SIBYLLA
OR
THE REVIVAL OF PROPHECY
I
Experience enables us to defend in age the prejudices of our youth, and
belatedly to realize ambitions forsaken in earlier years. This would
seem to be true not only of individuals but of institutions also.
Modern science, adolescent in the nineteenth century, shows signs
of middle age; and with it that mellowed and urbane tolerance which
fosters idealism and optimistic projects, projects which the realism
and studied pessimism of youth declare to be beyond all powers of
attainment.
The researches of Rutherford and his fellow-workers have disposed
the serious physicist to dally once more with the Philosopher’s
Stone. Again we hope to transmute the baser metals into gold. Indeed,
the Philosopher’s Stone is found. Japanese physicists claim that
a magnification 2,500 times of the produce of their experiments
enables us actually to photograph the world’s augmented gold-supply.
Furthermore, the progress of knowledge concerning atomic structure
and radiant energy promises to endow man with the powers and range of
influence for which the magicians of old had such a notable though
undeserved reputation.
Since Freud, the interpretation of dreams has become a serious
pre-occupation of the grave and a further relaxation for the gay. I
need not, however, multiply examples. Let us turn forthwith to the
latest phase in this development――the revival of prophecy.
Prophecy, of course, has never wholly died. Though the soothsayer fell
into disrepute and was banished from the temple precincts to earn
a precarious livelihood on Margate Sands, his mantle has fallen on
Mr Wells. Mr Wells, however, is merely a prophet of the transition,
the journalese precursor of a new and hardier race whose influence
in the world I suspect will prove much greater. Like the modern
prophets generally, he has substituted for revelation and intuition a
thorough-going reliance upon the mundane intellect, fed upon scientific
generalizations and historical particularities. Mr Bernard Shaw is
another of the transition prophets, having marked affinities to the
new Biological School; but, like the rest, is transitional in lacking
the regalia of office and authority with which the newer prophets are
endowed.
The first of the prophets of the twentieth-century school was Mr J. B.
S. Haldane. In _Daedalus_ we find a frank abandonment of the pose of
scientific reserve about the future. Scientists generally for long had
said that they were concerned only with verifiable facts. Newton, in
particular, had said quite publicly that he had no use for hypotheses;
and his successors for the sake of their reputations had to keep up
the Newtonian manner. To distinguish themselves from journalists and
philosophers they avoided speculation like a plague. Now Haldane
found himself, I imagine, somewhat unduly constrained by this taboo.
Pursuing the most rigid methods of inquiry, he had come to conclusions
about some probable developments in the future, conclusions much less
speculative than many of the things it was his duty as a biologist to
teach about the past. So he prophesied.
The relief in the scientific world was heartfelt and instantaneous.
Scientists and others, of various degrees of eminence, literally
scrambled into Mr Haldane’s bus. In the year or so that followed some
twenty prophetic volumes had been produced, and the publishers tell us
of many others in the press.
However, in many of these documents we fail to detect the authentic
guiding hand, and these uncanonical works we must leave to the Higher
Critics of the future. The genuine prophet is to be known by his
strictly impersonal manner. He tells you neither what he wants nor
what he fears. So far as we can judge, he has no wants or fears. He
merely tells you what is going to be. Judged by this test we must, I
think, reject _Thrasymachus_, as purely propagandist. Mr Joad wants to
popularize immorality. He tries to persuade us to join the ranks of
the libertines lest we be swamped in the coming Neopuritan revival. By
the same token we must, reluctantly, reject Mrs Bertrand Russell. In
_Hypatia_ the quasi-prophetic rôle is assumed, we fear, merely as a
vantage point from which to wage sex-war.
Coming to the genuine prophets, I would divide them into two kinds; the
mechanists and the vitalists, not however, using these terms in their
traditional philosophical senses. The mechanists are those who view the
future in terms of the development of machinery. Man, having a nature
very much what it is to-day, is seen in an environment of mechanical
perfection, a world of wireless telegraphy, television, fuelless
traffic, moving pavements, rubber roads, windows of flexible glass,
rustless metals, dustless and smokeless cities, and private houses fit
for a plumber’s paradise.
The vitalists, of whom I take Mr Haldane to be the leading spokesman,
have a message in the face of which the wonders of wireless are
relatively tame. The time has come, they say, when our science and
our inventive genius are to be applied to life itself. In a sense, of
course, the journalists and men of letters got in first. Kapek with his
Robots made the idea dramatic; but the mechanical tradition was too
strong. The Robot was little more than clockwork. Wells’s “Men like
Gods” are perhaps a slight advance, but the gods are all too human,
and a bit too much like Mr Wells. Shaw, I think, got nearest. In _Back
to Methuselah_ the problem of biological invention was approached in a
more biological manner. But all these are prophets of the transition.
They are at heart Utopians, and neglect the evidences of the present
upon which the forecast must be based.