A Modern Utopia | Page 8

indeed, the science
of logic and the whole framework of philosophical thought men have
kept since the days of Plato and Aristotle, has no more essential
permanence as a final expression of the human mind, than the Scottish
Longer Catechism. Amidst the welter of modern thought, a philosophy
long lost to men rises again into being, like some blind and almost
formless embryo, that must presently develop sight, and form, and
power, a philosophy in which this assumption is denied. [Footnote: The
serious reader may refer at leisure to Sidgwick's Use of Words in
Reasoning (particularly), and to Bosanquet's Essentials of Logic,
Bradley's Principles of Logic, and Sigwart's Logik; the lighter minded
may read and mark the temper of Professor Case in the British
Encyclopaedia, article Logic (Vol. XXX.). I have appended to his book
a rude sketch of a philosophy upon new lines, originally read by me to
the Oxford Phil. Soc. in 1903.]
All through this Utopian excursion, I must warn you, you shall feel the
thrust and disturbance of that insurgent movement. In the reiterated use
of "Unique," you will, as it were, get the gleam of its integument; in the
insistence upon individuality, and the individual difference as the
significance of life, you will feel the texture of its shaping body.
Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a
pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal
inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being. Being,
indeed!--there is no being, but a universal becoming of individualities,
and Plato turned his back on truth when he turned towards his museum
of specific ideals. Heraclitus, that lost and misinterpreted giant, may
perhaps be coming to his own....
There is no abiding thing in what we know. We change from weaker to
stronger lights, and each more powerful light pierces our hitherto
opaque foundations and reveals fresh and different opacities below. We
can never foretell which of our seemingly assured fundamentals the
next change will not affect. What folly, then, to dream of mapping out
our minds in however general terms, of providing for the endless

mysteries of the future a terminology and an idiom! We follow the vein,
we mine and accumulate our treasure, but who can tell which way the
vein may trend? Language is the nourishment of the thought of man,
that serves only as it undergoes metabolism, and becomes thought and
lives, and in its very living passes away. You scientific people, with
your fancy of a terrible exactitude in language, of indestructible
foundations built, as that Wordsworthian doggerel on the title-page of
Nature says, "for aye," are marvellously without imagination!
The language of Utopia will no doubt be one and indivisible; all
mankind will, in the measure of their individual differences in quality,
be brought into the same phase, into a common resonance of thought,
but the language they will speak will still be a living tongue, an
animated system of imperfections, which every individual man will
infinitesimally modify. Through the universal freedom of exchange and
movement, the developing change in its general spirit will be a
world-wide change; that is the quality of its universality. I fancy it will
be a coalesced language, a synthesis of many. Such a language as
English is a coalesced language; it is a coalescence of Anglo-Saxon and
Norman French and Scholar's Latin, welded into one speech more
ample and more powerful and beautiful than either. The Utopian tongue
might well present a more spacious coalescence, and hold in the frame
of such an uninflected or slightly inflected idiom as English already
presents, a profuse vocabulary into which have been cast a dozen once
separate tongues, superposed and then welded together through
bilingual and trilingual compromises. [Footnote: Vide an excellent
article, La Langue Francaise en l'an 2003, par Leon Bollack, in La
Revue, 15 Juillet, 1903.] In the past ingenious men have speculated on
the inquiry, "Which language will survive?" The question was badly
put. I think now that this wedding and survival of several in a common
offspring is a far more probable thing.
Section 6
This talk of languages, however, is a digression. We were on our way
along the faint path that runs round the rim of the Lake of Lucendro,
and we were just upon the point of coming upon our first Utopian man.
He was, I said, no Swiss. Yet he would have been a Swiss on mother
Earth, and here he would have the same face, with some difference,
maybe, in the expression; the same physique, though a little better

developed, perhaps--the same complexion. He would have different
habits, different traditions, different knowledge, different ideas,
different clothing, and different appliances, but, except for all that, he
would be the same man. We very distinctly provided at the