The Research MagnificentWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
The Research Magnificent
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Conduct of life -- Fiction
During the intervening years he had never ceased to have her in his
mind; he would not think of her it is true if he could help it, but
often he could not help it, and as a negative presence, as a thing
denied, she was almost more potent than she had been as a thing
accepted. Meanwhile he worked. His nervous irritability increased, but
it did not hinder the steady development of his Research.
Long before his final parting from Amanda he had worked out his idea and
method for all the more personal problems in life; the problems he put
together under his headings of the first three “Limitations.” He
had resolved to emancipate himself from fear, indulgence, and that
instinctive preoccupation with the interests and dignity of self which
he chose to term Jealousy, and with the one tremendous exception of
Amanda he had to a large extent succeeded. Amanda. Amanda. Amanda.
He stuck the more grimly to his Research to drown that beating in his
brain.
Emancipation from all these personal things he held now to be a mere
prelude to the real work of a man's life, which was to serve this dream
of a larger human purpose. The bulk of his work was to discover and
define that purpose, that purpose which must be the directing and
comprehending form of all the activities of the noble life. One cannot
be noble, he had come to perceive, at large; one must be noble to
an end. To make human life, collectively and in detail, a thing more
comprehensive, more beautiful, more generous and coherent than it is
to-day seemed to him the fundamental intention of all nobility. He
believed more and more firmly that the impulses to make and help and
subserve great purposes are abundantly present in the world, that they
are inhibited by hasty thinking, limited thinking and bad thinking, and
that the real ennoblement of human life was not so much a creation as a
release. He lumped the preventive and destructive forces that keep men
dispersed, unhappy, and ignoble under the heading of Prejudice, and
he made this Prejudice his fourth and greatest and most difficult
limitation. In one place he had written it, “Prejudice or Divisions.”
That being subdued in oneself and in the world, then in the measure of
its subjugation, the new life of our race, the great age, the noble age,
would begin.
So he set himself to examine his own mind and the mind of the world
about him for prejudice, for hampering follies, disguised disloyalties
and mischievous distrusts, and the great bulk of the papers that White
struggled with at Westhaven Street were devoted to various aspects of
this search for “Prejudice.” It seemed to White to be at once the most
magnificent and the most preposterous of enterprises. It was indeed no
less than an enquiry into all the preventable sources of human failure
and disorder.... And it was all too manifest to White also that the last
place in which Benham was capable of detecting a prejudice was at the
back of his own head.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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