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World Brain

by

H.G. Wells

First UK edition: Methuen & Co., London, 1938

First US edition: Doubleday, Doran & Co., Garden City, NY, 1938

World Brain is a collection of essays and addresses by [...] H.G. Wells, dating from the period of 1936-38. Throughout the book, Wells describes his vision of the world brain: a new, free, synthetic, authoritative, permanent World Encyclopaedia that could help world citizens make the best use of universal information resources and make the best contribution to world peace. —Wikipedia

The text used to prepare this e-book edition of World Brain contained many OCR errors, most of which were amenable to correction. In cases of doubt the restored text has been enclosed in square brackets. R.G.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE papers and addresses I have collected in this little book are submitted as contributions, however informal, to what is essentially a scientific research. But it is a research in a field to which scientific standing is not generally accorded and where peculiar methods have to be employed. It is in the field of constructive sociology, the science of social organisation. This is a special sub-section of human ecology, which is a branch of general ecology, which again is a stem in the great and growing cluster of biological sciences. It stands with palaeontology at the opposite pole to experimental biology; hardly any verificatory experiment is possible and no controls. It is a science of pure observation, therefore, of analysis and of search for confirmatory instances. On the one hand it passes, without crossing any definite boundaries, into historical science proper, into the analysis of historical fact, that is, and on the other into the examination of such matters as geographical (and geological) conditions and the social consequences of industrial processes.

Human ecology surveys the species Homo sapiens as a whole in space and time; sociology is that part of the survey which concerns itself with the interaction and interdependence of human groups and individuals. It is hardly to be distinguished from social psychology. There has been an enormous increase in the intensity and scope of human interaction and interdependence during the past half-million years or more. Communities and what one may call ranges of reaction, have enlarged and continue to enlarge more and more rapidly towards a planetary limit. The human intelligence is involved in this enlargement and it is too deeply concerned with its role in the process, to observe it with the detachment it can maintain towards the facts, for example, of astronomy or crystallography. Constructive sociology has to bring not only the study of conduct but an irresistible element of purpose into its problems. Human beings are not simply born or thrown together into association like a swarm of herrings. They keep together with a sense of collective activities and common ends, even if these ends are little more than mutual aid, protection and defence.

Throughout the whole range of ecology we study the adaptation of living species to changing environments, but outside the human experience these adaptations are generally made unconsciously by the natural selection of mutations and variations. These adaptations are inherited. They are either successful and the species is modified and survives, or it perishes. In the cerebral animals, however, natural selection is supplemented by very considerable individual adaptability. Memories and habits are established in each generation which fit individuals to the special circumstances of their own generation. They are adaptations which perish with the individual. Such creatures learn; they are educable creatures; dogs, cats, seals, elephants for example learn and the next generation has, if necessary, to learn the old lesson all over again or a different lesson. In the human being there is an unprecedented extension of educability; not only is learning developed to relatively immense proportions, but it is further supplemented by curiosity, precept and tradition. In such a slow-breeding creature as man educational adaptation is, beyond all comparison, a swifter process than genetic adaptation. His social life, his habits, have changed completely, have even undergone reversion and reversal, while his heredity seems to have changed very little if at all, since the late Stone Age. Possibly he is more educable now and with a more prolonged physical and mental adolescence.

The human individual is born now to live in a society for which his fundamental instincts are altogether inadequate. He has to be educated systematically for his social role. The social man is a manufactured product of which the natural man is the raw nucleus. In a world of fluctuating and generally expanding communities and ranges of reaction, the science of constructive sociology seeks to detect and give definition to the trends and requirements of man's social circumstances and to study the possibilities and methods of adapting the natural man to them. It is the science of current adaptations. It has therefore two reciprocal aspects; on the one hand it has to deal with social organisations, laws, customs and regulations, which may either be actually operative or merely projected and potential, and on the other hand it has to examine the education these real or proposed social organisations require. These two aspects are inseparable, they need to fit like hand and glove. Plans and theories of social structure and plans and theories of education are the outer and inner aspects of the same thing. Each necessitates the other. Every social order must have its own distinctive process of education.

In the past this imperative association of education and social structure was not recognised so clearly as it is at the present time. Communities would grow up and not change their mental clothes until they burst out of them. Ideas would change and disorganise institutions. For the past twenty-six centuries, and particularly, and much more definitely, during the last three, there has been a very great expenditure of mental energy upon the statement in various terms and metaphors, as theologies, as religions, socialisms, communisms, devotions, loyalties, codes of behaviour and so on, of the desirable and necessary form of human adaptation to new conditions of association. From the point of view of constructive sociology, or to coin a hideous phrase, human adaptology, all these efforts, although not deliberately made as experiments, are so much experience and working material, and though almost all of them have involved special teachings (doctrines) the need for a close interlocking of training and teaching with the social order sought, though always fairly obvious, has never been so fully realised as it is today. The new doctrines were often only subconsciously linked to the new needs. The idea, for instance, of a universal God replacing local gods ensued upon the growth of great empires, but it was not explicitly related to the growth of great empires. The connection was not plainly apparent to men's minds. In the looser, easier past of our species, there has never been such a close interweaving of current usage and practices with instruction and precept as we are now beginning to feel desirable. The reference of one to the other was not direct. Now education becomes more and more definitely political and economic. It must penetrate deeper and deeper into life as life ceases to be customary and grows more and more deliberately planned and adjusted. The need for lively and continuous invention in constructive sociology and for an animated and animating progressive education correlated with these innovations, has hardly more than dawned on the world. The urgency of adaptation has still to be grasped.

Throughout the nineteenth century certain systems of adaptive ideas spread throughout the world to meet the requirements of what was recognised with increasing understanding as a new age. Mechanism was altering both the fundamental need for toil and the essential nature of war. The practical and cynically accepted need for labouring classes and subject-peoples, was dissolving quietly out of human thought—though it still exists in the minds of those who employ personal servants. Means of intercommunication and mutual help and injury have developed amazingly. A mechanical unification of the world has been demanding (and still demands) profound moral and ideological readjustments. It is, for example, being realised, slowly but steadily, that the fragmentary control of production and trade through irresponsible individual ownership gives quite lamentably inadequate results, that the whole property-money system needs revision very urgently, and that the belated recrudescence of sentimental nationalism largely through misguided school-teaching and newspaper propaganda, is becoming an increasing menace to world welfare. The old ideological equipments throughout the world are misfits everywhere. Mental and moral adaptation is lagging dreadfully behind the change in our conditions. A great and menacing gulf opens which only an immense expansion of teaching and instruction can fill.

In the field of sociology it is impossible to disentangle social analysis from literature, and the criticism of the social order by Ruskin, William Morris and so forth was at least as much a contribution to social science as Herbert Spencer's quasi-scientific defence of individualism and the abstractions and dogmas of the political economists. The biological sciences did not spread very easily into this undeveloped region. It was a hinterland of novel problems and possibilities. Even today proper methods of study in this field have still to be fully worked out and brought into association. It has had to be explored by moral and religious appeals, by utopias and speculative writings of a quality and texture. very unsatisfying to scientific workers in more definite fields. It is still subject to irruptions of a type that the normal scientist of today finds highly questionable. Poets even and seers have their role in this experimentation. But economics and sociology can only be made hard sciences by eliminating much of their living content. Knowledge has to be attained by any available means. Inquirers cannot be limited to passable imitations of the methods followed in other fields. It may be doubted if constructive sociology and educational science can ever be freed from a certain literary, aesthetic and ethical flavouring. We have to assume certain desiderata before we can get down to effective, applicable work. Yet it does seem possible to state the problem of adaptation in practical scientific terms.

It was not realised at first, and it is still not fully realised, how vague and unsuitable for immediate application the generous propositions of Socialism and World Peace remain, until further intensive and continuous research and elaboration have been undertaken. It is widely assumed that to profess Socialism or Pacifism implies the immediate undertaking of vehement political activities unencumbered by further thought. But the profession of Socialism or World Peace should commit a man to nothing of the sort. Socialism and World Peace are hardly more than sketches of the general frame of adaptation of which our species stands in need. "We are all socialists nowadays," but all the same there is very little really efficient working socialism.

"All men are brothers "—we have echoed that since the days of Buddha and Christ—but Spain and China are poor evidence of that fraternity. We know we want these things quite clearly, but we have still to learn how they are to be got.

Man reflects before he acts, but not very much; he is still by nature intellectually impatient. No sooner does he apprehend, in whole or in part, the need of a new world, than, without further plans or estimates, he gem into a state of passionate aggressiveness and suspicion and sets about trying to change the present order. There and then, he sets about it, with anything that comes handy, violently, disastrously, making the discordances worse instead of better, and quarrelling bitterly with any one who is not in complete accordance with his particular spasmodic conception of the change needful. He is unable to realise that when the time comes I to act, that also is the time to think fast and hard. He will not think enough.

There has been, therefore, an enormous waste of human mental, moral and physical resources in premature revolutionary thrusts, ill-planned, dogmatic, essentially unscientific reconstructions and restorations of the social order, during the past hundred years. This was the inevitable first result of the discrediting of those old and superseded mental adaptations which were embodied in the institutions and education of the past. They discredited themselves and left the world full of problems. The idea of expropriating the owners of land and industrial plant, for instance (Socialism), long preceded any deliberate attempt to create a Competent Receiver. Hysterical objection to further research, to any sustained criticism, has been, and is still characteristic of nearly all the pseudo-constructive movements of our time, culminating in projects for a "seizure of power" by some presumptuous oaf or other. The meanest thing in human natures is the fear of responsibility and the craving for leadership. "Right" dictators there are and "Left" dictators, and in effect there is hardly a pin to choose between them. The important thing about them from our present point of view, is that fear-saturated impatience for guidance, which renders dictatorships possible. First there comes a terrifying realisation of the limitless uncontrolled changes now in progress, then wild stampedes, suspicions, mass murders and finally mus ridiculus the Hero emerges, a poor single, silly, little human cranium held high and adorned usually with something preposterous in the way of hats. "He knows," they cry. "Hail the Leader!" He acts his part; he may even believe in it. And for quite a long time the crowd will refuse to realise that not only is nothing better than it was before, but that change is still marching on and marching at it—as inexorably as though there were no Leaders on the scene at all. Between the extremes of Right and Left hysteria, there remains a great under-developed region in the world of political thought and will, that we may characterise as "do-nothing democracy ". Out of the sudden realisation of its do-nothingness arise these psychological storms which give gangster dictators their opportunities. It is only gradually that people have come to realise that current democratic institutions are a very poor, slow and slack method of conducting human affairs which need an exhaustive revision, and that when one has declared oneself Anti-Fascist, Anti-Communist or both, one has still said precisely nothing about the government of the world. One is brought back to the unsolved problem of the Competent Receiver. It exercised Plato. It has been intermittently revived and neglected ever since.

It is an intricate and difficult problem. To that I can testify because for more than half my life it has been my main preoccupation. The attack on this problem is, to begin with, a task to be done in the study and in the unhurried and irresponsible spirit of pure inquiry. As the attack gathers confidence a taint of propaganda may easily infect it, but the less that constructive sociology is propagandist, the higher will be its scientific standing and the greater its ultimate usefulness to mankind. The application of the results of its researches is another business altogether, the business of the statesman, organiser and practical administrator. And in spite of the paucity of disinterested explorers in this region of speculation and analysis, and in spite of the lack of effective discussion and interchange in this field (due mainly, I think, to the inadequate recognition of its immense scientific importance which forces its workers so often into a hampering association with politically active bodies) there does seem to be a growing and spreading clarification of the realities of the human situation. It is becoming apparent that the real clue to that reconciliation of freedom and sustained initiative with the more elaborate social organisation which is being demanded from us, lies in raising and unifying, and so implementing and making more effective, the general intelligence services of the world. That at least is the argument in this book. The missing factor in human airs, it is suggested here, is a gigantic and many-sided educational renascence. The highly educated section, the finer minds of the human race are so dispersed, so ineffectively related to the common man, that they are powerless in the face of political and social adventurers of the coarsest sort. We want a reconditioned and more powerful Public Opinion. In a universal organisation and clarification of knowledge and ideas, in a closer synthesis of university and educational activities, in the evocation, that is, of what I have here called a World Brain, operating by an enhanced educational system through the whole body of mankind, a World Brain which will replace our multitude of unco-ordinated ganglia, our powerless miscellany of universities, research institutions, literatures with a purpose, national educational systems and the like; in that and in that alone, it is maintained, is there any clear hope of a really Competent Receiver for world affairs, any hope of an adequate directive control of the present destructive drift of world affairs. We do not want dictators, we do not want oligarchic parties or class rule, we want a widespread world intelligence conscious of itself To work out a way to that World Brain organisation is therefore our primary need in this age of imperative construction.

It is an immense undertaking but not an impossible undertaking. I do not think there is any insurmountable obstacle in the way to the production of such a ruling World Brain. There are favourable conditions for it, encouraging precedents and a plainly evident need. The various lectures, addresses and papers, collected here, few, thin and sketchy though they may seem, are all in their scope and measure contributions to this urgent research.

H.G. Wells

I. — WORLD ENCYCLOPAEDIA

Lecture delivered at the weekly evening meeting of the

Royal Institution of Great Britain, November 20th, 1936

MOST of the lectures that are given in this place to this audience are delivered by men of very special knowledge. They come here to tell you something you did not know before. But tonight I doubt if I shall tell you anything that is not already quite familiar to you. I am here not to impart facts but to make certain suggestions. And there is no other audience in the world to which I would make these suggestions more willingly and more hopefully than I do to you.

My particular line of country has always been generalisation and synthesis. I dislike isolated events and disconnected details. I really hate statements, views, prejudices and beliefs that jump at you suddenly out of mid-air. I like my world as coherent and consistent as possible. So far at any rate my temperament is that of a scientific man. And that is why I have spent a few score thousand hours of my particular allotment of vitality in making outlines of history, short histories of the world, general accounts of the science of life, attempts to bring economic, financial and social life into one conspectus and even, still more desperate, struggles to estimate the possible consequences of this or that set of operating causes upon the future of mankind. All these attempts had profound and conspicuous faults and weaknesses; even my friends are apt to mention them with an apologetic smile; presumptuous and preposterous they were, I admit, but I look back upon them, completely unabashed. Somebody had to break the ice. Somebody had to try out such summaries on the general mind. My reply to the superior critic has always been—forgive me—"Damn you, do it better".

The least satisfactory thing about these experiments of mine, so far as I am concerned, is that they did not at once provoke the learned and competent to produce superior substitutes. And in view of the number of able and distinguished people we have in the world professing and teaching economic, sociological, financial science, and the admittedly unsatisfactory nature of the world's financial, economic and political affairs, it is to me an immensely disconcerting fact that the Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind which was first published in 1932 remains—practically uncriticised, unstudied and largely unread—the only attempt to bring human ecology into one correlated survey.

Well, I mention this experimental work now in order that you should not think I am throwing casually formed ideas before you tonight. I am bringing you my best. The thoughts I am setting out here have troubled my mind for years, and my ideas have been slowly gathering definition throughout these experiments and experiences. They have interwoven more and more intimately with other solicitudes of a more general nature in which I feel fairly certain of meeting your understanding and sympathy.

I doubt if there is anybody here tonight who has not given a certain amount of anxious thought to the conspicuous ineffectiveness of modern knowledge and—how do I call it?—trained and studied thought in contemporary affairs. And I think that it is mainly in the troubled years since 1914 that the world of cultivated, learned and scientific people of which you are so representative, has become conscious of this ineffectiveness. Before that time, or to be more precise before 1909 or 1910, the world, our world as we older ones recall it, was living in a state of confidence, of established values, of assured security, which is already becoming now almost incredible. We had no suspicion then how much that apparent security had been undermined by science, invention and sceptical inquiry. Most of us carried on into the War, and even right through the War, under the inertia of the accepted beliefs to which we had been born. We felt that the sort of history that we were used to was still going on, and we hardly realised at all that the war was a new sort of thing, not like the old wars, that the old traditions of strategy were disastrously out of date, and that the old pattern of settling up after a war could only lead to such a thickening tangle of evil consequences as we contemplate today. We know better now.

Wiser after the events as we all are, few of us now fail to appreciate the stupendous ignorance, the almost total lack of grasp of social and economic realities, the short views, the shallowness of mind, that characterised the treaty-making of 1919 and 1920. I suppose Mr. Maynard Keynes was one of the first to open our eyes to this worldwide intellectual insufficiency. What his book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, practically said to the world was this: These people, these politicians, these statesmen, these directive people who are in authority over us, know scarcely anything about the business they have in hand. Nobody knows very much, but the important thing to realise is that they do not even know what is to he known. They arrange so and so, and so and so must ensue and they cannot or will not see that so and so must ensue. They are so unaccustomed to competent thought, so ignorant that there is knowledge and of what knowledge is, that they do not understand that it matters.

The same terrifying sense of insufficient mental equipment was dawning upon some of us who watched the birth of the League of Nations. Reluctantly and with something like horror, we realised that these people who were, they imagined, turning over a new page and beginning a fresh chapter in human history, knew collectively hardly anything about the formative forces of history. Collectively, I say. Altogether they had a very considerable amount of knowledge, unco-ordinated bits of quite good knowledge, some about this period and some about that, but they had no common understanding whatever of the processes in which they were obliged to mingle and interfere. Possibly all the knowledge and all the directive ideas needed to establish a wise and stable settlement of the world's affairs in 1919 existed in bits and fragments, here and there, but practically nothing had been assembled, practically nothing had been thought out, nothing practically had been done to draw that knowledge and these ideas together into a comprehensive conception of the world. I Put it to you that the Peace Conference at Versailles did not use anything but a very small fraction of the political and economic wisdom that already existed in human brains at that time. And I put it to you as rational creatures that if usage had not chilled our apprehension to this state of affairs, we should regard this as fantastically absurd.

And if I might attempt a sweeping generalisation about the general course of human history in the eighteen years that have followed the War, I believe I should have you with me if I described it as a series of flounderings, violent ill-directed mass-movements, slack here and convulsive action there. We talk about the dignity of history. It is a bookish phrase for which I have the extremest disrespect. There is no dignity yet in human history. It would be pure comedy, if it were not so often tragic, so frequently dismal, generally dishonourable and occasionally quite horrible. And it is so largely tragic because the creature really is intelligent, can feel finely and acutely, expresses itself poignantly in art, music and literature, and—this is what I am driving at—impotently knows better.

Consider only the case of America during this recent period. America when all is said and done, is one of the most intelligently aware communities in the world. Quite a number of people over there seem almost to know what is happening to them. Remember first the phase of fatuous self-sufficiency, the period of unprecedented prosperity, the boom, the crisis, the slump and the dismay. And then appeared the new President, Franklin Roosevelt, and from the point of view of the present discussion he is one of the most interesting figures in all history. Because he really did make an appeal for such knowledge and understanding as existed to come to his aid. America in an astounding state of meekness was ready to be told and shown. There were the universities, great schools, galaxies of authorities, learned men, experts, teachers, gowned, adorned and splendid. Out of this knowledge mass there have since come many very trenchant criticisms of the President's mistakes. But at the time this—what shall I call it—this higher brain, this cerebrum, this grey matter of America was so entirely unco-ordinated that it had nothing really comprehensive, searching, thought-out and trustworthy for him to go upon. The President had to experiment and attempt this and that, he fumed from one promising adviser to another, because there was nothing ready for him. He did not pretend to be a divinity. He was a politician of exceptional good-will. He was none of your dictator gods. He showed himself extremely open and receptive for the organised information and guidance... that wasn't there.

And it isn't there now.

Some years ago there was a considerable fuss in the world about preparedness and unpreparedness. Most of that clamour concerned the possibility of war. But this was a case of a most fantastic unpreparedness on the part of hundreds of eminent men, who were supposed to have studied them, for the normal developments of a community in times of peace. There had been no attempt to assemble that mechanism of knowledge of which America stood in need.

I repeat that if usage had not drilled us into a sort of acquiescence, we should think our species collectively insane to go about its business in this haphazard, planless, negligent fashion.

I think I have said enough to recall to any one here, who may have lapsed from the keen apprehension of his first realisation, this wide gap between what I may call the at present unassembled and unexploited best thought and knowledge in the world, and the ideas and acts not simply of the masses of common people, but of those who direct public affairs, the dictators, the leaders, the politicians, the newspaper directors and the spiritual guides and teachers. We live in a world of unused and misapplied knowledge and skill. That is my ease. Knowledge and thought are ineffective. The human species as a whole is extraordinarily like a man of the best order of brain, who through some lesions or defects or insufficiencies of his lower centres, suffers from the wildest unco-ordinations; St. Vitus's dance, agraphobia, aphonia, and suffers dreadfully (knowing better all the time) from the silly and disastrous gestures he makes and the foolish things he says and does.

I don't think this has ever been so evident as it is now. I doubt if in the past the gap was so wide as it is now between the occasions that confront us, and the knowledge we have assembled to meet them. But because of a certain run of luck in the late nineteenth century, the existence of that widening gap and the menace of that widening gap, was not thrust upon our attention as it has been since the war.

At first that realisation of the ineffectiveness of our best thought and knowledge struck only a few people, like Mr. Maynard Keynes for example, who were in what I may call salient positions, but gradually I have noted the realisation spreading and growing. It takes various forms. Prominent men of science speak more and more frequently of the responsibility of science for the disorder of the world. And if you are familiar with that most admirable of all newspapers, Nature, and if you care to turn over the files of that very representative weekly for the past quarter of a century or so and sample the articles, you will observe a very remarkable change of note and scope in what it has to say to its readers. Time was when Nature was almost pedantically special and scientific. Its detachment from politics and general affairs was complete. But latterly the concussions of the social earthquake and the vibration of the guns have become increasingly perceptible in the laboratories. Nature from being specialist has become world—conscious, so that now it is almost haunted week by week by the question: "What are we to do before it is too late, to make what we know and our way of thinking effective in world affairs?" In that I think it is expressing a change which is happening in the minds of—if I may presume to class myself with you—nearly all people of the sort which fills this theatre tonight.

And consider again the topics that have been dealt with at the latest gathering of the British Association. The very title of the Presidential Address: "The Impact of Science upon Society." Sir Josiah Stamp, as you will remember, stressed the need of extending endowment and multiplying workers in the social sciences. Professor Philip dealt with "The Training of the Chemist for the Service of the Community." Professor Cramp talked of "The Engineer and the Nation," and there was an important discussion of "The Cultural and Social Values of Science" in which Sir Richard Gregory, Professor Hogben and Sir Daniel Hall said some memorable things. There can be no doubt of the reality of this awakening of the scientific worker to the necessity of his becoming a definitely organised factor in the social scheme of the years before us.

Well, so far I have been merely opening up my subject and stating the problem for consideration. We want the intellectual worker to become a more definitely organised factor in the human scheme. How is that factor to be organised? Is there any way of implementing knowledge for ready and universal effect? I ask you to examine the question whether this great and growing gap of which we are becoming so acutely aware, between special knowledge and thought and the common ideas and motives of mankind can be bridged, and if so how it can be bridged. Can scientific knowledge and specialised thought be brought into more effective relation to general affairs?

Q:— Let us consider first what is actually going on. I find among my uneasy scientific and specialist friends a certain disposition—and I think it is a mistaken disposition—for direct political action and special political representation. The scientific and literary workers of the days when I was a young man were either indifferent or conservative in politics, nowadays quite a large proportion of them are inclined to active participation in extremist movements; many are leftish and revolutionary, some accept the strange pseudo-scientific dogmas of the Communist party, though that does no credit to their critical training, and even those who are not out on the left are restless for some way of intervening, definitely as a class, in the general happenings of the community. Their ideas of possible action vary from important-looking signed pronouncements and protests to a sort of strike against war, the withholding of services and the refusal I to assist in technical developments that may be misapplied. Some favour the idea of a gradual supersession of the political forms and methods of mass democracy by government through some sort of elite, in which the man of science and the technician will play a dominating part. There are very large vague patches upon this ¤ idea, but the general projection is in the form of a sort of modern priesthood, an oligarchy of professors and exceptionally competent people. Like Plato they would make the philosopher king. This project involves certain assumptions about the general quality and superiority of the intellectual worker that I am afraid will not stand scrutiny.

I submit that sort of thing—political activities, party intervention and dreams of an authoritative élite—is not the way in which specialists, artists and specialised thinkers and workers who constitute the vital feeling and understanding of the body politic can be brought into a conscious, effective, guiding and directive relationship to the control of human affairs. Because—I hope you will acquit me of any disrespect for science and) philosophy when I say this—we have to face the fact that from the point of view of general living, men of science, artists, philosophers, specialised intelligences of any sort, do not constitute an elite that can be mobilised for collective action. They are an extraordinarily miscellaneous assembly, and their most remarkable common quality is the quality of concentration in comparative retirement, each along his own line. They have none of the solidarity, the customary savoir faire, the habits arising out of practices, activities and interests in common that lawyers, doctors or any of the really socially organised professions for instance display. A professor-ridden world might prove as unsatisfactory under the stress of modern life and fluctuating conditions as a theologian-ridden world. A distinguished specialist is precious because of his cultivated gift. It does not follow at all that by the standards of all-round necessity he is a superior person. Indeed by the very fact of his specialisation he may be less practised and competent than the average man. He probably does not read his newspaper so earnestly, he finds much of the common round a bother and a distraction and he puts it out of his mind. I think we should get the very gist of this problem if we could compare twelve miscellaneous men of science and special skill, with twelve unspecialised men taken—let us say—from the head clerk's morning train to the city. We should probably find that for commonplace team-work and the ordinary demands and sudden urgencies of life, the 2nd dozen was individually quite as good as, if not better than, the first dozen. In a burning hotel or cast away on a desert island they would probably do quite as well. And yet collectively they would be limited men; the whole dozen of them would have nothing much more to tell you than any one of them. On the other hand our dozen specialists would each have something distinctive to tell you. The former group would be almost as uniform in their knowledge and ability as tiles on a roof; the latter would be like pieces from a complicated jig-saw puzzle. The more you got them together the more they would signify. Twelve clerks or a hundred clerks; it wouldn't matter; you would get nothing but dull repetitions and a flat acquiescent suggestible outlook upon life. But every specialised man we added would be adding something to the directive pattern of life. I think that consideration takes us a step further in defining our problem tonight.

It is science and not men of science that we want to enlighten and animate our politics and rule the world. And now I will take rather a stride forward in my argument. I will introduce a phrase New Encyclopaedism which I shall spend most of the rest of my time defining. I want to suggest that something—a new social organ, a new institution—which for a time I shall call World Encyclopaedia, is the means whereby we can solve the problem of that jig-saw puzzle and bring all the scattered and ineffective mental wealth of our world into something like a common understanding, and into effective reaction upon our vulgar everyday political, social and economic life. I warn you that I am flinging moderation to the winds in the suggestions I am about to put before you. They are immense suggestions. I am sketching what is really a scheme for the reorganisation and reorientation of education and information throughout the world. No less. We are so accustomed to the existing schools, colleges, universities, research organisations of the world; they have so moulded and made us and trained us from our earliest years to respect and believe in them; that it is with a real feeling of temerity, of a matricidal impiety, so to speak, that I have allowed my mind to explore their merits and question whether they are not now altogether an extraordinarily loose, weak and out-of-date miscellany. Yet I do not see how we can admit, and I am disposed to think you have admitted with me, the existence of this terrifying gap between available knowledge and current social and political events, and not go on to something like an indictment of this whole great world of academic erudition, training and instruction from China to Peru—an indictment for, at least, inadequacy and unco- ordination if not for actual negligence. It may be only a temporary inadequacy, a pause in development before renascence, but inadequate altogether they are. Universities have multiplied greatly, yes, but they have failed to participate in the general advance in power, scope and efficiency that has occurred in the past century.

In transport we have progressed from coaches and horses by way of trains to electric traction, motor-cars and aeroplanes. In mental organisation we have simply multiplied our coaches and horses and livery stables. Let me now try to picture for you this missing element in the modern human social mechanism, this needed connection between the percipient and informative parts and the power organisation for which I am using this phrase, World Encyclopaedia. And I will take it first from the point of view of the ordinary educated citizen—for in a completely modernised state every ordinary man will be an educated citizen. I will ask you to imagine how this World Encyclopaedia organisation would enter into his life and how it would affect him. From his point of view the World Encyclopaedia would be a row of volumes in his own home or in some neighbouring house or in a convenient public library or in any school or college, and in this row of volumes he would, without any great toil or difficulty, find in clear understandable language, and kept up to date, the ruling concepts of our social order, the outlines and main particulars in all fields of knowledge, an exact and reasonably detailed picture of our universe, a general history of the world, and if by any chance he wanted to pursue a question into its ultimate detail, a trustworthy and complete system of reference to primary sources of knowledge. In fields where wide varieties of method and opinion existed, he would find, not casual summaries of opinions, hut very carefully chosen and correlated statements and arguments. I do not imagine the major subjects as being dealt with in special articles rather hastily written, in what has been the tradition of Encyclopaedias since the days of Diderot's heroic effort. Our present circumstances are altogether different from his. Nowadays there is an immense literature of statement and explanation scattered through tens of thousands of books, pamphlets and papers, and it is not necessary, it is undesirable, to trust to such hurried summaries as the old tradition was obliged to make for its use. The day when an energetic journalist could gather together a few star contributors and a miscellany of compilers of very uneven quality to scribble him special articles, often tainted with propaganda and advertisement, and call it an Encyclopaedia, is past. The modern World Encyclopaedia should consist of selections, extracts, quotations, very carefully assembled with the approval of outstanding authorities in each subject, carefully collated and edited and critically presented. It would be not a miscellany, but a concentration, a clarification and a synthesis. This World Encyclopaedia would be the mental background of every intelligent man in the world. It would be alive and growing and changing continually under revision, extension and replacement from the original thinkers in the world everywhere. Every university and research institution should be feeding it. Every fresh mind should be brought into contact with its standing editorial organisation. And on the other hand its contents would be the standard source of material for the instructional side of school and college work, for the verification of facts and the testing of statements—everywhere in the world. Even journalists would deign to use it; even newspaper proprietors might be made to respect it.

Such an Encyclopaedia would play the role of an undogmatic Bible to a world culture. It would do just what our scattered and disoriented intellectual organisations of today fall short of doing. It would hold the world together mentally.

It may be objected that this is a Utopian dream. This is something too great to achieve, too good to be true. I won't deal with that for a few minutes. Flying was a Utopian dream a third of a century ago. What I am putting before you is a perfectly sane, sound and practicable proposal.

But first I will notice briefly two objections—obstructions rather than objections—that one will certainly encounter at this point.

One of these is not likely to appear in any great force in this gathering. You have all heard and you have all probably been irritated or bored by the assertion that no two people think alike, "quot homines, tot sententiae", that science is always contradicting itself, that theologians and economists can never agree. It is largely mental laziness on the defensive that makes people say this kind of thing. They don't want their intimate convictions turned over and examined and it is unfortunate that the emphasis put upon minor differences by men of science and belief in their strenuous search for the completest truth and the exactest expression sometimes gives colour to this sort of misunderstanding. But I am inclined to think that most people overrate the apparent differences in the world of opinion today. Even in theology a psychological analysis reduces many flat contradictions to differences in terminology. My impression is that human brains are very much of a pattern, that under the same conditions they react in the same way, and that were it not for tradition, upbringing, accidents of circumstance and particularly of accidental individual obsessions, we should find ourselves—since we all face the same universe—much more in agreement than is superficially apparent. We speak different languages and dialects of thought and can even at times catch ourselves flatly contradicting each other in words while we are doing our utmost to express the same idea. And self-love and personal vanity are not excluded from the intellectual life. How often do we sec men misrepresenting each other in order to exaggerate a difference and secure the gratification of an argumentative victory! A World Encyclopaedia as I conceive it would bring together into close juxtaposition and under critical scrutiny many apparently conflicting systems of statement. It might act not merely as an assembly of fact and statement, but as an organ of adjustment and adjudication, a clearing house of misunderstandings; it would be deliberately a synthesis, and so act as a [test] and a filter for a very great quantity of human misapprehension. It would compel men to come to terms with one another. I think it would relegate "quot homines, tot sententiae" back to the Latin comedy from which it emerged.

The second type of obstruction that this idea of a World Encyclopaedia will encounter is even less likely to find many representatives in the present gathering and I will give it only the briefest of attention. (You know that kind of neuralgic expression, the high protesting voice, the fluttering gesture of the hands.) But you want to stereotype people. What a dreadful, dreadful world it will be when everybody thinks alike "—and so they go on. Most of these elegant people who want the world picturesquely at sixes and sevens are hopeless cases, but for the milder instances it may be worth while remarking that it really does not enhance the natural variety and beauty of life to have all the clocks in a town keeping individual times of their own, no charts of the sea, no timetables, but trains starting secretly to unspecified destinations, infectious diseases without notification and postmen calling occasionally when they can get by the picturesque footpads at the corner. I like order in the place of vermin, I prefer a garden to a swamp and the whole various world to a hole-and-corner life in some obscure community, and tonight I like to imagine I am making my appeal to hearers of a kindred disposition to my own. And next let us take this World Encyclopaedia from the point of view of the specialist and the super-intellectual. To him even more than to the common intelligent man World Encyclopaedia is going to be of value because it is going to afford him an intelligible statement of what is being done by workers parallel with himself. And further it will be giving him the general statement of 4 his own subject that is being made to the world at large. He can watch that closely. On the assumption that the World Encyclopaedia is based on a world-wide organisation he will be—if he is a worker of any standing—a corresponding associate of the Encyclopaedia organisation. He will be able to criticise the presentation of his subject, to suggest amendments and re-statements. For a World Encyclopaedia that was kept alive and up to date by the frequent re-issue of its volumes, could be made the basis of much fundamental discussion and controversy. It might breed swarms of pamphlets, and very wholesome swarms. It would give the specialist just that contact with the world at large which at present is merely caricatured by more or less elementary class teaching, amateurish examination work and college administrations. In my dream of a World Encyclopaedia I have a feeling that part of the scheme would be the replacement of the latter group of professional activities, the college business, tutoring, normal lecturing work and so on, by a new set of activities, the encyclopaedic work, the watching brief to prevent the corruption of the popular mind. In enlightening the general mind the specialist will broaden himself. He will be redeemed from oddity, from shy preciousness and practical futility. Well, you begin to see the shape of this project. And you will realise that it is far away from anything like the valiant enterprise of Denis Diderot and his associates a century and a half ago, except in so far as the nature of its reaction upon the world's affairs is concerned. That extraordinary adventure in intellectual synthesis makes this dream credible. That is our chief connection with it. And here I have to make an incidental disavowal. I want to make it clear how little I have to do with what I am now discussing. In order to get some talk going upon this idea of an Encyclopaedia, I have been circulating a short memorandum upon the subject among a number of friends. I did not think to mark it Private, and unhappily one copy seems to have fallen into the hands of one of those minor pests of our time, a personal journalist, who at once rushed into print with the announcement that I was proposing to write a brand new Encyclopaedia, all with my own little hand out of my own little head. At the age of seventy l Once a thing of this sort is started there is no stopping it—and I admit that announcement put me in my place in a pleasantly ridiculous light. But I think after what I have put before you now that you will acquit me of any such colossal ambition. I implore you not to let that touch of personal absurdity belittle the greatness and urgency of the cause I am pleading. This Encyclopaedia I am thinking of is something in which manifestly I have neither the equipment nor the quality to play any but an infinitesimal part. I am asking for it in the role of a common intelligent man who needs it and understands the need for it, both for himself and his world. After that you can leave me out of it. It is just because in the past I have had some experience in the assembling of outlines of knowledge for popular use that I realise, perhaps better than most people, the ineffectiveness of this sort of effort on the part of individuals or small groups. It is something that must be taken up and taken up very seriously—by the universities, the learned societies, the responsible educational organisations if it is to be brought into effective being. It is a super university I am thinking of a world brain; no less. It is nothing in the nature of a supplementary enterprise. I; is a completion necessary to modernise the university. And that brings me to the last part of this speculation. Can such an Encyclopaedia as I have been suggesting to you be a possible thing? How can it be set going? How can it be organised and paid for?

I agree I have now to show it is a possible thing. For I am going to make the large assumption that you think that it is a possible thing it is a desirable thing. How are we to set about it?

I think something in this way: To begin with we want a Promotion Organisation. We want, shall I call it, an Encyclopaedia Society to ask for an Encyclopaedia and get as many people as possible asking for an Encyclopaedia. Directly that Society asks for an Encyclopaedia it will probably have to resort to precautionary measures against any enterprising publisher who may see in that demand a chance for selling some sort of vamped-up miscellany as the thing required, and who may even trust to the unworldliness of learned men for some sort of countenance for his raid.

And next this society of promoters will have to survey the available material. For most of the material for a modern Encyclopaedia exists already—though in a state of impotent diffusion. In all the various departments with which an Encyclopaedia should deal, groups of authoritative men might be induced to prepare a comprehensive list of primary and leading books, articles, statements which taken together would give the best, clearest and most quintessential renderings of what is known and thought within their departments. This would make a sort of key bibliography to the thoughts and knowledge of the world. My friend Sir Richard Gregory has suggested that such a key bibliography for a World Encyclopaedia would in itself. be a worthwhile thing to evoke. I agree with him. I haven't an idea what we should get. I imagine something on the scale of ten or twenty thousand items. I don't know.

Possibly our Encyclopaedia Society would find that such a key bibliography was in itself a not unprofitable publication, but that is a comment by the way. The next step from this key bibliography would be the organisation of a general editorial board and of departmental boards. These would be permanent bodies—for a World Encyclopaedia must have a perennial life. We should have to secure premises, engage a literary staff and, with the constant co-operation of the departmental groups, set about the task of making our great synthesis and abstract. I must repeat that for the purposes of a World Encyclopaedia probably we would not want much original writing. If a thing has been stated clearly and compactly once for all, why paraphrase it or ask some inferior hand to restate it? Our job may be rather to secure the use of copyrights, and induce leading exponents of this or that field of science or criticism to co-operate in the selection, condensation, expansion or simplification of what they have already said so well.

And now I will ask you to take another step forward and imagine our World Encyclopaedia has been assembled and digested and that the first edition is through the press. So far we shall have been spending money on this great enterprise and receiving nothing; we shall have been spending capital, for which I have at present not accounted. I will merely say that I see no reason why the capital needed for these promotion activities should not be forthcoming. This is no gainful enterprise, but you have to remember that the values we should create would be far more stable than the ephemeral encyclopaedias representing sums round about a million pounds or so which have hitherto been the high-water of Encyclopaedic enterprise. These were essentially book-selling enterprises made to exploit a demand. But this World Encyclopaedia as I conceive it, if only because it will have roped in the larger part of the original sources of exposition, discussion and information, will be in effect a world monopoly, and it will be able to levy and distribute direct and indirect revenue, on a scale quite beyond the resources of any private publishing enterprise. I do not see that the financial aspects of this huge enterprise, big though the sums involved may be, present any insurmountable difficulties in the way of its realisation. The major difficulty will be to persuade the extremely various preoccupied, impatient and individualistic scholars, thinkers, scientific workers and merely distinguished but unavoidable men on whose participation its success depends, of its practicability, convenience and desirability. And so far as the promotion of it goes I am reasonably hopeful. Quite a few convinced, energetic and resourceful people could set this ball rolling towards realisation. To begin with it is not necessary to convert the whole world of learning, research and teaching. I see no reason why at any stage it should encounter such positive opposition. Negative opposition—the refusal to have anything to do with it and so forth-can be worn down by persistence and the gathering promise of success. It has not to fight adversaries or win majorities before it gets going. And once this ball is fairly set rolling it will be very hard to stop. A greater danger, as I have already suggested, will come from attempts at the private mercenary exploitation of this world-wide need—the raids of popular publishers and heavily financed salesmen, and in particular attempts to create copyright difficulties and so to corner the services and prestige of this or that unwary eminent person by anticipatory agreements.

Vis-à-vis with salesmanship the man of science, the man of the intellectual élite, is a t to show himself a very Simple Simon indeed. And) of course from the very start, various opinionated cults and propagandists will be doing their best to capture or buy the movement. Well, we mustn't be captured or bought, and in particular our silence must not be bought or captured. That danger may in the end prove to be a stimulus. It may be possible in some cases to digest and assimilate special cults to their own and the general advantage.

And there will be a constant danger that some of the early promoters may feel and attempt to realise a sort of proprietorship in the organisation, to make a group or a gang of it. But to recognise that danger is half-way to averting it.

I have said nothing so far about the language in which the Encyclopaedia should appear. It is a question I have not worked out. But I think that the main text should be in one single language, from which translations in whole or part could be made. Catholic Christianity during the years of its greatest influence was held together by Latin, and I do not think I am giving way to any patriotic bias when I suggest that unless we contemplate a polyglot publication—and never yet have I heard of a successful polyglot publication—English because it has a wider range than German, a greater abundance and greater subtlety of expression than French and more precision than Russian, is the language in which the original text of a World Encyclopaedia ought to stand. And moreover it is in the English-speaking communities that such an enterprise as this is likely to find the broadest basis for operations, the frankest criticism and the greatest freedom from oflicial interference and government propaganda. But that must not hinder us from drawing help and contributions from, and contemplating a use in every community in the world.

And so far I have laid no stress upon the immense advantage this enterprise would have in its detachment from immediate politics, Ultimately if our dream is realised it must exert a very great influence upon everyone who controls administrations, makes wars, directs mass behaviour, feeds, moves, starves and kills populations. But it does not immediately challenge these active people. It is not the sort of thing to which they would be directly antagonistic. It is not ostensibly anti-them. It would have a terrible and ultimately destructive aloofness. They would not easily realise its significance for all that they do and are. The prowling beast will right savagely if it is pursued and challenged upon the jungle path in the darkness, but it goes home automatically as the day breaks.

You see how such an Encyclopaedic organisation could spread like a nervous network, a system of mental control about the globe, knitting all the intellectual workers of the world through a common interest and a common medium of expression into a more and more conscious co-operating unity and a growing sense of their own dignity, informing without pressure or propaganda, directing without tyranny. It could be developed wherever conditions were favourable; it could make inessential concessions and bide its time in regions of exceptional violence, grow vigorously again with every return to liberalism and reason.

So I sketch my suggestion for a rehabilitation of thought and learning that ultimately may release a new form of power in the world, recalling indeed the power and influence of the churches and religions of the past but with a progressive, adaptable and recuperative quality that none of these possessed. I believe that in some such way as I have sketched tonight the mental forces now largely and regrettably scattered and immobilised in the universities, the learned societies, research institutions and technical workers of the world could be drawn together in a real directive world intelligence, and by that mere linking and implementing of what is known, human life as a whole could be made much surer, stronger, bolder and happier than it has ever been up to the present time. And until something of this sort is done, I do not see how the common life can ever be raised except occasionally, locally and by a conspiracy of happy chances, above its present level of impulsiveness, insincerity, insecurity, general under-vitality, under-nourishment and aimlessness. For that reason I think the promotion of an organisation for a World Encyclopaedia may prove in the long run to be a better investment for the time and energy of intelligent men and women than any definite revolutionary movement, Socialism, Communism, Fascism, Imperialism, Pacifism or any other of the current isms into which we pour ourselves and our resources so freely. None of these movements have anything like the intellectual comprehensiveness needed to construct the world anew.

Let me be very clear upon one point.

I am not saying that a World Encyclopaedia will in itself solve any single one of the vast problems that must be solved if man is to escape from his present dangers and distresses and enter upon a more hopeful phase of history; what I am saying—and saying with the utmost conviction—is this, that without a World Encyclopaedia to hold men's minds together in something like a common interpretation of reality, there is no hope whatever of anything but an accidental and transitory alleviation of any of our world troubles. As mankind is, so it will I remain, until it pulls its mind together. And if it does . not pull its mind together then I do not see how it can help but decline. Never was a living species more perilously poised than ours at the present time. If it does not take thought to end its present mental indecisiveness catastrophe lies ahead. Our species may yet end its strange eventful history as just the last, the cleverest of the great apes. The great ape that was clever—but not clever enough. It could escape from most things but not from its own mental confusion.

II. — THE BRAIN ORGANIZATION OF THE MODERN WORLD

Lecture delivered in America, October and November, 1937

FOR half a century I have resisted temptations to lecture in America—if for no other reason than the insufficiency of my voice. But the microphone is a great leveller and here I am at last on terms of practical equality with your most audible speakers and very glad indeed of this belated opportunity of talking to you. I want to talk to you about an idea which seems to me to be a very important one indeed. I want to interest you in it, and if possible find out what you think of it. I call that idea for reasons I shall try to make clear as I proceed, The New Encyclopaedism, and the gist of it is that the time is ripe for a very extensive revision and modernisation of the intellectual organisation of the world. Can I put it more plainly than that? Perhaps I can.

Our world is changing and it is changing with an ever-increasing violence. An old world dies about us. A new world struggles into existence. But it is not developing the brain and the sensitiveness and delicacy necessary for its new life. That is the essence of what I have to say.

To put my argument squarely on its feet I must begin by telling you things that you know quite as well or better than I do. I will just remind you of them. It is, so to speak, a matter of current observation that in the past century and a half there has been an enormous increase in the speed and facility of communications between men in every part of the world. Two hundred years ago Oliver Goldsmith said that if every time a man fired a gun in England, someone was killed in China, we should never hear of it and no one would bother very much about it. All that is changed. We should hear about that murdered Chinaman almost at once. Today we can go all round the world in the time it took a man to travel from New York to Washington in 1800, we can speak to any one anywhere so soon as the proper connections have been made and in a little while we shall be able to look one another in the face from the ends of the earth. In a very few years now we shall be able to fly in the stratosphere across the Atlantic in a few hours with a cargo of passengers, or bombs or other commodities. There has in fact been a complete revolution in our relation to distances. And the practical consequences of these immense approximations are only beginning to be realised. Everybody knows these facts now, but round about 1900 we were only beginning to take notice of this abolition of distance. Even in 1919 the good gentlemen who settled the world for ever at Versailles had not observed this strange new thing in human affairs. They had not observed that it was no longer possible to live in little horse-and-foot communities because of this change of scale. We know better now. Now the consequences of this change of scale force themselves upon our attention everywhere. Often in the rudest fashion. Our interests and our activities interpenetrate more and more. We are all consciously or unconsciously adapting ourselves to a single common world. For a time North America and the great sprawl of Russia and Siberia are for obvious reasons feeling less restriction than let us say japan or Germany, but, as my glancing allusion to the stratosphere was intended to remind you, this relative isolation of yours is also a diminishing isolation. The Abolition of Distance is making novel political and economic arrangements more and more imperative if the populations of the earth are not to grind against each other to their mutual destruction.

That imperative expansion of the scale of the community in which we have to live is the first truism I want to recall to you and bring into the foreground of our discussion. The second truism is the immense increase in our available power that has been going on. I do not know if any precise estimate of the physical energy at the disposal of mankind now and at any previous age, has ever been made, but the disproportion between what we have and what our great-grand-parents had, is stupendous and continually increasing. I am told that two or three power stations in the United States are today pouring out more energy night and day than could be produced by the sustained muscular effort of the entire United States population, and that the Roman empire at its mightiest could not—even by one vast unanimous thrust, not a single soul doing anything but push and push—have kept the street and road transport of New York State moving as it moves today. You are almost sick of being told it, in this form or that, over and over again. But we all know about this sort of thing. Man was slower and feebler beyond comparison a century or so ago than he is today. He has become a new animal incredibly swift and strong—except in his head. We all know—in theory at least—how this increase of power affects the nature of war. None of our new powers in this world of increasing power, have been so rapidly applied as our powers of mutual injury. A child of five with a bomb no bigger than my hand, can kill as many men in a moment as any paladin of antiquity hacking and hewing and bashing through a long and tiring battle. Both these two realities, these two portentous realities, the change of scale in human affairs and the monstrous increase of destructive power, haunt every intelligent mind today. One needs an exceptional stupidity even to question the urgency we are under to establish some effective World Pax, before gathering disaster overwhelms us. The problem of reshaping human affairs on a world-scale, this World problem, is drawing together an ever-increasing multitude of minds. It is becoming the common solicitude of all sane and civilised men. We must do it—or knock ourselves to pieces. I think it would be profitable if a group of history students were to trace how this World Problem has dawned upon the popular mind from, let us say, 1900 up to the present time. To begin with it was hardly felt to be important. Our apprehension of what it really amounts to has grown in breadth and subtlety during all these past seven-and-thirty years. We have been learning hard in the past third of a century. And particularly since 1919. In 1900 the general sense of the historical process, of what was going on in the world, was altogether shallower than ours today. People were extraordinarily ignorant of the operating causes of political events. It was quite possible then for them to agree that it was not at all a nice or desirable thing I and that it ought to be put an end to, and to imagine that setting up a nice little international court at the Hague to which states could bring their grievances and get a decision without going to the trouble and expense of hostilities would end this obsolescent scandal. Then we should have peace for ever—and everything else would go on as before. But now even the boy picking cotton or working the elevator, knows that nothing will go as before. The fear of change has reached them. You will remember that Mr. Andrew Carnegie set aside quite a respectable fraction of his savings to buy us world peace for ever and have done with it. The Great War was an enlightening disappointment to this earlier school of peacemakers, and it released a relatively immense flow of thought about the World Problem. But even at Versailles the people most immediately powerful, were still evidently under the impression that world peace was simply a legal and political business. They thought the Great War had happened, but they were busy politicians, and had not remarked that vastly greater things were happening. They did not realise even that elementary point about the unsuitable size of contemporary states to which I have recalled your attention. Still less did they think about the new economic stresses that were revolutionising every material circumstance of litre. They saw the issue as a simple aiirair upon the lines of old-fashioned history. So far as their ideas went it was just Carthage and Rome over again. The central Powers were naughty naughty nations and had to be punished. Their greatest novelty was the League of Nations, which indeed was all very well as a gesture and an experiment but which as an irremovable and irreplaceable reality in the path of world adjustment has proved anything but a blessing. It had been a brilliant idea in the reign of Francis I of France. Still we have to recognise that in 1919 the Geneva League was about as far as anyone's realisation of the gravity of the World Problem had gone. It is our common quality to be wise after the event and still quite unprepared for the next change ahead. It is an almost universal human failing to believe that now we know everything, that nothing more than we know can be known about human relations, and that in our limitless wisdom we can fix up our descendants for evermore, by constitutions, treaties, boundaries and leagues. So my poor generation built this insufficient League. For a time a number of well-meaning people did consider that the League of Nations settled the World Problem for good and all, and that they need not bother their heads about it any more. There were we felt, no further grounds for anxiety, and we all sat down within our nice little national boundaries to resume business . according to the old ways, securing each of us the largest possible share of the good things the new Era of Peace and Prosperity was to bring—at least to the good countries to whom victory had been accorded. Wlten later the history of our own times comes to be written, I imagine this period between 1919 and 1929 will be called the Fatuous Twenties.

We all know better now. Now that we are living in what no doubt the historian will some day call the Frightened Thirties. Versailles was no settlement. There is still no settlement. The World Problem still pursues us. And it seems now vastly nearer, uglier and more formidable than it ever did before. It emerges through all our settlements like a dangerous rhinoceros coming through a reed fence. Our mood changes now from one in which off-hand legal solutions were acceptable, to an almost feverish abundance of mental activity. From saying "There is the Hague Court and what more do you want?" or "There is the League of Nations, what more can you want?" or "There is the British Peace Ballot and please don't bother me further," we are beginning to apprehend something of the full complexity and vastness of the situation that faces mankind, that is to say all of us, as a living species. Our minds are beginning to grasp the vastness of these grim imperatives. That change of scale, that enhancement of power has altered the fundamental conditions of human life—of all our lives. The traditions of the old world, the comparatively easy traditions in which we have grown up and in which we have shaped our lives, are bankrupt. They are outworn. They are outgrown. They are too decayed for much more patching. They are as untrustworthy and dangerous as a very old car whose engine has become explosive, which has lost its brake lining and has a loose steering-wheel. What I am saying now is gradually becoming as plain in men's minds as the roundness of the earth. New World or nothing. We have to make a new world for ourselves or we shall sufier and perish amidst the downfall of the decaying old. This is a business of fundamentals in which we are all called upon to take part, and through which the lives of all of us are bound to be changed essentially and irrevocably.

With this realisation of the true immensity and penetration of the World Problem we are passing out of the period of panaceas—of simple solutions. As We grow wiser we realise more and more that the World Problem is not a thing like a locked door for which it is only necessary to End a single key. It is infinitely more complex. It is a battle all along the line and every man is a combatant or a deserter. Popular discussion is thick with competing simple remedies, these [sometimes] needful proposals, each of which has its factor of truth and each of which in itself is entirely inadequate. Consider some of them. Arbitration, League of Nations, I have spoken of World Socialism. The Socialist very rightly points out the evils and destructive stresses that arise from the free play of the acquisitive impulse in production and business affairs, but his solution, which is to take the control of things out of the hands of the acquisitive in order to put it into the hands of the inexperienced, plainly leaves the bulk of the world's troubles unsolved. The Communist and Fascist have theorised about and experimented with the seizure and concentration of Power, but they produce no sound schemes for its beneficial use. Seizing power by itself is a gangster's game. You can do nothing with power except plunder and destroy—unless you know exactly what to do with it. People tell us that Christianity, the Spirit of Christianity, holds a key to all our difficulties. Christianity, they say, has never yet been tried. We have all heard that. The trouble is that Christianity in all its various forms never does try. Ask it to work out practical problems and it immediately floats off into other-worldliness. Plainly there is much that is wrong in our property-money arrangements, but there again prescriptions for a certain juggling with currency and credit, seem unlikely in themselves to solve the World Problem. A multitude of such suggestions are bandied about with increasing passion. In comparison with any preceding age, we are in a state of extreme mental fermentation. This is, I suggest, an inevitable phase in the development of our apprehension of the real magnitude and complexity of the World Problem which faces us. Except for the faddists and fanatics we all feel a sort of despairing inadequacy amidst this wild storm of suggestions and rash beginnings. We want to know more, we want digested facts to go upon. Our minds are not equipped for the job.

And shaking a finger at you to mark the point we have reached, I repeat, our minds are not equipped for the job.

We are ships in uncharted seas. We are big-game hunters without weapons of precision.

This present uproar of incomplete ideas was as inevitable as the Imperialist Optimism of 1900, the Futile Amazement of the Great War, and the self-complacency of the Fatuous Twenties. These were all phases, necessary phases, in the march of our race through disillusionment to understanding. After the phase of panaceas there comes now, I hope, a phase of intelligent co-ordination of creative movements, a balanced treatment of our complex difficulties. We are going to think again. We are all beginning to realise that the World Problem, the universal world problem of adapting our life to its new scale and its new powers, has to be approached on a broad front, along many paths and in many fashions. In my opening remarks I stressed our spreading realisation of the possibility of a great catastrophe in world affairs. One immediate consequence of our full realisation of what this World Problem before us means is dismay. We lose heart. We feel that anyhow we cannot adjust that much. We throw up the sponge. We say, let us go on as long as possible anyhow, and after us, let what will happen. A considerable and a growing number of people are persuaded that a drift towards a monstrously destructive war cycle which may practically obliterate our present civilisation is inevitable. I have, I suppose, puzzled over such possibilities rather more than most people. I do not agree with that inevitability of another real war. But I agree with its possibility. I think such a collapse so possible that I have played with it imaginatively in a book or so and a film. It is so much a possibility that it is wholesome to bear it constantly in mind. But all the same I do not believe that world disaster is unavoidable. It is extraordinarily difficult to estimate the relative strength of the driving forces in human affairs today. We are not dealing with measurable quantities. We are easily the prey of our moods, and our latest vivid impression is sure to count for far too much. Values in my own mind, I find, shift about from hour to hour. I guess it is about the same with most of you. Just as in a battle, so here, our moods are factors in the situation. When we feel depressed, the world is going to the devil and we meet defeat half-way; when we are elated, the world is all right and we win. And I think that most of us are inclined to overestimate the menace of violence, the threats of nationalist aggression and the suppression of free discussion in many parts of the world at the present time. I admit the darkness and grimness on the face of things. Indisputably vehement State-ism now dominates affairs over large regions of the civilised world. Everywhere liberty is threatened or outraged. Here again, I merely repeat, what the whole intelligent world is saying.

Well....I do not want to seem smug amidst such immunities as we English- speaking people still enjoy, nevertheless I must confess I think it possible to overrate the intensity and staying power of this present nationalist phase. I think that the present vehemence of nationalism in the world may be due not to the strength of these tyrannies but to their weakness. This change of scale, this increment of power that has come into human affairs, has strained every boundary, every institution and every tradition in the world. It is an age of confusion, an age of gangster opportunity. After the gangsters the Vigilantes. Both the dying old and the vamped-up new are on the defensive. They build up their barriers and increase their repression because they feel the broad flood of change towards a vastly greater new order is rising. Every old government, every hasty new government that has leapt into power, is made crazy by the threat of a wider and greater order, and its struggle to survive becomes desperate. It tries still to carry onto deny that it is an experiment—even if it survives crippled and monstrous. The dogmatic Russian Revolution has not held power for a score of years and yet it, too, is now as much on the defensive as any other upstart dictatorship. A lot of what looks to us now like triumphant reaction may in the end prove to be no more than doomed, dwarfed and decaying dogmas and traditions at bay. None of the utterances of these militant figures that most threaten the peace of the world today have the serene assurance of men conscious that they are creating something that marches with the ruling forces of life. For the most part they are shouts—screams—of defiance. They scold and rant and threaten. That is the rebel note and not the note of mastery. We hear very much about the suppression of thought in the world. is there really—even at the present time—in spite of all this current violence, any real diminution of creative thought in the world—as compared with 1500 or 1850—or 1900, or 1914 or 1924? You have to remember that the suppression of free discussion in such countries as Germany, Italy and Russia does not mean an end to original thought in these countries. Thought, like gunpowder, may be all the more effective for being confined. I know that beneath the surface Germany is thinking intensely, and Russia is thinking more clearly if less discursively than ever before. Maybe we overestimate the value of that idle and safe, slack, do-as-you-please discussion that we English-speaking folk enjoy under our democratic regime. The concentration camps of today may prove after all to be the austere training grounds of a new freedom.

Let us glance for a moment at the chief forces that are driving against all that would keep the world in its ancient tradition of small national governments, warring and planning perpetually against each other, of a perpetual struggle not only of nations but individuals for a mere cramped possessiveness.

Consider now the drives towards release, abundance, one World Pax, one world control of violence, that are going on today. They seem to me very much like those forces that drove the United States to the Pacific coast and prevented the break-up of the Union. No doubt, many a heart failed in the covered waggons as they toiled westward, face to face with the Red Indian and every sort of lawless violence. Yet the drive persisted and prevailed. The Vigilantes prepared the way for the reign of law. The railway, the telegraph and so on followed the covered waggon and knitted this new-scale community of America together. In the middle nineteenth century all Europe thought that the United States must break up into a lawless confusion. The railway, the printing press, saved that. The greater unity conquered because of its immense appeal to common-sense in the face of the new conditions. And because it was able to appeal to common sense through these media.

The United States could spread gigantically and keep a common mind. And today I believe in many ways, in a variety of fashions and using many weapons and devices, the Vigilantes of World Peace, under the stimulus of still wider necessities, are finding themselves and each other and getting together to ride. That is to say their minds are getting together. One great line of development must be towards a Common Control of the Air. The great spans of the Atlantic and Pacific may prevent this from beginning as a world-wide Air Control, but that, I think, is just a passing phase of the problem. I submit to you that a state of affairs in which vast populations are under an ever- increasing threat of aerial bombardment with explosives, incendiary bombs and poison gas at barely an hour's notice, is intolerable to human reason. Maybe there will be terrible wars first. Quite possibly not. It may after all prove unnecessary to have very many great cities destroyed and very many millions of people burnt, suffocated, blown limb from limb, before men see what stares them in the face and accept the obvious. Men are, after all, partly reasonable creatures, they have at least spasmodic moral impulses. There is already in action—a movement—for World Air Control. But you can't have a thing like that by itself. Who or what will control the air?

This is a political question. None of us quite know the answer, but the answer has to be found, and hundreds of thousands of the best brains on earth are busy at the riddle of that adjustment. We can rule out any of the pat, ready-made answers of yesterday, League of Nations or what not. None the less that implacable necessity for World Air Control insists upon something, something with at least the authority of a World Federal Government in these matters, and that trails with it, you will find, a revelation of other vast collateral necessities. I cannot now develop these at any great length. But in the end I believe we are led to the conviction that the elemental forces of human progress, the stars in their courses, are fighting to evoke at least this much world community as involves a control of communications throughout the whole world, a common federal protection of everyone in the world from private, sectarian or national violence, a common federal protection of the natural resources of the planet from national, class or individual appropriation, and a world system of money and credit. The obstinacy of man is great, but the forces that grip him are greater and in the end, after I know not what wars, struggles and afflictions, this is the road along which he will go. He has to see it first—and then he will do it. I am sure of the ultimate necessity of this federal world state—and at the backs of your minds at least, I believe most of you are too—as I am sure that, whatever clouds may obscure it, the sun will rise to-morrow.

And now having recapitulated and brought together this general conception of human progress towards unity which is forming in most of our minds, as an answer to the ever-more insistent World Problem, I propose to devote the rest of my time with you to the discussion of one particular aspect of this march towards a world community, the necessity it brings with it, for a correlated educational expansion. This has not so far been given anything like the attention it may demand in the near future. We have been gradually brought to the pitch of imagining and framing our preliminary ideas of a federal world control of such things as communications, health, money, economic adjustments, and the suppression of crime. In all these material things we have begun to foresee the possibility of a world-wide network being woven between all men about the earth. So much of the World Peace has been brought into the range of—what shall I call it?—the general imagination. But I do not think we have yet given sufficient attention to the prior necessity, of linking together its mental organisations into a much closer accord than obtains at the present time. All these ideas of unifying mankind's affairs depend ultimately for their realisation on mankind having a unified mind for the job. The want of such effective mental unification is the key to most of our present frustrations. While men's minds are still confused, their social and political relations will remain in confusion, however great the forces that are grinding them against each other and however tragic and monstrous the consequences.

Now I know of no general history of human education and discussion in existence. We have nowadays—in what is called the New History-books which trace for us in rough outline the growth in size and complexity of organised human communities. But so far no one has attempted to trace the stages through which teaching has developed, how schools began, how discussions grew, how knowledge was acquired and spread, how the human intelligence kept pace with its broadening responsibilities. We know that in the small tribal community and even in the city states of, for example, Greece, there was hardly any need for reading or writing. The youngsters were instructed and initiated by their elders. They could walk all over the small territory of their community and see and hear, how it was fed, guarded, governed. The bright young men gathered for oral instruction in the Porch or the Academy. With the growth of communities into states and kingdoms we know that the medicine man was replaced by an organised priesthood, we know that scribes appeared, written records. There must have been schools for the priests and scribes, but we know very little about it. We know something of the effect of the early writings, the Bible particularly, in consolidating and preserving the Jewish tradition—giving it such a start off that for a long time it dominated the subsequent development of the Gentile world, and we know that the survival and spread of Christianity is largely due to its resort to written records to supplement that oral teaching of disciples with which it began. But the growing thirst for medical, theological and general knowledge that appeared in the Middle Ages and which led to those remarkable gatherings of hungry minds, the Universities, has still to be explained and described. That appearance and that swarming of scholars would make an extraordinary ¤ story. After the lecture room, the book; after that the newspaper, universal education, the cinema, the radio. No one has yet appeared to make an orderly, story of the developments of information and instruction that have occurred in the past hundred years. Age by age the World's Knowledge Apparatus has grown up. Unpremeditated. Without a plan. But enlarging due possible areas of political co-operation at every stage in its growth.

It is a very interesting thing indeed to ask oneself certain questions. How did I come to know what I know about the world and myself? What ought I to know? What would I like to know that I don't know? If I want to know about this or that, where can I get the clearest, best and latest information? And where did these other people about me get their ideas about things?

Which are sometimes so different from mine. Why do we differ so widely? Surely about a great number of things upon which we differ there is in existence exact knowledge? So that we ought not to differ in these things. This is true not merely about small matters in dispute but about vitally important things concerning our business, our money, our political outlook, our health, the general conduct of our lives. We are guessing when we might know. The facts are there, but we don't know them completely. We are inadequately informed. We blunder about in our ignorance and this great ruthless world in which we live, beats upon us and punishes our ignorance like a sin. Not only in our mass-ruled democracies but in the countries where dogmas and dictators rule, tremendous decisions are constantly being made affecting human happiness, root and branch, in complete disregard of realities that are known.

You see we are beginning to realise not only that the formal political structures of the world and many of the methods of our economic life are out of date and out of scale, but also another thing that hampers us hopelessly in every endeavour we make to adjust life to its new conditions—our World Knowledge Apparatus is not up to our necessities. We are neither collecting, arranging nor digesting what knowledge we have at all adequately, and our schools, our instruments of distribution are old-fashioned and ineffective.

We are not being told enough, we are not being told properly, and that is one main reason why we are all at sixes and sevens in our collective life.

The other day my university, the University of London, celebrated its centenary. For some minor reason I was asked to assist at these celebrations. And to do so I had to assume some very remarkable garments—most remarkable if you consider that London University was founded in the year 1836 when gentlemen wore tight trousers with straps, elegantly waisted coats and bell-shaped top hats. Did I dress up like that? No. I found myself retreating from the age of the aeroplane to the age of the horse and mule outfit of the Canterbury Pilgrims. I found myself wearing a hood and gown and carrying a Beret rather like those worn by prosperous citizens of the days of Edward IV, when the University of London was as little anticipated as the continent of America. My modern head peeped out at the top of this get-up and my modern trousers at the bottom. Properly I ought to have been wearing a square beard or have been clean-shaven, but I was forgiven that much. And from all parts of the world representatives of innumerable universities had come with beautifully illuminated addresses to congratulate our Chancellor and ourselves on our hundred years of sham mediaevalism. They came from the ends of the earth, they came up the aisle in an endless process; one ancient name followed another, now it was Tokyo, now Athens, now Upsala, now Cape Town, now the Sorbonne, now Glasgow, now Johns Hopkins, on they came and on and bowed and handed their addresses and passed aside. It was a marvellous, a dazzling array of beautifully coloured robes. It was also a marvellous collection of men and women. I watched the grave and dignified faces of some of the finest minds in the world. Together they presented, they embodied or they were there to represent, the whole body of human knowledge. There it was in effect parading before me. And nine out of ten of them were dressed up in some colourful imitation of a costume worn centuries before their foundations came into existence. It was picturesque, it was imposing—but it was just a little odd of them.

My thoughts drifted away to certain political gatherings I had seen and heard; faces of an altogether inferior type, leather-lunged adventurers bawling and gesticulating, raucous little men screaming plausible nonsense to ignorant crowds, supporters herded like sheep and saluting like trained monkeys, and the incongruity of the contrast came to me—you know how things come to you suddenly at times—so that I almost laughed aloud. Because, when it comes to the direction of human affairs, all these universities, all these nice refined people in their lovely gowns, all this visible body of human knowledge and wisdom, has far less influence upon the conduct of human affairs, than, let us say, an intractable newspaper proprietor, an unscrupulous group of financiers or the leader of a recalcitrant minority.

Some weeks previously I had taken part in a little private conference of scientific men in London. They were very distinguished men indeed, and they were distressed beyond measure at the way in which one scientific invention after another was turned to the injury of human life. What was to be done? What could be done? Our discussion was inconclusive, but it had quickened my sense of the reality of the situation. I put these three separate impressions together before you: First, these anxious scientific specialists, then the unchallenged power and mischief of these bawling war-making politicians and their crowds at the present time, and finally, capping the whole, these hundreds of all-too-decorated learned gentlemen, fine and delicate, bowing, presenting addresses (for the most part in Latin) and conferring further gowns and diplomas on one another. This last lot, I said, this third lot is after all—in spite of its elegant weakness, the organised brain of mankind so far as there is an organised brain of mankind—and it is not doing its proper work. Why? Why are our universities Boating above the general disorder of mankind like a beautiful sunset over a battlefield? Is it not high time that something was done about it? Certain ideas had been stirring in my mind for some time already, but this scene of archaic ceremony just lit up the situation for me. I realised that these mediaeval robes were in the highest degree symptomatic. They clothed an organisation essentially mediaeval, inadequate and out of date. We are living in 1937 and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organisation, education, graduation, for a century—for several centuries. The three- or four-years' course of lectures, the bachelor who knows some, the master who knows most, the doctor who knows all, are ideas that have come down unimpaired from the Middle Ages. Nowadays no one should end his learning while he lives and these university degrees are preposterous. It is true that we have multiplied universities greatly in the past hundred years, but we seem to have multiplied them altogether too much upon the old pattern. A new battleship, a new aeroplane, a new radio receiver is always an improvement upon its predecessor. But a new university is just another imitation of all the old universities that have ever been. Educationally we are still for all practical purposes in the coach and horse and galley stage. The new university is just one more mental gilt-coach in which minds take a short ride and get out again. We have done nothing to co-ordinate the work of our universities in the world—or at least we have done very little. What are called the learned societies with correspondents all over the world have been the chief addition to the human knowledge organisation since the Renaissance and most of these societies took their shape and scale in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. All the new means of communicating ideas and demonstrating realities that modern invention has given us, have been seised upon by other hands and used for other purposes; these universities which should guide the thought of the world, making no protest. The showmen got the cinema and the governments or the adventurers got the radio. The university teacher and the schoolmaster went on teaching in the class-room and checking his results by a written examination. It is as if one attempted to satisfy the traffic needs of greater New York or London or Western Europe by a monstrous increase in horses and carts and nothing else. The universities go out to meet the tremendous challenges of our social and political life, like men who go out in armour with bows and arrows to meet a bombing aeroplane. They are pushed aside by men like Hitler, Mussolini creates academies in their despite, Stalin sends party commissars to regulate their research