Speaker 1: Chapter nine B of Anticipations. This is a LibriVox recording.
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Speaker 1: by H. G. Wells, Chapter nine B. And the type
Speaker 1: of men that I conceive emerging in the coming years
Speaker 1: will deal simply and logically, not only with the business
Speaker 1: of death, but with birth. That presently sexual morality of
Speaker 1: the civilized world is the most illogical and incoherent system
Speaker 1: of wild permissions and insane prohibitions, foolish tolerance, and ruthless
Speaker 1: cruelty that it is possible to imagine. Our current civilization
Speaker 1: is a sexual lunatic, and it has lost its reason
Speaker 1: in this respect under the stresses of the new birth
Speaker 1: of things, largely through the difficulties that have stood in
Speaker 1: the way and do still, in a diminishing degree, stand
Speaker 1: in the way of any sane discussion of the matter
Speaker 1: as a whole. To approach it is to approach excitement.
Speaker 1: So few people seemed to be leading happy and healthy
Speaker 1: sexual lives that to mention the very word sexual is
Speaker 1: to set them stirring, to brighten the eye, lower the voice,
Speaker 1: and blanch or flush the cheek with a flavor of guilt.
Speaker 1: We are all, as it were, keeping our secrets and
Speaker 1: hiding our shames. One of the most curious revelations of
Speaker 1: this fact occurred only a few years ago, when the
Speaker 1: artless outpourings and fiction of certain young women, who had
Speaker 1: failed to find light on problems that pressed upon them
Speaker 1: for solution, and which it was certainly their business as
Speaker 1: possible wives and mothers to solve, roused all sorts of
Speaker 1: respectable people to a quite insane vehemence of condemnation. Now
Speaker 1: there are excellent reasons and a permanent necessity for the
Speaker 1: preservation of decency, and for a far more stringent suppression
Speaker 1: of matter that is merely intended to excite than at
Speaker 1: present obtains. And the chief of these reasons lies in
Speaker 1: the need of preserving the young from a premature awakening,
Speaker 1: and indeed in the interests of civilization in positively delaying
Speaker 1: the period of awakening, retarding maturity, and lengthening the period
Speaker 1: of growth and preparation as much as possible. But purity
Speaker 1: and innocence may be prolonged too late. Innocence is really
Speaker 1: no more becoming to adults than a rattle or a
Speaker 1: rubber consoler, and the bashfulness that hampers this discussion, that
Speaker 1: permits it only in a furtive, silly sort of way,
Speaker 1: has its ugly consequences in shames and cruelties, in miserable
Speaker 1: households and pitiful crises, in the production of countless, needless
Speaker 1: and unhappy lives. Indeed, too often we carry our decency
Speaker 1: so far as to make it suggestive and stimulating in
Speaker 1: a non natural way. We invest the plain business of
Speaker 1: reproduction with a mystic religious quality far more unwholesome than
Speaker 1: a savage nakedness could possibly be the essential aspect of
Speaker 1: all this wild and windy business of the sexual relations is,
Speaker 1: after all births. Upon this plain fact, the people of
Speaker 1: the emergent New Republic will unhesitatingly go. The pre eminent
Speaker 1: value of sexual questions and morality lies in the fact
Speaker 1: that the lives which will constitute the future are involved.
Speaker 1: If they are not involved, if we can dissociate this
Speaker 1: relationship from this issue, then sexual questions become of no
Speaker 1: more importance than the morality of one's deportment at chess
Speaker 1: or the general morality of outdoor games. Indeed, then the
Speaker 1: question of sexual relationships would be entirely on all falls
Speaker 1: with and probably very analogous to the question of golf.
Speaker 1: In each case, it would be for the medical man
Speaker 1: and the psychologist to decide how far the thing was
Speaker 1: wholesome and permissible, and how far it was an aggressive,
Speaker 1: bad habit and an absorbing waste of time and energy.
Speaker 1: An able bodied man continually addicted to love making that
Speaker 1: had no result in offspring would be just as silly
Speaker 1: and morally objectionable as an able bodied man who devoted
Speaker 1: his chief energies to hitting little balls over golf links,
Speaker 1: but no more. Both would probably be wasting the lives
Speaker 1: of other human beings. The golfer must employ his caddy.
Speaker 1: It is entirely the matter of births, and a further
Speaker 1: consideration to be presently discussed, that makes this analogy untrue.
Speaker 1: It does not, however, make it so untrue as to
Speaker 1: do away with the probability that, in many cases the
Speaker 1: emergent men of the new time will consider sterile gratification
Speaker 1: a moral and legitimate thing. Saint Paul tells us that
Speaker 1: it is better to marry than to burn, but to
Speaker 1: beget children on that account will appear, I imagine to
Speaker 1: those coming men as an absolutely loathsome proceeding. They will
Speaker 1: stifle no spread of knowledge that will diminish the swarming
Speaker 1: misery of childhood in the slums. They will regard the
Speaker 1: disinclination of the witless society woman to become a mother
Speaker 1: as a most amiable trait in her folly. In our
Speaker 1: bashful is about these things, we talk an abominable lot
Speaker 1: of nonsense. All this uproar one hears about the rapid
Speaker 1: multiplication of the unfit and the future of the lower
Speaker 1: races takes on an entirely different complexion. Directly, we face known,
Speaker 1: if indelicate facts. Most of the human types that by
Speaker 1: civilized standards are undesirable are quite willing to die out
Speaker 1: through such suppressions if the world will only encourage them
Speaker 1: a little. They multiply in sheer ignorance, but they do
Speaker 1: not desire multiplication even now, and they can easily be
Speaker 1: made to dread it. Sensuality aims not at life, but
Speaker 1: at itself. I believe that the men of the New
Speaker 1: Republic will deliberately shape their public policy along these lines.
Speaker 1: They will route out and illuminate urban rookeries and all
Speaker 1: places where the base can drift to multiply. They will
Speaker 1: contrive a land legislation that will keep the black or
Speaker 1: yellow or mean white squatter on the move. They will
Speaker 1: see to it that no parent can make a profit
Speaker 1: out of a child, so that child bearing shall cease
Speaker 1: to be a hopeful speculation for the unemployed poor. And
Speaker 1: they will make the maintenance of a child the first
Speaker 1: charge upon the parents who have brought it into the world.
Speaker 1: Only in this way can progress escape being clogged by
Speaker 1: the products of the security it creates. The development of
Speaker 1: science has lifted femine and pestilence from the shoulders of man,
Speaker 1: and it will yet lift war for some other end
Speaker 1: than to give him a spell of promiscuous and finely
Speaker 1: cruel and horrible reproduction. No doubt, the sentimentalist in all,
Speaker 1: whose moral sense has been vigorously trained in the old
Speaker 1: school will find this rather a dreadful suggestion. It amounts
Speaker 1: to saying that for the abyss to become a hotbed
Speaker 1: of sterile immorality will fall in with the deliberate policy
Speaker 1: of the ruling class in the days to come. At
Speaker 1: any rate, it will be a terminating evil. At present,
Speaker 1: the abyss is a hotbed breeding undesirable and too often
Speaker 1: fearfully miserable children, that is something more than a sentimental
Speaker 1: horror under the really very horrible morality of today, the
Speaker 1: spectacle of a mean, spirited, undersized, diseased little man, quite
Speaker 1: incapable of earning a decent living even for himself, married
Speaker 1: to some underfed, ignorant, ill shaped, plain and diseased little woman,
Speaker 1: and gold of the lives of ten or twelve ugly
Speaker 1: ailing children is regarded as an extremely edifying spectacle, and
Speaker 1: the two parents consider their reproductive excesses as giving them
Speaker 1: a distinct claim upon less thick hund and more prosperous people.
Speaker 1: Benevolent persons throw themselves with peculiar ardour into a case
Speaker 1: of this sort, and quite passionate efforts are made to
Speaker 1: strengthen the mother against further eventualities and protect the children
Speaker 1: until they attain to neubile years, until the attention of
Speaker 1: the benevolent persons is presently distracted by a new case.
Speaker 1: Yet so powerful is the suggestion of current opinions that
Speaker 1: few people seem to see nowadays just what a horrible
Speaker 1: and criminal thing this sort of family, seen from the
Speaker 1: point of view of social physiology, appears, and directly such
Speaker 1: principles as these come into effective operation, and I believe
Speaker 1: that the next hundred years will see this new phase
Speaker 1: of the human history beginning. There will recommence a process
Speaker 1: of physical and mental improvement in mankind, a raising and
Speaker 1: elaboration of the average man that has virtually been in
Speaker 1: suspense during the greater portion of the historical period. It
Speaker 1: is possible that in the last hundred years, in the
Speaker 1: more civilized states of the world, the average of humanity
Speaker 1: has positively fallen. All our philanthropists, all our religious teachers,
Speaker 1: seem to be in a sort of informal conspiracy to
Speaker 1: preserve an atmosphere of mystical ignorance about these matters, which,
Speaker 1: in view of the irresistible nature of the sexual impulse,
Speaker 1: results in a swelling tide of miserable little lives. Consider
Speaker 1: what it will mean to have perhaps half the population
Speaker 1: of the world in every generation restrained from or tempted
Speaker 1: to evade reproduction. This thing, this euthanasia of the weak
Speaker 1: and sensual, is possible on the principles that will probably
Speaker 1: animate the predominant classes of the new time. It will
Speaker 1: be permissible, and I have little or no doubt that
Speaker 1: in the future it will be planned and achieved. If
Speaker 1: birth were all the making of a civilized man, the
Speaker 1: men of the future, on the general principles we have
Speaker 1: imputed to them, would under no circumstances find the birth
Speaker 1: of a child healthy in body and brain more than
Speaker 1: the most venial of offenses. But birth gives only the
Speaker 1: beginning the raw material of a civilized man. The perfect
Speaker 1: civilized man is not only a sound, strong body, but
Speaker 1: a very elaborate fabric of mind. He is a fabric
Speaker 1: of moral suggestions that become mental habits, a magazine of
Speaker 1: more or less systematized ideas, a scheme of knowledge and training,
Speaker 1: and an esthetic culture. He is the child not only
Speaker 1: of parents, but of a home and of an education.
Speaker 1: He has to be carefully guarded from physical and moral contagions.
Speaker 1: A reasonable probability of ensuring home and education and protection
Speaker 1: without any parasitic dependence on people outside the kin of
Speaker 1: the child, will be a necessary condition to a moral
Speaker 1: birth under such general principles as we have supposed now.
Speaker 1: This sweeps out of reason any such promiscuity of healthy people,
Speaker 1: as the late mister Grant Allen is supposed to have advocated.
Speaker 1: But so far as I can understand, him did not.
Speaker 1: But whether it works out to the taking over of
Speaker 1: the permanent monogamic marriage of the old morality as a
Speaker 1: going concern is another matter. Upon this matter I must
Speaker 1: confess my views of the trend of things in the
Speaker 1: future do not seem to be finely shaped. The question
Speaker 1: involves very obscure physiological and psychological considerations. A man who
Speaker 1: aims to become a novelist naturally prize into these matters
Speaker 1: whenever he can, but the vital facts are very often
Speaker 1: hard to come by. It is probable that a great
Speaker 1: number of people could be pared off in couples who
Speaker 1: would make permanently happy and successful monogamic homes for their
Speaker 1: sound and healthy children. At any rate, if a certain
Speaker 1: freedom of regrouping were possible within a time limit. This
Speaker 1: might be so. But I am convinced that a large
Speaker 1: proportion of married couples in the world to day are
Speaker 1: not completely and happily matched, that there is much mutual limitation,
Speaker 1: mutual annulment, and mutual exasperation. Home with an atmosphere of
Speaker 1: contention is worse than none for the child. And it
Speaker 1: is the interest of the child, and that alone, that
Speaker 1: will be the test of all these things. I do
Speaker 1: not think that the arrangement in couples is universally applicable,
Speaker 1: or that celibacy tempered by sterile vice should be its
Speaker 1: only alternative. Nor can I see why the union of
Speaker 1: two childless people should have an indissoluble permanence or prohibit
Speaker 1: an ampler grouping. The question is greatly complicated by the
Speaker 1: economic disadvantage of women, which makes wifehood the chief feminine profession,
Speaker 1: while only for an incidental sort of man is marriage
Speaker 1: a source of income, And further by the fact that
Speaker 1: most women have a period of maximum attractiveness, after which
Speaker 1: it would be grossly unfair to cast them aside. From
Speaker 1: the point of view we are discussing, the efficient mother,
Speaker 1: who can make the best of her children, is the
Speaker 1: most important sort of person in the state. She is
Speaker 1: a primary necessity to the coming civilization. Can the wife
Speaker 1: in any sort of polygamic arrangement or a woman of
Speaker 1: no assured status attain to the maternal possibilities of the
Speaker 1: ideal monogamic wife. One is disposed to answer no. But then,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, does the ordinary monogamic wife do that?
Speaker 1: We are dealing with the finer people of the future
Speaker 1: strongly individualized people who will be much freer from stereotyped
Speaker 1: moral suggestions and much less inclined to be dealt with
Speaker 1: wholesale than the people of today. I have already shown
Speaker 1: cause in these anticipations to expect a period of disorder
Speaker 1: and hypocrisy in matters of sexual morality. I am inclined
Speaker 1: to think that when the new Republic emerges on the
Speaker 1: other side of this disorder, there will be a great
Speaker 1: number of marriage contracts possible between men and women, and
Speaker 1: that the strong arm of the state will insist only
Speaker 1: upon one thing, the security and welfare of the child.
Speaker 1: The inevitable removal of births from the sphere of an
Speaker 1: uncontrollable providence to the category of deliberate acts will enormously
Speaker 1: enhance the responsibility of the parent and of the state
Speaker 1: that has failed to adequately discourage the philoprogenitiveness of the
Speaker 1: parent towards the the child. Having permitted the child to
Speaker 1: come into existence, public policy and the older standard of
Speaker 1: justice alike demand under these new conditions that it must
Speaker 1: be fed, cherished, and educated, not merely up to the
Speaker 1: respectable minimum, but to the full height of its possibilities.
Speaker 1: The state will therefore be the reserved guardian of all children.
Speaker 1: If they are being undernourished, if their education is being neglected,
Speaker 1: the state will step in take over the responsibility of
Speaker 1: their management, and enforce their charge upon the parents. The
Speaker 1: first liability of a parent will be to his child,
Speaker 1: and for his child, even the dues of that darling
Speaker 1: of our current law, the landlord will stand second to that.
Speaker 1: This conception of the responsibility of the parents and the
Speaker 1: state to the child and the future runs quite counter
Speaker 1: to the general ideas of today. These general ideas disc
Speaker 1: distort grim realities. Under the most pious and amiable professions,
Speaker 1: all the Christian states of today are, as a matter
Speaker 1: of fact, engaged in slave breeding. The chief result, though
Speaker 1: of course it is not the intention of the activities
Speaker 1: of priests and moralist today in these matters, is to
Speaker 1: lure a vast multitude of little souls into this world,
Speaker 1: for whom there is neither sufficient food, nor love, nor schools,
Speaker 1: nor any prospect at all in life, but the insufficient
Speaker 1: bread of servitude. It is a result that endears religion
Speaker 1: and purity to the sweating employer, and leads unimaginative bishops
Speaker 1: who have never missed a meal in their lives, and
Speaker 1: who know nothing of the indescribable bitterness of a handicapped
Speaker 1: entry into this world to draw a complacent contrast with
Speaker 1: irreligious France. It is a result that must necessarily be
Speaker 1: recognized in its reality and faced by these men who
Speaker 1: will presently emerge to rule the world, Men who will
Speaker 1: have neither the plea of ignorance, nor moral stupidity, nor
Speaker 1: dogmatic revelation to excuse such elaborate cruelty, And having set
Speaker 1: themselves in these ways to raise the quality of human birth,
Speaker 1: the new Republicans will see to it that the children
Speaker 1: who do at last effectually get born come into a
Speaker 1: world of spacious opportunity. The half educated, unskilled pretenders professing
Speaker 1: impossible creeds and propounding ridiculous curricula, to whom the unhappy
Speaker 1: parents of today must needs and trust the intelligences of
Speaker 1: their children. These heavy handed barber surgeons of the mind,
Speaker 1: these schoolmasters, with their ragtag and bobtail of sweated and
Speaker 1: unqualified assistance, will be succeeded by capable, self respecting men
Speaker 1: and women, constituting the most important profession of the world,
Speaker 1: the windy pretenses of forming character, supplying moral training, and
Speaker 1: so forth under which the educationalist of to day conceals
Speaker 1: the fact that he is incapable of his proper task
Speaker 1: of training, developing, and equipping the mind. Will no longer
Speaker 1: be made by the teacher, nor will the teacher be
Speaker 1: permitted to subordinate his duties to the entirely irrelevant business
Speaker 1: of his pupil's sports. The teacher will teach and confine
Speaker 1: his moral training beyond enforcing truth and discipline, to the
Speaker 1: exhibition of a capable person doing his duty as well
Speaker 1: as it can be done. He will know that his
Speaker 1: utmost province is only a part of the educational process,
Speaker 1: that equally important educational influences are the home and the
Speaker 1: world of thought about the pupil and himself. The whole
Speaker 1: world will be thinking and learning. The old idea of
Speaker 1: completing one's education will have vanished with the fancy of
Speaker 1: a static universe. Every school will be a preparatory school,
Speaker 1: every college. The school and college will probably give only
Speaker 1: the keys and a baratus. Have thought a necessary language,
Speaker 1: or so thoroughly done a sound mathematical training, drawing a
Speaker 1: wide and reason view of philosophy, some good exercises and
Speaker 1: dialectics a training in the use of those stores of
Speaker 1: fact that science has made so equipped. The young man
Speaker 1: and young women will go on to the technical school
Speaker 1: of their chosen profession, and to the criticism of contemporary
Speaker 1: practice for their special efficiency, and to the literature of
Speaker 1: contemporary thought for their general development. And while the emergent
Speaker 1: New Republic is deciding to provide for the swarming inferiority
Speaker 1: of the abyss and developing the morality and educational system
Speaker 1: of the future. In this fashion, it will be attacking
Speaker 1: that mass of irresponsible property that is so unavoidable and
Speaker 1: so threatening under present conditions. The attack will of course
Speaker 1: be made along lines that the developing science of economics
Speaker 1: will trace in the days immediately before us. A scheme
Speaker 1: of death duties and of heavy graduated taxes upon irresponsible incomes,
Speaker 1: with perhaps in addition, a system of terminable liability for
Speaker 1: borrowers will probably suffice to control the growth of this
Speaker 1: creditor aliphanticis. The detailed contrivances are for the specialists to make.
Speaker 1: If there is such a thing as bitterness in the
Speaker 1: public acts of the New Republicans, it will probably be
Speaker 1: found in the measures that will be directed against those
Speaker 1: who are parasitic, or who attempt to be parasitic upon
Speaker 1: the social body, either by means of gambling, by manipulating
Speaker 1: the medium of exchange, or by such interventions upon legitimate transactions,
Speaker 1: as for example, the legal trade Union in Great Britain
Speaker 1: contrives in the case of house, property and land, simply
Speaker 1: because he fails more often than he succeeds. There is
Speaker 1: still a disposition among sentimental people to regard the gambler
Speaker 1: or the speculator as rather a dashing, advance, enterous sort
Speaker 1: of person, and to contrast his picturesque gallantry with the
Speaker 1: sober certainties of honest men. The men of the New
Speaker 1: Republic will be obtuse to the glamour of such romance.
Speaker 1: They will regard the gambler simply as a mean creature
Speaker 1: who hangs about the social body in the hope of
Speaker 1: getting something for nothing, who runs risks to filter the
Speaker 1: possessions of other men exactly as a thief does. They
Speaker 1: will put the two on a footing, and the generous gambler,
Speaker 1: like the kindly drunkard, in the face of their effectual
Speaker 1: provision for his little weakness, will cease to complain that
Speaker 1: his worst enemy is himself, and in dealing with speculation,
Speaker 1: the new Republic will have the power of an assured
Speaker 1: faith and purpose, and the resources of an economic science
Speaker 1: that is as yet only in its infancy. In such matters,
Speaker 1: the new Republic will entertain no superstition of lasar Fare.
Speaker 1: Money and credit are as much human contrivances as bicycles,
Speaker 1: and as liable to its expansion and modification as any
Speaker 1: other sort of prevalent but imperfect machine. And how will
Speaker 1: the new Republic treat the inferior races? How will it
Speaker 1: deal with the black How will it deal with the
Speaker 1: yellow man? How will it tackle that alleged termite in
Speaker 1: the civilized woodwork? The jew certainly not as races at all.
Speaker 1: It will aim to establish, and it will, at last,
Speaker 1: though probably only after a second century has passed, establish
Speaker 1: a world state with a common language and a common
Speaker 1: rule all over the world. Its roads, its standards, its laws,
Speaker 1: and its apparatus of control will run. It will, i
Speaker 1: have said, make the multiplication of those who fall behind
Speaker 1: a certain standard of social efficiency unpleasant and difficult. And
Speaker 1: it will have cast aside any coddling laws to save
Speaker 1: adult men from themselves. Footnote v Day, mister Archdall reads
Speaker 1: excellent and suggestive book, The Present Evolution of Man end footnote.
Speaker 1: It will tolerate no dark corners where the people of
Speaker 1: the Abyss may fester, no vast diffused slums of peasant proprietors,
Speaker 1: no stagnant plague preserves. Whatever men may come into its
Speaker 1: efficient citizenship. It will let come white, black, red or brown.
Speaker 1: The efficiency will be the test, and the Jew also
Speaker 1: it will treat as any other man. It is said
Speaker 1: that the Jew is incurably a parasite on the apparatus
Speaker 1: of credit. If there are parasites on the apparatus of credit,
Speaker 1: that is a reason for the legislative cleaning of the
Speaker 1: apparatus of credit. But it is no reason for the
Speaker 1: special treatment of the Jew. If the Jew has a
Speaker 1: certain incurable tendency to social parasitism, and we make social
Speaker 1: parasitism impossible, we shall abolish the Jew. And if he
Speaker 1: has not, there is no need to abolish the Jew.
Speaker 1: We are much more likely to find we have abolished
Speaker 1: the Caucasian solicitor. I really do not understand the exceptional
Speaker 1: attitude people take up against the Jews. There is something
Speaker 1: very ugly about many Jewish faces, but there are Gentile faces,
Speaker 1: just as coarse and gross. The Jew asserts himself in
Speaker 1: relation to his nationality with a singular tactlessness. But it
Speaker 1: is hardly for the English to blame that many Jews
Speaker 1: are intensely vulgar in dress and bearing, materialistic in thought
Speaker 1: and cunning, and base in method, but no more so
Speaker 1: than many Gentiles. The Jew is mentally and physically precocious,
Speaker 1: and he ages and dies sooner than the average European.
Speaker 1: But in that, and in a certain disingenuousness, he is
Speaker 1: simply on all fours with the short, dark Welsh. He
Speaker 1: foregathers with those of his own nation and favors them
Speaker 1: against the stranger. But so do the Scotch. I see
Speaker 1: nothing in his curious, dispersed nationality to dread or dislike.
Speaker 1: He is a remnant and legacy of medievalism, a sentimentalist, perhaps,
Speaker 1: but no furtive plotter against the present progress of things.
Speaker 1: He was the medieval liberal. His persistent existence gave the
Speaker 1: lie to Catholic pretensions all through the days of their ascendency,
Speaker 1: and to day he gives the lie to all our
Speaker 1: yapping nationalisms and sketches in his dispersed sympathies the coming
Speaker 1: of the world state. He has never been known to
Speaker 1: burke a school. Much of the Jew's usury is no
Speaker 1: more than social scavenging. The Jew will probably lose much
Speaker 1: of his particularism, inter marry with gentiles, and cease to
Speaker 1: be a physically distinct element in human affairs in the
Speaker 1: century or so. But much of his moral tradition will,
Speaker 1: I hope, never die. And for the rest those swarms
Speaker 1: of black and brown and dirty white and yellow people
Speaker 1: who do not come into the new needs of efficiency, well,
Speaker 1: the world is a world, not a charitable institution, and
Speaker 1: I take it they will have to go. The whole
Speaker 1: tenorant meaning of the world as I see it, is
Speaker 1: that they have to go. So far as they fail
Speaker 1: to develop sane, vigorous, and distinctive personalities for the great
Speaker 1: world of the future, it is their portion to die
Speaker 1: out and disappear. The world has a purpose greater than happiness.
Speaker 1: Our lives are to serve God's purpose, and that purpose
Speaker 1: aims not at man as an end, but works through
Speaker 1: him to greater issues. This, I believe, will be the
Speaker 1: distinctive quality of the New Republican's belief, and for that
Speaker 1: reason I have not even speculated whether he will hold
Speaker 1: any belief in human immortality or no. He will certainly
Speaker 1: not believe there is any post mortem state of rewards
Speaker 1: and punishments because of his faith in the sanity of God,
Speaker 1: and I do not see how he will trace any
Speaker 1: reaction between this world world and whatever world there may
Speaker 1: be of disembodied lives. Active and capable men of all
Speaker 1: forms of religious profession to day tend in practice to
Speaker 1: disregard the question of immortality altogether. So to a greater
Speaker 1: degree will the kinetic men of the coming time. We
Speaker 1: may find that issue interesting enough when we turn over
Speaker 1: the leaf, but at present we have not turned over
Speaker 1: the leaf on this side. In this life, the relevancy
Speaker 1: of things points not in the slightest towards the immortality
Speaker 1: of our egotisms, but convergently and overpoweringly to the future
Speaker 1: of our race, to that spacious future of which these weak,
Speaker 1: ambitious anticipations are, as it were, the dim reflection seen
Speaker 1: in a shallow and troubled pool. For that future, these
Speaker 1: men will live and die. End of Chapter nine b
Speaker 1: recording by John Trevivick. End of Anticipations by H. G.
Speaker 1: Welve