Mr. Wells, however, is not quite clear enough of the narrower
scientific outlook to see that there are some things which actually
ought not to be scientific. He is still slightly affected with
the great scientific fallacy; I mean the habit of beginning not
with the human soul, which is the first thing a man learns about,
but with some such thing as protoplasm, which is about the last.
The one defect in his splendid mental equipment is that he does
not sufficiently allow for the stuff or material of men.
In his new Utopia he says, for instance, that a chief point of
the Utopia will be a disbelief in original sin. If he had begun
with the human soul--that is, if he had begun on himself--he would
have found original sin almost the first thing to be believed in.
He would have found, to put the matter shortly, that a permanent
possibility of selfishness arises from the mere fact of having a self,
and not from any accidents of education or ill-treatment. And
the weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest
difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give
an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones.
They first assume that no man will want more than his share,
and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his share
will be delivered by motor-car or balloon. And an even stronger
example of Mr. Wells's indifference to the human psychology can
be found in his cosmopolitanism, the abolition in his Utopia of all
patriotic boundaries. He says in his innocent way that Utopia
must be a world-state, or else people might make war on it.
It does not seem to occur to him that, for a good many of us, if it were
a world-state we should still make war on it to the end of the world.
For if we admit that there must be varieties in art or opinion what
sense is there in thinking there will not be varieties in government?
The fact is very simple. Unless you are going deliberately to prevent