The Research MagnificentWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
The Research Magnificent
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Conduct of life -- Fiction
It was clear to White that as Benham progressed with this major part of
his research, he was more and more possessed by the idea that he was not
making his own personal research alone, but, side by side with a vast,
masked, hidden and once unsuspected multitude of others; that this great
idea of his was under kindred forms the great idea of thousands, that
it was breaking as the dawn breaks, simultaneously to great numbers of
people, and that the time was not far off when the new aristocracy, the
disguised rulers of the world, would begin to realize their common
bent and effort. Into these latter papers there creeps more and more
frequently a new phraseology, such expressions as the “Invisible King”
and the “Spirit of Kingship,” so that as Benham became personally more
and more solitary, his thoughts became more and more public and social.
Benham was not content to define and denounce the prejudices of mankind.
He set himself to study just exactly how these prejudices worked, to get
at the nature and habits and strengths of each kind of prejudice, and to
devise means for its treatment, destruction or neutralization. He had no
great faith in the power of pure reasonableness; his psychological ideas
were modern, and he had grasped the fact that the power of most of the
great prejudices that strain humanity lies deeper than the intellectual
level. Consequently he sought to bring himself into the closest contact
with prejudices in action and prejudices in conflict in order to
discover their sub-rational springs.
A large proportion of that larger moiety of the material at Westhaven
Street which White from his extensive experience of the public patience
decided could not possibly “make a book,” consisted of notes and
discussions upon the first-hand observations Benham had made in this
or that part of the world. He began in Russia during the revolutionary
trouble of 1906, he went thence to Odessa, and from place to place in
Bessarabia and Kieff, where during a pogrom he had his first really
illuminating encounter with race and culture prejudice. His examination
of the social and political condition of Russia seems to have left him
much more hopeful than was the common feeling of liberal-minded people
during the years of depression that followed the revolution of 1906, and
it was upon the race question that his attention concentrated.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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