Mankind in the MakingWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
Mankind in the Making
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Social problems; Social sciences
We have already discussed the means and possibilities of a net of
education that should sweep through the whole social body, and of the
creation of an atmosphere more alert and active than our present one.
We have now to consider how the greatest proportion of those born with
exceptional literary powers may be picked out and induced to exercise
those powers to the utmost. Let us admit at once that this is a research
of extraordinary subtlety and complexity, that there are ten thousand
ways of going wrong, and perhaps mischievously wrong. That one may
submit, is not a sufficient reason for abandonment and despair. To take
an analogous case, it may be a complex and laborious thing to escape out
of a bear-pit into which one has fallen, but few people will consider
that a reason for inaction. Even if they had small hope of doing
anything effectual they might find speculation and experiments in
escape, a congenial way of passing the time. It is the sort of project
one should only abandon at the final and conclusive proof of its
impossibility. Exactly the same principle applies to human destinies
and the saving of other lives than our own. As a matter of fact, the
enterprise is not at all a hopeless one if it is undertaken honestly,
warily, and boldly.
Let us consider the lines upon which men must go to ensure the greatest
possible growth of original thought in the state, original thought of
which what scientific men call Research is only one phase.
Before we can consider how we may endow him and equip him and help him,
we have to consider how we may find the original thinker, and we have,
if we can, to define him and to discover whatever we can of his
methods and habits, his natural history as it were. We are attempting
generalization about a class of remarkably peculiar and difficult
persons. They are persons either of great intellectual power or simply
of great imaginative power, whose bias and quality it is to apply these
exceptional powers not directly and simply to their personal advancement
and enrichment, but primarily through philosophical, scientific, or
artistic channels, to the increase of knowledge or of wisdom or of both.
And here is the peculiar point in this problem, they are men who put,
or who wish to put the best of themselves and most of themselves into
occupations and interests that do not lead to practical results, that
often for the individual in open competition and the market fail more or
less completely to “pay.” Their activities, of course, pay tremendously
at last for the race, but that is not their personal point of
application. They take their lives and their splendid powers, they waste
themselves in remote and inaccessible regions and bring back precious
things that immediately any sharp commercial-minded man will turn into
current coin for himself and the use of the world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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