempts to correlate

statesmanship, which they regard with interest as a dramatic

interplay of personalities, with any secular movement of humanity,

they class with the differential calculus and Darwinism, as things

far too difficult to be anything but finally and subtly wrong.

So the argument must pass into a direct address to the reader.

If you are not prepared to regard a world-wide synthesis of all

cultures and polities and races into one World State as the

desirable end upon which all civilising efforts converge, what do

you regard as the desirable end? Synthesis, one may remark in

passing, does not necessarily mean fusion, nor does it mean

uniformity.

The alternatives fall roughly under three headings. The first is to

assume there is a best race, to define as well as one can that best

race, and to regard all other races as material for extermination.

This has a fine, modern, biological air ("Survival of the Fittest").

If you are one of those queer German professors who write insanity

about Welt-Politik, you assume the best race is the "Teutonic";

Cecil Rhodes affected that triumph of creative imagination, the

"Anglo-Saxon race"; my friend, Moses Cohen, thinks there is much to

be said for the Jew. On its premises, this is a perfectly sound and

reasonable policy, and it opens out a brilliant prospect for the

scientific inventor for what one might call Welt-Apparat in the

future, for national harrowing and reaping machines, and

race-destroying fumigations. The great plain of China ("Yellow

Peril") lends itself particularly to some striking wholesale

undertaking; it might, for example, be flooded for a few days, and

then disinfected with volcanic chlorine. Whether, when all the

inferior races have been stamped out, the superior race would not

proceed at once, or after a brief millennial period of social

harmony, to divide itself into sub-classes, and begin the business

over again at a higher level, is an interesting residual question

into which we need not now penetrate.

That complete development of a scientific Welt-Politik is not,

however, very widely advocated at present, no doubt from a want of

confidence in the public imagination. We have, however, a very

audible and influential school, the Modern Imperialist school, which

distinguishes its own race--there is a German, a British, and an

Anglo-Saxon section in the school, and a wider teaching which

embraces the whole "white race" in one remarkable tolerance--as the

superior race, as one, indeed, superior enough to own slaves,

collectively, if not individually; and the exponents of this

doctrine look with a resolute, truculent, but slightly indistinct

eye to a future in which all the rest of the world will be in

subjection to these elect. The ideals of this type are set forth

pretty clearly in Mr. Kidd's Control of the Tropics. The whole world

is to be administered by the "white" Powers--Mr. Kidd did not

anticipate Japan--who will see to it that their subjects do not

"prevent the utilisation of the immense natural resources which they

have in charge." Those other races are to be regarded as children,

recalcitrant children at times, and without any of the tender

emotions of paternity. It is a little doubtful whether the races

lacking "in the elementary qualities of social efficiency" are

expected to acquire them under the chastening hands of those races

which, through "strength and energy of character, humanity, probity,

and integrity, and a single-minded devotion to conceptions of duty,"

are developing "the resources of the richest regions of the earth"

over their heads, or whether this is the ultimate ideal.

Next comes the rather incoherent alternative that one associates in

England with official Liberalism.

Liberalism in England is not quite the same thing as Liberalism in

the rest of the world; it is woven of two strands. There is

Whiggism, the powerful tradition of seventeenth-century Protestant

and republican England, with its great debt to republican Rome, its

strong constructive and disciplinary bias, its broad and originally

very living and intelligent outlook; and interwoven with this there

is the sentimental and logical Liberalism that sprang from the

stresses of the eighteenth century, that finds its early scarce

differentiated expression in Harrington's Oceana, and after fresh

draughts of the tradition of Brutus and Cato and some elegant

trifling with noble savages, budded in La Cite Morellyste, flowered

in the emotional democratic naturalism of Rousseau, and bore

abundant fruit in the French Revolution. These are two very distinct

strands. Directly they were freed in America from the grip of

conflict with British Toryism, they came apart as the Republican and

Democratic parties respectively. Their continued union in Great

Britain is a political accident. Because of this mixture, the whole

career of English-speaking Liberalism, though it has gone to one

unbroken strain of eloquence, has never produced a clear statement

of policy in relation to other peoples politically less fortunate.

It has developed no definite ideas at all about the future of

mankind. The Whig disposition, which once had some play in India,

was certainly to attempt to anglicise the "native," to assimilate

his culture, and then to assimilate his political status with that

of his temporary ruler. But interwoven with this anglicising

tendency, which was also, by the bye, a Christianising tendency, was

a strong disposition, derived from the Rousseau strand, to leave

other peoples alone, to facilitate even the separation and autonomy

of detached portions of our own peoples, to disintegrate finally

into perfect, because lawless, individuals. The official exposition

of British "Liberalism" to-day still wriggles unstably because of

these conflicting constituents, but on the whole the Whig strand now

seems the weaker. The contemporary Liberal politician offers cogent

criticism upon the brutality and conceit of modern imperialisms, but

that seems to be the limit of his service. Taking what they do not

say and do not propose as an indication of Liberal intentions, it

would seem that the ideal of the British Liberals and of the

American Democrats is to favour the existence of just as many petty,

loosely allied, or quite independent nationalities as possible, just

as many languages as possible, to deprecate armies and all controls,

and to trust to the innate goodness of disorder and the powers of an

ardent sentimentality to keep the world clean and sweet. The

Liberals will not face the plain consequence that such a state of

affairs is hopelessly unstable, that it involves the maximum risk of

war with the minimum of permanent benefit and public order. They

will not reflect that the stars in their courses rule inexorably

against it. It is a vague, impossible ideal, with a rude sort of

unworldly moral beauty, like the gospel of the Doukhobors. Besides

that charm it has this most seductive quality to an official British

Liberal, that it does not exact intellectual activity nor indeed

activity of any sort whatever. It is, by virtue of that alone, a far

less mischievous doctrine than the crude and violent Imperialism of

the popular Press.

Neither of these two schools of policy, neither the international

laisser faire of the Liberals, nor "hustle to the top" Imperialism,

promise any reality of permanent progress for the world of men. They

are the resort, the moral reference, of those who will not think

frankly and exhaustively over the whole field of this question. Do

that, insist upon solutions of more than accidental applicability,

and you emerge with one or other of two contrasted solutions, as the

consciousness of kind or the consciousness of individuality prevails

in your mind. In the former case you will adopt aggressive

Imperialism, but you will carry it out to its "thorough" degree of

extermination. You will seek to develop the culture and power of

your kind of men and women to the utmost in order to shoulder all

other kinds from the earth. If on the other hand you appreciate the

unique, you will aim at such a synthesis as this Utopia displays, a

synthesis far more credible and possible than any other

Welt-Politik. In spite of all the pageant of modern war, synthesis

is in the trend of the world. To aid and develop it, could be made

the open and secure policy of any great modern empire now. Modern

war, modern international hostility is, I believe, possible only

through the stupid illiteracy of the mass of men and the conceit and

intellectual indolence of rulers and those who feed the public mind.

Were the will of the mass of men lit and conscious, I am firmly

convinced it would now burn steadily for synthesis and peace.

It would be so easy to bring about a world peace within a few

decades, was there but the will for it among men! The great empires

that exist need but a little speech and frankness one with another.

Within, the riddles of social order are already half solved in books

and thought, there are the common people and the subject peoples to

be educated and drilled, to be led to a common speech and a common

literature, to be assimilated and made citizens; without, there is

the possibility of treaties. Why, for example, should Britain and

France, or either and the United States, or Sweden and Norway, or

Holland, or Denmark, or Italy, fight any more for ever? And if there

is no reason, how foolish and dangerous it is still to sustain

linguistic differences and custom houses, and all sorts of foolish

and irritating distinctions between their various citizens! Why

should not all these peoples agree to teach some common language,

French, for example, in their common schools, or to teach each

other's languages reciprocally? Why should they not aim at a common

literature, and bring their various common laws, their marriage

laws, and so on, into uniformity? Why should they not work for a

uniform minimum of labour conditions through all their communities?

Why, then, should they not--except in the interests of a few rascal

plutocrats--trade freely and exchange their citizenship freely

throughout their common boundaries? No doubt there are difficulties

to be found, but they are quite finite difficulties. What is there

to prevent a parallel movement of all the civilised Powers in the

world towards a common ideal and assimilation?

Stupidity--nothing but stupidity, a stupid brute jealousy, aimless

and unjustifiable.

The coarser conceptions of aggregation are at hand, the hostile,

jealous patriotisms, the blare of trumpets and the pride of fools;

they serve the daily need though they lead towards disaster. The

real and the immediate has us in its grip, the accidental personal

thing. The little effort of thought, the brief sustained effort of

will, is too much for the contemporary mind. Such treaties, such

sympathetic international movements, are but dream stuff yet on

earth, though Utopia has realised them long since and already passed

them by.

CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH

The Bubble Bursts

Section 1

As I walk back along the river terrace to the hotel where the

botanist awaits me, and observe the Utopians I encounter, I have no

thought that my tenure of Utopia becomes every moment more

precarious. There float in my mind vague anticipations of more talks

with my double and still more, of a steady elaboration of detail, of

interesting journeys of exploration. I forget that a Utopia is a

thing of the imagination that becomes more fragile with every added

circumstance, that, like a soap-bubble, it is most brilliantly and

variously coloured at the very instant of its dissolution. This

Utopia is nearly done. All the broad lines of its social

organisation are completed now, the discussion of all its general

difficulties and problems. Utopian individuals pass me by, fine

buildings tower on either hand; it does not occur to me that I may

look too closely. To find the people assuming the concrete and

individual, is not, as I fondly imagine, the last triumph of

realisation, but the swimming moment of opacity before the film

gives way. To come to individual emotional cases, is to return to

the earth.

I find the botanist sitting at a table in the hotel courtyard.

"Well?" I say, standing before him.

"I've been in the gardens on the river terrace," he answers, "hoping

I might see her again."

"Nothing better to do?"

"Nothing in the world."

"You'll have your double back from India to-morrow. Then you'll have

conversation."

"I don't want it," he replies, compactly.

I shrug my shoulders, and he adds, "At least with him."

I let myself down into a seat beside him.

For a time I sit restfully enjoying his companionable silence, and

thinking fragmentarily of those samurai and their Rules. I entertain

something of the satisfaction of a man who has finished building a

bridge; I feel that I have joined together things that I had never

joined before. My Utopia seems real to me, very real, I can believe

in it, until the metal chair-back gives to my shoulder blades, and

Utopian sparrows twitter and hop before my feet. I have a pleasant

moment of unhesitating self-satisfaction; I feel a shameless

exultation to be there. For a moment I forget the consideration the

botanist demands; the mere pleasure of completeness, of holding and

controlling all the threads possesses me.

"You _will_ persist in believing," I say, with an aggressive

expository note, "that if you meet this lady she will be a person

with the memories and sentiments of her double on earth. You think

she will understand and pity, and perhaps love you. Nothing of the

sort is the case." I repeat with confident rudeness, "Nothing of the

sort is the case. Things are different altogether here; you can

hardly tell even now how different are----"

I discover he is not listening to me.

"What is the matter?" I ask abruptly.

He makes no answer, but his expression startles me.

"What is the matter?" and then I follow his eyes.

A woman and a man are coming through the great archway--and

instantly I guess what has happened. She it is arrests my attention

first--long ago I knew she was a sweetly beautiful woman. She is

fair, with frank blue eyes, that look with a sort of tender

receptivity into her companion's face. For a moment or so they

remain, greyish figures in the cool shadow, against the sunlit

greenery of the gardens beyond.

"It is Mary," the botanist whispers with white lips, but he stares

at the form of the man. His face whitens, it becomes so transfigured

with emotion that for a moment it does not look weak. Then I see

that his thin hand is clenched.

I realise how little I understand his emotions.

A sudden fear of what he will do takes hold of me. He sits white and

tense as the two come into the clearer light of the courtyard. The

man, I see, is one of the samurai, a dark, strong-faced man, a man I

have never seen before, and she is wearing the robe that shows her a

follower of the Lesser Rule.

Some glimmering of the botanist's feelings strikes through to my

slow sympathies. Of course--a strange man! I put out a restraining

hand towards his arm. "I told you," I say, "that very probably, most

probably, she would have met some other. I tried to prepare

you."

"Nonsense," he whispers, without looking at me. "It isn't that.

It's--that scoundrel----"

He has an impulse to rise. "That scoundrel," he repeats.

"He isn't a scoundrel," I say. "How do you know? Keep still! Why are

you standing up?"

He and I stand up quickly, I as soon as he. But now the full meaning

of the group has reached me. I grip his arm. "Be sensible," I say,

speaking very quickly, and with my back to the approaching couple.

"He's not a scoundrel here. This world is different from that. It's

caught his pride somehow and made a man of him. Whatever troubled

them there----"

He turns a face of white wrath on me, of accusation, and for the

moment of unexpected force. "This is _your_ doing," he says. "You

have done this to mock me. He--of all men!" For a moment speech

fails him, then; "You--you have done this to mock me."

I try to explain very quickly. My tone is almost propitiatory.

"I never thought of it until now. But he's---- How did I know he was

the sort of man a disciplined world has a use for?"

He makes no answer, but he looks at me with eyes that are positively

baleful, and in the instant I read his mute but mulish resolve that

Utopia must end.

"Don't let that old quarrel poison all this," I say almost

entreatingly. "It happened all differently here--everything is

different here. Your double will be back to-morrow. Wait for him.

Perhaps then you will understand----"

He shakes his head, and then bursts out with, "What do I want with a

double? Double! What do I care if things have been different here?

This----"

He thrusts me weakly back with his long, white hand. "My God!" he

says almost forcibly, "what nonsense all this is! All these dreams!

All Utopias! There she is----! Oh, but I have dreamt of her! And

now----"

A sob catches him. I am really frightened by this time. I still try

to keep between him and these Utopians, and to hide his gestures

from them.

"It's different here," I persist. "It's different here. The emotion

you feel has no place in it. It's a scar from the earth--the sore

scar of your past----"

"And what are we all but scars? What is life but a scarring? It's

_you_--you who don't understand! Of course we are covered with

scars, we live to be scarred, we are scars! We are the scars of the

past! These _dreams_, these childish dreams----!"

He does not need to finish his sentence, he waves an unteachable

destructive arm.

My Utopia rocks about me.

For a moment the vision of that great courtyard hangs real. There

the Utopians live real about me, going to and fro, and the great

archway blazes with sunlight from the green gardens by the

riverside. The man who is one of the samurai, and his lady, whom the

botanist loved on earth, pass out of sight behind the marble

flower-set Triton that spouts coolness in the middle of the place.

For a moment I see two working men in green tunics sitting on a

marble seat in the shadow of the colonnade, and a sweet little

silver-haired old lady, clad all in violet, and carrying a book,

comes towards us, and lifts a curious eye at the botanist's

gestures. And then----

"Scars of the past! Scars of the past! These fanciful, useless

dreams!"

Section 2

There is no jerk, no sound, no hint of material shock. We are in

London, and clothed in the fashion of the town. The sullen roar of

London fills our ears....

I see that I am standing beside an iron seat of poor design in that

grey and gawky waste of asphalte--Trafalgar Square, and the

botanist, with perplexity in his face, stares from me to a poor,

shrivelled, dirt-lined old woman--my God! what a neglected thing she

is!--who proffers a box of matches....

He buys almost mechanically, and turns back to me.

"I was saying," he says, "the past rules us absolutely. These

dreams----"

His sentence does not complete itself. He looks nervous and

irritated.

"You have a trick at times," he says instead, "of making your

suggestions so vivid----"

He takes a plunge. "If you don't mind," he says in a sort of

quavering ultimatum, "we won't discuss that aspect of the

question--the lady, I mean--further."

He pauses, and there still hangs a faint perplexity between us.

"But----" I begin.

For a moment we stand there, and my dream of Utopia runs off me like

water from an oiled slab. Of course--we lunched at our club. We came

back from Switzerland by no dream train but by the ordinary Bale

express. We have been talking of that Lucerne woman he harps upon,

and I have made some novel comment on his story. I have touched

certain possibilities.

"You can't conceivably understand," he says.

"The fact remains," he goes on, taking up the thread of his argument

again with an air of having defined our field, "we are the scars of

the past. That's a thing one can discuss--without personalities."

"No," I say rather stupidly, "no."

"You are always talking as though you could kick the past to pieces;

as though one could get right out from oneself and begin afresh. It

is your weakness--if you don't mind my being frank--it makes you

seem harsh and dogmatic. Life has gone easily for you; you have

never been badly tried. You have been lucky--you do not understand

the other way about. You are--hard."

I answer nothing.

He pants for breath. I perceive that in our discussion of his case I

must have gone too far, and that he has rebelled. Clearly I must

have said something wounding about that ineffectual love story of

his.

"You don't allow for my position," he says, and it occurs to me to

say, "I'm obliged to look at the thing from my own point of

view...."

One or other of us makes a move. What a lot of filthy, torn paper is

scattered about the world! We walk slowly side by side towards the

dirt-littered basin of the fountain, and stand regarding two grimy

tramps who sit and argue on a further seat. One holds a horrible old

boot in his hand, and gesticulates with it, while his other hand

caresses his rag-wrapped foot. "Wot does Cham'lain _si_?" his words

drift to us. "W'y, 'e says, wot's the good of 'nvesting your kepital

where these 'ere Americans may dump it flat any time they

like...."

(Were there not two men in green sitting on a marble seat?)

Section 3

We walk on, our talk suspended, past a ruthlessly clumsy hoarding,

towards where men and women and children are struggling about a

string of omnibuses. A newsvendor at the corner spreads a newspaper

placard upon the wood pavement, pins the corners down with stones,

and we glimpse something about:--

MASSACRE IN ODESSA.

DISCOVERY OF HUMAN REMAINS AT CHERTSEY.

SHOCKING LYNCHING OUTRAGE IN NEW YORK STATE.

GERMAN INTRIGUES GET A SET-BACK.

THE BIRTHDAY HONOURS.--FULL LIST.

Dear old familiar world!

An angry parent in conversation with a sympathetic friend jostles

against us. "I'll knock his blooming young 'ed orf if 'e cheeks me

again. It's these 'ere brasted Board Schools----"

An omnibus passes, bearing on a board beneath an incorrectly drawn

Union Jack an exhortation to the true patriot to "Buy Bumper's

British-Boiled Jam." ...

I am stunned beyond the possibility of discussion for a space. In

this very place it must have been that the high terrace ran with the

gardens below it, along which I came from my double to our hotel. I

am going back, but now through reality, along the path I passed so

happily in my dream. And the people I saw then are the people I am

looking at now--with a difference.

The botanist walks beside me, white and nervously jerky in his

movements, his ultimatum delivered.

We start to cross the road. An open carriage drives by, and we see a

jaded, red-haired woman, smeared with paint, dressed in furs, and

petulantly discontented. Her face is familiar to me, her face, with

a difference.

Why do I think of her as dressed in green?

Of course!--she it was I saw leading her children by the hand!

Comes a crash to our left, and a running of people to see a

cab-horse down on the slippery, slanting pavement outside St.

Martin's Church.

We go on up the street.

A heavy-eyed young Jewess, a draggled prostitute--no crimson flower

for her hair, poor girl!--regards us with a momentary speculation,

and we get a whiff of foul language from two newsboys on the

kerb.

"We can't go on talking," the botanist begins, and ducks aside just

in time to save his eye from the ferule of a stupidly held umbrella.

He is going to treat our little tiff about that lady as closed. He

has the air of picking up our conversation again at some earlier

point.

He steps into the gutter, walks round outside a negro hawker, just

escapes the wheel of a hansom, and comes to my side again.

"We can't go on talking of your Utopia," he says, "in a noise and

crowd like this."

We are separated by a portly man going in the opposite direction,

and join again. "We can't go on talking of Utopia," he repeats, "in

London.... Up in the mountains--and holiday-time--it was all right.

We let ourselves go!"

"I've been living in Utopia," I answer, tacitly adopting his tacit

proposal to drop the lady out of the question.

"At times," he says, with a queer laugh, "you've almost made me live

there too."

He reflects. "It doesn't do, you know. _No_! And I don't know

whether, after all, I want----"

We are separated again by half-a-dozen lifted flagstones, a burning

brazier, and two engineers concerned with some underground business

or other--in the busiest hour of the day's traffic.

"Why shouldn't it do?" I ask.

"It spoils the world of everyday to let your mind run on impossible

perfections."

"I wish," I shout against the traffic, "I could _smash_ the world of

everyday."

My note becomes quarrelsome. "You may accept _this_ as the world of

reality, _you_ may consent to be one scar in an ill-dressed compound

wound, but so--not I! This is a dream too--this world. _Your_ dream,

and you bring me back to it--out of Utopia----"

The crossing of Bow Street gives me pause again.

The face of a girl who is passing westward, a student girl, rather

carelessly dressed, her books in a carrying-strap, comes across my

field of vision. The westward sun of London glows upon her face. She

has eyes that dream, surely no sensuous nor personal dream.

After all, after all, dispersed, hidden, disorganised, undiscovered,

unsuspected even by themselves, the samurai of Utopia are in this

world, the motives that are developed and organised there stir

dumbly here and stifle in ten thousand futile hearts....

I overtake the botanist, who got ahead at the crossing by the

advantage of a dust-cart.

"You think this is real because you can't wake out of it," I say.

"It's all a dream, and there are people--I'm just one of the first

of a multitude--between sleeping and waking--who will presently be

rubbing it out of their eyes."

A pinched and dirty little girl, with sores upon her face, stretches

out a bunch of wilting violets, in a pitifully thin little fist, and

interrupts my speech. "Bunch o' vi'lets--on'y a penny."

"No!" I say curtly, hardening my heart.

A ragged and filthy nursing mother, with her last addition to our

Imperial People on her arm, comes out of a drinkshop, and stands a

little unsteadily, and wipes mouth and nose comprehensively with the

back of a red chapped hand....

Section 4

"Isn't _that_ reality?" says the botanist, almost triumphantly, and

leaves me aghast at his triumph.

"_That_!" I say belatedly. "It's a thing in a nightmare!"

He shakes his head and smiles--exasperatingly.

I perceive quite abruptly that the botanist and I have reached the

limits of our intercourse.

"The world dreams things like that," I say, "because it suffers from

an indigestion of such people as you."

His low-toned self-complacency, like the faded banner of an

obstinate fort, still flies unconquered. And you know, he's not even

a happy man with it all!

For ten seconds or more I am furiously seeking in my mind for a

word, for a term of abuse, for one compendious verbal missile that

shall smash this man for ever. It has to express total inadequacy of

imagination and will, spiritual anaemia, dull respectability, gross

sentimentality, a cultivated pettiness of heart....

That word will not come. But no other word will do. Indeed the word

does not exist. There is nothing with sufficient vituperative

concentration for this moral and intellectual stupidity of educated

people....

"Er----" he begins.

No! I can't endure him.

With a passionate rapidity of movement, I leave his side, dart

between a carriage and a van, duck under the head of a cab-horse,

and board a 'bus going westward somewhere--but anyhow, going in

exactly the reverse direction to the botanist. I clamber up the

steps and thread my swaying way to the seat immediately behind the

driver.

"There!" I say, as I whack myself down on the seat and pant.

When I look round the botanist is out of sight.

Section 5

But I am back in the world for all that, and my Utopia is done.

It is good discipline for the Utopist to visit this world

occasionally.

But from the front seat on the top of an omnibus on a sunny

September afternoon, the Strand, and Charing Cross corner, and

Whitehall, and the great multitude of people, the great uproar of

vehicles, streaming in all directions, is apt to look a world

altogether too formidable. It has a glare, it has a tumult and

vigour that shouts one down. It shouts one down, if shouting is to

carry it. What good was it to trot along the pavement through this

noise and tumult of life, pleading Utopia to that botanist? What

good would it be to recommend Utopia in this driver's preoccupied

ear?

There are moments in the life of every philosopher and dreamer when

he feels himself the flimsiest of absurdities, when the Thing in

Being has its way with him, its triumphant way, when it asks in a

roar, unanswerably, with a fine solid use of the current vernacular,

"What Good is all this--Rot about Utopias?"

One inspects the Thing in Being with something of the diffident

speculation of primitive man, peering from behind a tree at an angry

elephant.

(There is an omen in that image. On how many occasions must that

ancestor of ours have had just the Utopist's feeling of ambitious

unreality, have decided that on the whole it was wiser to go very

quietly home again, and leave the big beast alone? But, in the end,

men rode upon the elephant's head, and guided him this way or

that.... The Thing in Being that roars so tremendously about Charing

Cross corner seems a bigger antagonist than an elephant, but then we

have better weapons than chipped flint blades....)

After all, in a very little time everything that impresses me so

mightily this September afternoon will have changed or passed away

for ever, everything. These omnibuses, these great, stalwart,

crowded, many-coloured things that jostle one another, and make so

handsome a clatter-clamour, will all have gone; they and their

horses and drivers and organisation; you will come here and you will

not find them. Something else will be here, some different sort of

vehicle, that is now perhaps the mere germ of an idea in some

engineer student's brain. And this road and pavement will have

changed, and these impressive great buildings; other buildings will

be here, buildings that are as yet more impalpable than this page

you read, more formless and flimsy by far than anything that is

reasoned here. Little plans sketched on paper, strokes of a pen or

of a brush, will be the first materialisations of what will at last

obliterate every detail and atom of these re-echoing actualities

that overwhelm us now. And the clothing and gestures of these

innumerable people, the character of their faces and bearing, these

too will be recast in the spirit of what are now obscure and

impalpable beginnings.

The new things will be indeed of the substance of the thing that is,

but differing just in the measure of the will and imagination that

goes to make them. They will be strong and fair as the will is

sturdy and organised and the imagination comprehensive and bold;

they will be ugly and smeared with wretchedness as the will is

fluctuating and the imagination timid and mean.

Indeed Will is stronger than Fact, it can mould and overcome Fact.

But this world has still to discover its will, it is a world that

slumbers inertly, and all this roar and pulsation of life is no more

than its heavy breathing.... My mind runs on to the thought of an

awakening.

As my omnibus goes lumbering up Cockspur Street through the clatter

rattle of the cabs and carriages, there comes another fancy in my

mind.... Could one but realise an apocalyptic image and suppose an

angel, such as was given to each of the seven churches of Asia,

given for a space to the service of the Greater Rule. I see him as a

towering figure of flame and colour, standing between earth and sky,

with a trumpet in his hands, over there above the Haymarket, against

the October glow; and when he sounds, all the samurai, all who are

samurai in Utopia, will know themselves and one another....

(Whup! says a motor brougham, and a policeman stays the traffic with

his hand.)

All of us who partake of the samurai would know ourselves and one

another!

For a moment I have a vision of this resurrection of the living, of

a vague, magnificent answer, of countless myriads at attention, of

all that is fine in humanity at attention, round the compass of the

earth.

Then that philosophy of individual uniqueness resumes its sway over

my thoughts, and my dream of a world's awakening fades.

I had forgotten....

Things do not happen like that. God is not simple, God is not

theatrical, the summons comes to each man in its due time for him,

with an infinite subtlety of variety....

If that is so, what of my Utopia?

This infinite world must needs be flattened to get it on one

retina. The picture of a solid thing, although it is flattened and

simplified, is not necessarily a lie. Surely, surely, in the end, by

degrees, and steps, something of this sort, some such understanding,

as this Utopia must come. First here, then there, single men and

then groups of men will fall into line--not indeed with my poor

faulty hesitating suggestions--but with a great and comprehensive

plan wrought out by many minds and in many tongues. It is just

because my plan is faulty, because it mis-states so much, and omits

so much, that they do not now fall in. It will not be like _my_

dream, the world that is coming. My dream is just my own poor dream,

the thing sufficient for me. We fail in comprehension, we fail so

variously and abundantly. We see as much as it is serviceable for us

to see, and we see no further. But the fresh undaunted generations

come to take on our work beyond our utmost effort, beyond the range

of our ideas. They will learn with certainty things that to us are

guesses and riddles....

There will be many Utopias. Each generation will have its new

version of Utopia, a little more certain and complete and real, with

its problems lying closer and closer to the problems of the Thing

in Being. Until at last from dreams Utopias will have come to be

working drawings, and the whole world will be shaping the final

World State, the fair and great and fruitful World State, that will

only not be a Utopia because it will be this world. So surely it

must be----

The policeman drops his hand. "Come up," says the 'bus driver, and

the horses strain; "Clitter, clatter, cluck, clak," the line of

hurrying hansoms overtakes the omnibus going west. A dexterous lad

on a bicycle with a bale of newspapers on his back dodges nimbly

across the head of the column and vanishes up a side street.

The omnibus sways forward. Rapt and prophetic, his plump hands

clasped round the handle of his umbrella, his billycock hat a trifle

askew, this irascible little man of the Voice, this impatient

dreamer, this scolding Optimist, who has argued so rudely and

dogmatically about economics and philosophy and decoration, and

indeed about everything under the sun, who has been so hard on the

botanist and fashionable women, and so reluctant in the matter of

beer, is carried onward, dreaming dreams, dreams that with all the

inevitable ironies of difference, may be realities when you and I

are dreams.

He passes, and for a little space we are left with his egoisms and

idiosyncrasies more or less in suspense.

But why was he intruded? you ask. Why could not a modern Utopia be

discussed without this impersonation--impersonally? It has confused

the book, you say, made the argument hard to follow, and thrown

a quality of insincerity over the whole. Are we but mocking at

Utopias, you demand, using all these noble and generalised hopes

as the backcloth against which two bickering personalities jar and

squabble? Do I mean we are never to view the promised land again

except through a foreground of fellow-travellers? There is a common

notion that the reading of a Utopia should end with a swelling heart

and clear resolves, with lists of names, formation of committees,

and even the commencement of subscriptions. But this Utopia began

upon a philosophy of fragmentation, and ends, confusedly, amidst a

gross tumult of immediate realities, in dust and doubt, with, at the

best, one individual's aspiration. Utopias were once in good faith,

projects for a fresh creation of the world and of a most unworldly

completeness; this so-called Modern Utopia is a mere story of

personal adventures among Utopian philosophies.

Indeed, that came about without the writer's intention. So it was

the summoned vision came. For I see about me a great multitude of

little souls and groups of souls as darkened, as derivative as my

own; with the passage of years I understand more and more clearly

the quality of the motives that urge me and urge them to do whatever

we do.... Yet that is not all I see, and I am not altogether bounded

by my littleness. Ever and again, contrasting with this immediate

vision, come glimpses of a comprehensive scheme, in which these

personalities float, the scheme of a synthetic wider being, the

great State, mankind, in which we all move and go, like blood

corpuscles, like nerve cells, it may be at times like brain cells,

in the body of a man. But the two visions are not seen consistently

together, at least by me, and I do not surely know that they exist

consistently together. The motives needed for those wider issues

come not into the interplay of my vanities and wishes. That greater

scheme lies about the men and women I know, as I have tried to make

the vistas and spaces, the mountains, cities, laws, and order of

Utopia lie about my talking couple, too great for their sustained

comprehension. When one focuses upon these two that wide landscape

becomes indistinct and distant, and when one regards that then the

real persons one knows grow vague and unreal. Nevertheless, I cannot

separate these two aspects of human life, each commenting on the

other. In that incongruity between great and individual inheres the

incompatibility I could not resolve, and which, therefore, I have

had to present in this conflicting form. At times that great scheme

does seem to me to enter certain men's lives as a passion, as a real

and living motive; there are those who know it almost as if it was a

thing of desire; even for me, upon occasion, the little lures of the

immediate life are seen small and vain, and the soul goes out to

that mighty Being, to apprehend it and serve it and possess. But

this is an illumination that passes as it comes, a rare transitory

lucidity, leaving the soul's desire suddenly turned to presumption

and hypocrisy upon the lips. One grasps at the Universe and

attains--Bathos. The hungers, the jealousies, the prejudices and

habits have us again, and we are forced back to think that it is so,

and not otherwise, that we are meant to serve the mysteries; that in

these blinkers it is we are driven to an end we cannot understand.

And then, for measured moments in the night watches or as one walks

alone or while one sits in thought and speech with a friend, the

wider aspirations glow again with a sincere emotion, with the

colours of attainable desire....

That is my all about Utopia, and about the desire and need for

Utopia, and how that planet lies to this planet that bears the daily

lives of men.

APPENDIX

SCEPTICISM OF THE INSTRUMENT

A Portion of a Paper read to the Oxford Philosophical Society,

November 8, 1903, and reprinted, with some Revision, from the

Version given in Mind, vol. xiii. (N.S.), No. 51.

(See also Chapter I., Section 6, and Chapter X., Sections 1 and 2.)

It seems to me that I may most propitiously attempt to interest you

this evening by describing very briefly the particular metaphysical

and philosophical system in which I do my thinking, and more

particularly by setting out for your consideration one or two points

in which I seem to myself to differ most widely from current

accepted philosophy.

You must be prepared for things that will strike you as crude, for a

certain difference of accent and dialect that you may not like, and

you must be prepared too to hear what may strike you as the clumsy

statement of my ignorant rediscovery of things already beautifully

thought out and said. But in the end you may incline to forgive me

some of this first offence.... It is quite unavoidable that, in

setting out these intellectual foundations of mine, I should lapse

for a moment or so towards autobiography.

A convergence of circumstances led to my having my knowledge of

concrete things quite extensively developed before I came to

philosophical examination at all. I have heard someone say that a

savage or an animal is mentally a purely objective being, and in

that respect I was like a savage or an animal until I was well over

twenty. I was extremely unaware of the subjective or introverted

element in my being. I was a Positivist without knowing it. My early

education was a feeble one; it was one in which my private

observation, inquiry and experiment were far more important factors

than any instruction, or rather perhaps the instruction I received

was less even than what I learnt for myself, and it terminated at

thirteen. I had come into pretty intimate contact with the harder

realities of life, with hunger in various forms, and many base and

disagreeable necessities, before I was fifteen. About that age,

following the indication of certain theological and speculative

curiosities, I began to learn something of what I will call

deliberately and justly, Elementary Science--stuff I got out of

Cassell's Popular Educator and cheap text-books--and then, through

accidents and ambitions that do not matter in the least to us now, I

came to three years of illuminating and good scientific work. The

central fact of those three years was Huxley's course in Comparative

Anatomy at the school in Exhibition Road. About that as a nucleus I

arranged a spacious digest of facts. At the end of that time I had

acquired what I still think to be a fairly clear, and complete and

ordered view of the ostensibly real universe. Let me try to give you

the chief things I had. I had man definitely placed in the great

scheme of space and time. I knew him incurably for what he was,

finite and not final, a being of compromises and adaptations. I had

traced his lungs, for example, from a swimming bladder, step by

step, with scalpel and probe, through a dozen types or more, I had

seen the ancestral caecum shrink to that disease nest, the appendix

of to-day, I had watched the gill slit patched slowly to the

purposes of the ear and the reptile jaw suspension utilised to eke

out the needs of a sense organ taken from its native and natural

water. I had worked out the development of those extraordinarily

unsatisfactory and untrustworthy instruments, man's teeth, from the

skin scutes of the shark to their present function as a basis for

gold stoppings, and followed the slow unfolding of the complex and

painful process of gestation through which man comes into the world.

I had followed all these things and many kindred things by

dissection and in embryology--I had checked the whole theory of

development again in a year's course of palaeontology, and I had

taken the dimensions of the whole process, by the scale of the

stars, in a course of astronomical physics. And all that amount of

objective elucidation came before I had reached the beginnings of

any philosophical or metaphysical inquiry, any inquiry as to why I

believed, how I believed, what I believed, or what the fundamental

stuff of things was.

Now following hard upon this interlude with knowledge, came a time

when I had to give myself to teaching, and it became advisable to

acquire one of those Teaching Diplomas that are so widely and so

foolishly despised, and that enterprise set me to a superficial, but

suggestive study of educational method, of educational theory, of

logic, of psychology, and so at last, when the little affair with

the diploma was settled, to philosophy. Now to come to logic over

the bracing uplands of comparative anatomy is to come to logic with

a lot of very natural preconceptions blown clean out of one's mind.

It is, I submit, a way of taking logic in the flank. When you have

realised to the marrow, that all the physical organs of man and all

his physical structure are what they are through a series of

adaptations and approximations, and that they are kept up to a level

of practical efficiency only by the elimination of death, and that

this is true also of his brain and of his instincts and of many of

his mental predispositions, you are not going to take his thinking

apparatus unquestioningly as being in any way mysteriously different

and better. And I had read only a little logic before I became aware

of implications that I could not agree with, and assumptions that

seemed to me to be altogether at variance with the general scheme of

objective fact established in my mind.

I came to an examination of logical processes and of language with

the expectation that they would share the profoundly provisional

character, the character of irregular limitation and adaptation that

pervades the whole physical and animal being of man. And I found the

thing I had expected. And as a consequence I found a sort of

intellectual hardihood about the assumptions of logic, that at first

confused me and then roused all the latent scepticism in my

mind.

My first quarrel with the accepted logic I developed long ago in a

little paper that was printed in the Fortnightly Review in July

1891. It was called the "Rediscovery of the Unique," and re-reading

it I perceive not only how bad and even annoying it was in manner--a

thing I have long known--but also how remarkably bad it was in

expression. I have good reason for doubting whether my powers of

expression in these uses have very perceptibly improved, but at any

rate I am doing my best now with that previous failure before

me.

That unfortunate paper, among other oversights I can no longer

regard as trivial, disregarded quite completely the fact that a

whole literature upon the antagonism of the one and the many, of the

specific ideal and the individual reality, was already in existence.

It defined no relations to other thought or thinkers. I understand

now, what I did not understand then, why it was totally ignored. But

the idea underlying that paper I cling to to-day. I consider it an

idea that will ultimately be regarded as one of primary importance

to human thought, and I will try and present the substance of that

early paper again now very briefly, as the best opening of my

general case. My opening scepticism is essentially a doubt of the

objective reality of classification. I have no hesitation in saying

that is the first and primary proposition of my philosophy.

I have it in my mind that classification is a necessary condition of

the working of the mental implement, but that it is a departure from

the objective truth of things, that classification is very

serviceable for the practical purposes of life but a very doubtful

preliminary to those fine penetrations the philosophical purpose, in

its more arrogant moods, demands. All the peculiarities of my way of

thinking derive from that.

A mind nourished upon anatomical study is of course permeated with

the suggestion of the vagueness and instability of biological

species. A biological species is quite obviously a great number of

unique individuals which is separable from other biological species

only by the fact that an enormous number of other linking

individuals are inaccessible in time--are in other words dead and

gone--and each new individual in that species does, in the

distinction of its own individuality, break away in however

infinitesimal degree from the previous average properties of the

species. There is no property of any species, even the properties

that constitute the specific definition, that is not a matter of

more or less. If, for example, a species be distinguished by a

single large red spot on the back, you will find if you go over a

great number of specimens that red spot shrinking here to nothing,

expanding there to a more general redness, weakening to pink,

deepening to russet and brown, shading into crimson, and so on, and

so on. And this is true not only of biological species. It is true

of the mineral specimens constituting a mineral species, and I

remember as a constant refrain in the lectures of Prof. Judd upon

rock classification, the words "they pass into one another by

insensible gradations." That is true, I hold, of all things.

You will think perhaps of atoms of the elements as instances of

identically similar things, but these are things not of experience

but of theory, and there is not a phenomenon in chemistry that is

not equally well explained on the supposition that it is merely the

immense quantities of atoms necessarily taken in any experiment that

mask by the operation of the law of averages the fact that each atom

also has its unique quality, its special individual difference. This

idea of uniqueness in all individuals is not only true of the

classifications of material science; it is true, and still more

evidently true, of the species of common thought, it is true of

common terms. Take the word chair. When one says chair, one thinks

vaguely of an average chair. But collect individual instances, think

of armchairs and reading chairs, and dining-room chairs and kitchen

chairs, chairs that pass into benches, chairs that cross the

boundary and become settees, dentists' chairs, thrones, opera

stalls, seats of all sorts, those miraculous fungoid growths that

cumber the floor of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition, and you will

perceive what a lax bundle in fact is this simple straightforward

term. In co-operation with an intelligent joiner I would undertake

to defeat any definition of chair or chairishness that you gave me.

Chairs just as much as individual organisms, just as much as mineral

and rock specimens, are unique things--if you know them well enough

you will find an individual difference even in a set of machine-made

chairs--and it is only because we do not possess minds of unlimited

capacity, because our brain has only a limited number of

pigeon-holes for our correspondence with an unlimited universe of

objective uniques, that we have to delude ourselves into the belief

that there is a chairishness in this species common to and

distinctive of all chairs.

Let me repeat; this is of the very smallest importance in all the

practical affairs of life, or indeed in relation to anything but

philosophy and wide generalisations. But in philosophy it matters

profoundly. If I order two new-laid eggs for breakfast, up come two

unhatched but still unique avian individuals, and the chances are

they serve my rude physiological purpose. I can afford to ignore the

hens' eggs of the past that were not quite so nearly this sort of

thing, and the hens' eggs of the future that will accumulate

modification age by age; I can venture to ignore the rare chance of

an abnormality in chemical composition and of any startling

aberration in my physiological reaction; I can, with a confidence

that is practically perfect, say with unqualified simplicity "two

eggs," but not if my concern is not my morning's breakfast but the

utmost possible truth.

Now let me go on to point out whither this idea of uniqueness tends.

I submit to you that syllogism is based on classification, that

all hard logical reasoning tends to imply and is apt to imply a

confidence in the objective reality of classification. Consequently

in denying that I deny the absolute validity of logic. Classification

and number, which in truth ignore the fine differences of objective

realities, have in the past of human thought been imposed upon

things. Let me for clearness' sake take a liberty here--commit, as

you may perhaps think, an unpardonable insolence. Hindoo thought

and Greek thought alike impress me as being overmuch obsessed by

an objective treatment of certain necessary preliminary conditions

of human thought--number and definition and class and abstract

form. But these things, number, definition, class and abstract

form, I hold, are merely unavoidable conditions of mental

activity--regrettable conditions rather than essential facts. The

forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a

little in taking hold of it.

It was about this difficulty that the mind of Plato played a little

inconclusively all his life. For the most part he tended to regard

the _idea_ as the something behind reality, whereas it seems to me

that the idea is the more proximate and less perfect thing, the

thing by which the mind, by ignoring individual differences,

attempts to comprehend an otherwise unmanageable number of unique

realities.

Let me give you a rough figure of what I am trying to convey in this

first attack upon the philosophical validity of general terms. You

have seen the results of those various methods of black and white

reproduction that involve the use of a rectangular net. You know the

sort of process picture I mean--it used to be employed very

frequently in reproducing photographs. At a little distance you

really seem to have a faithful reproduction of the original picture,

but when you peer closely you find not the unique form and masses of

the original, but a multitude of little rectangles, uniform in shape

and size. The more earnestly you go into the thing, the closer you

look, the more the picture is lost in reticulations. I submit the

world of reasoned inquiry has a very similar relation to the world I

call objectively real. For the rough purposes of every day the

net-work picture will do, but the finer your purpose the less it

will serve, and for an ideally fine purpose, for absolute and

general knowledge that will be as true for a man at a distance with

a telescope as for a man with a microscope it will not serve at

all.

It is true you can make your net of logical interpretation finer and

finer, you can fine your classification more and more--up to a

certain limit. But essentially you are working in limits, and as you

come closer, as you look at finer and subtler things, as you leave

the practical purpose for which the method exists, the element of

error increases. Every species is vague, every term goes cloudy at

its edges, and so in my way of thinking, relentless logic is only

another phrase for a stupidity,--for a sort of intellectual

pigheadedness. If you push a philosophical or metaphysical inquiry

through a series of valid syllogisms--never committing any generally

recognised fallacy--you nevertheless leave a certain rubbing and

marginal loss of objective truth and you get deflections that are

difficult to trace, at each phase in the process. Every species

waggles about in its definition, every tool is a little loose in its

handle, every scale has its individual error. So long as you are

reasoning for practical purposes about the finite things of

experience, you can every now and then check your process, and

correct your adjustments. But not when you make what are called

philosophical and theological inquiries, when you turn your

implement towards the final absolute truth of things. Doing that is

like firing at an inaccessible, unmarkable and indestructible target

at an unknown distance, with a defective rifle and variable

cartridges. Even if by chance you hit, you cannot know that you hit,

and so it will matter nothing at all.

This assertion of the necessary untrustworthiness of all reasoning

processes arising out of the fallacy of classification in what is

quite conceivably a universe of uniques, forms only one introductory

aspect of my general scepticism of the Instrument of Thought.

I have now to tell you of another aspect of this scepticism of the

instrument which concerns negative terms.

Classes in logic are not only represented by circles with a hard

firm outline, whereas they have no such definite limits, but also

there is a constant disposition to think of negative terms as if

they represented positive classes. With words just as with numbers

and abstract forms there are definite phases of human development.

There is, you know, with regard to number, the phase when man can

barely count at all, or counts in perfect good faith and sanity upon

his fingers. Then there is the phase when he is struggling with the

development of number, when he begins to elaborate all sorts of

ideas about numbers, until at last he develops complex superstitions

about perfect numbers and imperfect numbers, about threes and sevens

and the like. The same is the case with abstracted forms, and even

to-day we are scarcely more than heads out of the vast subtle muddle

of thinking about spheres and ideally perfect forms and so on, that

was the price of this little necessary step to clear thinking. You

know better than I do how large a part numerical and geometrical

magic, numerical and geometrical philosophy has played in the

history of the mind. And the whole apparatus of language and mental

communication is beset with like dangers. The language of the savage

is, I suppose, purely positive; the thing has a name, the name has a

thing. This indeed is the tradition of language, and to-day even,

we, when we hear a name, are predisposed--and sometimes it is a very

vicious disposition--to imagine forthwith something answering to the

name. We are disposed, as an incurable mental vice, to accumulate

intension in terms. If I say to you Wodget or Crump, you find

yourself passing over the fact that these are nothings, these are,

so to speak, mere blankety blanks, and trying to think what sort of

thing a Wodget or a Crump may be. And where this disposition has

come in, in its most alluring guise, is in the case of negative

terms. Our instrument of knowledge persists in handling even such

openly negative terms as the Absolute, the Infinite, as though they

were real existences, and when the negative element is ever so

little disguised, as it is in such a word as Omniscience, then the

illusion of positive reality may be complete.

Please remember that I am trying to tell you my philosophy, and not

arguing about yours. Let me try and express how in my mind this

matter of negative terms has shaped itself. I think of something

which I may perhaps best describe as being off the stage or out of

court, or as the Void without Implications, or as Nothingness or as

Outer Darkness. This is a sort of hypothetical Beyond to the visible

world of human thought, and thither I think all negative terms reach

at last, and merge and become nothing. Whatever positive class you

make, whatever boundary you draw, straight away from that boundary

begins the corresponding negative class and passes into the

illimitable horizon of nothingness. You talk of pink things, you

ignore, if you are a trained logician, the more elusive shades of

pink, and draw your line. Beyond is the not pink, known and

knowable, and still in the not pink region one comes to the Outer

Darkness. Not blue, not happy, not iron, all the not classes meet in

that Outer Darkness. That same Outer Darkness and nothingness is

infinite space, and infinite time, and any being of infinite

qualities, and all that region I rule out of court in my philosophy

altogether. I will neither affirm nor deny if I can help it about

any not things. I will not deal with not things at all, except by

accident and inadvertence. If I use the word 'infinite' I use it as

one often uses 'countless,' "the countless hosts of the enemy"--or

'immeasurable'--"immeasurable cliffs"--that is to say as the limit

of measurement rather than as the limit of imaginary measurability,

as a convenient equivalent to as many times this cloth yard as you

can, and as many again and so on and so on. Now a great number of

apparently positive terms are, or have become, practically negative

terms and are under the same ban with me. A considerable number of

terms that have played a great part in the world of thought, seem to

me to be invalidated by this same defect, to have no content or an

undefined content or an unjustifiable content. For example, that

word Omniscient, as implying infinite knowledge, impresses me as

being a word with a delusive air of being solid and full, when it is

really hollow with no content whatever. I am persuaded that knowing

is the relation of a conscious being to something not itself, that

the thing known is defined as a system of parts and aspects and

relationships, that knowledge is comprehension, and so that only

finite things can know or be known. When you talk of a being of

infinite extension and infinite duration, omniscient and omnipotent

and Perfect, you seem to me to be talking in negatives of nothing

whatever. When you speak of the Absolute you speak to me of nothing.

If however you talk of a great yet finite and thinkable being, a

being not myself, extending beyond my imagination in time and space,

knowing all that I can think of as known and capable of doing all

that I can think of as done, you come into the sphere of my mental

operations, and into the scheme of my philosophy....

These then are my first two charges against our Instrument of

Knowledge, firstly, that it can work only by disregarding

individuality and treating uniques as identically similar objects in

this respect or that, so as to group them under one term, and that

once it has done so it tends automatically to intensify the

significance of that term, and secondly, that it can only deal

freely with negative terms by treating them as though they were

positive. But I have a further objection to the Instrument of Human

Thought, that is not correlated to these former objections and that

is also rather more difficult to convey.

Essentially this idea is to present a sort of stratification in

human ideas. I have it very much in mind that various terms in our

reasoning lie, as it were, at different levels and in different

planes, and that we accomplish a large amount of error and confusion

by reasoning terms together that do not lie or nearly lie in the

same plane.

Let me endeavour to make myself a little less obscure by a most

flagrant instance from physical things. Suppose some one began to

talk seriously of a man seeing an atom through a microscope, or

better perhaps of cutting one in half with a knife. There are a

number of non-analytical people who would be quite prepared to

believe that an atom could be visible to the eye or cut in this

manner. But any one at all conversant with physical conceptions

would almost as soon think of killing the square root of 2 with a

rook rifle as of cutting an atom in half with a knife. Our

conception of an atom is reached through a process of hypothesis and

analysis, and in the world of atoms there are no knives and no

men to cut. If you have thought with a strong consistent mental

movement, then when you have thought of your atom under the knife

blade, your knife blade has itself become a cloud of swinging

grouped atoms, and your microscope lens a little universe of

oscillatory and vibratory molecules. If you think of the universe,

thinking at the level of atoms, there is neither knife to cut, scale

to weigh nor eye to see. The universe at that plane to which the

mind of the molecular physicist descends has none of the shapes or

forms of our common life whatever. This hand with which I write is

in the universe of molecular physics a cloud of warring atoms and

molecules, combining and recombining, colliding, rotating, flying

hither and thither in the universal atmosphere of ether.

You see, I hope, what I mean, when I say that the universe of

molecular physics is at a different level from the universe of

common experience;--what we call stable and solid is in that world a

freely moving system of interlacing centres of force, what we call

colour and sound is there no more than this length of vibration or

that. We have reached to a conception of that universe of molecular

physics by a great enterprise of organised analysis, and our

universe of daily experiences stands in relation to that elemental

world as if it were a synthesis of those elemental things.

I would suggest to you that this is only a very extreme instance of

the general state of affairs, that there may be finer and subtler

differences of level between one term and another, and that terms

may very well be thought of as lying obliquely and as being twisted

through different levels.

It will perhaps give a clearer idea of what I am seeking to convey

if I suggest a concrete image for the whole world of a man's thought

and knowledge. Imagine a large clear jelly, in which at all angles

and in all states of simplicity or contortion his ideas are

imbedded. They are all valid and possible ideas as they lie, none in

reality incompatible with any. If you imagine the direction of up or

down in this clear jelly being as it were the direction in which one

moves by analysis or by synthesis, if you go down for example from

matter to atoms and centres of force and up to men and states and

countries--if you will imagine the ideas lying in that manner--you

will get the beginning of my intention. But our Instrument, our

process of thinking, like a drawing before the discovery of

perspective, appears to have difficulties with the third dimension,

appears capable only of dealing with or reasoning about ideas by

projecting them upon the same plane. It will be obvious that a great

multitude of things may very well exist together in a solid jelly,

which would be overlapping and incompatible and mutually

destructive, when projected together upon one plane. Through the

bias in our Instrument to do this, through reasoning between terms

not in the same plane, an enormous amount of confusion, perplexity

and mental deadlocking occurs.

The old theological deadlock between predestination and free-will

serves admirably as an example of the sort of deadlock I mean. Take

life at the level of common sensation and common experience and

there is no more indisputable fact than man's freedom of will,

unless it is his complete moral responsibility. But make only the

least penetrating of analyses and you perceive a world of inevitable

consequences, a rigid succession of cause and effect. Insist upon a

flat agreement between the two, and there you are! The Instrument

fails.

It is upon these three objections, and upon an extreme suspicion of

abstract terms which arises materially out of my first and second

objections, that I chiefly rest my case for a profound scepticism of

the remoter possibilities of the Instrument of Thought. It is a

thing no more perfect than the human eye or the human ear, though

like those other instruments it may have undefined possibilities of

evolution towards increased range, and increased power.

So much for my main contention. But before I conclude I may--since I

am here--say a little more in the autobiographical vein, and with

a view to your discussion to show how I reconcile this fundamental

scepticism with the very positive beliefs about world-wide issues I

possess, and the very definite distinction I make between right and

wrong.

I reconcile these things by simply pointing out to you that if there

is any validity in my image of that three dimensional jelly in which

our ideas are suspended, such a reconciliation as you demand in

logic, such a projection of the things as in accordance upon one

plane, is totally unnecessary and impossible.

This insistence upon the element of uniqueness in being, this

subordination of the class to the individual difference, not only

destroys the universal claim of philosophy, but the universal claim

of ethical imperatives, the universal claim of any religious

teaching. If you press me back upon my fundamental position I must

confess I put faith and standards and rules of conduct upon exactly

the same level as I put my belief of what is right in art, and what

I consider right practice in art. I have arrived at a certain sort

of self-knowledge and there are, I find, very distinct imperatives

for me, but I am quite prepared to admit there is no proving them

imperative on any one else. One's political proceedings, one's moral

acts are, I hold, just as much self-expression as one's poetry or

painting or music. But since life has for its primordial elements

assimilation and aggression, I try not only to obey my imperatives,

but to put them persuasively and convincingly into other minds, to

bring about _my_ good and to resist and overcome _my_ evil as though

they were the universal Good and the universal Evil in which

unthinking men believe. And it is obviously in no way contradictory

to this philosophy, for me, if I find others responding

sympathetically to any notes of mine or if I find myself responding

sympathetically to notes sounding about me, to give that common

resemblance between myself and others a name, to refer these others

and myself in common to this thing as if it were externalised and

spanned us all.

Scepticism of the Instrument is for example not incompatible with

religious association and with organisation upon the basis of a

common faith. It is possible to regard God as a Being synthetic in

relation to men and societies, just as the idea of a universe of

atoms and molecules and inorganic relationships is analytical in

relation to human life.

The repudiation of demonstration in any but immediate and verifiable

cases that this Scepticism of the Instrument amounts to, the

abandonment of any universal validity for moral and religious

propositions, brings ethical, social and religious teaching into the

province of poetry, and does something to correct the estrangement

between knowledge and beauty that is a feature of so much mental

existence at this time. All these things are self-expression. Such

an opinion sets a new and greater value on that penetrating and

illuminating quality of mind we call insight, insight which when it

faces towards the contradictions that arise out of the imperfections

of the mental instrument is called humour. In these innate,

unteachable qualities I hold--in humour and the sense of

beauty--lies such hope of intellectual salvation from the original

sin of our intellectual instrument as we may entertain in this

uncertain and fluctuating world of unique appearances....

So frankly I spread my little equipment of fundamental assumptions

before you, heartily glad of the opportunity you have given me of

taking them out, of looking at them with the particularity the

presence of hearers ensures, and of hearing the impression they make

upon you. Of course, such a sketch must have an inevitable crudity

of effect. The time I had for it--I mean the time I was able to give

in preparation--was altogether too limited for any exhaustive finish

of presentation; but I think on the whole I have got the main lines

of this sketch map of my mental basis true. Whether I have made

myself comprehensible is a different question altogether. It is for

you rather than me to say how this sketch map of mine lies with

regard to your own more systematic cartography....

Here followed certain comments upon Personal Idealism, and Mr. F. C.

S. Schiller's Humanism, of no particular value.