The Shape of Things to Come, page 64
§7 THE DECLARATION OF MÉGÈVE
1. the Martyrdom of Man: A reference to Winwood Reade’s book of this name published in 1872.
BOOK V
THE MODERN STATE IN CONTROL OF LIFE
§1 MONDAY MORNING IN THE CREATION OF A NEW WORLD
1. Zionism: The political movement, founded by Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) in 1896 with the publication of Judenstaat, which secured national privileges and territory in Palestine for Jews and which now strives to maintain and develop the state of Israel.
2. Israel: According to the biblical book of Genesis 22-49, tne name given to the patriarch Jacob whose sons founded the Twelve Tribes of Israel, from which the Jewish people are believed to have descended, and from which the State of Israel takes its name. ‘Israel’ is also used as the name for the Jewish people.
3. the Law: This refers to the Jewish Talmudic code, which is considered an authoritative record of rabbinical discussions on Jewish law, ethics, customs, legends and stories. It is a fundamental source of legislation, customs, case histories and moral exhortations, first written down between 200 and 500, though having existed much earlier.
§2 KEYING UP THE PLANET
1. Frederick Keeble: Sir Frederick William Keeble (1870-1952) was a British botanist who published Plant-animals: a study in symbiosis (1910) and Practical Plant Physiology (1911).
2. ‘nitrogen-starved world’: Although not a direct quotation from the book, Frederick Keeble’s work on nitrogen-deficiency in agriculture was elaborated in Fertilizers and Food Production on Arable and Grass Land (1932), which resulted from his research on fertilizers for Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI).
3. work with the barometer from 1643 onward: The barometer (originally called the torrecellian tube), an instrument for measuring atmospheric pressure, was invented in 1643 by the Italian physicist and mathematician, Evangelista Torricelli (1608-47).
4. forecasting began – not systematically attempted until 1810:Meteorology as a discipline dates from c. 340 bc when Aristotle published his Meteorologica which combined observations with speculation as to the origin of celestial phenomena. Wells’s dating of forecasting at 1850, however, was probably related to the invention of the telegraph in 1843 which allowed the exchange of weather information with unprecedented speed.
5. The world layout of the Second Council… swept aside by our new operations: This rejection by Wells of a static society in favour of an ever-progressing kinetic one has its origins in his A Modern Utopia (1905) in which he declares ‘the Modern Utopia must be not static but kinetic, must shape not as a permanent state but as a hopeful stage, leading to a long ascent of stages.’
6. below the rafts of Atlantis: A legendary ancient culture and island, whose existence or location have never been confirmed. It was originally mentioned by Plato, who said that it was destroyed by a natural disaster about 9,000 years before his own time. Some believe that its remains are to be found on the floor of the Mediterranean; others that it collapsed into the Atlantic Ocean just beyond Gibraltar.
§5 ORGANIZATION OF PLENTY
1. the drawings of Albrecht Dtirer: (1471-1528), German painter and engraver and the inventor of etching, famous for such works as The Prodigal Son (1500), Feast of the Rosaries (1506) and the woodcut Triumphal Arch (1515-17), the largest ever produced covering an area of 100 square feet.
2. the Empire State Building: Constructed between 1930 and 1931, the tallest building in the world (1,454 feet or 443.2 metres) until the construction of the Sears Tower, Chicago, in 1974.
§6 THE AVERAGE MAN GROWS OLDER AND WISER
1. the ‘threescore and ten’ of the Biblical barbarian: In the Old Testament book of Psalms 90:10, the general age apportioned to the life of humans: ‘In the days of our years there are threescore years and ten.’
2. Youth was stuff would not endure: This is a quotation from William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (Act z, scene 3).
3. Romeos and Juliets: This is a reference to the young title characters of William Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595-96).
4. El Dorado: A mythical land, long assumed to be in South America, in which gold and precious stones could be found in fabulous abundance. Many Spanish explorers sought El Dorado during the sixteenth century, and they were joined in their pursuit by many others in subsequent centuries, but all to no avail.
5. The Juvenile Treat: This would seem to refer to the thrill that older people feel when they momentarily escape the sense of being ‘older’ as they passed forty. In Wells’s future society everyone feels young until truly advanced years.
§7 LANGUAGE AND MENTAL GROWTH
1. Bunyan: John Bunyan (1628-88) was an English writer and preacher who was imprisoned for many years for his nonconformist beliefs, and who published Some Gospel Truths Opened (1656),Grace Abounding (1666) and Pilgrim’s Progress in two parts (1678, 1684).
2. James Joyce (1882-195j): James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish author, linguist and pioneer of modernism who wrote Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (192.2) and Finnegans Wake (1939)-
3. Early English: Also called Early Middle English, the language spoken in England between c. 1100 and c. 1300.
4. Gothic: A dead language belonging to the now extinct East Germanic group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. Gothic has special value for the linguist because it was first recorded in the fourth century, several hundred years before the oldest surviving texts of all the other Germanic languages with the exception of a handful of earlier runic inscriptions in Old Norse. It was a dead language by c. 800.
5. Lady Welby (1837-1912): Lady Victoria Alexandrina Maria Louisa Welby-Gregory was the founder of the science of signifies, the forerunner of semiology. She wrote Grains of Sense (1897),What is Meaning? (1903) and Signifies and Language (1911).
6. Fellow of Magdalene College: Magdalene College is a college of the University of Cambridge, so named in 1542, though it was founded as Buckingham College in the late fifteenth century. A Fellow of the College is one who holds a fellowship and is thereby responsible for teaching and research, while receiving certain college privileges in regard to accommodation and meals.
7. I A. Richards (1893-1977): Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893-1979) was a British linguist and literary critic who initiated the so-called ‘New Criticism’ movement. With C. K. Ogden, he developed the idea of Basic English, and he published Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), Science and Poetry (1925) and Practical Criticism (1929), as well as volumes of his own poetry late in life.
8. a book, The Meaning of Meaning, in 1923: C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards published The Meaning of Meaning: A Study in the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (1923) in which they viewed metaphors as the use of one reference to a group of things that are related in a particular way in order to discover a similar relation in another group. They concluded that humans think metaphorically.
9. Aryan and Semitic thought: Aryan thought expresses in profound terms the oneness of human life and nature. Everything in existence is a conglomerated system encompassing all the smallest to the largest entities. Aryan religion was pantheistic, with Skambha representing heat that spreads through the universe as waves of water; while the units of this spreading entity are the various gods equating to the branches of one tree. Semitic thought believes in uniqueness and ethnic destiny, a racial oneness with god and is thoroughly monotheistic. Both the Aryan and Semitic traditions saturate European and Indie cultures, maintaining a cultural tension, often within the same person, which inspires cultural change and advance.
10. a collective Brain, the Encyclopaedia, the Fundamental Knowledge System: This is a clear reference to Wells’s own commitment to a generally accessible universal knowledge system which he variously termed the ‘mind of the race’ (inBoon, 1915), the ‘world encyclopaedia’ (in The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, 1931) or the ‘world brain’ (inWorld Brain, 1938).
§8 SUBLIMATION OF INTEREST
1. two and a half years of compulsory public service: Wells acquired the idea of public (non-military) service from William James who lectured on the subject in 1906 and presented the idea in his book The Moral Equivalent of War (1910). It is likely that James in turn had been inspired by the ‘labour army’ in Looking Backward (1888) by Edward Bellamy (1850-98).
2. Leonardo da Vinci: Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), an Italian painter, sculptor, architect and engineer, most famous for The Last Supper (1498) and Mona Lisa (1504), and responsible for such engineering feats as the design of an hydraulic irrigation system for Lombardy.
§9 A NEW PHASE IN THE HISTORY OF LIFE
1. this general outline of history: In referring to The Shape of Things to Come as a ‘general outline of history’, Wells is casting it as a future-history extension of his non-fictional textbook, The Outline of History, first published in 1920 and revised by him several times between that date and 1940. After Wells’s death, The Outline of History continued to be revised until as late as 1971 by the historian Raymond William Postgate (1896-1971) and Wells’s son, George Philip Wells (1901-1985).
2. We are all members of one body: This is a quotation from the St Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians (12:12-31).
3. Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard... the mind of man to conceive: This is a partial quotation from St Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians 2:9, the full quotation reading, ‘But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.’
4. For now we see as in a glass darkly….: This is a further quotation from St Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians 13:12.
5. This was the phrase – and the City of God of St Augustine: This asterisked footnote is Wells’s own. St Augustine of Hippo (354-430) is considered by many Christians to be the greatest of the Latin church fathers. He was a prolific author, writing his autobiographical Confessions (400) and The City of God (412-27).
* Here for once the editor knows better than the writer of the history. This pamphlet was written by William Archer, the dramatic critic, and reprinted under its author’s name with a preface by Gilbert Murray 2 in 1931. Apparently the book collectors of the years ahead are going to miss this book. – Ed.
* This was the phrase of that interesting mystic St Paul (Saul) of Tarsus (2-62 ce. Epistles with analysis and commentary by Hirsch and Potter in the Historical Reprints: Development of Ideas Series), who did so much to pervert and enlarge the simpler cosmopolitan fraternalism of Jesus of Nazareth (-4-30 CE) before it was finally overwhelmed and lost in the sacrificial sacerdotalism of formal Christianity. For a brief period before it relapsed the Pauline cult had a curious flavour of Modern State feeling. There was, however, a politic disingenuousness in Paul which betrayed his undeniable intellectual power. He was ambiguous about blood sacrifices, immortality, private property and slavery, to the eternal injury of the Christian movement. It was completely prostituted to usage before the first century was over. See Ivan Mackenzie, General Elements of Religion 2103. Mackenzie has an excellent chapter on the anticipation of Modern State ideas by ancient writers, and is particularly interesting on the Superior Person (Generalized or Super Man) of Confucius (551-478 BC) and the City of God of St Augustine (354-430).5
H.G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come
