Mankind in the MakingWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
Mankind in the Making
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Social problems; Social sciences
Directly the man, who has found akin to himself and who has accepted and
assimilated this new view, turns to the affairs of the political
world, to the general professions of our great social and business
undertakings, and to the broad conventions of human conduct, he will
find, I think, a very wide discrepancy from the implications of this
view. He will find--the New Republican finds--that the declared aims and
principles of the larger amount of our social and political effort are
astonishingly limited and unsatisfactory, astonishingly irrelevant to
the broad reality of Life. He will find great masses of men embarked
collectively upon enterprises that will seem to his eyes to have no
definable relation to this real business of the world, or only the
most accidental relationship, he will find others in partial lop-sided
cooperation or unintelligently half helpful and half obstructive, and he
will find still other movements and developments which set quite in
the opposite direction, which make neither for sound births nor sound
growth, but through the thinnest shams of excuse and purpose, through
the most hypnotic and unreal of suggestions and motives, directly and
even plainly towards waste, towards sterility, towards futility and
death and extinction.
But not deliberately towards Death. It is only in the theoretical
aspirations of Schopenhauer that he will find an expression of conscious
and resolved opposition to the pervading will and purpose in things.
In the common affairs of the world he will find neither deliberate
opposition nor deliberate co-operation, chance opposition indeed
and chance co-operation, but for the most part only a complete
unconsciousness, a blind irrelevance or a purely accidental accordance
to the essential aspect of Life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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