H. Wells - The World Set Free

it is first the conquest of those distrusts and fiercenesses,

that self-concentration and intensity of animalism, that tie his

hands from taking his inheritance. The ape in us still resents

association. From the dawn of the age of polished stone to the

achievement of the Peace of the World, man's dealings were

chiefly with himselfand his fellow man, trading, bargaining,

law-making, propitiating, enslaving, conquering, exterminating,

and every little increment in Power, he turned at once and always

turns to the purposes of this confusedelaborate struggle to

socialise. To incorporate and comprehend his fellow men into a

community of purpose became the last and greatest of his

instincts. Already before the last polished phase of the stone

age was over he had become a political animal. He made

astonishingly far-reaching discoveries within himself, first of

counting and then of writing and making records, and with that

his town communities began to stretch out to dominion; in the

valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the great Chinese rivers,

the first empires and the first written laws had their

beginnings. Men specialised for fighting and rule as soldiers and

knights. Later, as ships grewseaworthy, the Mediterranean which

had been a barrier became a highway, and at last out of a tangle

of pirate polities came the great struggle of Carthage and Rome.

The history of Europe is the history of the victory and breaking

up of the Roman Empire. Every ascendant monarch in Europe up to

the last, aped Caesar and called himselfKaiser or Tsar or

Imperator or Kasir-i-Hind. Measured by the duration of human life

it is a vast space of time between that first dynasty in Egypt

and the coming of the aeroplane, but by the scale that looks back

to the makers of the eoliths, it is all of it a story of

yesterday.

Now during this period of two hundred centuries or more, this

period of the warring states, while men's mindswere chiefly

preoccupied by politics and mutual aggression, their progress in

the acquirement of external Power was slow-rapid in comparison

with the progress of the old stone age, but slow in comparison

with this new age of systematic discovery in which we live. They

did not very greatly alter the weapons and tactics of warfare,

the methods of agriculture, seamanship, their knowledgeof the

habitable globe, or the devices and utensils of domestic life

between the days of the early Egyptians and the days when

Christopher Columbus was a child. Of course, there were

inventions and changes, but there were also retrogressions;

things were found out and then forgotten again; it was, on the

whole, a progress, but it contained no steps; the peasant life

was the same, there were already priests and lawyers and town

craftsmen and territorial lords and rulers doctors, wisewomen,

soldiers and sailors in Egypt and China and Assyria and

south-eastern Europe at the beginning of that period, and they

were doing much the same things and living much the same life as

they were in Europe in A.D. 1500. The English excavators of the

year A.D. 1900 could delve into the remains of Babylon and Egypt

and disinter legal documents, domestic accounts, and family

correspondence that they could read with the completest sympathy.

There were great religious and moral changes throughout the

period, empires and republics replaced one another, Italy tried a

vast experiment in slavery, and indeed slavery was tried again

and again and failed and failed and was still to be tested again

and rejected again in the New World; Christianity and

Mohammedanism swept away a thousand more specialised cults, but

essentially these were progressive adaptations of mankind to

material conditionsthat must have seemed fixed for ever. The

idea of revolutionary changes in the material conditionsof life

would have been entirely strange to human thoughtthrough all

that time.

Yet the dreamer, the story-teller, was there still, waiting for

his opportunity amidst the busy preoccupations, the comings and

goings, the wars and processions, the castle building and

cathedral building, the arts and loves, the small diplomacies and

incurable feuds, the crusades and trading journeys of the middle

ages. He no longer speculated with the untrammelled freedom of

the stone-age savage; authoritative explanations of everything

barred his path; but he speculated with a better brain, sat idle

and gazed at circling stars in the sky and mused upon the coin

and crystal in his hand. Whenever there was a certain leisure for

thoughtthroughout these times, then men were to be found

dissatisfied with the appearances of things, dissatisfied with

the assurances of orthodox belief, uneasy with a sense of unread

symbols in the world about them, questioning the finality of

scholastic wisdom. Through all the ages of history there were

men to whom this whisper had come of hidden things about them.

They could no longer lead ordinary lives nor content themselves

with the common things of this world once they had heardthis

voice. And mostly they believed not only that all this world was

as it were a painted curtain before things unguessed at, but that

these secrets were Power. Hitherto Power had come to men by

chance, but now there were these seekers seeking, seeking among

rare and curious and perplexing objects, sometimes finding some

odd utilisable thing, sometimes deceiving themselveswith fancied

discovery, sometimes pretending to find. The world of every day

laughed at these eccentric beings, or found them annoying and

ill-treated them, or was seized with fearand made saints and

sorcerers and warlocks of them, or with covetousness and

entertained them hopefully; but for the greater part heeded them

not at all. Yet they were of the blood of him who had first

dreamtof attacking the mammoth; every one of them was of his

blood and descent; and the thing they sought, all unwittingly,

was the snare that will some day catch the sun.

Section 3

Such a man was that Leonardo da Vinci, who went about the court

of Sforza in Milan in a stateof dignified abstraction. His

common-place books are full of prophetic subtlety and ingenious

anticipations of the methods of the early aviators. Durer was his

parallel and Roger Bacon-whom the Franciscans silenced-of his

kindred. Such a man again in an earlier city was Hero of

Alexandria, who knewof the power of steam nineteen hundred years

before it was first brought into use. And earlier still was

Archimedes of Syracuse, and still earlier the legendary Daedalus

of Cnossos. All up and down the record of history whenever there

was a little leisure from war and brutality the seekers appeared.

And half the alchemists were of their tribe.

When Roger Bacon blew up his first batch of gunpowder one might

have supposed that men would have gone at once to the explosive

engine. But they could seenothing of the sort. They were not

yet beginning to thinkof seeingthings; their metallurgy was all

too poor to make such engines even had they thoughtof them. For

a time they could not make instruments sound enough to stand this

new force even for so rough a purpose as hurling a missile. Their

first guns had barrels of coopered timber, and the world waited

for more than five hundred years before the explosive engine

came.

Even when the seekers found, it was at first a long journey