God and Mr. Wells Part 1

G.o.d and Mr. Wells.

by William Archer.

FOREWORD

As I look through the proofs of this little treatise, a twinge of compunction comes upon me. That humane philosopher Mr. Dooley has somewhere a saying to this effect: "When an astronomer tells me that he has discovered a new planet, I would be the last man to brush the fly off the end of his telescope." Would not this have been a good occasion for a similar exercise of urbanity? Nay, may it not be said that my criticism of _G.o.d the Invisible King_ is a breach of discipline, like duelling in the face of the enemy? I am proud to think that Mr. Wells and I are soldiers in the same army; ought we not at all costs to maintain a united front? On the destructive side (which I have barely touched upon) his book is brilliantly effective; on the constructive side, if unconvincing, it is thoughtful, imaginative, stimulating, a thing on the whole to be grateful for.

Ought one not rather to hold one's peace than to afford the common enemy the encouragement of witnessing a squabble in the ranks?

But we must not yield to the obsession of military metaphor. It is not what the enemy thinks or what Mr. Wells or I think that matters--it is what the men of the future ought to think, as being consonant with their own nature and with the nature of things. Ideas, like organisms, must abide the struggle for existence, and if the Invisible King is fitted to survive, my criticism will reinforce and not invalidate him.

Even if he should come to life in a way one can scarcely antic.i.p.ate, his proceedings will have to be carefully watched. He cannot claim the reticences of a "party truce." He will be all the better for a candid, though I hope not captious, Opposition.

I thought of printing on my t.i.tle-page a motto from Mr. Bernard Shaw; but it will perhaps come better here. "The fact," says Mr. Shaw, "that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life. Whether Socrates got as much happiness out of life as Wesley is an unanswerable question; but a nation of Socrateses would be much safer and happier than a nation of Wesleys; and its individuals would be higher in the evolutionary scale. At all events, it is in the Socratic man and not in the Wesleyan that our hope lies now."

Besides, it has yet to be proved that the believer in the Invisible King is happier than the sceptic.

LONDON, _May_ 24, 1917.

G.o.d AND MR. WELLS

I

THE GREAT ADVENTURER

When it was known that Mr. H. G. Wells had set forth to discover G.o.d, all amateurs of intellectual adventure were filled with pleasurable excitement and antic.i.p.ation. For is not Mr. Wells the great Adventurer of latter-day literature? No quest is too perilous for him, no forlorn-hope too daring. He led the first explorers to the moon. He it was who lured the Martians to earth and exterminated them with microbes. He has ensnared an angel from the skies and expiscated a mermaid from the deep. He has mounted a Time Machine (of his own invention) and gone careering down the vistas of the Future. But these were comparatively commonplace feats. After all, there had been a Jules Verne, there had been a Gulliver and a Peter Wilkins, there had been a More, a Morris and a Bellamy. It might be that he was fitted for far greater things. "There remains," we said to ourselves, "the blue ribbon of intellectual adventure, the unachieved North Pole of spiritual exploration. He has had countless predecessors in the enterprise, some of whom have loudly claimed success; but their log-books have been full of mere hallucinations and nursery tales.

What if it should be reserved for Mr. Wells to bring back the first authentic news from a source more baffling than that of Nile or Amazon--the source of the majestic stream of Being? What if it should be given him to sign his name to the first truly-projected chart of the scheme of things?"

We almost held our breath in eager antic.i.p.ation, just as we did when there came from America a well-authenticated rumor that the problem of flying had at last been solved. Were we on the brink of another and much more momentous discovery? Was Mr. Wells to be the Peary of the great quest? Or only the last of a thousand Dr. Cooks?

II

A G.o.d WHO "GROWED"

Our excitement, our suspense, were so much wasted emotion. Mr. Wells's enterprise was not at all what we had figured it to be.

G.o.d THE INVISIBLE KING

is a very interesting, and even stimulating disquisition, full of a fine social enthusiasm, and marked, in many pa.s.sages, by deep poetic feeling. But it is not a work of investigation into the springs of Being. Mr. Wells explicitly renounces from the outset any dealings with "cosmogony." It is a description of a way of thinking, a system of nomenclature, which Mr. Wells declares to be extremely prevalent in "the modern mind," from which he himself extracts much comfort and fortification, and which he believes to be destined to regenerate the world.

But Mr. Wells will not have it that what is involved is a mere system of nomenclature. He avers that he, in common with many other like-minded persons, has achieved, not so much an intellectual discovery as an emotional realisation, of something actual and objective which he calls G.o.d. He does not, so far as I remember, use the term "objective"; but as he insists that G.o.d is "a spirit, a person, a strongly marked and knowable personality" (p. 5), "a single spirit and a single person" (p. 18), "a great brother and leader of our little beings" (p. 24) with much more to the same purpose, it would seem that he must have in his mind an object external to us, no mere subjective "stream of tendency," or anything of that sort. It would of course be foolish to doubt the sincerity of the conviction which he so constantly and so eagerly a.s.serts. Nevertheless, one cannot but put forward, even at this stage, the tentative theory that he is playing tricks with his own mind, and attributing reality and personality to something that was in its origin a figure of speech. He has been hypnotized by the word G.o.d:

As when we dwell upon a word we know, Repeating, till the word we know so well Becomes a wonder, and we know not why.

At all events, "G.o.d the Invisible King" is not the creator and sustainer of the universe. As to the origin of things Mr. Wells professes the most profound agnosticism. "At the back of all known things," he says, "there is an impenetrable curtain; the ultimate of existence is a Veiled Being, which seems to know nothing of life or death or good or ill.... The new religion does not pretend that the G.o.d of its life is that Being, or that he has any relation of control or a.s.sociation with that Being. It does not even a.s.sert that G.o.d knows all, or much more than we do, about that ultimate Being" (p. 14). Very good; but--here is the first question which seems to arise out of the Wellsian thesis--are we not ent.i.tled to ask of "the new religion" some more definite account of the relation between "G.o.d" and "the Veiled Being"? Surely it is not enough that it should simply refrain from "a.s.serting" anything at all on the subject. If "G.o.d" is outside ourselves ("a Being, not us but dealing with us and through us," p. 6) we cannot leave him hanging in the void, like the rope which the Indian conjurer is fabled to throw up into the air till it hooks itself on to nothingness. If we are to believe in him as a lever for the righting of a world that has somehow run askew, we want to know something of his fulcrum. Is it possible thus to dissociate him from the Veiled Being, and proclaim him an independent, an agnostic G.o.d? Do we really get over any difficulty--do we not rather create new difficulties,--by saying, as Mr. Wells practically does, "Our G.o.d is no metaphysician. He does not care, and very likely does not know, how this tangle of existence came into being. He is only concerned to disentangle it a little, to reduce the chaos of the world to some sort of seemliness and order"? Is it an idle and presumptuous curiosity which enquires whether we are to consider him co-ordinate with the Veiled Being, and in that case probably hostile, or subordinate, and in that case instrumental? Are we, in a word, to consider the earth a little rebel state in the gigantic empire of the universe, working out its own salvation under its Invisible King? Or are we to regard G.o.d as the Viceroy of the Veiled Being, to whom, in that case, our ultimate allegiance is due?

I talked the other day to a young Australian who had been breaking new land for wheat-growing. "What do you do?" I asked, "with the stumps of the trees you fell? It must be a great labour to clear them out." "We don't clear them out," he replied. "We use ploughs that automatically rise when they come to a stump, and take the earth again on the other side." I cannot but conjecture that Mr. Wells's thinking apparatus is fitted with some such automatic appliance for soaring gaily over the snags that stud the ploughlands of theology.

III

NEW MYTHS FOR OLD

Before examining the particular attributes and activities of the Invisible King, let us look a little more closely into the question whether a G.o.d detached alike from man below and (so to speak) from heaven above, is a thinkable G.o.d in whom any satisfaction can be found. Mr. Wells must not reply (he probably would not think of doing so) that "satisfaction" is no test: that he a.s.serts an objective truth which exists, like the Nelson Column or the Atlantic Ocean, whether we find satisfaction in it or not. Though he does not mention the word "pragmatism," his standards are purely pragmatist. He offers no jot or t.i.ttle of evidence for the existence of the Invisible King, except that it is a hypothesis which he finds to work extremely well.

Satisfaction and nothing else is the test he applies. So we have every right to ask whether the renunciation of all concern about the Veiled Being, and concentration upon the thought of a finite G.o.d, practically unrelated to the infinite, can bring us any reasonable sense of reconciliation to the nature of things. For that, I take it, is the essence of religion.

It was in no spirit of irony that I began this essay by expressing the lively interest with which I learned that Mr. Wells was setting out on the quest for G.o.d. The dogmatic agnosticism which declares it impossible ever to know anything about the whence, how and why of the universe does not seem to me more rational than any other dogma which jumps from "not yet" to "never." Mr. Wells himself disclaims that dogma. He says: "It may be that minds will presently appear among us of such a quality that the face of that Unknown will not be altogether hidden" (p. 108). And in another place (p. 15) he suggests that "our G.o.d, the Captain of Mankind," may one day enable us to "pierce the black wrappings," or, in other words, to get behind the veil. There is nothing, then, unreasonable or absurd in man's incurable inquisitiveness as to G.o.d, in the non-Wellsian sense of the term. G.o.d simply means the key to the mystery of existence; and though the keys. .h.i.therto offered have all either jammed or turned round and round without unlocking anything, it does not follow that no real key exists within the reach of human investigation or speculation. Therefore one naturally feels a little stirring of hope at the news that a fresh and keen intellect, untrammelled by the folk-lore theologies of the past, is applying itself to the problem. It is always possible, however improbable, that we may be helped a little forwarder on the path towards realization. One comes back to the before-mentioned a.n.a.logy of flying. We had been a.s.sured over and over again, on the highest authority, that it was an idle dream. When we wanted to express the superlative degree of the impossible, we said "I can no more do it than I can fly." But the irrepressible spirit of man was not to be daunted by _a priori_ demonstrations of impossibility. One day there came the rumour that the thing had been achieved, followed soon by ocular demonstration; and now we rub shoulders every day with men who have outsoared the eagle, and--alas!--carried death and destruction into the hitherto stainless empyrean.

It would seem, then, that there is no reason absolutely to despair of some advance towards a conception of the nature and reason of the universe. And it is certain that Mr. Wells's G.o.d would stand a better chance of satisfying the innate needs of the human intelligence if he had not (apparently) given up as a bad job the attempt to relate himself to the causal plexus of the All. Is he outside that causal plexus, self-begotten, self-existent? Then he is the miracle of miracles, a second mystery superimposed on the first. If, on the other hand, he falls within the system, he might surely manage to convey to his disciples some glimmering notion of his place in it. The birth-stories of G.o.ds are always grotesque and unedifying, but that is because they belong to folk-lore. If this G.o.d does not belong to folk-lore, surely his relation to the Veiled Being might be indicated without impropriety. Mr. Wells, as we have seen, hints that his reticence may be due to the fact that he does not know. In that case this "modern" G.o.d is suspiciously like all the ancient G.o.ds, whose most unfortunate characteristic was that they never knew anything more than their worshippers. The reason was not far to seek--namely, that they were mere projections of the minds of these worshippers, fashioned in their own image. But Mr. Wells a.s.sures us that this is not the case of the Invisible King.

Mr. Wells will scarcely deny that if it were possible to compress his mythology and merge his Invisible King in his Veiled Being, the result would be a great simplification of the problem. But this is not, in fact, possible; for it would mean the positing of an all-good and all-powerful Creator, which is precisely the idea which Mr. Wells rebels against,[1] in common with every one who realizes the facts of life and the meaning of words. Short of this, however, is no other simplification possible? Would it not greatly clarify our thought if we could bring the Invisible King into action, not, indeed, as the creator of all things, but as the organizer and director of the surprising and almost incredible epiphenomenon which we call life? Our scheme would then take this shape: an inconceivable unity behind the veil, somehow manifesting itself, where it comes within our ken, in the dual form of a great Artificer and a ma.s.s of terribly recalcitrant matter--the only medium in which he can work. In other words, the Veiled Being would be as inscrutable as ever, but the Invisible King, instead of dropping in with a certain air of futility, like a doctor arriving too late at the scene of a railway accident, would be placed at the beginning, not of the universe at large, but of the atomic re-arrangements from which consciousness has sprung. Can we, on this hypothesis (which is practically that of Manichaeanism) hazard any guess at the motives or forces actuating the Invisible King,--or, to avoid confusion, let us say the Artificer--which should acquit him of the charge of being a callous and mischievous demon rather than a well-willing G.o.d? Can we not only place pain and evil (a tautology) to the account of sluggish, refractory matter, but also conjecture a sufficient reason why the Artificer should have started the painful evolution of consciousness, instead of leaving the atoms to whirl insentiently in the figures imposed on them by the stupendous mathematician behind the veil?

[1] In _Mr. Britling Sees It Through_, which is in some sense a prologue to _G.o.d the Invisible King_, we find an emphatic renunciation of the all-good and all-powerful G.o.d. "The theologians," says Mr. Britling, "have been extravagant about G.o.d. They have had silly, absolute ideas--that he is all powerful. That he's omni-everything.... Why! if I thought there was an omnipotent G.o.d who looked down on battles and deaths and all the waste and horror of this war--able to prevent these things--doing them to amuse himself--I would spit in his empty face" (p. 406).

A complete answer to this question would be a complete solution of the riddle of existence. That, if it be ever attainable, is certainly far enough off. But there are some considerations, not always sufficiently present to our minds, which may perhaps help us, not to a solution, but to a rational restatement, of the riddle.

It is possible to suppose, in the first place, that the Artificer, though entirely well-meaning, was not a free agent. We can construct a myth in which an Elder Power should announce to a Younger Power his intention of setting a number of sentient puppets dancing for his amus.e.m.e.nt, and regaling himself with the spectacle of their antics, in utter heedlessness of the agonies they must endure, which would, indeed, lend an additional savor to the diversion. This Elder Power, with the "sportsman's" preference for pigeons as against clay b.a.l.l.s, would be something like the G.o.d of Mr. Thomas Hardy. Then we can imagine the Younger Power, after a vain protest demanding, as it were, the vice-royalty of the new kingdom, in order that he might shape its polity to high and n.o.ble ends, educe from tragic imperfection some approach to perfection, and, in short, make the best of a bad business. We should thus have (let us say) Marcus Aurelius claiming a proconsulate under Nero, and, with very limited powers, gradually subst.i.tuting order and humanity for oppression and rapine. This fairy-tale is not unlike Mr. Wells's; but I submit that it has the advantage of placing the Invisible King, or his equivalent, in a conceivable relation to the whole mundane process.

Now let us proceed to the alternative hypothesis. Let us suppose that the Artificer was a free agent, and that he voluntarily, and in full view of the consequences, engineered the conjunction of atoms from which consciousness arose. He could have let it alone, he could have suffered life to remain an abortive, slumbering potentiality, like the fire in a piece of flint; yet he deliberately clashed the flint and steel and kindled the torch which was to be handed on, not only from generation to generation, but from species to species, through all the stages of a toilsome, slaughterous, immeasurable ascent. If we accept this hypothesis, can we acquit the Artificer of wanton cruelty? Can we view his action with approval, even with grat.i.tude? Or must we, like Mr. Wells, if we wish to find an outlet for religious emotion, postulate another, subsequent, intermeddling Power--like, say, an American consul at the scene of the Turkish ma.s.sacre--wholly guiltless of the disaster of life, and doing his little best to mitigate and remedy it?

In the present state of our knowledge, it is certainly very difficult to see how the kindler of the _vitai lampada_, supposing him to have been responsible for his actions, can claim from a jury of human beings a verdict of absolute acquittal. But we can, even now, see certain extenuating circ.u.mstances, which evidence not yet available may one day so powerfully reinforce as to enable him to leave the Court without a stain on his character.

For one thing, we are too much impressed and oppressed by the ideas of magnitude and mult.i.tude. Since we have realized the unspeakable insignificance of the earth in relation to the unimaginable vastness of star-sown s.p.a.ce, we have come to feel such a disproportion between the mechanism of life and its upshot, as known in our own experience, that we have a vague sense of maleficence, or at any rate of brutal carelessness, in the responsible Power, whoever that may be. "What is it all," we say, "but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns?" We feel like insects whom the foot of a heedless giant may at any moment crush. We dream of the swish of a comet's tail wiping out organic life on the planet, and we see, as a matter of fact, great natural convulsions, such as the earthquake of Lisbon or the eruption of Mont Pelee, treating human communities just as an elephant might treat an ant-hill. It is this sense of the immeasurable disproportion in things that a pessimist poet has expressed in the well-known sonnet:--

Know you, my friend, the sudden ecstasy Of thought that time and s.p.a.ce annihilates, Creation in a moment uncreates, And whirls the mind, from secular habit free, Beyond the spheres, beyond infinity, Beyond the empery of the eternal Fates, To where the Inconceivable ruminates, The unthinkable "To be or not to be?"

Then, as Existence flickers into sight, A marsh-flame in the night of Nothingness-- The great, soft, restful, dreamless, fathomless night-- We know the Affirmative the primal curse, And loathe, with all its imbecile strain and stress, This ostentatious, vulgar Universe.

The mood here recorded is one that must be familiar to most thinking people. "The undevout astronomer is mad," said eighteenth-century deism: to-day we are more apt to think that the uncritical astronomer is dense. There is a sort of colossal stupidity about the stars in their courses that overpowers and disquiets us. If (as Alfred Russel Wallace has argued) the geocentric theory was not so far out after all, and the earth, holding a specially favored place in the universe, is the only home of life, then the disproportion of mechanism to result seems absolutely appalling. If, on the other hand, all the million million of suns are pouring out vital heat to a like number of inhabited planetary systems, the sheer quant.i.ty of life, of struggle, of suffering implied, seems a thought at which to shudder.

We are inclined to say to the inventor of sentience: "Since this ingenious combination of yours was at best such a questionable boon, surely you might have been content with one experiment."

But all such criticism rests upon a fallacy, or rather a brace of interrelated fallacies. There can be no disproportion between consciousness and the unconscious, because they are absolutely incommensurable; and number, in relation to consciousness, is an illusion. Consciousness, wherever it exists, is single, indivisible, inextensible; and other consciousnesses, and the whole external universe, are, to the individual percipient, but shapes in a more or less protracted dream.

Why should we trouble about vastness--mere extension in s.p.a.ce? There is a sense in which the infinitesimally small is more marvellous, more disquieting, than the infinitely great. The ant, the flea, nay, the phagocyte in our blood, is really a more startling phenomenon than all the mechanics and chemistry of the heavens. In worrying about the bigness and the littleness of things, we are making the human body our standard--the body whose dimensions are no doubt determined by convenience in relation to terrestrial conditions, but have otherwise no sort of sanct.i.ty or superiority, rightness or fitness. It happens to be the object to which is attached the highest form of consciousness we know; but consciousness itself has neither parts nor magnitude. And consciousness itself is essentially greater than the very vastness which appals us, seeing that it embraces and envelops it. Enormous depths of s.p.a.ce are pictured in my brain, through my optic nerve; and what eludes the magic mirror of my retina, my mind can conceive, apprehend, make its own. It is not even true to say that the mind cannot conceive infinity--the real truth (if I may for once be Chestertonian), the real truth is that it can conceive nothing else. "When Berkeley said there was no matter"--it mattered greatly what he said. Nothing can be more certain than that, apart from percipience, there is no matter that matters. From the point of view of pantheism (the only logical theism) G.o.d, far from being a Veiled Being, or an Invisible King, is precisely the mind which translates itself into the visible, sensible universe, and impresses itself, in the form of a never-ending pageant, upon our cognate minds. It has been thought that human consciousness may have come into being because G.o.d wanted an audience. He was tired of being a cinematograph-film unreeling before empty benches. Some people have even carried the speculation further, and wondered whether the attachment of percipience to organized matter, as in the case of human beings, may not be a necessary stage in the culture of a pure percipience, capable of furnishing the pageant of the universe with a permanent and appreciative audience. In that case the Scottish Catechism would be justified, which asks "What is the chief end of man?" and answers (as Stevenson says) n.o.bly if obscurely: "To glorify G.o.d and to enjoy Him forever." But enough of these idle fantasies. What is certain is that we can hold up our heads serenely among the immensities, knowing that we are immenser than they. Even if they were malevolent--and that they do not seem to be--they are no more terrible than the familiar dangers of our homely earth. They cannot hurt us more than we can be hurt--an obvious truism but one which is often overlooked. And this brings us to the consideration of the second fallacy which sometimes warps our judgment as to the responsibility of the Power which invented life.

We are all apt to speak and think as though sentience were an article capable of acc.u.mulation, like money or merchandise, in enormous aggregates--as though pleasure, and more particularly pain, were subject to the ordinary rules of arithmetic, so that minor quant.i.ties, added together, might mount up to an indefinitely gigantic total.

Poets and philosophers, time out of mind, have been heartbroken over the enormous ma.s.s of evil in the world, and have spoken as though animated nature were one great organism, with a brain in which every pang that afflicted each one of its innumerable members was piled up into a huge, pyramidal agony. But this is obviously not so. That very "individuation" which to some philosophies is the primal curse--the condition by all means to be annulled and shaken off[2]--forbids the adding up of units of sentience. If "individuation" is the source of human misery (which seems a rather meaningless proposition) it is beyond all doubt its boundary and limit. We are each of us his own universe. With each of us the universe is born afresh; with each of us it dies--a.s.suming, that is to say, that consciousness is extinguished at death. There never has been and never can be in the world more suffering than a single organism can sustain--which is another way of saying that nothing can hurt us more than we can be hurt. Is this an optimistic statement? Far from it. The individual is capable of great extremities of suffering; and though not all men, or even most, are put to the utmost test in this respect, there are certainly cases not a few in which a man may well curse the day he was born, and see in the universe that was born with him nothing but an instrument of torture. But such an one must speak for himself. It is evident that, take them all round, men accept life as no such evil gift. It cannot even be said that, in handing it on to others, they are driven by a fatal instinct which they know in their hearts to be cruel, and would resist if they could. The vast majority have been, and still are, entirely light-hearted about the matter, thus giving the best possible proof that they cherish no grudge against the source of being, but find it, on the balance, acceptable enough. If it be said that this is due to stupidity, then stupidity is one of the factors in the case which the great Artificer must be supposed to have foreseen and reckoned upon. All these considerations must be taken into account when we try to sum up the responsibility of an organizer and director of life, acting of his own free will, although he knew that the conditions under which he had to work would make the achievement of any satisfactory result a slow, laborious and painful business.

[2] Mr. Wells himself is not far from this view. See _G.o.d the Invisible King_, pp. 73, 76, and this book, pp. 39-40.