Герберт Джордж Уэллс
Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump;

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
Wilkins makes Certain Objections

§ 1

Wilkins the author began to think about the Mind of the Race quite suddenly. He made an attack upon Boon as we sat in the rose-arbour smoking after lunch. Wilkins is a man of a peculiar mental constitution; he alternates between a brooding sentimental egotism and a brutal realism, and he is as weak and false in the former mood as he is uncompromising in the latter. I think the attraction that certainly existed between him and Boon must have been the attraction of opposites, for Boon is as emotional and sentimental in relation to the impersonal aspects of life as he is pitiless in relation to himself. Wilkins still spends large portions of his time thinking solemnly about some ancient trouble in which he was treated unjustly; I believe I once knew what it was, but I have long since forgotten. Yet when his mind does get loose from his own “case” for a bit it is, I think, a very penetrating mind indeed. And, at any rate, he gave a lot of exercise to Boon.

“All through this book, Boon,” he began.

“What book?” asked Dodd.

“This one we are in. All through this book you keep on at the idea of the Mind of the Race. It is what the book is about; it is its theme. Yet I don’t see exactly what you are driving at. Sometimes you seem to be making out this Mind of the Race to be a kind of God – ”

“A synthetic God,” said Boon. “If it is to be called a God at all.”

Dodd nodded as one whose worst suspicions are confirmed.

“Then one has to assume it is a continuing, coherent mind, that is slowly becoming wider, saner, profounder, more powerful?”

Boon never likes to be pressed back upon exact statements. “Yes,” he said reluctantly. “In general – on the whole – yes. What are you driving at?”

“It includes all methods of expression from the poster when a play is produced at His Majesty’s Theatre, from the cheering of the crowd when a fireman rescues a baby, up to – Walter Pater.”

“So far as Pater expresses anything,” said Boon.

“Then you go on from the elevation this idea of a secular quasi-divine racial mental progress gives you, to judge and condemn all sorts of decent artistic and literary activities that don’t fall in or don’t admit that they fall in…”

“Something of that idea,” said Boon, growing a little testy – “something of that idea.”

“It gives you an opportunity of annoying a number of people you don’t like.”

“If I offend, it is their fault!” said Boon hotly. “Criticism can have no friendships. If they like to take it ill… My criticism is absolutely, honest… Some of them are my dearest friends.”

“They won’t be,” said Wilkins, “when all this comes out… But, anyhow, your whole case, your justification, your thesis is that there is this Mind of the Race, overriding, dominating – And that you are its Prophet.”

“Because a man confesses a belief, Wilkins, that doesn’t make him a Prophet. I don’t set up – I express.”

“Your Mind of the Race theory has an elegance, a plausibility, I admit,” said Wilkins.

Dodd’s expression indicated that it didn’t take him in. He compressed his lips. Not a bit of it.

“But is this in reality true? Is this what exists and goes on? We people who sit in studies and put in whole hours of our days thinking and joining things together do get a kind of coherence into our ideas about the world. Just because there is leisure and time for us to think. But are you sure that is the Race at all? That is my point. Aren’t we intellectually just a by-product? If you went back to the time of Plato, you would say that the idea of his “Republic” was what was going on in the Mind of the Race then. But I object that that was only the futile fancy of a gentleman of leisure. What was really going on was the gathering up of the Macedonian power to smash through Greece, and then make Greece conquer Asia. Your literature and philosophy are really just the private entertainment of old gentlemen out of the hurly-burly and ambitious young men too delicate to hunt or shoot. Thought is nothing in the world until it begins to operate in will and act, and the history of mankind doesn’t show now, and it never has shown, any consecutive relation to human thinking. The real Mind of the Race is, I submit, something not literary at all, not consecutive, but like the inconsecutive incoherences of an idiot – ”

“No,” said Boon, “of a child.”

“You have wars, you have great waves of religious excitement, you have patriotic and imperial delusions, you have ill-conceived and surprising economic changes – ”

“As if humanity as a whole were a mere creature of chance and instinct,” said Boon.

“Exactly,” said Wilkins.

“I admit that,” said Boon. “But my case is that sanity grows. That what was ceases to be. The mind of reason gets now out of the study into the market-place.”

“You mean really, Boon, that the Mind of the Race isn’t a mind that is, it is just a mind that becomes.”

“That’s what it’s all about,” said Boon.

“And that is where I want to take you up,” said Wilkins. “I want to suggest that the Mind of the Race may be just a gleam of conscious realization that passes from darkness to darkness – ”

“No,” said Boon.

“Why not?”

“Because I will not have it so,” said Boon.

§ 2

There can be no denying that from quite an early stage in the discussion Boon was excited and presently on the verge of ill-temper. This dragging of his will into a question of fact showed, I think, the beginning of his irritation. And he was short and presently rather uncivil in his replies to Wilkins.

Boon argued that behind the individualities and immediacies of life there was in reality a consecutive growth of wisdom, that larger numbers of people and a larger proportion of people than ever before were taking part in the World Mind process, and that presently this would become a great conscious general thinking of the race together.

Wilkins admitted that there had been a number of starts in the direction of impersonal understanding and explanation; indeed, there was something of the sort in every fresh religious beginning; but he argued that these starts do not show a regular progressive movement, and that none of them had ever achieved any real directive and unifying power over their adherents; that only a few Christians had ever grasped Christianity, that Brahminism fell to intellectual powder before it touched the crowd, that nowadays there was less sign than ever of the honest intellectuals getting any hold whatever upon the minds and movements of the popular mass…

“The Mind of the Race,” said Wilkins, “seems at times to me much more like a scared child cowering in the corner of a cage full of apes.”

Boon was extraordinarily disconcerted by these contradictions.

“It will grow up,” he snatched.

“If the apes let it,” said Wilkins. “You can see how completely the thinkers and poets and all this stuff of literature and the study don’t represent the real Mind, such as it is, of Humanity, when you note how the mass of mankind turns naturally to make and dominate its own organs of expression. Take the popular press, take the popular theatre, take popular religion, take current fiction, take the music-hall, watch the development of the cinematograph. There you have the real body of mankind expressing itself. If you are right, these things should fall in a kind of relationship to the intellectual hierarchy. But the intellectual hierarchy goes and hides away in country houses and beautiful retreats and provincial universities and stuffy high-class periodicals. It’s afraid of the mass of men, it dislikes and dreads the mass of men, and it affects a pride and aloofness to cover it. Plato wanted to reorganize social order and the common life; the young man in the twopenny tube was the man he was after. He wanted to exercise him and teach him exactly what to do with the young woman beside him. Instead of which poor Plato has become just an occasion for some Oxford don to bleat about his unapproachable style and wisdom…”

“I admit we’re not connected up yet,” said Boon.

“You’re more disconnected than ever you were. In the Middle Ages there was something like a connected system of ideas in Christendom, so that the Pope and the devout fishwife did in a sense march together…”

You see the wrangling argument on which they were launched.

Boon maintained that there was a spreading thought process, clearly perceptible nowadays, and that those detachments of Wilkins’ were not complete. He instanced the cheap editions of broad-thinking books, the variety of articles in the modern newspaper, the signs of wide discussions. Wilkins, on the other hand, asserted a predominant intellectual degeneration… Moreover, Wilkins declared, with the murmurous approval of Dodd, that much even of the Academic thought process was going wrong, that Bergson’s Pragmatism for Ladies was a poor substitute even for Herbert Spencer, that the boom about “Mendelism” was a triumph of weak thinking over comprehensive ideas.

“Even if we leave the masses out of account, it is still rather more than doubtful if there is any secular intellectual growth.”

And it is curious to recall now that as an instance of a degenerative thought process among educated people Wilkins instanced modern Germany. Here, he said, in the case of a Mind covering over a hundred million people altogether, was a real retrocession of intellectual freedom. The pretentious expression of instinctive crudity had always been the peculiar weakness of the German mind. It had become more and more manifest, he said, as nationalism had ousted foreign influence. You see what pretty scope for mutual contradiction there was in all this. “Let me get books,” cried Wilkins, “and I will read you samples of the sort of thing that passes for thinking in Germany. I will read you some of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, some of Nietzsche’s boiling utterance, some of Schopenhauer.”

“Let me,” said Wilkins, “read a passage I have picked almost haphazard from Schopenhauer. One gets Schopenhauer rammed down one’s throat as a philosopher, as a deep thinker, as the only alternative to the Hegelian dose. And just listen – ”

He began to read in a voice of deliberate malice, letting his voice italicize the more scandalous transitions of what was certainly a very foolish and ill-knit piece of assertion.

“‘Little men have a decided inclination for big women, and vice versâ; and indeed in a little man the preference for big women will be so much the more passionate if he himself was begotten by a big father, and only remains little through the influence of his mother; because he has inherited from his father the vascular system and its energy which was able to supply a large body with blood. If, on the other hand, his father and grandfather were both little, that inclination will make itself less felt. At the foundation of the aversion of a big woman to big men lies the intention of Nature to avoid too big a race… Further, the consideration as to the complexion is very decided. Blondes prefer dark persons or brunettes; but the latter seldom prefer the former. The reason is, that fair hair and blue eyes are in themselves a variation from the type, almost an abnormity, analogous to white mice, or at least to grey horses. In no part of the world, not even in the vicinity of the Pole, are they indigenous, except in Europe, and are clearly of Scandinavian origin. I may here express my opinion in passing that the white colour of the skin is not natural to man, but that by nature he has a black or brown skin, like our forefathers the Hindus; that consequently a white man has never originally sprung from the womb of Nature, and that thus there is no such thing as a white race, much as this is talked of, but every white man is a faded or bleached one. Forced into this strange world, where he only exists like an exotic plant, and like this requires in winter the hothouse, in the course of thousands of years man became white. The gipsies, an Indian race which immigrated only about four centuries ago, show the transition from the complexion of the Hindu to our own. Therefore in sexual love Nature strives to return to dark hair and brown eyes as the primitive type; but the white colour of the skin has become second nature, though not so that the brown of the Hindu repels us. Finally, each one also seeks in the particular parts of the body the corrective of his own defects and aberrations, and does so the more decidedly the more important the part is. Therefore snub-nosed individuals have an inexpressible liking for hook-noses, parrot-faces; and it is the same with regard to all other parts. Men with excessively slim, long bodies and limbs can find beauty in a body which is even beyond measure stumpy and short… Whoever is himself in some respects very perfect does not indeed seek and love imperfection in this respect, but is yet more easily reconciled to it than others; because he himself insures the children against great imperfection of this part. For example, whoever is himself very white will not object to a yellow complexion; but whoever has the latter will find dazzling whiteness divinely beautiful.’ (You will note that he perceives he has practically contradicted this a few lines before, and that evidently he has gone back and stuck in that saving clause about a white skin being second nature.) ‘The rare case in which a man falls in love with a decidedly ugly woman occurs when, beside the exact harmony of the degree of sex explained above, the whole of her abnormities are precisely the opposite, and thus the corrective, of his. The love is then wont to reach a high degree…’

“And so on and so on,” said Wilkins. “Just a foolish, irresponsible saying of things. And all this stuff, this celibate cerebration, you must remember, is not even fresh; it was said far more funnily and pleasantly by old Campanella in his ‘City of the Sun.’ And, mind you, this isn’t a side issue Schopenhauer is upon; it isn’t a moment of relaxation; this argument is essential to the whole argument of his philosophy…”

“But after all,” said Boon, “Schopenhauer is hardly to be considered a modern. He was pre-Darwinian.”

“Exactly why I begin with him,” said Wilkins. “He was a contemporary of Darwin, and it was while Darwin was patiently and industriously building up evidence, that this nonsense, a whole torrent of it, a complete doctrine about the Will to Live, was being poured out. But what I want you to notice is that while the sort of cautious massing of evidence, the close reasoning, the honesty and veracity, that distinguished the method of Darwin and Huxley, are scarcely to be met with anywhere to-day, this spouting style of doing things is everywhere. Take any of the stuff of that intellectual jackdaw, Bernard Shaw, and you will find the Schopenhauer method in full development; caught-up ideas, glib, irrational transitions, wild assertions about the Life Force, about the effects of alcohol, about ‘fear-poisoned’ meat, about medical science, about economic processes, about Russia, about the Irish temperament and the English intelligence, about the thoughts and mental processes of everybody and every sort of mind, stuff too incoherent and recklessly positive ever to be systematically answered. And yet half at least of the English-speaking intelligenzia regards Shaw as a part of the thought process of the world. Schopenhauer was a pioneer in the game of impudent assertion, very properly disregarded by his own generation; Shaw’s dementia samples this age. You see my case? In any rationally trained, clear-headed period Shaw would have been looked into, dissected, and disposed of long ago… And here I have two other of the voices that this time respects. It is all my argument that they are respected now enormously, Boon; not merely that they exist. Men to talk and write foolishly, to make groundless positive statements and to misapprehend an opponent there have always been, but this age now tolerates and accepts them. Here is that invalid Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who found a more congenial, intellectual atmosphere in Germany, and this is his great book, ‘The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century.’ This book has been received with the utmost solemnity in the highest quarters; nowhere has it been handed over to the derision which is its only proper treatment. You remember a rather readable and rather pretentious history we had in our schooldays, full of bad ethnology about Kelts and Anglo-Saxons, called J. R. Green’s ‘History of the English People’; it was part of that movement of professorial barbarity, of braggart race-Imperialism and anti-Irishism, of which Froude and Freeman were leaders; it smelt of Carlyle and Germany, it helped provoke the Keltic Renascence. Well, that was evidently, the germ of Herr Chamberlain. Here – ”

Wilkins turned over the pages.

“Here he is, in fairly good form. It is a section called ‘The Turning Point,’ and it’s quite on all fours with Schopenhauer’s ‘our ancestors the Hindus.’ It is part of a sketch in outline of the history of the past. ‘The important thing,’ he says, is to ‘fix the turning-point of the history of Europe.’ While he was at it he might just as well have fixed the equator of the history of Europe and its sparking-plug and the position of its liver. Now, listen —

“‘The awakening of the Teutonic peoples to the consciousness of their all-important vocation as the founders of a completely new civilization and culture marks the turning-point; the year 1200 can be designated the central moment of this awakening.’

“Just consider that. He does not even trouble to remind us of the very considerable literature that must exist, of course, as evidence of that awakening. He just flings the statement out, knowing that his sort of follower swallows all such statements blind, and then, possibly with some qualms of doubt about what may have been happening in Spain and Italy and India and China and Japan, he goes on —

“‘Scarcely any one will have the hardihood to deny that the inhabitants of Northern Europe have become the makers of the world’s history. At no time have they stood alone … others, too, have exercised influence – indeed great influence – upon the destinies of mankind, but then always merely as opponents of the men from the north…’

“Poor Jenghiz Khan, who had founded the Mogul Empire in India just about that time, and was to lay the foundations of the Yuen dynasty, and prepare the way for the great days of the Mings, never knew how mere his relations were with these marvellous ‘men from the north.’ The Tartars, it is true, were sacking Moscow somewhere about twelve hundred… But let us get on to more of the recital of Teutonic glories.

“‘If, however, the Teutons were not the only people who moulded the world’s history’ (generous admission) ‘they unquestionably’ (that unquestionably!) ‘deserve the first place; all those who appear as genuine shapers of the destinies of mankind, whether as builders of States or as discoverers of new thoughts and of original art’ (oh Japan! oh Ming dynasty! oh art and life of India!) ‘belong to the Teutonic race. The impulse given by the Arabs is short lived’ (astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, modern science generally!); ‘the Mongolians destroy but do not create anything’ (Samarkand, Delhi, Pekin); ‘the great Italians of the rinascimento were all born either in the north, saturated with Lombardic, Gothic, and Frankish blood, or in the extreme Germano-Hellenic south; in Spain it was the Western Goths who formed the element of life; the Jews are working out their “Renaissance” of to-day by following in every sphere as closely as possible the example of the Teutonic peoples.’

“That dodge of claiming all the great figures of the non-Teutonic nations as Teutons is carried out to magnificent extremes. Dante is a Teuton on the strength of his profile and his surname, and there is some fine play about the race of Christ. He came from Galilee, notoriously non-Jewish, and so on; but Lord Redesdale, who writes a sympathetic Introduction, sets the seal on the Teutonic nationality of Christ by reminding us that Joseph was only the putative father…

“It makes a born Teuton like myself feel his divinity,” said Wilkins, and read, browsing: “‘From the moment the Teuton awakes a new world begins to open out – ’ Um! Um!.. Oh, here we are again! —

“‘It is equally untrue that our culture is a renaissance of the Hellenic and the Roman; it was only after the birth of the Teutonic peoples that the renaissance of past achievements was possible and not vice versâ.’… I wonder what exactly vice versâ means there!.. ‘The mightiest creators of that epoch – a Shakespeare, a Michael Angelo – do not know a word of Greek or Latin.’

“The stalwart ignorance of it! Little Latin and less Greek even Ben Jonson allowed our William, and manifestly he was fed on Tudor translations. And the illiteracy of Michael Angelo is just an inspiration of Chamberlain’s. He knows his readers. Now, in itself there is no marvel in this assertive, prejudiced, garrulous ignorance; it is semi-sober Bierhalle chatter, written down; and, God forgive us! most of us have talked in this way at one time or another; the sign and the wonder for you, Boon, is that this stuff has been taken quite seriously by all Germany and England and America, that it is accepted as first-rank stuff, that it has never been challenged, cut up, and sent to the butterman. It is Modern Thought. It is my second sample of the contemporary Mind of the Race. And now, gentlemen, we come to the third great intellectual high-kicker, Nietzsche. Nietzsche, I admit, had once a real and valid idea, and his work is built upon that real and valid idea; it is an idea that comes into the head of every intelligent person who grasps the idea of the secular change of species, the idea of Darwinism, in the course of five or six minutes after the effective grasping. This is the idea that man is not final. But Nietzsche was so constituted that to get an idea was to receive a revelation; this step, that every bright mind does under certain circumstances take, seemed a gigantic stride to him, a stride only possible to him, and for the rest of his lucid existence he resounded variations, he wrote epigrammatic cracker-mottoes and sham Indian apophthegms, round and about his amazing discovery. And the whole thing is summed up in the title of Dr. Alexander Tille’s ‘Von Darwin bis Nietzsche,’ in which this miracle of the obvious, this necessary corollary, is treated as a huge advance of the mind of mankind. No one slays this kind of thing nowadays. It goes on and goes on, a perpetually reinforced torrent of unreason washing through the brain of the race. There was a time when the general intelligence would have resisted and rejected Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Chamberlain, Shaw; now it resists such invasions less and less. That, Boon, is my case.”

Wilkins, with his little pile of books for reference, his sombre manner, and his persistence, was indeed curiously suggestive of an advocate opening a trial. The Mind of the Race was far less of a continuity than it was when a generally recognized and understood orthodox Christianity held it together, as a backbone holds together the ribs and limbs and head of a body. That manifestly was what he was driving at, as Dodd presently complained. In those stabler days every one with ideas, willingly or unwillingly, had to refer to that doctrinal core, had to link up to it even if the connection was used only as a point of departure. Now more and more, as in these three examples, people began irresponsibly in the air, with rash assertions about life and race and the tendency of things. And the louder they shouted, the more fantastic and remarkable they were, the more likely they were to gather a following and establish a fresh vortex in the deliquescent confusion.

On the whole, Boon was disposed to tolerate these dispersed beginnings. “We attack truth in open order,” he said, “instead of in column.”

“I don’t mind fresh beginnings,” said Wilkins; “I don’t mind open order, but I do object to blank ignorance and sheer misconception. It isn’t a new beginning for Schopenhauer to say we are descended from Hindus; it is just stupidity and mental retrogression. We are no more descended from Hindus than Hindus are descended from us; that we may have a common ancestry is quite a different thing. One might as well say that the chimpanzee is descended from a gorilla or a gorilla from a chimpanzee. And it isn’t any sort of truth, it is just a loud lie, that the ‘Germanic’ peoples realized anything whatever in the year 1200. But all these – what shall I call them? —moderns are more and more up to that kind of thing, stating plausible things that have already been disproved, stating things erroneously, inventing pseudo-facts, and so getting off with a flourish. In the fields of ideas, and presently in the fields of action, these wildly kicking personalities have swamped any orderly progress; they have arrested and disowned all that clearing up of thought and all that patient, triumphant arrangement of proven fact which characterized the late eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. During that time the great analysis of biological science went on, which culminated in an entire revision of our conceptions of species, which opened a conceivable and hitherto undreamed-of past and future to the human imagination, which seemed to have revised and relaid the very foundations of philosophical discussion. And on that foundation, what has been done?”

“Naturally,” cried Boon, “after a great achievement there must be a pause. The Mind of the Race must have its digestive interludes.”

“But this is indigestion! First comes Herbert Spencer, with his misconception of the life process as a struggle of individuals to survive. His word ‘Evolution’ is the quintessence of the misunderstanding; his image of a steadfast, mechanical unfolding through selfishness, masked plausibly and disastrously the intricate, perplexing vision of the truth. From that sort of thing we go at a stride to the inevitable Super Man, the megatherium individual of futurity, the large egoist, and all that nonsense. Then comes a swarm of shallow, incontinent thinkers, anxious to find a simple driving force with a simple name for the whole process; the ‘Life Force’ and ‘Will,’ and so on. These things, my dear Boon, are just the appalling bubbles of gas that show how completely the Mind of the Race has failed to assimilate…”

“It is remarkable,” said Boon, “how a metaphor may run away with the clearest of thinkers. The Mind of the Race is not so consistently gastric as all that.”

“You started the metaphor,” said Wilkins.

“And you mounted it and it bolted with you. To these unpleasant consequences… Well, I hold, on the contrary, that after the superficialities of the sixties and seventies and eighties people’s minds have been getting a firmer and firmer grip upon the reality of specific instability. The new body of intellectual experiment, which isn’t indigestion at all but only a preliminary attack, is all that mass of trial thinking that one lumps together in one’s mind when one speaks of Pragmatism. With the breakdown of specific boundaries the validity of the logical process beyond finite ends breaks down. We make our truth for our visible purposes as we go along, and if it does not work we make it afresh. We see life once more as gallant experiment. The boundaries of our universe recede not only in time and space but thought. The hard-and-fast line between the scientific and the poetic method disappears…”

“And you get Bergson,” said Wilkins triumphantly.

“Bergson is of that class and type that exploits the affairs of thought. But I refuse to have Pragmatism judged by Bergson. He takes hold of the unfinished inquiries that constitute the movement of Pragmatism and he makes a soft scepticism for delicate minds with easy ways back to any old-established orthodoxy they may regret.”

“But here is my case again,” said Wilkins. “It is only through Bergson that the Mind of the Race, the great operating mass mind out there, can take hold of this new system of ideas…”

§ 3

But now Boon and Wilkins were fairly launched upon a vital and entirely inconclusive controversy. Was the thought process of the world growing, spreading, progressing, or was it going to pieces? The one produced a hundred instances of the enlarging and quickening of men’s minds, the other replied by instancing vulgarities, distortions, wide acceptance of nonsense. Did public advertisements make a more intelligent or less intelligent appeal now than they used to do? For half an afternoon they fought over the alleged degeneration of the Times, multiplying instances, comparing the “Parnellism and Crime” pamphlet with Lord Northcliffe’s war indiscretions, and discussing the comparative merits of Mr. Moberly Bell’s campaign to sell the twenty-year-old “Encyclopædia Britannica” and found a “Book Club” that should abolish booksellers, with the displayed and illustrated advertisements of the new period.

The talk, you see, went high and low and came to no conclusion; but I think that on the whole Wilkins did succeed in shaking Boon’s half-mystical confidence in the inevitableness of human wisdom. The honours, I think, lay with Wilkins. Boon did seem to establish that in physical science there had been, and was still, a great and growing process; but he was not able to prove, he could only express his faith, that the empire of sanity was spreading to greater and more human issues. He had to fall back upon prophecy. Presently there would be another big lunge forward, and so forth. But Wilkins, on his side, was able to make a case for a steady rotting in political life, an increase in loudness, emptiness, and violence in the last twenty years: he instanced Carsonism, the methods of Tariff Reform, the vehement Feminist movement, the malignant silliness of the “rebel” Labour Press, the rankness of German “patriotism.”…