Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thoughtWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thought
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Civilization; Communication and traffic; Social prediction; Twentieth century -- Forecasts
How will the landscape shape itself to the dominant men of the new time
and in relation to themselves? What is the will and purpose that these
men of will and purpose will find above and comprehending their own?
Into this our inquiry resolves itself. They will hold with Schopenhauer,
I believe, and with those who build themselves on Malthus and Darwin,
that the scheme of being, in which we live is a struggle of existences
to expand and develop themselves to their full completeness, and to
propagate and increase themselves. But, being men of action, they will
feel nothing of the glamour of misery that irresponsible and sexually
vitiated shareholder, Schopenhauer, threw over this recognition. The
final object of this struggle among existences they will not understand;
they will have abandoned the search for ultimates; they will state this
scheme of a struggle as a proximate object, sufficiently remote and
spacious to enclose and explain all their possible activities. They will
seek God's purpose in the sphere of their activities, and desire no
more, as the soldier in battle desires no more, than the immediate
conflict before him. They will admit failure as an individual aspect of
things, as a soldier seeking victory admits the possibility of death;
but they will refuse to admit as a part of their faith in God that any
existence, even if it is an existence that is presently entirely erased,
can be needless or vain. It will have reacted on the existences that
survive; it will be justified for ever in the modification it has
produced in them. They will find in themselves--it must be remembered I
am speaking of a class that has naturally segregated, and not of men as
a whole--a desire, a passion almost, to create and organize, to put in
order, to get the maximum result from certain possibilities. They will
all be artists in reality, with a passion for simplicity and directness
and an impatience of confusion and inefficiency. The determining frame
of their ethics, the more spacious scheme to which they will shape the
schemes of their individual wills, will be the elaboration of that
future world state to which all things are pointing. They will not
conceive of it as a millennial paradise, a blissful inconsequent
stagnation, but as a world state of active ampler human beings, full of
knowledge and energy, free from much of the baseness and limitations,
the needless pains and dishonours of the world disorder of to-day, but
still struggling, struggling against ampler but still too narrow
restrictions and for still more spacious objects than our vistas have
revealed. For that as a general end, for the special work that
contributes to it as an individual end, they will make the plans and the
limiting rules of their lives.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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