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The other motto, "All things change," epitomizes the Wells-Clisspldian feeling about the world. Physics, most exact of sciences, has made an endless staircase of inorganic matter, proceeding from what used to be called the "concrete" to what seems more and more the discrete. Dean Inge, personifying the modernized church, is "elaborately uninforming about the Virgin Birth and courageously outspoken on birth control." In him, science and religion meet. (Catholicism is told off with an intimate example of its ingenious priestly accommodation. Of the Orthodox church "there is little left . . . save as a method of partisanship in the Balkans.")
All things change, flowing. The Chinese "superior person" is an evolution identical with the Christian saint, the German "overman," the Shavian "superman"—Science interpreting all these as its own ideal of the disinterestedly intelligent individual, humbled before and exalted by the orderly universe of which he is a part. Humanity is not yet awake to these evolutions; and it has not yet seen with Wells-Clissoldian eyes that the flux is not also in reflux; that history does not repeat itself; that there are no mystical cycles, but always progress, increasingly swift, cumulative and complex. Mankind is approaching Utopia, which must, in turn, become a super-Utopia.
Fluctionists naturally distrust systems. Even Science is suspect to Mr. Wells-Clissold. Its technique is ever more admirable, but how many of its most stunning advances have been accidentally stumbled into? Lazy Newton and the apple; Watt dozing by a kettle!
Karl Marx suffers the brunt of the economic onslaught, being reduced to a bearded pomposity. William Clissold is completely forgotten while Mr. Wells calls Communism "the sabotage of civilization by the disappointed," and other names. The industrio-political world of Capitalism is likewise assailed, more dreamily. Its populace is seen in microcosm from the window in Provence: Frenchmen sniping the swart Riffi, ladies in cosmetics fussing over dinner on the Riviera, peasants rooting up their olive trees to plant jasmine for the perfume factories.
And so on, through pages and pages of vital, anxious discussion.
The Significance. Mr. Wells has before this enraged the scientist and excited the layman. This time he bids fair to dismay more laymen than he excites. He has taken two fat volumes to precipitate what he conceives to be the doxy of an intelligent resident of the 20th Century, but, the prefatory note notwithstanding, this doxy seems more than ever Mr. Wells' own, only not so artistically expressed as usual. For practical purposes, the book would make a handy reference volume on Author Wells, if indexed. From a philosophical point of view, Mr. Wells appears once more in his familiar role of a gentle little man gesturing wildly on the edge of a cliff over which he lacks either wit or courage to leap alone.