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A Modern Utopia Chapter 1 - Topographical · The H. G. Wells Library

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Speaker 1: Chapter one of A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells.
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Speaker 1: This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
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Speaker 1: the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
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Speaker 1: visit LibriVox dot org. A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells,
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Speaker 1: Chapter the first topographical section one. The utopia of a
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Speaker 1: modern dreamer must needs differ in one fundamental aspect from
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Speaker 1: the no whares in utopia's men planned before Darwin quickened
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Speaker 1: the thought of the world, those were all perfect and
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Speaker 1: static states, a balance of happiness one forever against the
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Speaker 1: forces of unrest and disorder. That inhere in things one
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Speaker 1: beheld a healthy and simple generation, enjoying the fruits of
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Speaker 1: the earth, in an atmosphere of virtue and happiness, to
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Speaker 1: be followed by other, virtuous, happy, and entirely similar generations,
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Speaker 1: until the gods grew weary, change and development were dammed
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Speaker 1: back by invincible dams forever. But the modern utopia must
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Speaker 1: be not static, but kinetic, must shape not as a
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Speaker 1: permanent state, but as a hopeful stage, leading to a
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Speaker 1: long ascent of stages. Nowadays we do not resist and
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Speaker 1: overcome the great stream of things, but rather float upon it.
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Speaker 1: We build now not citadels, but ships of state, for
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Speaker 1: one ordered arrangement of citizens rejoicing in inequality of happiness
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Speaker 1: safe and assured to them and their children forever. We
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Speaker 1: have to plan a flexible common compromise in which perpetually
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Speaker 1: novel succession of individualities may inverge most of the victually
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Speaker 1: upon a comprehensive onward development. That is the first most
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Speaker 1: generalized difference between a utopia based upon modern conceptions and
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Speaker 1: all the utopias that were written in the former time.
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Speaker 1: Our business here is to be utopian, to meet, rivid
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Speaker 1: and creditable if we can first this facet and then
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Speaker 1: that of an imaginary, whole and happy world. Our deliberate
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Speaker 1: intention is to be not indeed impossible, but most distetly
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Speaker 1: impracticable by every scale that reaches only between today and tomorrow.
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Speaker 1: We are to turn our backs for a space upon
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Speaker 1: the insistent examination of the thing that is, and face
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Speaker 1: towards the freer air, the ampler spaces of the thing
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Speaker 1: that perhaps might be, to the projection of a state
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Speaker 1: or city worthwhile to design upon the sheet of our
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Speaker 1: imaginations the picture of a life conceiving possible and yet
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Speaker 1: better worth living than our own that is our present enterprise.
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Speaker 1: We are going to lay down certain necessary starting propositions,
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Speaker 1: and then we shall proceed to explore sort of world
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Speaker 1: these propositions give us. It is no doubt an optimistic enterprise.
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Speaker 1: But it is good for a while to be free
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Speaker 1: from the carving. Note that must needs be audible when
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Speaker 1: we discuss our present imperfections. To release ourselves from practical
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Speaker 1: difficulties and the tangle of ways and means, it is
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Speaker 1: good to stop by the track for a space, put
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Speaker 1: aside the knapsack, wipe the brows, and talk a little
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Speaker 1: of the upper slopes of the mountain we think we
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Speaker 1: are climbing, would but the trees let us see it.
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Speaker 1: There is to be no inquiry here at policy and method.
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Speaker 1: There is to be a holiday from politics and movements
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Speaker 1: and methods. But for all that we must needs to
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Speaker 1: find certain limitations. Were we free to have our untrammeled desire,
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Speaker 1: I suppose we should follow Morris to his nowhere. We
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Speaker 1: should change the nature of man and the nature of things. Together.
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Speaker 1: We should make the whole base wise, tolerant, noble purpect.
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Speaker 1: Weave our hands to a splendid anarchy, every man doing
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Speaker 1: as it pleases him, and none please to do evil
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Speaker 1: in a world as good in its essential nature, as
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Speaker 1: ripe and sunny as the world before the fall. But
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Speaker 1: that golden age, the perfect world, comes out into the
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Speaker 1: possibilities of space and time. In space and time, the
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Speaker 1: pervading will to live sustains for evermore a perpetuity of aggressions.
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Speaker 1: Our proposal here is upon a more practical plane, at
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Speaker 1: least than that. We are to restrict ourselves, first to
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Speaker 1: the limitations of human possibility as we know them in
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Speaker 1: the men and women of this world to day, and
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Speaker 1: when to all the inhumanity, all the insubordination of nature.
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Speaker 1: We are to shape our state in a world of
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Speaker 1: uncertain seasons, sudden catastrophes, antagonistic diseases, and inlimicable beasts and
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Speaker 1: vermin out of many women with like passions, like uncertainties
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Speaker 1: of mood and desire to our own. And moreover, we
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Speaker 1: are going to accept this world of conflict, to adopt
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Speaker 1: no attitude of renunciation towards it, to face it in
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Speaker 1: no ascetic spirit, but in the mood of the Western peoples,
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Speaker 1: whose purpose is to survive and overcome. So much we
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Speaker 1: adopt in common with those who deal not in utopias,
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Speaker 1: but in the world of here and now certain liberties. However,
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Speaker 1: following the best utopian precedence we may take with existing fact,
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Speaker 1: we assume that the tone of public thought may be
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Speaker 1: entirely different from what it is in the present world.
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Speaker 1: We promote ourselves a free hand with the mental conflict
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Speaker 1: of life within the possibilities of the human mind as
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Speaker 1: we know it. We promote ourselves also a free hand
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Speaker 1: with all the apparatus of existence that man has, so
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Speaker 1: to speak, made for himself, with houses, roads, clothing, canals, machinery,
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Speaker 1: with laws, boundaries, conventions, and traditions, with schools, with literature
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Speaker 1: and religious organization, with creeds and customs, with everything in
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Speaker 1: fact that it lies within man's power to alter. That indeed,
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Speaker 1: is the cardinal assumption of all utopian speculations old and new,
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Speaker 1: the Republican laws of Plato and Mare's Utopia, Howells implicit
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Speaker 1: Altruria and Bellamies future Boston comtes, Great Western Republic, Hertzka's Freeland,
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Speaker 1: caveats Icaria, and Campernilla's City of the Sun are built,
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Speaker 1: just as we shall build upon that upon the nypothesis
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Speaker 1: of the complete emancipation of a community of men from tradition,
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Speaker 1: from habits, from legal bonds, and that subtless servitude possessions entail.
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Speaker 1: And much of the essential value of all such speculations
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Speaker 1: lies in this assumption of emancipation lies in that regard
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Speaker 1: towards human freedom, in the undying interest of the human
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Speaker 1: power of self escape, the power to resist the causation
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Speaker 1: of the past, and to evade, initiate, endeavor, and overcome
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Speaker 1: Section two. There are very definite artistic limitations. Also, there
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Speaker 1: must always be a certain effect of hardness and thinness
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Speaker 1: about Utapian speculations. Their common fault is to be comprehensively
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Speaker 1: to June. That which is the blood and warmth and
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Speaker 1: reality of life is largely absent. There are no individualities,
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Speaker 1: but only generalized people. In almost every utopia, except perhaps
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Speaker 1: Morris's used from Nowhere, one sees handsome but characterless buildings,
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Speaker 1: symmetrical and perfect cultivations, and a multitude of people, healthy, happy,
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Speaker 1: beautifully dressed, but without any personal distinction whatever. Too often
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Speaker 1: the prospect resembles the key to one of those large
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Speaker 1: pictures of coronations, royal weddings, parliaments, conferences, and gatherings so
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Speaker 1: popular in Victorian times, in which instead of a face,
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Speaker 1: each figure bears a neat oval with its index number
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Speaker 1: legibly inscribed. This burdens us with an incurable effect unreality,
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Speaker 1: and I do not see how it is altogether to
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Speaker 1: be escaped. It is a disadvantage that has to be accepted.
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Speaker 1: Whatever institution has existed, or an exists, however irrational, however preposterous,
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Speaker 1: has by virtue of its contact with individualities, an effect
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Speaker 1: of realness and rightness. No untried thing may share. It
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Speaker 1: is ripened, It has been christened with blood. It has
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Speaker 1: been stained and mellowed by handling. It has been rounded
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Speaker 1: and dented to the softened contours that we associate with life.
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Speaker 1: It has been salted. May be in a brine of tears.
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Speaker 1: But the thing that is merely proposed, the thing that
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Speaker 1: has merely suggested, however rational, however necessary, seems strained and inhuman.
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Speaker 1: In its clear, hard, uncompromising lines, its unqualified angles and surfaces.
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Speaker 1: There is no help for it. There it is the
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Speaker 1: Master suffers, with the last and least of his successes,
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Speaker 1: for all the humanity. He wins too through his dramatic,
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Speaker 1: devisive dialogue. I doubt if any one has ever been
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Speaker 1: warmed to desire himself a citizen of the the Republic
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Speaker 1: of Plato. I doubt if anyone could stand a month
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Speaker 1: of the relentless publicity of virtue planned by More. No
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Speaker 1: one wants to live in any community of intercourse, really,
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Speaker 1: save for the sake of the individualities he would meet there.
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Speaker 1: The fertilizing conflict of individualities is the ultimate meaning of
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Speaker 1: the personal life, and all are utopias no more than
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Speaker 1: schemes for bettering that interplay. At least, that is how
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Speaker 1: life shapes itself more and more to modern perceptions. Until
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Speaker 1: you bring in individualities, nothing comes into being, and a
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Speaker 1: universe ceases when you shiver the mirror of the least
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Speaker 1: of individual minds. Section three. No less than a planet
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Speaker 1: will serve the purpose of a modern utopia. Time was
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Speaker 1: when a mountain, valley, or an island seemed to promise
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Speaker 1: sufficient isolation for a polity to maintain its self intact
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Speaker 1: from outward force. The Republican Plato stood armed, ready for
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Speaker 1: defensive war, and the new Atlantis and the utopia of
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Speaker 1: More in theory, like China and Japan, through many centuries
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Speaker 1: of effectual practice, help themselves isolated from intruders. Such late
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Speaker 1: instances as Butler's satirical Erewhon and his Distead's Queendom of
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Speaker 1: inverted sexual conditions in Central Africa found the Tibetan method
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Speaker 1: of slaughtery in the Inquiring Visitor a simple sufficient rule.
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Speaker 1: But the whole trend of modern thought is against the
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Speaker 1: permanence of any such enclosures. We are acutely aware nowadays that,
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Speaker 1: however subtly contrived, a state may be outside your boundary lines.
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Speaker 1: The epidemic, the breeding barbarian, or the economic power will
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Speaker 1: gather its strength to overcome you. The swift march of
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Speaker 1: invention is all for the invader. Now, perhaps you might
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Speaker 1: still regard a rocky coast or a narrow pass. But
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Speaker 1: what if that near to morrow on the flying machine
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Speaker 1: soars overhead, free to descend at this point, Or that
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Speaker 1: a state powerful enough to keep isolated under modern conditions
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Speaker 1: would be powerful enough to rule the world, would be indeed,
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Speaker 1: if not actively ruling, yet passively acquiescent to all other
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Speaker 1: human organizations, and so responsible for them altogether world state. Therefore,
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Speaker 1: it must be that leaves no room for a modern
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Speaker 1: utopian in Central Africa or in South America or round
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Speaker 1: about the Pole, those last refuges of ideality, the floating
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Speaker 1: isle of La Cite Morrelistee no longer avails. The made
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Speaker 1: a planet. Lord Erskine, the author of a utopia ar
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Speaker 1: Martyr that might have been inspired by mister Hewans, was
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Speaker 1: the first of all utopists to perceive this. He joined
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Speaker 1: his twenty planets polled Pole by a sort of umbilical cord.
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Speaker 1: The modern imagination, obsessed by physics, must travel further than that,
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Speaker 1: out beyond a serious firing, the deeps of space, beyond
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Speaker 1: the flight of a cannon ball flying for a billion years,
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Speaker 1: beyond the range for unaided vision, blazes the star that
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Speaker 1: is our Utopia's sun to those who know where to look,
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Speaker 1: with a good opera glass aiding good eyes, it and
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Speaker 1: three fellows that seem in a cluster with it, though
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Speaker 1: they are incredible billions of miles nearer, make just the
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Speaker 1: faintest speck of light about it. Good planets, eating as
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Speaker 1: our planets, but wreathing a different fate. And in its
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Speaker 1: place among them is Utopia, with its system mate the Moon.
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Speaker 1: It is a planet like our planet, the same continents,
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Speaker 1: the same islands, the same oceans and seas. Another Fuji
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Speaker 1: Yama is beautiful there, dominating another yokoha armor, and another
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Speaker 1: matter horn overlooks the icy disorder of another Theodore. It
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Speaker 1: is so like our planet that a terrestrial botanist might
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Speaker 1: find his every species there, even to the meanest pondweed
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Speaker 1: or the remotest alpine blossom, only when he had gathered
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Speaker 1: the last and turned about to find his inn again,
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Speaker 1: perhaps he will not find his inn. Suppose now that
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Speaker 1: two of us were actually to turn about in just
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Speaker 1: that fashion, two, I think, for to face a strange planet,
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Speaker 1: even though it be a wholly civilized one, without some
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Speaker 1: other familiar backing dashes the courage over much. Suppose that
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Speaker 1: we were indeed so translated even as we stood. You
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Speaker 1: figure us upon some high paths in the Alps. And
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Speaker 1: though I being one easily made Gillea by stooping, and
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Speaker 1: no botanist myself, if my companion were to have a
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Speaker 1: specimen tin under his arm, so long as it is
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Speaker 1: not painted that abominable po pilas Swiss apple green, I
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Speaker 1: would make it no occasion for quarrel. We have tramped
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Speaker 1: and botanized, and come to a rest and sitting among rocks.
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Speaker 1: We've eaten our lunch and finished our bottle of Yvorne,
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Speaker 1: and fallen into a talk of utopias, and said such
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Speaker 1: things side been saying, I could figure it myself upon
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Speaker 1: that little neck of the Lucendro Pass, upon the shoulder
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Speaker 1: of the piece Leuchendro. For there once I lunched and
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Speaker 1: talked very pleasantly, and we were looking down upon the Valvedretto,
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Speaker 1: and Vila and Fontana and Idolo try to hide from
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Speaker 1: us under the mountainside three quarters of a mile they
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Speaker 1: are vertically below lantern. With that absurd nearness of effect
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Speaker 1: one gets in the Alps, we see the little train
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Speaker 1: a dozen miles away running down the Biascina to Italy,
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Speaker 1: and the Lucmannier Pass, the old Piora left of us,
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Speaker 1: and the san Jacomu right near foot paths under our feet.
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Speaker 1: And behold, in the twinkling of an eye, we are
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Speaker 1: in that other world. We should scarcely note the change.
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Speaker 1: Not a cloud would have gone from the sky. It
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Speaker 1: might be the remote town below would take a different air,
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Speaker 1: and my companion, the botanist, with its educated observation, might
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Speaker 1: almost see as much, and the train perhaps would be
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Speaker 1: gone out of the picture, and the embarrased straightness of
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Speaker 1: the tuccino in the ambri Piota meadows. That might be altered,
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Speaker 1: but that would be all the visible change. Yet I
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Speaker 1: have an idea that, in some obscure manner we should
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Speaker 1: come to feel at once a difference in things. The
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Speaker 1: buttleist's glance would, under a subtle attraction, float back to Airolo.
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Speaker 1: It's queer, he would see, quite idly. But I never
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Speaker 1: noticed that building at the right before which building to
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Speaker 1: the right, with a queer sort of thing. I see now. Yes, yes,
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Speaker 1: it's certainly an odd looking affair and big, you know fansome.
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Speaker 1: I wondered that would interrupt our utopian speculations. We should
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Speaker 1: both discover that the little town below had changed. But
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Speaker 1: how we should not have marked them well enough to
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Speaker 1: know it would be indefinable a change in the quality
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Speaker 1: of their grouping, a change in the quality of their remote,
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Speaker 1: small shapes. I should flip a free crumbs from my knee.
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Speaker 1: Perhaps it's odd, I should say, for the tenth or
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Speaker 1: eleventh time, with the motion to rise, and we should
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Speaker 1: get up and stretch ourselves, and still a little puzzled,
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Speaker 1: turn our faces towards the path that clambers down over
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Speaker 1: the tumble rocks and runs round by the still clear
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Speaker 1: lake and down towards the hospice of Saint Bothard. If
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Speaker 1: perchance we could still find that path one before we
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Speaker 1: got to that, before even we got to the great
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Speaker 1: high road, we should have hints from the stone cabin
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Speaker 1: in the nape of the pass. It would be gone
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Speaker 1: or wonderfully changed. We very goats upon the rocks, when
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Speaker 1: we were very hut by the rough bridge of stone,
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Speaker 1: that a mighty difference had come to the world of men,
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Speaker 1: And presently amazed and amazing we should happen on a
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Speaker 1: man no Swiss, dressed in unfamiliar clothing and speaking an
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Speaker 1: unfamiliar speech. Section four before nightfall, we should be drenched
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Speaker 1: in wonders, But still we should have wonder left for
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Speaker 1: the thing. My companion, with a scientific training, would no
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Speaker 1: doubt be the first to see. I would glance up
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Speaker 1: with that proprietory eye of a man who knows its
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Speaker 1: constellations down to the little Greek letters. I imagine his exclamation,
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Speaker 1: Who would it first? Out his eyes? I should inquire
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Speaker 1: the cause of his consternation, And it would be hard
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Speaker 1: to explain. He would ask me with a certain singularity
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Speaker 1: of manner for Orion, and I should not find him
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Speaker 1: for all the great bear, and it would have vanished.
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Speaker 1: Where I should ask, and where seeking among that scattered starliness,
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Speaker 1: And slowly I should acquire the wonder that possessed him. Then,
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Speaker 1: for the first time, perhaps we should realize from this
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Speaker 1: unfamiliar heaven that not the world changed, but ourselves, that
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Speaker 1: we had come into the uttermost deeps of space. Section five.
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Speaker 1: We need suppose no linguistic impediments to intercourse. The whole
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Speaker 1: world will surely have a common language that is quite
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Speaker 1: elementarily utopian, And since we are free of the trammels
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Speaker 1: of convincing story telling, we may suppose that language to
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Speaker 1: be sufficiently our own to understand. Indeed, should we be
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Speaker 1: in utopia at all if we could not talk to everyone,
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Speaker 1: that accursed bar of language, that style inscription in the
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Speaker 1: foreigner's eyes deaf and dumb to you, sir, And so
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Speaker 1: your enemy is the very first of the defects and
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Speaker 1: complications one has fled the earth to escape. But what
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Speaker 1: sort of language would we have the world speak? If
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Speaker 1: we were told the miracle of Babel was presently to
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Speaker 1: be reversed. If I may take a daring image a
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Speaker 1: medieval liberty, I would suppose that in this lonely place,
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Speaker 1: the spirit of Creation spoke to us on this matter.
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Speaker 1: You are wise men, that spirit might say, And I,
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Speaker 1: being a suspicious, touchy over earnest man, for all my
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Speaker 1: predisposition to plumpness, would instantly scent the irony, while my
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Speaker 1: companion I fancy, might even plume himself. And to beget
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Speaker 1: your wisdom is chiefly while the world was made. You
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Speaker 1: are so good as to propose an acceleration of that tedious,
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Speaker 1: multitudinous evolution upon which I am engaged. I gather a
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Speaker 1: universal would serve you there. While I sit here among
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Speaker 1: these mountains, I have been filing away at them for
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Speaker 1: this last aon or so, just to attract your hotels.
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Speaker 1: You know, we'd be so kind a few hints, then,
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Speaker 1: in this spirit of Creation might transiently smile a smile
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Speaker 1: that would be like the passing of a cloud. All
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Speaker 1: the mountain wilderness about us would be radiantly lit, you know,
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Speaker 1: those swift moments when warmth and brightness drift by in
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Speaker 1: lonely and desolate places. Yet, after all, why should two
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Speaker 1: men be smiled into apathy by the infinite. Here we
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Speaker 1: are with our lobby little heads, our eyes, and hands
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Speaker 1: and feets and stout hearts. And if not us or ours,
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Speaker 1: still the endless multitudes about us and in our loins
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Speaker 1: are to come at last to the world state and
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Speaker 1: a greater fellowship in the universal tongue. That's the extent
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Speaker 1: of our ability. If not on that question at any rate,
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Speaker 1: try to think ourselves within sight of the best thing possible. That,
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Speaker 1: after all, is our purpose to imagine our best and
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Speaker 1: to strive for it. And it is a worse folly
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Speaker 1: and a worse sin than presumption to abandon striving because
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Speaker 1: the best of all our bests, because the best of
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Speaker 1: all our bests looks mean amidst the suns. Now you,
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Speaker 1: as a botanist, would I suppose inclined to something as
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Speaker 1: they say scientific? You wouldn't under that most offensive epithet,
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Speaker 1: And that I am able to give you my intelligent sympathy.
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Speaker 1: Though pseudo scientific and quasi scientific are worse by far
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Speaker 1: for the skin. You would begin to talk of scientific
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Speaker 1: languages of Esperanto, the Langue Bleu, New Latin, Polapuk, and
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Speaker 1: Lord Lytton of the philosophical language of Archbishop waterly Lady
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Speaker 1: Welby's work upon Significance and the like. You would tell
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Speaker 1: me of the remarkable precisions the encyclopedic quality of chemical terminology,
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Speaker 1: and at the word terminology, I should insinuate a comment
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Speaker 1: on that eminent American biologist, Professor Mark Baldwin, who has
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Speaker 1: carried the language biological to such heights of expressive clearness
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Speaker 1: as to be triumphantly and invincibly unreadable, which foreshadows the
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Speaker 1: line of my defense. You make your ideal clear. A
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Speaker 1: scientific language you demand without ambiguity, as precise as mathematical formulae,
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Speaker 1: and with every term in relations of exact logical consistency
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Speaker 1: with every other. It would be a language with all
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Speaker 1: the infections of verbs and nouns regular, and all its
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Speaker 1: constructions inevitable, each word clearly distinguishable from every other word
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Speaker 1: in sound as well as spelling. That, at any rate
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Speaker 1: is the sort of thing one he is demanded. And
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Speaker 1: if only because the demand rests upon indications that reach
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Speaker 1: which far beyond the region of language, it is worth
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Speaker 1: considering here it implies, indeed, almost everything that we are
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Speaker 1: endeavoring to repudiate. In this particular work, it implies that
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Speaker 1: the whole intellectual basis of mankind is established, the rules
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Speaker 1: of logic, the systems of counting and measurement, the general
24:19
Speaker 1: categories and schemes of resemblance and difference are established for
24:24
Speaker 1: the human mind. For ever blank comptyism in fact the
24:29
Speaker 1: blankest description. But indeed the science of logic and the
24:33
Speaker 1: whole framework of philosophical thought men have kept since the
24:37
Speaker 1: days of Plato and Aristotle, has no more essential permanence
24:41
Speaker 1: as the final expression of the human mind than the
24:44
Speaker 1: Scottish longer catechism. Amidst the world are of modern wars,
24:49
Speaker 1: philosophy long lost to men rises again into being like
24:53
Speaker 1: some blind and almost formless embryo that must presently develop
24:57
Speaker 1: sight and form and powerlosophy in which this assumption is denied.
25:04
Speaker 1: The series reader may refer at leisure to Sidui's use
25:08
Speaker 1: of words and reasoning particularly, and to Bosanqui's essentials of
25:13
Speaker 1: logic badly as principles of logic and sigwuds logic. The
25:18
Speaker 1: lighter minded may read and mark the temper of Professor
25:22
Speaker 1: Case in the British Encyclopedia article Logic Volume thirty. I
25:28
Speaker 1: have repended in this book a rude sketch of a
25:30
Speaker 1: philosophy upon the new lines, originally read by me to
25:35
Speaker 1: the Oxford Philosophical Society in nineteen o three. All through
25:41
Speaker 1: this utopian excursion, I must warn you you shall feel
25:44
Speaker 1: the thrust and disturbance of that insurgent movement in the
25:49
Speaker 1: reiterated use of unique you world as it were, get
25:52
Speaker 1: the gleam of its integument, any insistence upon individuality and
25:57
Speaker 1: the individual difference as the significance of life. Life we
26:00
Speaker 1: feel the texture of its shaping body. Nothing endures, nothing
26:05
Speaker 1: is precise and certain except the mind of a pedant.
26:08
Speaker 1: Perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal in
26:12
Speaker 1: its attitude, which is the mysterious inmost quality of being being. Indeed,
26:19
Speaker 1: there is no being but a universal becoming of individualities.
26:23
Speaker 1: And Plato turned his back on truth when he turned
26:26
Speaker 1: towards his museum of specific ideals. Heraclitus, that lost and
26:31
Speaker 1: misinterpreted giant, may perhaps be coming to his own. There
26:36
Speaker 1: is no abiding thing in what we know. We change
26:40
Speaker 1: from weaker to stronger lights, and each more powerful light
26:43
Speaker 1: pierces our hitherto opaque foundations and reveals fresh and different
26:47
Speaker 1: opacities below. We can never foretell which of our seemingly
26:52
Speaker 1: assured fundamentals the next change will not affect. What folly
26:57
Speaker 1: then to dream of mapping out our minds? And however
27:00
Speaker 1: general terms are providing for the endless mysteries of the future,
27:04
Speaker 1: a terminology and an idiom. We follow the vein, we
27:08
Speaker 1: mine and accumulate our treasure, But who can tell which
27:12
Speaker 1: way the vein may trend. Language is the nourishment of
27:15
Speaker 1: the thought of man, that serves only as it undergoes
27:18
Speaker 1: metabolism and becomes thought and lives, and in its very
27:22
Speaker 1: living passes away. You scientific people, with your fancy of
27:28
Speaker 1: a terrible exactitude in language of indestructible foundations, built as
27:33
Speaker 1: that words worthy in dog raw, and the type of
27:36
Speaker 1: paine of nature says for I are marvelously without imagination.
27:43
Speaker 1: The language of eutopia will no doubt be one and indivisible.
27:47
Speaker 1: All mankind will, in the measure of their individual differences
27:50
Speaker 1: in equality, be brought into the same phase, into a
27:54
Speaker 1: common resonance of thought. But the language they will speak
27:58
Speaker 1: will still be a living tongue, an animated system of
28:01
Speaker 1: inperfections which every individual man will infinitesimally infinitesimally modify through
28:09
Speaker 1: the universal freedom of exchange and movement. The developing change
28:13
Speaker 1: in its general spirit will be a world wide change.
28:17
Speaker 1: That is the quality of its universality. I fancy it
28:21
Speaker 1: will be a coalesque language, a synthesis of many such
28:26
Speaker 1: a language as English is a coalesque language. It is
28:30
Speaker 1: a coalescence of Anglo saxon in Norman, French, and scholars Latin,
28:35
Speaker 1: welded into one speech more ample and more powerful and
28:39
Speaker 1: beautiful than either. The utopian tongue might well present a
28:43
Speaker 1: more spacious coalescence and hold in the frame of such
28:46
Speaker 1: an uninflected or slightly inflected idiom as English already presents
28:52
Speaker 1: a profuse vocabulary into which have been cast a dozen
28:56
Speaker 1: and once separate tongues, superposed and then welded together through
29:01
Speaker 1: bilingual and trilingual promises. In the past, ingenious men have
29:08
Speaker 1: speculated on the inquiry which language will survive. The question
29:12
Speaker 1: was badly put. I think now that this wedding and
29:16
Speaker 1: survival of several in a common offspring is a far
29:19
Speaker 1: more probable thing. Section six. This talk of languages, however,
29:31
Speaker 1: is of aggression. We are on our way along the
29:34
Speaker 1: faint path that runs round the rim of the Lake
29:37
Speaker 1: of Lucendro, and we were just on the point of
29:40
Speaker 1: coming upon our first utopian man. He was, I said,
29:44
Speaker 1: no Swiss. Yet he would have been a Swiss on
29:47
Speaker 1: mother Earth. And here he would have the same face,
29:50
Speaker 1: with some difference, maybe in the expression, the same physique,
29:55
Speaker 1: they were a little better developed, perhaps the same complexion
29:59
Speaker 1: he would. We have different habits, different traditions, different knowledge,
30:03
Speaker 1: different ideas, different clothing, and different appliances. But except for
30:08
Speaker 1: all that, he would be the same man. We very
30:12
Speaker 1: distinctly provided at the outset that the modern utopia must
30:16
Speaker 1: have people inherently the same as those in the world.
30:20
Speaker 1: There is more, perhaps in that than appears for the
30:23
Speaker 1: first suggestion. That proposition gives one characteristic difference between a
30:30
Speaker 1: modern utopia and almost all its predecessors. It is to
30:34
Speaker 1: be a world utopia. We have agreed no less, and
30:37
Speaker 1: so we must needs face the fact that we are
30:39
Speaker 1: to have differences of race. Even the lower classes of
30:43
Speaker 1: Plato's republic were not specifically of different race. But this
30:47
Speaker 1: is a utopia as wide as Christian charity, and white
30:51
Speaker 1: and black brown, red, and yellow, ald hints of skin,
30:55
Speaker 1: All types of body and character will be there. How
30:59
Speaker 1: we are to adjust their differences is a master question,
31:03
Speaker 1: and the matter is not even to be opened in
31:05
Speaker 1: this chapter, that we need a whole chapter even to
31:09
Speaker 1: grant it its issues. But here we underline that stipulation.
31:14
Speaker 1: Every race of the planet's Earth is to be found
31:17
Speaker 1: in the strictest parallelism there in numbers the same, only
31:21
Speaker 1: as I say, with an entirely different set of traditions, ideals, ideas,
31:27
Speaker 1: and purposes, and so moving under those different skies to
31:31
Speaker 1: an altogether difference to destiny. There follows a curious development
31:37
Speaker 1: of this to anyone clearly impressed by the uniqueness and
31:40
Speaker 1: the unique significance of individualities. Races are no hard and
31:46
Speaker 1: fast things, no crowd of identically similar persons, but masks,
31:50
Speaker 1: sub races, and tribes and families, each after its kind unique.
31:55
Speaker 1: And these again are clusterings of still smaller uniques, and
31:59
Speaker 1: so down to each several persons, so that our first
32:04
Speaker 1: convention works out to this, not only as every earthly mountain, river, plant,
32:10
Speaker 1: and beast in that paralleled planet beyond serious also, but
32:15
Speaker 1: every man, woman, and child alive has a utopian parallel.
32:19
Speaker 1: From now onward, of course, the fates of these two
32:22
Speaker 1: planets will diverge. Men will die here whom wisdom will
32:26
Speaker 1: save there, and perhaps conversely here we shall save men.
32:30
Speaker 1: Children will be born to them and not to us,
32:33
Speaker 1: to us and not to them. But this, this moment
32:37
Speaker 1: of reading, is the starting moment, and for the first
32:40
Speaker 1: and last occasion, the populations of our planets are oppressed,
32:45
Speaker 1: they must in these days make some such supposition. The
32:48
Speaker 1: alternative is a utopia of dolls, in the likeness of angels,
32:52
Speaker 1: imaginary laws to fit incredible people, and unattractive undertaking. For example,
32:59
Speaker 1: we must there is a man such as I might
33:01
Speaker 1: have been better informed, better disciplined, better employed, thinner, and
33:06
Speaker 1: more active, And I wonder what he is doing. And you,
33:09
Speaker 1: sir or madam, are in duplicate also, and all the
33:13
Speaker 1: men and women that you know. And I I doubt
33:17
Speaker 1: if we shall meet our doubles, or if it will
33:19
Speaker 1: be pleasant for us to do so. But as we
33:23
Speaker 1: come down from these lonely mountains to the roads and
33:25
Speaker 1: houses and living places of the utopian world state, we
33:29
Speaker 1: shall certainly find here and there faces that will remind
33:32
Speaker 1: us singularly of those who have lived under our eyes.
33:37
Speaker 1: There are some you never wish to meet again, you say,
33:40
Speaker 1: and some I gather you do, and one. It is strange,
33:46
Speaker 1: But this figure of the botanist will not keep in place.
33:49
Speaker 1: It sprang up between us, dear reader, as a passing,
33:52
Speaker 1: illustrative invention. I do not know what put him into
33:56
Speaker 1: my head, and for the moment it fell in with
33:59
Speaker 1: my humor for space to foist the man's personality upon
34:02
Speaker 1: you as yours, and call you scientific, that most abusive word.
34:08
Speaker 1: But here he is indisputably with me in utopia, and
34:11
Speaker 1: lapsing from our high speculative theme into halting but intimate confidences,
34:16
Speaker 1: it declares he has not come to Utopia to meet
34:18
Speaker 1: again with his sorrows. What sorrows? I protest even warmly
34:24
Speaker 1: that neither he nor his sorrows were in my intention.
34:28
Speaker 1: He is a man I should think of thirty nine,
34:31
Speaker 1: a man whose life has been neither tragedy nor a
34:34
Speaker 1: joice adventure, A man with one of those spaces that
34:37
Speaker 1: have gained interest, rather than force on obility, from their
34:41
Speaker 1: commerce with life. He is something refined, with some knowledge,
34:45
Speaker 1: perhaps of the minor pains and all the civil self controls.
34:50
Speaker 1: He has read more than he has suffered, and suffered
34:53
Speaker 1: rather than done. He regards me with his blue gray eye,
34:57
Speaker 1: from which all interest in this Utopia has faded. Is
35:01
Speaker 1: a trouble, he says, that has come into my life
35:04
Speaker 1: only for a month or so, and theased acute me again.
35:08
Speaker 1: I thought it was all over. There was someone. It
35:12
Speaker 1: is an amazing story to hear upon a mountain crest
35:15
Speaker 1: in Utopia, this Hampstead affair, this story of a frognal heart, Frognal.
35:21
Speaker 1: He says. It's the place where they met, and it
35:24
Speaker 1: summons to my memory the word on a board at
35:27
Speaker 1: the corner of a flint dressed new road, the state's
35:30
Speaker 1: development road, with vista of villas up a hill. He
35:35
Speaker 1: had known her before he got his professorship, and neither
35:38
Speaker 1: her people nor his. He speaks that detestable middle class
35:42
Speaker 1: dialect in which aunts and things with money and the
35:46
Speaker 1: right of intervention are called. People approved of the affair.
35:51
Speaker 1: She was, I think rather easily swayed. He says. That's
35:55
Speaker 1: not fair to her. Perhaps she thought too much of others.
35:58
Speaker 1: They seemed stressed if they seem to think, of course,
36:01
Speaker 1: right have I come to Utopia to hear this sort
36:06
Speaker 1: of thing. Section seven, It is necessary to turn the
36:16
Speaker 1: botanist's thoughts into a worthier channel. It is necessary to
36:20
Speaker 1: override these modest regrets, this intrusive, petty love story. Does
36:25
Speaker 1: he realize this is indeed utopia? Tell your mind, I
36:28
Speaker 1: insist to this utopia of mine, and lead these earthly
36:32
Speaker 1: troubles to their proper planet. You realize just where the
36:36
Speaker 1: propositions necessary to a modern utopia are taking us. Everyone
36:40
Speaker 1: on Earth will have to be here themselves, but with
36:43
Speaker 1: a difference. Somewhere here in this world is, for example,
36:47
Speaker 1: mister Chamberlain, and the King is here no doubt, incognito,
36:51
Speaker 1: and all the world Academy, and Sandow and mister Arnold White.
36:56
Speaker 1: These famous names do not field him. A mine goes
37:00
Speaker 1: from this prominent and typical personage to that, and for
37:03
Speaker 1: a time I forget my companion. I am distracted by
37:07
Speaker 1: the curious side issues. This general proposition trails after it.
37:12
Speaker 1: There will be so and so and so and so.
37:14
Speaker 1: The name and figure of mister Roosevelt jerks into focus
37:18
Speaker 1: and obliterates an attempt to accramatize the Emperor of the Germans. What,
37:23
Speaker 1: for instance, will utopia do with mister Roosevelt. There drifts
37:27
Speaker 1: across my inner vision, the image of a strenuous struggle
37:31
Speaker 1: with utopian constables, the voice that has thrilled the terrestrial
37:35
Speaker 1: millions in eloquent protests. The writ of arrest, drifting loose
37:39
Speaker 1: in the conflict, comes to my feet. I impale the
37:42
Speaker 1: scrap of paper and read. But can it be attempted
37:46
Speaker 1: disorganization incitements to disarrange the balance of population? The train
37:54
Speaker 1: of my logic, for once has led us into a
37:56
Speaker 1: facetious alley. One might indeed keep in this key and
38:00
Speaker 1: write in agreeable little utopia that, like the holy families
38:04
Speaker 1: of the medieval artists or Michelangelo's Last Judgment, could compliment
38:10
Speaker 1: one's friends in various degrees. Or one might embark upon
38:15
Speaker 1: speculative treatment of the entire Almanach de Gotha, something on
38:19
Speaker 1: the lines of Epistemon's vision of the Damned Great. When
38:23
Speaker 1: Xerxes was a crier of mustard, Romulus was assaulter in
38:27
Speaker 1: a pature of patterns that incomparable catalog, that incomparable catalog.
38:35
Speaker 1: Inspired by the muse of parody, we might go on
38:38
Speaker 1: to the pages of Who's Who, and even with an
38:41
Speaker 1: eye to the object Republic, to who's who in America,
38:45
Speaker 1: and make the most delightful and extensive arrangements. Now where
38:49
Speaker 1: shall we put this most excellent man and this? But indeed,
38:53
Speaker 1: it is doubtful if we shall meet any of these
38:56
Speaker 1: doubles during our utopian journey, or know them when we
38:59
Speaker 1: meet them. I doubt if any one will be making
39:02
Speaker 1: the best of both these worlds. The great men in
39:06
Speaker 1: this still unexplored utopia may be but Village Hampton's in
39:10
Speaker 1: our own and earthly goatherds and obscure illiterates sit here
39:14
Speaker 1: in the seats of the Mighty That again opens agreeable
39:18
Speaker 1: Vista's left of us and right from our botanist of
39:22
Speaker 1: True to his personality, Again, his thoughts have traveled by
39:25
Speaker 1: a different rote. I know. He says that she will
39:29
Speaker 1: be happier here, and that they will value her better
39:32
Speaker 1: than she has been valued upon Earth. His interruption serves
39:37
Speaker 1: to turn me back from my momentary contemplation of those
39:40
Speaker 1: popular effigies inflated by old newspapers and windy report the
39:44
Speaker 1: earthly great. He sets me thinking of more personal and
39:48
Speaker 1: intimate applications of the human beings. One knows with a
39:52
Speaker 1: certain approximation to real knowledge of the actual common substance
39:57
Speaker 1: of life. He turns me to the talks of rivalries
40:01
Speaker 1: and tendernesses, of differences and disappointments. I am suddenly brought
40:06
Speaker 1: painfully against the things that might have been. What if
40:10
Speaker 1: instead of that utopia vacant ovals, we meet relinquished loves here,
40:15
Speaker 1: and opportunities lost, and faces as there might have looked
40:18
Speaker 1: to us? I turned to my botanist, almost reprovingly, you
40:24
Speaker 1: know she won't be quite the same lady here that
40:26
Speaker 1: you knew, And fogmle, I say, and wrest myself from
40:30
Speaker 1: a subject that is no longer agreeable by rising to
40:33
Speaker 1: my feet, And besides, I say, standing above him. The
40:38
Speaker 1: chances against our meeting her are a million to one,
40:41
Speaker 1: and we loiter. This is not the business we have
40:44
Speaker 1: come upon, but a mere incidental kink in our larger plan.
40:48
Speaker 1: The fact remains, these people we have come to see
40:51
Speaker 1: are people with like infirmities to our own, and only
40:54
Speaker 1: the conditions are changed. Let us pursue the tenor of
40:58
Speaker 1: our inquiry with that, and lead the way round the
41:02
Speaker 1: edge of the lake of Uchamber tours our utopian world
41:07
Speaker 1: to figure him doing it down the valley we shall go,
41:12
Speaker 1: and down the passes. And as the valleys open, and
41:16
Speaker 1: the world will open, Utopia where men and women are happy,
41:20
Speaker 1: and dolls are wise, and where all that is tangled
41:23
Speaker 1: and confused in human affairs has been unraveled and need
41:27
Speaker 1: right end of chapter one,