Mr. Wells, however, is not quite clear enough of the narrower scientific outlook to see that there are some things which actually ought not to be scientific. He is still slightly affected with the great scientific fallacy; I mean the habit of beginning not with the human soul, which is the first thing a man learns about, but with some such thing as protoplasm, which is about the last. The one defect in his splendid mental equipment is that he does not sufficiently allow for the stuff or material of men. In his new Utopia he says, for instance, that a chief point of the Utopia will be a disbelief in original sin. If he had begun with the human soul - that is, if he had begun on himself - he would have found original sin almost the first thing to be believed in. He would have found, to put the matter shortly, that a permanent possibility of selfishness arises from the mere fact of having a self, and not from any accidents of education or ill-treatment.
'But you and all the kind of Christ
Are ignorant and brave,
And you have wars you hardly win
And souls you hardly save.'
The ballad of the white horse
Sunday, March 13, 2011
H.G. Wells & science
Two days after my post about science and religion, I read the following paragraph in 'Heretics', chapter 5:
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