A Modern Utopia | Page 7

with a certain singularity of
manner for "Orion," and I should not find him; for the Great Bear, and
it would have vanished. "Where?" I should ask, and "where?" seeking
among that scattered starriness, and slowly I should acquire the wonder
that possessed him.
Then, for the first time, perhaps, we should realise from this unfamiliar
heaven that not the world had changed, but ourselves--that we had
come into the uttermost deeps of space.
Section 5
We need suppose no linguistic impediments to intercourse. The whole
world will surely have a common language, that is quite elementarily
Utopian, and since we are free of the trammels of convincing
story-telling, we may suppose that language to be sufficiently our own
to understand. Indeed, should we be in Utopia at all, if we could not
talk to everyone? That accursed bar of language, that hostile inscription
in the foreigner's eyes, "deaf and dumb to you, sir, and so--your
enemy," is the very first of the defects and complications one has fled
the earth to escape.
But what sort of language would we have the world speak, if we were
told the miracle of Babel was presently to be reversed?
If I may take a daring image, a mediaeval liberty, I would suppose that
in this lonely place the Spirit of Creation spoke to us on this matter.
"You are wise men," that Spirit might say--and I, being a suspicious,
touchy, over-earnest man for all my predisposition to plumpness,
would instantly scent the irony (while my companion, I fancy, might
even plume himself), "and to beget your wisdom is chiefly why the
world was made. You are so good as to propose an acceleration of that
tedious multitudinous evolution upon which I am engaged. I gather, a
universal tongue would serve you there. While I sit here among these
mountains--I have been filing away at them for this last aeon or so, just
to attract your hotels, you know--will you be so kind----? A few
hints----?"

Then the Spirit of Creation might transiently smile, a smile that would
be like the passing of a cloud. All the mountain wilderness about us
would be radiantly lit. (You know those swift moments, when warmth
and brightness drift by, in lonely and desolate places.)
Yet, after all, why should two men be smiled into apathy by the Infinite?
Here we are, with our knobby little heads, our eyes and hands and feet
and stout hearts, and if not us or ours, still the endless multitudes about
us and in our loins are to come at last to the World State and a greater
fellowship and the universal tongue. Let us to the extent of our ability,
if not answer that question, at any rate try to think ourselves within
sight of the best thing possible. That, after all, is our purpose, to
imagine our best and strive for it, and it is a worse folly and a worse sin
than presumption, to abandon striving because the best of all our bests
looks mean amidst the suns.
Now you as a botanist would, I suppose, incline to something as they
say, "scientific." You wince under that most offensive epithet--and I am
able to give you my intelligent sympathy--though "pseudo-scientific"
and "quasi-scientific" are worse by far for the skin. You would begin to
talk of scientific languages, of Esperanto, La Langue Bleue, New Latin,
Volapuk, and Lord Lytton, of the philosophical language of
Archbishop Whateley, Lady Welby's work upon Significs and the like.
You would tell me of the remarkable precisions, the encyclopaedic
quality of chemical terminology, and at the word terminology I should
insinuate a comment on that eminent American biologist, Professor
Mark Baldwin, who has carried the language biological to such heights
of expressive clearness as to be triumphantly and invincibly unreadable.
(Which foreshadows the line of my defence.)
You make your ideal clear, a scientific language you demand, without
ambiguity, as precise as mathematical formulae, and with every term in
relations of exact logical consistency with every other. It will be a
language with all the inflexions of verbs and nouns regular and all its
constructions inevitable, each word clearly distinguishable from every
other word in sound as well as spelling.
That, at any rate, is the sort of thing one hears demanded, and if only
because the demand rests upon implications that reach far beyond the
region of language, it is worth considering here. It implies, indeed,
almost everything that we are endeavouring to repudiate in this

particular work. It implies that the whole intellectual basis of mankind
is established, that the rules of logic, the systems of counting and
measurement, the general categories and schemes of resemblance and
difference, are established for the human mind for ever--blank
Comte-ism, in fact, of the blankest description. But,