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Toye, Richard
2010.
No Wealth but Life.
p.
161.
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Religious Orientations of H. G. Wells: a Case Study in Scientific Humanism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2011
Extract
The literary career of H. G. Wells began in the reign of Victoria and extended beyond World War II. For some three decades down into the 1930's his ideas on the human situation and the probable future of mankind were as much a part of the popular mind as those of anyone else writing in English. In the last decade of his life, however, there was a sharp decline of interest in Wells which brought him to almost total eclipse by his death in 1946. He had reflected important facets of the mind of an age, and that age had passed. Even at the height of his fame, as we can see clearly now, he was not in the first rank of literary figures and was much less sensitive to what was happening in the West than Eliot or Conrad or even Aldous Huxley.
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References
1 Hazard, Paul, The European Mind, 1680–1715 (London, 1953)Google Scholar. The original French edition of this work was published in 1935. Regarding the continuity of the secular Enlightenment with earlier Christian culture cf. Becker, Carl L., The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, 1932).Google Scholar
2 PeterGay's emphasis on “the affinity of the Enlightenment to classical thought” is misleading. Gay, Peter, The Enlightenment: an Interpretation: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York, 1967)Google Scholar. The men of the Enlightenment quoted classical authors when it served their purpose and found, or thought they found, in classical history and literature illustrations of their own ideas; they even continued to learn from the ancient pagans as Christians had done since ancient times; but their own outlook and interests were essentially different. It is even open to question whether the philosophes ever understood the nature of classical civilization in more than a very partial and superficial way. The Enlightened were pagan in the sense that they were not Christian; but any very close identification of the Enlightenment with ancient, classical paganism obscures the originality of modern humanism and its historical relationship to the Biblical-Christian tradition.
3 The brief comment on Saint-Simon included here is based mostly on Manuel, Frank Edward, The New World of Henri Saint-Simon (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1956).Google Scholar
4 Ibid., 353.
5 Ibid., 127.
6 Quoted by Manuel, op. cit., 305.
7 The persistence of an overt religious interest in scientific humanism is seen again in Huxley's, Julian book Religion without Revelation (New York, 1957).Google ScholarHuxley was a friend of Wells, and the two were co-authors of The Science of Life, 4v. (Garden City, New York, 1931)Google Scholar.
8 Wells, H. G., Experiment in Autobiography (New York, 1934), 456.Google Scholar
9 Ibid., 281.
10 Wells, H. G., God the Invisible King (New York, 1917), 150–55.Google Scholar
11 Wells, H. G., The Secret Places of the Heart (New York, 1922), 17Google Scholar. Wells's idea that Nature is the source of human sin is given its most elaborate literary expression in The Croquet Player (London, 1936), which is one of his best books, though it has not received much attention.
12 Wells, , The Fate of Man (New York, 1939), 150.Google Scholar
13 Wells, H. G., First and Last Things; a Confession of Faith and a Rule of Life (New York, 1908), 135–36Google Scholar. See also pages 194–95 and 240.
14 Wells, H. G., Babes in the Darkling Wood (New York, 1940), 64–66.Google Scholar
15 Wells, , The Fate of Man, 13.Google Scholar
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20 The Works of H. G. Wells, XI (New York, 1925), x.Google Scholar Cf. Wells, H. G., Mr. Britling Sees It Through (New York, 1916), 290–91Google Scholar; Autobiography, 273; You Can't Be Too Careful, 285–89; Mind at the End of Its Tether (New York, 1946).Google Scholar
21 Wells, , God the Invisible King, xvi, 14–15 and 108.Google Scholar
22 Ibid., ix, 15, 22–24, 61, 67–68, and passim.
23 Ibid., 61.
24 Ibid., 61–63.
25 Ibid., 99.
27 Ibid., 24, 67, 68.
28 Ibid., 15–18, 100–03.
29 Ibid., 101.
30 Ibid., 14–15, 108.
31 Wells, , Works, XI, x.Google Scholar
32 Archer, , God and Mr. Wells, 6.Google Scholar For the optimism of Wells, see God the Invisible King, 111.
33 Wells, H. G., The Undying Fire (New York, 1919), 206–12.Google Scholar
34 Wells, , The Fate of Man, 247Google Scholar; Mind at the End of Its Tether, 10–13. Wells would not like the word “teleology,” but his conception of a process with a direction that man must conform to or perish clearly implies a cosmic teleology.
35 Wells, , God the Invisible King, ix.Google Scholar
36 Ibid., 83–84.
37 Ibid., 95.
38 Ibid., 84.
39 Ibid., 21–23.
40 Ibid., 155–56.
41 Ibid., 99.
42 Ibid., 39.
43 Ibid., 6, 13.
43 Ibid., 170.
45 Wells, , You Can't Be Too Careful, 272–73, 289Google Scholar; The Open Conspiracy (Garden City, New York, 1928), 2.Google Scholar
46 Archer, op. cit., 32, 48.
47 Wells, , Works, XI, x–xii.Google Scholar This volume was published in 1925.
48 Ibid.
49 Wells, , The Undying Fire, 196–97Google Scholar; Babes in the Darkling Wood, 243–46. Cf. the personal confession in his earlier (1908) First and Last Things, 69.
50 Wells, , God the Invisible King, xvi.Google Scholar
51 Niebuhr, H. Richard, Christ and Culture (New York, c. 1951), 101Google Scholar. Cf. Case, Shirley Jackson, Christian Philosophy of History (Chicago, c. 1943), 213–18Google Scholar. Cf. the following from Manuel, op. cit., 359: “The gulf between Saint-Simon and traditional faiths is so unbridgeable that it seems presumptuous to embrace his humanitarian creed and the Judeo-Christian revelations under the same rubric of religion, were it not for the fact that the actual practice of many Jewish and Christian modernists is far closer to Saint-Simon's morality religion than to orthodox belief.”
52 This tendency in the liberal theology of H. G. Wells's time is also characteristic of more recent “radical” theology. Altizer, Thomas J. J., The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Philadelphia, 1966)Google Scholar, is an interesting example.
53 Niebuhr, op. cit., 114–15.
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