A Modern Utopia
The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Modern Utopia, by H. G. Wells
#24 in our series by H. G. Wells
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Title: A Modern Utopia
Author: H. G. Wells
Release Date: September, 2004 [EBook #6424] [Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on December 10,
2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MODERN
UTOPIA ***
Produced by Andrew Sly
A MODERN UTOPIA
BY H. G. WELLS
A NOTE TO THE READER
This book is in all probability the last of a series of writings, of
which--disregarding certain earlier disconnected essays--my
Anticipations was the beginning. Originally I intended Anticipations to
be my sole digression from my art or trade (or what you will) of an
imaginative writer. I wrote that book in order to clear up the muddle in
my own mind about innumerable social and political questions,
questions I could not keep out of my work, which it distressed me to
touch upon in a stupid haphazard way, and which no one, so far as I
knew, had handled in a manner to satisfy my needs. But Anticipations
did not achieve its end. I have a slow constructive hesitating sort of
mind, and when I emerged from that undertaking I found I had still
most of my questions to state and solve. In Mankind in the Making,
therefore, I tried to review the social organisation in a different way, to
consider it as an educational process instead of dealing with it as a
thing with a future history, and if I made this second book even less
satisfactory from a literary standpoint than the former (and this is my
opinion), I blundered, I think, more edifyingly--at least from the point
of view of my own instruction. I ventured upon several themes with a
greater frankness than I had used in Anticipations, and came out of that
second effort guilty of much rash writing, but with a considerable
development of formed opinion. In many matters I had shaped out at
last a certain personal certitude, upon which I feel I shall go for the rest
of my days. In this present book I have tried to settle accounts with a
number of issues left over or opened up by its two predecessors, to
correct them in some particulars, and to give the general picture of a
Utopia that has grown up in my mind during the course of these
speculations as a state of affairs at once possible and more desirable
than the world in which I live. But this book has brought me back to
imaginative writing again. In its two predecessors the treatment of
social organisation had been purely objective; here my intention has
been a little wider and deeper, in that I have tried to present not simply
an ideal, but an ideal in reaction with two personalities. Moreover,
since this may be the last book of the kind I shall ever publish, I have
written into it as well as I can the heretical metaphysical scepticism
upon which all my thinking rests, and I have inserted certain sections
reflecting upon the established methods of sociological and economic
science....
The last four words will not attract the butterfly reader, I know. I have
done my best to make the whole of this book as lucid and entertaining
as its matter permits, because I want it read by as many people as
possible, but I do not promise anything but rage and confusion to him
who proposes to glance through my pages just to see if I agree with him,
or to begin in the middle, or to read without a constantly alert attention.
If you are not already a little interested and open-minded with regard to
social and political questions, and a little exercised in self-examination,
you will find neither interest nor pleasure
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