THE BOUNDS OF NATURE: AUTONOMY AND CONSTRAINT

Scholars of Wells's political thought often focus on his debts to Huxley (Partington Reference Partington2003; Hale Reference Hale2014, 252–300). According to John Partington, for example, the “ideological impact” of Huxley's work “did more than anything to shape Wells's thinking,” providing him with a “philosophical basis upon which to establish his ideas about the future of human society” (Reference Partington2003, 4, 31). Although Huxley was the main source of Wells's biological ideas, they disagreed about the political implications of evolution. Furthermore, while Huxley furnished Wells with an empirical theory of evolutionary dynamics, the philosophical basis of his thinking—its epistemology, ontology, and metaethics—was buttressed by Jamesian pragmatism.

Evolutionary arguments were common currency among British political thinkers throughout the nineteenth century, although their meaning was fiercely contested (Claeys Reference Claeys2000; Hawkins Reference Hawkins1997). By the 1890s, liberals and socialists were debating whether Malthusian interpretations of Darwin were compatible with progressive politics and, in particular, the extent to which evolutionary imperatives constrained the ability of humans to establish new forms of community (Hale Reference Hale2014). Huxley used his great authority to prescribe the form and limits of evolutionary explanation. While propagating a strict Malthusianism, arguing that natural history was a story of “ceaseless modification and the internecine struggle for existence of living things” ([Reference Huxley1888] Reference Huxley1989b, 61), he famously distinguished “cosmic” from “ethical” evolution. The former comprised the “competition of each with all” that applied to every living thing; the latter referred to the development of human moral sentiments that repudiated the “gladiatorial theory of existence” (Reference Huxley, Paradis and Williams1989a, 62; Reference Huxley1989b 140). As D. G. Ritchie put it, “when these ideals have once arisen, they make social progress become something different from mere organic evolution, though, of course, such progress must, for a metaphysical theory, fall within evolution as a conception applicable to the universe as a whole” (Reference Ritchie1894, 110–11). Among other things, Huxley sought to refute Herbert Spencer's naturalized evolutionary ethics, a task also pursued by Henry Sidgwick and G. E. Moore, though he also took aim at socialist accounts of political transformation. In principle, the Huxleyean configuration of autonomy and constraint was flexible, leaving considerable scope for human flourishing, but the conclusions he drew from it were bleak: cosmic and ethical processes were locked in unremitting conflict (Reference Huxley1989b, 139; Hale Reference Hale2014, 206–220). Cosmic evolution—a “tenacious and powerful enemy as long as the world lasts” (Huxley Reference Huxley1989b, 143)—was vastly more powerful than the ethical process, and it would eventually annihilate human progress. Settler colonialism illustrated this Malthusian point. After a colony established peace and affluence, its population would increase rapidly, catalyzing resource conflicts and the “cosmic struggle for existence” (Reference Huxley, Paradis and Williams1989a, 79). There was no escape from evolutionary fate. “Eden,” Huxley warned, “would have its serpent” (Reference Huxley, Paradis and Williams1989a, 78).

Wells adopted Huxley's framework. An avid reader of his work (Reference Wells1901, 211), Wells agreed that the social and political world should be viewed as “aspects of one universal evolving scheme” (Reference Wells1903, v), and he shared Huxley's Malthusianism, declaring in Anticipations, his first sustained excursion into political writing, that “[p]robably no more shattering book than the Essay on Population has ever been, or ever will be, written” (Wells Reference Wells1999, 162; also Reference Wells1903, 409; Reference Wells and Claeys2005a, 105, 124). “Man,” Wells declaimed, “is the creature of a struggle for existence,” and life was driven by “reproductive competition among individualities” (Reference Wells1999, 125; Reference Wells and Claeys2005a, 95). His early fiction experimented with these ideas, articulating a deeply pessimistic account of the human future. The Time Machine, Wells informed Huxley, was a fable of evolutionary “degeneration following security” (Reference Wells and Smith1998, 238; James Reference James2012, 50–64; McLean Reference McLean2009, 11–40). His nonfictional political writings of the following decade, however, offered a more optimistic view of human destiny. He accepted Huxley's distinction between cosmic and ethical. The process “now operating in the social body,” he contended, was “essentially different from that which had differentiated species in the past and raised man to his ascendancy among the animals” (Reference Wells1975b, 211). “Civilised man” was a combustible admixture of two elements, an “inherited factor”—the “natural man”—produced by millennia of natural selection, and an “acquired factor”—the “artificial man”—shaped by “tradition, suggestion, and reasoned thought” (Reference Wells1975a, 217). Neither inscribed in nor legitimated by nature, human norms and values were the contingent products of historical development. “Morality is made for man, and not man for morality” (Reference Wells1975c, 226).

Huxley would have viewed Wells's political prescriptions as incompatible with the dictates of evolution. An exponent of classical political economy, his scientific naturalism underwrote attacks on Spencerian laissez-faire and political radicalism alike. He eyed the socialist currents of the 1880s and 1890s with horror. “He needed a competitive Nature. He needed to undercut the socialist legions” (Desmond Reference Desmond1997, 217). Huxley regarded fierce competition between individuals and states as perennial, rendering any hope of fundamental socio-political transformation a dangerous illusion (Huxley Reference Huxley1989b, 143). Human nature was not malleable. Wells concurred that political philosophers had to accept humans as competitive products of an ancient evolutionary process, but he rejected Huxley's fatalism, arguing that there was greater scope for autonomy—both collective and individual—than his teacher ordained. The contrast between the metaphors they employed indexes the substantive difference. Whereas Wells spoke of humanity “steering itself against the currents and winds of the universe” (Reference Wells1975b, 218), Huxley invoked war (Reference Huxley, Paradis and Williams1989a: 70, 85; Reference Huxley1989b: 85, 141). For Wells, humans had considerable freedom of action to pursue their own ends within a spatiotemporal framework structured by evolution. With intelligent piloting, it was possible to create societies “cunningly balanced against external necessities on the one hand, and the artificial factor in the individual on the other,” where everyone, and indeed “every sentient creature,” could be “generally happy” (Reference Wells1975b, 218). Wells's modern utopia was characterized by universal peace and harmony, as competition was harnessed to beneficent social ends, education instilled discipline and a sense of duty, and a program of “positive” eugenics blocked the least “fit” members of society from reproducing. Degeneration could be postponed indefinitely.Footnote ² In contrast, Huxley had declared that such happiness was impossible to achieve (Reference Huxley, Paradis and Williams1989a, 102).

“Philosophy,” Wells observed, “correlates the sciences and keeps them subservient to the universals of life” (Reference Wells2016b, 213). It was essential for guiding thought and action. But what philosophy did Wells affirm? Huxley's capacious philosophical range included Stoicism and Buddhism, though his primary interests were in eighteenth-century British thinkers, especially Hume (Huxley Reference Huxley1879, Reference Huxley1989b; Paradis Reference Paradis1989). Little of Huxley's philosophical armature is found in Wells's work. Instead, Wells came to regard pragmatism as both a reflection of and a solution to contemporary intellectual conundrums. Above all, James acted as inspiration, though Wells also drew on Schiller.Footnote ³ (He did not engage with Peirce or Dewey during this period.) In Anticipations, he described James's The Principles of Psychology as “that most wonderful book” (Reference Wells1999, 134). Looking back on his early career, Wells noted that, as the century dawned, he had labored “under the influence” of James's Will to Believe (Reference Wells1942, 1). On hearing of James's death in 1910, he wrote to Henry James that the philosopher had been “something big and reassuring in my background for many years” (Edel and Ray Reference Edel and Ray1958, 124). Elsewhere, he anointed James his “friend and master” (Reference Wells1917, 203).

James reciprocated the admiration, lavishing praise on Wells: “You enrich the lean earth on which you have consented for awhile to incarnate yourself!” (Reference James2004, 8).Footnote ⁴ He extolled First and Last Things, Wells's main philosophical text, as a “great achievement,” pronouncing that it should be “used as a textbook in all the colleges of the world.” Wells had put his “finger accurately on the true emphases and (in the main) on what seem to me the true solutions,” and it was worth “any 100 volumes on Metaphysics and any 200 of Ethics, of the ordinary sort” (Reference James2004, 126). James was also clear about Wells's philosophical identity: “You're a pragmatist!” (Reference James2003, 290). Indeed, he regarded Wells as one of the foremost preachers of the creed. In May 1906, James told the literary critic John Jay Chapman that a philosophical revolution was brewing, and that among pragmatists leading the charge, “H. G. Wells ought to be counted in” (Reference James2003, 225).

Wells's pragmatism was recognized at the time. In 1909, the idealist philosopher J. H. Muirhead hailed him as the “latest and most brilliant recruit. . .to philosophy as well as to Pragmatism” (Reference Muirhead1909, 183). Reviewing First and Last Things, the sociologist Charles Ellwood noted that Wells professed “a sort of individualistic pragmatism” (Reference Ellwood1909, 550), while the literary critic Van Wyck Brooks wrote, in the first intellectual biography of the Englishman, that Wells was “perfectly American,” not least because of his “thorough-going pragmatism.” Like James, Brooks elevated him to the pragmatist pantheon: “Wells has inevitably become one of the leaders” (Reference Brooks1915, 178).Footnote ⁵ A handful of literary scholars—Sylvia Hardy above all—have probed James's influence on Wells's fiction, though they rarely address his political thought (Hardy Reference Hardy1991, Reference Hardy and McLean2008; Parrinder Reference Parrinder1995, 101). Indeed, scholarship since the Second World War has tended to miss what was clear to many of his contemporaries. The relationship between Wells's pragmatism and his socialism is usually mentioned only in passing (Wagar Reference Wagar1961, 77, 106, 251; Wagar Reference Wagar2004, 30–2, 40–43; Partington Reference Partington2008, 520), or it is ignored (Earle Reference Earle1950; Hyde Reference Hyde1956; Partington Reference Partington2003; Planinc Reference Planinc2017; Toye Reference Toye2008; Smith Reference Smith1986, 122–28). Yet, his pragmatism was integral to his political vision, and that vision was one of the most widely discussed of the day.

This poses an interpretive puzzle: why did Wells's pragmatism drop from view? There are many possible answers to this question. Two concern the scholarship on Wells. First, the bulk of work on Wells has been produced by literary scholars, and they frequently downplay or sideline his philosophical, social, and political writings. They approach his vast oeuvre—over 100 books, hundreds of shorter documents, thousands of pieces of correspondence—with their own disciplinary training, questions, and interests. Moreover, Wells scholars have tended to overlook the significance of the texts in which he outlined his pragmatism most explicitly, especially “Scepticism of the Instrument” (Reference Wells1904) and First and Last Things (Reference Wells2016b). Second, while Wells repeatedly affirmed his commitment to nominalism, he rarely mentioned James during the interwar period. Strikingly, James plays little role in Wells's Experiment in Autobiography (1934), whereas Huxley is acclaimed. But as he later confessed, Wells's account of his intellectual formation is misleading. In 1936, a German scholar, Fritz Krog, questioned Wells about the absence of James. In reply, Wells admitted that Experiment was deficient. “I assimilated Pragmatism so completely that I failed to do justice in the Autobiography to William James. . .The omission was not deliberate. It is an incompleteness. I took him for granted.”Footnote ⁶ That omission has helped to distort understanding of Wells.

The historiography of pragmatism has ignored Wells. Once again, there are numerous possible reasons to explain this omission. Two are especially pertinent. The first is that work on pragmatism often adopts canonical interpretive protocols, plotting the early story of the tradition through reference to a select group of pivotal figures, above all James, Peirce, and Dewey. This means that the wider intellectual environment in which pragmatism flourished, both in the United States and abroad, is often passed over. This narrow focus is reinforced by a second problem. Bruce Kuklick has recently lamented the “disorder” besetting historical work on pragmatism (Reference Kuklick2017, 17). The subject is spread across three scholarly fields—American philosophy, American Studies, and intellectual history—each of which narrates a different story. He argues that scholars working in all three have exhibited a tendency to “Americanize” the tradition, reading pragmatism as a phenomenon originating from, and speaking mainly to, a particular national community, thus severing it from the transnational circuits of debate and reception that shaped its early years. A similar point could be made about the historical understanding of pragmatist political theory. Scholarship across all these interpretive perspectives has ignored Wells, despite his global reputation, his self-proclaimed pragmatism, and the significance he had for James (Festenstein Reference Festenstein1997; Pihlström Reference Pihlström2015; Shook and Margolis Reference Shook and Margolis2009; Thayer Reference Thayer1968).

Traditions of thought can be conceptualized as the sum of the arguments that have been classified as X, and recognized as such by other self-proclaimed X's, across time and space (Bell Reference Bell2014). On this “summative” account, if a thinker self-identifies with a tradition and this claim is recognized by a significant group of others who self-identify with it—especially if they include some of its most influential proponents—then we can argue that they belong to that tradition. Wells clearly meets these criteria: he described himself as a pragmatist, and was seen by others—including two of the leading pragmatists of the day—as such. Recognizing Wells's pragmatism necessitates a remapping of the early history of pragmatism.

THE LIFE KINETIC

Lacking any formal training in philosophy, Wells developed his metaphysical views in the late 1880s and early 1890s though reflecting on his education in biology. “Zoology,” he proclaimed, was a “philosophy and a literature to those who can read its symbols” (Reference Wells1894, 131). By the turn of the century, he was reading widely in philosophy, which sharpened his untutored arguments and allowed him to locate them in relation to contemporary schools of thought. His philosophical project had deconstructive and reconstructive elements. The deconstructive, the focus of this section, challenged orthodox accounts of truth and meaning. The reconstructive, which I discuss in the final section, aimed to reconcile his corrosive skepticism with an optimistic belief in human (socialist) destiny.

Wells sketched two general lines of reasoning—one ontological, the other epistemological—which, when combined, issued in his “heretical metaphysical scepticism.” First, the world was constituted in a particular way: it was composed of “uniques,” nonidentical particulars. Second, the human cognitive apparatus was poorly designed to grasp reality. “The forceps of our minds,” he wrote, “are clumsy forceps and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it” (Reference Wells2016b, 24–5). This had deep implications for what could be known about the world and how people should act in it. Wells fused these distinct claims, chiefly in his account of the limits of language. He argued that speech induced delusion through convincing people of its “unreal exactness, its actual habitual deflection from fact” (Reference Wells2016b, 35). The dappled world invariably eluded its signifying capacity.

The central argument of Wells's earliest philosophical essay, “The Rediscovery of the Unique” (1891), was that, while “All beings are unique, or, nothing is strictly like anything else” (Reference Wells1975a, 23), humans were incapable of adequately registering this fact. Although he later admitted that the essay was flawed (Reference Wells1904, 383; Reference Wells2008, I, 223–4), nominalism remained the keystone of his metaphysics. It was, he believed, an intellectual whirlwind coursing through society.

His nominalism is discussed at length in “Scepticism of the Instrument,” which he subsequently published in Mind, the esteemed philosophy journal, and reprinted as an Appendix to A Modern Utopia. It originated with an invitation to lecture to the Oxford Philosophical Society, which had been founded in 1898 to combat both naturalism and neo-Hegelian Absolute Idealism. The main fruit of their deliberations was an edited collection, Personal Idealism (1902), a book that James hailed as “rich in style and exceptionally rich in ideas” (Reference James1903, 7), and which Wells cited. In particular, Wells praised “Axioms as Postulates,” the programmatic chapter written by Schiller, observing that his own ideas fell “somewhere near to and parallel with” it (Reference Wells1904, 381; cf 393). A friend of James, Schiller was the leading European pragmatist (Porrovecchio Reference Porrovecchio2011; Skodo Reference Skodo2015; Thayer Reference Thayer1968, 272–303). Subsequently, he and Wells engaged in a productive correspondence and exchanged writings. Schiller commended “Scepticism” as “a great deal better than most of the stuff that gets into Mind,” and expressed pleasure when Wells informed him that First and Last Things was written on “sound pragmatic lines.”Footnote ⁷

Wells sketched arguments about classification, negative terms, and levels of cognition. Classification was both “a necessary condition of the working of the mental implement” and a “departure from the objective truth of things” (Reference Wells1904, 384). The human mind, on this account, only functions by “disregarding individuality and treating uniques as identically similar objects. . .so as to group them under one term,” and consequently, “it tends automatically to intensify the significance of that term” (Reference Wells1904, 389). Consider chairs.

We encounter a world of multiplicity but our language tricks us into thinking in terms of identity and patterned regularity.

Nominalists are committed to the view that everything is concrete or particular. James, unlike Peirce, placed nominalism at the heart of pragmatism (James Reference James and Gunn2000, 28; Dewey Reference Dewey, Hickman and Alexander1998, 5). Wells followed his lead. “[C]ounting, classification, measurement,” indeed the “whole fabric of mathematics,” was both “subjective and deceitful,” while the “uniqueness of individuals is the objective truth” (Reference Wells1907, 197; see also Reference Wells1975a, 25).

Classificatory schemes were “merely unavoidable conditions to mental activity—regrettable conditions rather than essential facts” (Reference Wells1904, 325). Scepticism about classification challenged the validity of classical logic—a favorite topic of James and Schiller. Syllogism, Wells argued, was based on classification, and “all hard logical reasoning” implied confidence in the “objective reality of classification and number,” whereas the “final absolute truth of things” was impossible to grasp (Reference Wells1904, 385, 386). Wells returned to the theme in A Modern Utopia, writing that it was commonly assumed that “rules of logic, the system of counting and measurement,” and “general categories and schemes of resemblance and difference,” were fixed and eternal (Reference Wells and Claeys2005a, 20). Reanimating a “philosophy long lost to men,” contemporary thinkers had demonstrated that this was mistaken (Reference Wells and Claeys2005a, 20).Footnote ⁸ In A Preface to Politics, Walter Lippmann observed that “Scepticism of the Instrument” was the best account of the critique of classification adduced by James (Reference Lippmann1913, 118).

This line of argument had important implications for empirical political analysis and political philosophy. The “uniqueness” of particulars meant that the orthodox methodological precepts of social science, based on sweeping classifications of society, were more misleading than illuminating. In Mankind in the Making, for example, Wells criticized the characterization of gender roles. We are told what “women” and “men” want or believe, he complained, yet there was “no such woman and no such man, but a vast variety of temperaments and dispositions, monadic, dyadic, and polymeric souls,” and it was impossible to build any adequate “code” on such classifications (Reference Wells1903, 299). The same was true of attempts to categorize social classes, nations, and races. Wells was thus hostile to the project of modeling social science on the natural sciences (Reference Wells1907; Bell, forthcoming). In 1891, he argued that moral principles needed to be reimagined as conventions, valuable only insofar as they helped realize human ends. While they were often “convenient as a missile weapon,” such principles dissolved when confronted with metaphysical skepticism (Reference Wells1975a, 29). He reaffirmed this position in First and Last Things, arguing that “nothing possessing the general validity of fact” could be ascertained about normative questions (Reference Wells2016b, 42). This argument dovetailed with James's account of morality (Reference James1979a, 206). In both cases, nominalism meant that common forms of reasoning about human life were faulty, at least if they were taken to reveal “absolute” truths about the world rather than providing revocable conceptual technologies for navigating it.

Wells's second argument concerned “negative” terms. Such terms, he explained, were “in plain fact just nothing”—“Not-A is the absence of any trace of the quality that constitutes A, it is the rest of everything forever.” Drawing a boundary creates a negative class and “passes away into the illimitable horizon of nothingness” (Reference Wells1904, 388). The human mind, however, had a tendency to treat A and Not-A as equivalents, with Not-A seen as a “thing mysteriously in the Nature of A” (Reference Wells2016b, 28). This was a bad mistake. Take the color pink. In identifying something as pink, you draw a demarcation line. “Beyond is the not pink, known and knowable, and still in the not pink region one comes to the Outer Darkness.” An infinite regress looms. “That same Outer Darkness and nothingness of infinite space and infinite time, and any being of infinite qualities, and all that region I rule out of court in my philosophy altogether” (Reference Wells1904, 388). Wells's examples included such loaded terms—central to philosophical reflection at the time—as “absolute” and “infinite.” The mind had a tendency to treat them as “real existences” (Reference Wells1904, 387), when they were meaningless. Furthermore, Wells argued, many “apparently positive terms” are, or had become, “practically negative terms,” and suffered from the same conceptual problems. “Omniscient” was his favored example. “[K]nowing,” he averred, is the “relation of a conscious being to something not itself, that the thing known is defined as a system of parts and aspects and relationships, that knowledge is comprehension, and so that only finite things can know or be known.” It followed that, when talking of a “being of infinite extension and infinite duration, omniscient and omnipotent and Perfect, you seem to me to be talking in negatives of nothing whatever” (Reference Wells1904, 388). Idealists, James wrote to Schiller, “simply have ‘absoluteness’ so ingrained in them that they can't conceive of what any alternative can mean” (Reference James2002, 447). Wells concurred: “When you speak of the Absolute you speak to me of nothing” (Reference Wells1904, 388). This skepticism implied, among other things, that the popular idealist political thinking of Green, Bradley, Bosanquet, and Ritchie was based on incoherent, even unintelligible, philosophical foundations.

Recognition of the intrinsic fallibility of classificatory schema demanded a philosophically induced therapeutic regime—a form of care of the self. “Essentially we have to train our minds to think anew, if we are to think beyond the purposes for which the mind seems to have been evolved” (Wells Reference Wells2016b, 35). Artificial man could work on—and potentially bring under control—the apparatus that natural man had inherited. Having undergone such therapy, the inhabitants of Utopia adopted a pragmatist “science of human association” to govern their society. Adhering to a “philosophy of uniqueness,” they rejected “anything beyond similarities and practical parallelisms” (Wells Reference Wells and Claeys2005a, 201), while accepting the necessity of provisional classifications. “The social theorists of Utopia,” Wells wrote, discarded orthodox classifications such as labor and capital, regarding them as mere “accidental categories.” Instead, they distinguished between four types of human temperament—the poietic, kinetic, dull, and base (Reference Wells and Claeys2005a, 179)—which roughly mapped the “range and quality and character” of the imagination. Only those possessing one or other of the first two were eligible to serve as members of the ruling “Samurai” class. Yet no Utopian made the mistake of viewing this as “classification for individual application,” such that persons could be characterized as belonging exclusively to one type, for, in reality, the qualities were intermingled. It was a “classification to an end”—the end of virtuous governance—not a “classification for Truth.” Unfortunately, Wells never provided any guidance on how to distinguish apt from inapt classifications, other than specifying the epistemic criterion that aptness necessitated acknowledging their provisional and rough-grained character.

In First and Last Things, Wells identified another “infirmity of mind.” He drew the argument from an unpublished paper by Amber Reeves, who had developed a “suggestion” of Schiller's.

The mind was thus limited both by the failures of language and its inability to recognize the nature of time. It registered a dynamic reality in largely static terms (Reference Wells2016b, 31). James contended that, while experience was fluid, language was static. As Dewey noted, pragmatism had “a metaphysical implication. The doctrine of the value of consequences leads us to take the future into consideration. And this taking into consideration of the future takes us to the conception of a universe whose evolution is not finished, of a universe that is still, in James's terms, ‘in the making,’ ‘in the process of becoming,’ of a universe up to certain point still plastic” (Dewey Reference Dewey, Hickman and Alexander1998, 8). Wells shared this obsession with the flux of time, the unfinished nature of evolution, and the importance of consequences (Reference Wells1902). He often contrasted “static” and “dynamic” conceptions of the world. What made his Utopia modern was its “kinetic” character, the fact that it was constantly changing—not a “permanent State” but a “hopeful stage leading to a long ascent of stages” (Reference Wells and Claeys2005a, 12). There was “no being,” he declaimed, but instead “a universal becoming of individualities,” and Plato had erred “when he turned towards his museum of specific ideals” in The Republic (Reference Wells and Claeys2005a, 20–1). As Huxley had once done, Wells cited Heraclitus, whose creed, “[t]here is no Being but Becoming,” encapsulated his vision (Reference Wells2016b, 10–11; Reference Wells and Claeys2005a, 21; Huxley Reference Huxley1989b, 107, 127). A mutually reinforcing combination of Jamesian metaphysical commitments and Huxleyean evolutionary theory provided Wells with a framework through which to comprehend a world of becoming.

His third argument focused on the “stratification of human ideas.” The universe can be seen, Wells suggested, “in many different fashions and expressed by many different systems of terms, each expression within its limits true and yet incommensurable with expression upon a different system” (Reference Wells2016b, 32). His main example was the clash between free will and determinism. James used this issue to demonstrate the “pragmatic method”—the attempt to “interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences” (James Reference James and Gunn2000, 25)—in dissolving philosophical disputes. Once we have asked about the practical consequences of believing in either claim, we see that there is no conflict (Reference James1981, 1179; Reference James1979b). Wells followed the same strategy. He defined free will—contra James, he noted—as self-determination and predestination as “equivalent to the conception of a universe rigid in time and space,” wherein it was possible in theory to predict all human action (Reference Wells2016b, 49). If placed on the same plane these ideas were irreconcilable. Wells rejected this conclusion, endorsing both while asserting that the “important belief is free will” (Reference Wells2016b, 49). Since predestination had “no practical value” (Reference Wells2016b, 49), and, in particular, since it did not impinge on everyday decision-making, it could be ignored, even if it was theoretically true. “I am free and freely and responsibly making the future—as far as I am concerned. You others are equally free” (Reference Wells2016b, 50). Practical, purposeful activity grounded in lived experience dissolved such hypothetical disputes.

In good pragmatist fashion, Wells thought that the disclosure or resolution of philosophical confusion had great public significance: “most of the troubles of humanity are really misunderstandings” (Reference Wells2016b, 14). Recognizing the roots of conflict in metaphysical differences facilitated deeper cooperation. In addressing such confusions, he stated, “lies not only the cures of war and poverty” but also the “general form of all man's duty and the essential work of mankind” (Reference Wells2016b, 147). Few grander claims have been made about the value of philosophical reflection.

BEYOND THE SCHOOLMEN: NOMINALISM AND POLITICAL THEORY

In The Outline of History, Wells cautioned that “many people today blunder dangerously through their neglect of the [nominalist] issues the schoolmen discussed” (Reference Wells and Wagar2004, 210). Such blunders could be eliminated by absorbing the lessons of (Jamesian) pragmatism. As he later put it,

Justice, democracy, nationality, rights, the people: all fell foul of his skepticism. All required metaphysical deflation. For Wells, as for James, pragmatism meant “looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts” (James Reference James and Gunn2000, 29).

The idea of the people, for example, was dangerously misleading. The “most impossible and the most incredible” of “personifications,” it designated an entity composing more than the sum of its parts. An elusive emergent property irreducible to concrete persons, this “individuality of a higher order” established the legitimacy of government authority (Reference Wells1914b, 245). Lacking powers of speech or action, there was a “need of rulers and interpreters,” who comprised the priesthood of politics. “If they express its will in law and fact, in book and song, they prosper under its mysterious approval; if they do not, it revolts or forgets or does something else of an equally annihilatory sort” (Reference Wells1914b, 246). The people, then, was conceptualized as an agent. The problem was that this understanding was the result of an unjustifiable intension of the term, a common vice that elsewhere Wells suggested “explains a large proportion of human prejudice and misunderstanding” (Reference Wells2016b, 28). He insisted that the human world was constituted only by individuals and that collective action was simply the “algebraic sum of all individual action” (Reference Wells1914b, 246; Reference Wells2016b 158–9). The term was thus ideologically mystifying, shaping behavior and reproducing political divisions. Banishing this deceptive anthropomorphic idea, and recognizing the existence of “only enormous differentiating millions of men,” would catalyze new possibilities (Reference Wells1914b, 250). The implications for his critique of state sovereignty were clear. Wells utilized this kind of argument throughout his career.Footnote ⁹ In The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, a vast conspectus of human affairs published in 1932, he reaffirmed the importance of the still incomplete nominalist “emancipation of the human mind” that had found its most recent expression in the pragmatist revolution. Metaphysical disagreements, he argued, were at the root of the “greatest dangers that threaten our race” (Reference Wells1932, 68–9). Nationalism and racism were based on the same type of misleading abstraction as “the people.” Recognizing such cognitive errors, he suggested naively, could banish the scourge of xenophobia and war.

Wells also offered a pragmatist gloss on rights. Given his nominalism, the idea of natural rights—or any “absolute” conception—struck him as absurd. However, it did not follow that rights were irrelevant. They were “merely conventional,” like the “rules of a game, the rules of etiquette,” or “forms of address” (Reference Wells2016b, 163). Moreover, he historicized rights, arguing that they had emerged in the “mercantile phase of human development” (Reference Wells2016b, 162). Wells seems to have meant two things here. First, that the language of rights was only intelligible within a modern capitalist system that modeled interpersonal relationships as a quasilegal contract—interpolating persons as “litigious units” observing “nicely defined relationships” (Reference Wells2016b, 162). It thus excluded duty and service. And, second, that it implied a form of equality between persons that was empirically false. Evolutionary theory demonstrated that “all men are individual and unique,” and consequently that people were “superior and inferior upon countless scores” (Reference Wells1999, 163; Reference Wells1903, 26). The “appeal to justice” is thus an “inadequate attempt to de-individualize a case” (Reference Wells2016b, 163). It invariably missed the specific qualities or circumstances necessary to make sound judgements. “We perceive more and more clearly,” he wrote,

It was thus important, Wells asserted in Mankind in the Making, to view all “abstract, refined, and intellectualized ideas,” including Right and Liberty, as “starting propositions.” Although potentially valuable, they were not “primary” (Reference Wells1903, 8). Rather than serving as “quasi-absolute standards” (Reference Wells2016b, 163), rights should be judged on their usefulness in particular contexts. They could, for example, solve coordination problems, “economize thought” or “facilitate mutual self-understanding and codify common action” (Reference Wells2016b, 163). Neither idols of modern democratic politics nor timeless truths of the moral cosmos, they were instruments for helping to govern a society.Footnote ¹⁰

Given that his own work was awash with typologies and sweeping classifications, Wells was susceptible to the criticism he leveled at others. In January 1902, Henry James queried the categories used in Anticipations to map contemporary social classes. “There were more kinds of people than could fit into them,” he worried (Wells Reference Wells and Smith1998, 76). Much the same could be said of Wells's other political writings. Occasionally Wells admitted that he had not followed his own philosophical admonitions. In First and Last Things, he acknowledged that the Samurai of A Modern Utopia were too homogenous in beliefs and behavior (Reference Wells2016b, 122). A vanguardist “aristocratic method” of progress was important, even inevitable, but it had to embrace difference and individuality. “All organized aristocracy is manifestly begotten by that fallacy of classification my Metaphysical book set itself to expose” (Reference Wells2016b, 158). This moment of autocritique epitomizes Wells's approach to political theorizing. He was constantly revising his ideas in response to criticism and new experiences. Simon James argues that the “rewriting of his utopian vision also constitutes a kind of forward revision, as if by periodic repetition of the same process of literary creation, reality might each time be improved” (Reference James2012, 125). Sarah Cole (forthcoming) suggests that his thought can be characterized as “dialectal.” His twists and turns can also be seen as expressions of a pragmatist commitment to experimentation. “Pragmatism as I conceive it,” he wrote, involved the “extension of the experimental spirit to all human interests” (Reference Wells2016b, 43).

As well as challenging some of the conceptual shibboleths of modern political thought, Wells directed his skepticism at both critics of socialism and other socialist thinkers. Many of them were hamstrung by their failure to acknowledge the profound limitations of the “instrument” and the complexity of a world of “uniques.” In New Worlds for Old, he contended that most objections to socialism were marred by the “commonest vice” of reasoning, based on the “queer old scholastic logic.” Critics were unable or unwilling to think beyond binaries (Wells Reference Wells1908, 177). He singled out William Hurrell Mallock, a leading British antisocialist. “[G]oing about arranging his syllogisms, extracting his opponents ‘self-contradictions,’” Mallock attacked socialism “in quite the spirit of the young medieval scholar returning home to prove beyond dispute that ‘my cat has ten tails’ and, given a yard's start, that a tortoise can always keep ahead of a running man.” His chief mistake was to believe that something was always either A or Not-A, “either a thing is green or it is not green; either a thing is heavy or it is not heavy” (Wells Reference Wells1908, 177–8). Mallock claimed, for example, that socialists demanded the abolition of private property and the family (Wells Reference Wells1908, 179–80). But this was to place the doctrine under a blanket classification, equating all positions with the most radical. “To any person with a philosophical education this is a ridiculous mental process, but it seems perfectly rational to an untrained mind—and that is the usual case with the anti-Socialist” (Wells Reference Wells1908, 178). This mistake was compounded by an “error of overstatement” (Wells Reference Wells1908, 182), of thinking, for example, that a challenge to some forms of property meant an assault on all property. G. K. Chesterton and Max Beerbohm were likewise guilty of this vice. “The method of reasoning in all of these cases is the same: it is to assume that whatever the Socialist postulates as desirable is wanted without limit or qualification; to imagine whatever proposal is chosen for the controversy is to be carried out by uncontrolled monomaniacs” (Wells Reference Wells1908, 184). Critics of socialism were unable to acknowledge “qualified statements.”

In his popular semiautobiographical 1911 novel The New Machiavelli, the hero of the story, Richard Remington, declares that “my sympathies have always been Pragmatist. I belong almost by nature to that school of Pragmatism that, following the medieval Nominalists, bases itself upon a denial of the reality of classes, and of the validity of general laws.” In contrast, the Baileys—Wells's parody of the Fabian socialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb—“classified everything,” and, as such, they were philosophical “Realists” committed, as were most of those with “no metaphysical aptitude and no metaphysical training,” to the belief that “classes were real and independent of their individuals” (Reference Wells and James2005b, 174). This disqualified them as serious students of society.

Wells was also scathing about orthodox political economy. While its exponents displayed many failings, he argued that their use of language lead them to depart “more and more from reality” (Reference Wells1908, 222). Utilizing terms like rent, capital, and value, as if they were precise elements of scientific terminology rather than hopelessly vague attempts to capture a fluid reality, they falsely claimed the authority of the natural sciences (see also Wells Reference Wells1907). The result was a literature “more abundant, more difficult and less real than all the exercises of the schoolmen put together” (Reference Wells1908, 222). Wells condemned Marx for replicating many of the same mistakes. Among other faults, he erred in accepting the “verbal instruments” of the political economists while seeking to “reclassify and redefine” them. Marx had constructed an elaborate theoretical edifice on quicksand.

Wells's criticisms of other socialist positions often blended metaphysical skepticism and evolutionary argumentation. Early socialists, including Saint-Simon, Proudhon, and Fourier, fought a valiant battle against the forces of industrial capitalism, but their ideas were “extremely imperfect.” They required the creation of a new type of (socialist) person, and thus sought to transcend the constraints of natural man (Reference Wells1908, 207–9). Moreover, they too frequently made “unqualified statements,” especially concerning property. Rather than distinguishing between defensible and indefensible forms of ownership, they claimed that all property should be abolished. As “unreal as mathematics,” early socialist thought displayed “much the same relation to truth as the abstract process of calculation has to concrete individual things.” They were incapable of adopting the “reasoned middle attitude,” of refusing binary choices (Reference Wells1908, 210; Reference Wells1903 399–400). It was essential for socialists to absorb the lessons of both Huxley and James.

Walter Lippmann once suggested that Wells and James “come nearer to having a vocabulary fit for political uses than any other writers of English,” as they had the rare ability to “convey some of the curiosity and formlessness of modern life” (Reference Lippmann2000, 97). James was similarly impressed by Wells's communicative ability, declaring that, like Tolstoy, he possessed the gift of “contagious speech,” an extraordinary talent that allowed him to set a “similar mood vibrating in the reader” (Reference James2004, 126). James regarded the Englishman as one of the most inventive and effective advocates of pragmatism. He was effusive about Wells's philosophical and political writings. Anticipations, James wrote to the archaeologist Joseph Thatcher Clarke, was “tremendously bold” and would exert a “big liberating influence on some men's minds” (Reference James2002, 41). The Future in America was “as good a service as a foreigner has ever performed” for the American people (Reference James2003, 290), while A Modern Utopia demonstrated that Wells's “virtues are unparalleled and transcendent,” and that his work would give a “shove to the practical thought of the next generation that will be amongst the greatest of its influences of good” (Reference James2003, 56). New Worlds for Old, James predicted in April 1908, would be seen as an “‘epoch-making’ and tremendously influential document” (Reference James2004, 8). While exaggerating the quality and impact of Wells's work, these assessments highlight the public role that James hoped his pragmatist vision could play. Moreover, it is arguable that reading Wells had a significant effect on James's thinking. In his most famous political essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” James quotes extensively from Wells, endorsing his arguments about the unintended social effects of military organization: “H. G. Wells, as usual, sees the center of the situation” (Reference James and Kamber2016, 284).Footnote ¹¹ By then, James had converted to a utopian account of socialism. “I will now confess my own utopia,” he wrote: “I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of a socialistic equilibrium” (Reference James and Kamber2016, 281). However, as we shall see, their visions of socialism diverged considerably.

THE PROJECT OF ALL THINGS: SOCIALISM AS SPIRITUAL ETHOS

For both James and Wells, the human mind was a creative instrument. James had written in Pragmatism that the world “stands really malleable, waiting to receive its final touches at our hands” (Reference James and Gunn2000, 112). Wells would have concurred. He saw his role as helping to craft a socialist future, to realize the full potential of the species. His views on how to combine metaphysical skepticism and a vision of a future world-state were elaborated in First and Last Things, though his discussion left many theoretical issues unresolved. He regarded moral and political beliefs as expressions of will guided by practical interests. “I adopt certain beliefs because I feel the need for them, because I feel an often quite unanalysable rightness in them.” As such, his belief in them rested “on the fact that they work for me and satisfy my desire for harmony and beauty.” He was happy to admit that such beliefs were “arbitrary”; but they were nevertheless beliefs he saw fit “to impose upon my universe” (Reference Wells2016b, 43; Reference Wells1903, 240). This imposition had clear political intent. “My beliefs, my dogmas, my rules,” he asserted, “are made for my campaigning needs, like the knapsack and water bottle of a Cockney soldier invading some stupendous mountain gorge” (Reference Wells2016b, 197). Arbitrariness did not mean that social agreement or truth was unattainable. If beliefs were sufficiently convincing—and in particular if they could be verified through experiment—then convergence on their truth-value could be reached. “[I]t is the indefensible truth that lasts; it lasts because it works and serves. People come to it and remain and attract other understanding and enquiring people” (Reference Wells2016b, 43). While such knowledge was always provisional, it was secure enough to navigate the world.

Pragmatists were often criticized for the corrosive effects of their philosophy. The physicist Edwin Herbert Hall wrote to James, castigating him and Wells for advocating a dangerous will-to-believe, a charge that James rejected (James Reference James2004, 363). Schiller denied that pragmatism fostered intellectual anarchy.

While conceding that his skepticism destroyed the “universal claim of ethical imperatives,” as well as the “universal claim of any religious teaching” (Reference Wells1904, 391), Wells maintained that it was a matter of “practical necessity” to hold ethical beliefs, not least because they motivated action. The impossibly of ascertaining certain knowledge about the world, or grounding normative claims, was no bar to political understanding or transformation.

Wells claimed that his metaphysical beliefs could be reconciled with his optimism about human affairs through an act of faith. “Our lives and powers are limited, our scope in space and time is limited, and it is not unreasonable that for fundamental beliefs we must go outside the sphere of reason and set our feet upon Faith” (Reference Wells1902, 331). Moral and political beliefs were equivalent to artistic creation, “as much self-expression as one's poetry or painting or music” (Reference Wells1904, 391; Reference Wells2016b, 42). Worlds were made by acts of will. “Will,” he proclaimed, “is stronger than Fact, it can mould and overcome Fact” (Reference Wells and Claeys2005a, 245). As Wells acknowledged later, his early work was written “under the influence” of James's The Will to Believe, which led him to (over)emphasize the “wilful element in belief” (Reference Wells1942, 1). For Wells, beliefs crystalized into social practices, legal regimes and political institutions, and it followed that a change in beliefs could change the world. Wells's early socialism focused principally on altering beliefs as a necessary preliminary to transforming institutions and public policies (Reference Wells1908, 203, 265). Political thinking went badly astray when it concentrated on the latter, a failing he discerned among many contemporary socialists. Property was one such idea. The capitalist regime of private property was a historically contingent cluster of beliefs (Reference Wells1908, 62). Challenging those encrusted beliefs was an essential first step in remaking the social order. Wells's ideational view of socialism attracted criticism. Blaming his pragmatism, Brooks charged Wells with abandoning materialist economic analysis for “psychology” (Reference Brooks1915, 68).

The connection between Wells's short-term practical demands—old-age pensions, public health and education, national insurance schemes, financial recognition of “motherhood” (Reference Wells1908, 248–9)—and his long-term goal of a world state was straightforward. The former were prudential steps necessary to help bring about the latter. It was for similar reasons that, prior to the First World War, he promoted both a union of the “English-speaking peoples” and the continuation of the British empire as agents to precipitate a post-Westphalian order (Reference Wells1999, 138–55; Reference Wells1903, 1–33; Bell Reference Bell2016, 189–96). For Wells, socialism was institutionally indeterminate—various policies or organizational structures were viable as long as they contributed to the synthesis of human purposes and the creation of a world-state (Reference Wells2016b, 86–7). Socialism was both a reflection of the collective consciousness of humanity and a diffused movement seeking to attain its full flourishing.

In Pragmatism, James advocated a philosophical sensibility that balanced “scientific loyalty to facts” with the “old confidence in human values and the resultant spontaneity, whether of the religious or romantic type” (Reference James and Gunn2000, 14). Wells proffered a similar view—pragmatism allowed him to reconcile evolutionary theory with an account of human life that allowed for volition, creativity, and spirituality. Wells argued that science did not rest on secure epistemic foundations—though this had little impact on its practical value—and that other forms of knowledge incapable of empirical verification may nevertheless be useful for particular purposes (Reference Wells2016b, 36; James Reference James1979a). Here, too, James was a fellow traveler, arguing that pragmatism encompassed the spiritual: “She will count mystical experiences if they have practical consequences” (Reference James and Gunn2000, 39–40). Even as Wells's philosophical commitments dissolved claims to certainty, they opened the door to mysticism. His position, he admitted, “restores special providence and unverified assertions to the stock of credible things, and liberty to the human imagination” (Reference Wells1975a, 22). He was clear about his own will to believe. Even those who reject “each and every transcendentalism that is offered to us,” nevertheless “find it imperative to believe in spite of the absolute darkness that the whole of being has an interaction and a correlation beyond the system of causes that the scientific method reveals” (Reference Wells1975d, 45). This was a fair description of the reconstructive dimension of Wells's philosophical system.

Wells attempted to harmonize difference and unity. His celebration of individuality was derived from his nominalism. In Utopia, acknowledgement of the unique lead to an “insistence upon individuality and the individual difference as the significance of life” (Reference Wells and Claeys2005a, 20). This sense of individuality underpinned his conception of freedom: accepting metaphysical uniqueness “steadily intensifies the value of freedom, until at last we begin to see liberty as the very substance of life, that indeed it is life” (Reference Wells and Claeys2005a, 28; see also Reference Wells1908, 192–5). To be fully human was to be free because freedom was necessary for individual personalities to flourish and for healthy competition to catalyze progress, allowing “artificial man” to tame “natural man.” Wells argued that individual freedom had to be balanced against the freedom of others and the “welfare of the community as a whole” (Reference Wells1908, 191), though he failed to specify the appropriate equilibrium. He contrasted his account with “individualistic individuality,” the egotistic self-interest defended by Spencer (Wells Reference Wells1903, 13). “The State is for individuals, the law is for freedoms, the world is for experiment, experience and change,” he proclaimed: “these are the fundamental beliefs upon which a modern Utopia must go” (Reference Wells and Claeys2005a, 66).

Individuality was embedded in a wider whole. The “oneness of the species,” Wells asserted, “is a greater fact than individuality” (Reference Wells2016b, 93). Human history was characterized by the glacial unfolding of species consciousness. “In that awakening of the species, one's own personal being lives and moves—a part of it and contributing to it” (Reference Wells2016b, 62). Humanity was capable of self-consciousness. “You see that from this point of view—which is for me the vividly true and dominating point of view—our individualities, our nations and states and races are but bubbles and clusters of foam upon the great stream of the blood of the species, incidental experiments in the growing knowledge and consciousness of the race” (Reference Wells2016b, 63). This argument relied more on bold assertion than systematic argumentation. Wells expressed faith that humans had meaning and purpose in the universe, and that, given the right conditions, they could prosper. “On the whole—and nowadays almost steadily—things get better,” he divulged in New Worlds for Old. “There is a secular amelioration of life, and it is brought about by Good Will working through the efforts of man” (Reference Wells1908, 5). Humanity could create a utopia on (or beyond) earth. “In the ultimate I know, though I cannot prove my knowledge in any way whatever,” he concluded in First and Last Things, “that everything is right and all things mine” (Reference Wells2016b, 199). This was a dynamic picture of human evolution as purposeful and teleological. It had profound political implications, underwriting the eventual dissolution of exclusive human collectivities—states, nations, peoples—and pointing towards a vision of universal political association. Not just a model of socioeconomic order or a reformist movement, socialism was a “common step we are all taking in the great synthesis of human purpose” (Reference Wells2016b, 85). It was the “awakening of a collective consciousness in humanity, a collective will and a collective mind out of which finer individualities may arise forever in a perpetual series of fresh endeavours and fresh achievements for the race” (Reference Wells2016b, 86). Peering yet further ahead, he foresaw a posthuman future in which the species escaped its feeble organic shell to conquer the unknown. The planet, he hymned, “will someday bear a race beyond our most exalted and temerarious dreams, a race begotten of our wills and the substance of our bodies, a race. . .who will stand upon the earth as one stands upon a footstool and laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars” (Reference Wells1908, 241). Socialism was the medium and the means for achieving this “higher anarchism,” a world beyond law, rights, property, and jealousy (Reference Wells1908, 238).

Wells's attempted synthesis of nominalism and spiritual-cosmic growth was riddled with philosophical tensions, not least (in James's terms) that between pluralism and monism. James was skeptical of Wells's attempt: “you are more monistic in your faith that I should be” (Reference James2004, 126). Despite his fulsome praise for Wells, this was not James's only criticism. Elsewhere he challenged Wells's account of human nature and his admiration for technocratic leadership (Reference James2002, 50, 41; Reference James2004, 8). They also differed over the appropriate scale of socialist politics: Wells was obsessed with vast “synthetic” projects, seeking to agglomerate existing polities into a world state, while James was suspicious of “big” politics, fearing the will to imperial power (Livingston Reference Livingston2016). Nevertheless, James suggested that Wells's synthetic account could be rendered coherent: “as long as you only call it ‘faith,’ that's your right and privilege” (Reference James2004, 126). However, he didn't elaborate on this advice. A plausible pragmatist interpretation of James's advice posits that the practical consequences of the concepts Wells invoked—whether the people or the cosmic mind—are yoked to our epistemic stance towards them.Footnote ¹² If understood as absolutes, they mislead and can be dangerous, but if regarded as arbitrary but powerful objects of faith, they can be affirmed and mobilized insofar as they conduce to particular human purposes. In Jamesian terms, Wells's cosmic-evolutionary proposition can be seen as a “live” and “momentous” hypothesis rather than a “dead” or “trivial” one (Reference James1979a)—though not verified, dropping it would rule out the possibility that it might be true and hamper the valuable political action that such a belief motivated.

Schiller, a proud conservative, was more critical of Wells's political thought. While finding it “most enjoyable and stimulating,” he challenged the socialism of First and Last Things. He charged Wells with failing to discuss institutions in sufficient detail. “I cannot see how any Socialism cd exist without universally powerful political machinery. And the chances are that this machine wd be both tyrannical, wasteful, inefficient and weak in its different functions.” Moreover, he found Wells's account of freedom “quite inadequate,” for socialism and individualism were incompatible. “You I know realise the importance of this individualism as no political theorist has ever done before, but I am sure that even your Utopia does not sufficiently safeguard its possibility.” Indeed he questioned Wells's socialist credentials, labelling him a “Platonic aristocratic individualist,” who wanted to “change the current values and to upset the ruling types of man, in favour of better ones.”Footnote ¹³

Starting with skepticism, Wells ended up with belief. He acknowledged that his vision of socialist destiny and the interconnected nature of the universe was a form of “religious faith” (Reference Wells2016b, 94–5). This was a long way from Huxley's stern agnosticism and the pitiless conflict between nature and human morality. Indeed, at times Wells sounded like the Christian absolute idealists whose metaphysical foundations he so thoroughly rejected. This was no coincidence: “I write in phrases that the evangelical Christianity of my childhood made familiar to me, because they are the most expressive phrases I have ever met for the psychological facts with which I am dealing” (Reference Wells2016b, 82). The kinetic utopia of First and Last Things was a secular theodicy reconciling artificial and natural man in an earthly paradise. It is little wonder that only a few years later Wells entered a brief religious phase, drawing explicitly on James's notion of a finite deity in God the Invisible King (Reference Wells1917; Smith Reference Smith1986, 230–2).