The Works of H. G. Wells (Atlantic Edition)/Anticipations/Introduction to the 1914 Edition
It is now nearly fifteen years since "Anticipations" was written, and it is with a certain detachment and curiosity that I have read it over again to consider very seriously whether the issue of a fresh edition is justifiable. I have looked at the book only very occasionally since its first publication, I have never read it through since I passed the proofs for press until the present occasion, and on the whole I am surprised to find how few are the things I would change were I to rewrite it at the present time. It is a better book than I have been in the habit of thinking it was, and whatever the value of both of them to the world at large may be, the H. G. Wells of thirty-three has little to be ashamed of in presenting his book to the criticisms of the H. G. Wells of forty-eight. There are places, as I will presently indicate, which the latter, with some advantages of travel and experience, may be inclined to consider thin; there are ignorances and there are several rash and harsh generalisations; but an occasional trick of harshness and moments of leaping ignorance are in the blood of H. G. Wells; everybody who reads him has to stand that—he has to stand it himself more than any one—and forty-eight has, I fear, but small reason on that score for a superior attitude to thirty-three. It is like a lisp or an ugly voice. On the whole, and that is the astonishing thing, the book stands; there are places when you might very well think the writer was writing about the present instead of lunging boldly into what was then the future; and it may even be that in checking its forecasts by accomplishment, the reader will find an interest that his predecessor at the beginning of the century necessarily lacked.
Remember that the book was written during the Boer War, and before the complete publication of the 1901 census returns. Since then not only these but the returns of 1911 have come to hand to confirm very thoroughly the anticipations of urban extension, of social segregation and of the altering weight of classes that constitutes the opening chapters. All that has worked out very satisfactorily, so that even quite detailed prophecies have been confirmed, such as the disappearance of literary "Boomsters," and the decay of the press and appearance of smaller newspapers. And further on a considerable claim for verification may be based upon the estimate of Russia's power, made five years before the revolt of Moscow in 1906 and the war with Japan. The whole of that chapter, the Larger Synthesis, has stood the wear of fourteen years fairly well. For the most part it might have been written yesterday. But on the other hand, there are undeniable failures. Those specialised roads for motors, for example, and particularly the one that was to run from London to Brighton, do not materialise,[1] and the book displays a remarkable want of confidence in the immediate practicability of either flying-machines or submarines. Almost everyone who reads this book now will laugh at my timid little bladder-assisted aeroplanes, and yet in 1901 I was considered a very extravagant young man. "Long before 2000, and very probably before 1950, a successful aeroplane"—the boldness of it! The very stalest part of "Anticipations" is the anticipations of aerial war. But the laugh in that matter is more against me than the uninformed would believe, for even as I wrote those hesitating words, there lay in the bureau at which I wrote a pile of notes upon aviation, which a certain young soldier had confided to my keeping before he went to South Africa. He had come to me because I, at any rate, did not "think the whole blessed thing idiotic." If he came back I was to return them to him, it was his secret and he would go on with it; if he was killed I was to get them published. And now the Dunne self-balancing aeroplane defies the gales, and the other day, by Captain Dunne's kindness, I was soaring three thousand feet over the town of Sheerness.
The stuff about the "New Republic," and the attempt to define the social classes of the new age, is, I think, the most permanently valuable part of this book. The general idea of the "New Republic," the onslaught on "Democracy," the manifest dislike for such partisan and particularist things as trade unionism and nationalism are as much a part of me as the intonations of my voice or the shape of my nose. That conception of an open conspiracy of intellectuals and wilful people against existing institutions and existing limitations and boundaries is always with me; it is my King Charles's head, and it forms the substance of the longest novel I have ever written[2]—that is, if ever the war will let me get it written—the novel I am still writing. I admit that after fourteen years this open conspiracy still does not very definitely realise itself, but in that matter I have a constitutional undying patience. That open conspiracy will come. It is my faith. It is my form of political thought.
Since "Anticipations" was written I have been through the Fabian Society, and it is amusing in this moment of retrospect to recall that plunge and that tumultuous emergence. In the days when I wrote "Anticipations" I knew scarcely more of the Fabian Society than I did of the Zetetic Society, but the publication of that book and its follower "Mankind in the Making," brought Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb into my world. They appeared riding very rapidly upon bicycles from the direction of London, offering certain criticisms of my general forecast and urging me to join and stimulate the Fabians. This extraordinary couple, so able and energetic, so devoted, so perplexingly limited, exercised me enormously. Their essential criticism of "Anticipations" was that I did not sufficiently recognise the need and probability of a specialised governing class, and they expounded to my instinctively shrinking intelligence that conception of a great bureaucracy which it has been their life-work to convey to the English intelligence. They tried to bring my New Republic within the official dimensions of their bureaucratic state, while I as earnestly tried to relax their outlook to the demands of my own temperament. "A Modern Utopia" with its Samurai was the fruit of this transitory and never entirely harmonious marriage of minds, and then, recoiling as it were, I set myself with what I now perceive was an entirely exaggerated and unnecessary horror to release the Fabian Society and British Socialism from the Webbs' influence. I failed scandalously after preposterous wranglings at Clifford's Inn and Essex Hall, wranglings in which Mr. Bernard Shaw somehow contrived to take a leading and entirely incomprehensible part, and which I still find too amusing to regret; and when I did at last draw breath on the further side of these discussions it was with Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb for a time beyond the reach of any ordinary apology[3] and a much clearer, if perhaps not materially different, conception of the underlying forces of government than those set forth in this book.
I saw then what hitherto I had merely felt—that there was in the affairs of mankind something unorganised which is greater than any organisation. This unorganised power is the ultimate sovereign in the world. It is a thing closely interwoven with the sum of educational forces. It is a thing of the intellectual life and it is also a thing of the will. It is something transcending persons just as physical or biological science or mathematics transcends persons. It is a racial purpose to which our reason in the measure of its strength, submits us. It is what was intended when people used to talk about an Age of Reason, it was vaguely apprehended when the Victorians spoke of Public Opinion. Since writing "Anticipations" I have got into the habit of using for it the not very elegant phrase, the Collective Mind. I hope some one will soon find a better expression. This Collective Mind is essentially an extension of the spirit of science to all human affairs, its method is to seek and speak and serve the truth and to subordinate oneself to one's conception of a general purpose. Its immediate social and political effect is an insistent demand for perfect freedom of thought and discussion. Social and political order it values only as a means of freedom. But in these earlier books and until I had come into contact with those dreams of official controls, "governing classes" and the like, in action, it is manifest how little I apprehended the danger of interference and paralysis which through the self-sufficiency of governing and managing persons any attempt to organise this collective mind involves. That chiefly is what I should alter if I were to rewrite "Anticipations" now. I should point out that the New Republic is not a type and a class of persons but a power in men's minds and in mankind. And that the worst enemies the Collective Mind can have, are a swarm of busy little bureaucrats professing to direct or protect it, gaining a kind of stifling control of it and working in its name. Order is a convenience, but Anarchism is the aim and outcome of that convenience. For the material securities of life indeed we want police and roads and maps and market rules, "efficiency" and government, but for the supreme things we have to abandon the methods of self-preservation and get out of cliques, Academies, securities and all associations. It is not by canvassing and committees, by tricks and violence, but by the sheer power of naked reasonableness, by propaganda and open intention, by feats and devotions of the intelligence, that the great state of the future, the world-state, will come into being.