I have already spoken of his belief that the right sociological method is the creation and comparison of individual Utopias. Thus his own free-hand sketch of a better world is, in fact, a criticism of all previous works of the kind. As distinguished from them the modern Utopia, he says, has to present not a finally perfect stage but a hopefully ascending one; it has to present men not as uniform types but as conflicting individualities with a common bond; and moreover it has to occupy, not some remote island or province "over the range" but a whole planet. The Utopia of Wells is a world which differs from the present world in one fundamental respect only--it has one initial advantage: that every individual in it has been _started right_, in the degree in which the collective knowledge of the world has rendered that possible.
But there is no need for me to say anything more about these books. They are the free and suggestive motions of a mind inexhaustibly fertile and given to many devices. Anyone who has read Wells at all is aware of his ingenuity, his equal capacity for large schemes and minute details, his truly Japanese belief in radical changes, once they are seen to be necessary and possible. And indeed the details of social arrangement follow naturally and profusely enough, once you get the frame of mind that wishes them. Wells in his Utopia presupposes the frame of mind. In short, he puts education first; he believes that the essential problems of the present are not economic but psychological.
And here where the constructive theory of Wells begins, let me quote a passage from _The New Machiavelli_ that gives the gist of it:
The line of human improvements and the expansion of human life lies in the direction of education and finer initiatives. If humanity cannot develop an education far beyond anything that is now provided, if it cannot collectively invent devices and solve problems on a much richer, broader scale than it does at the present time, it cannot hope to achieve any very much finer order or any more general happiness than it now enjoys. We must believe, therefore, that it can develop such a training and education, or we must abandon secular constructive hope. And here my initial difficulty as against crude democracy comes in. If humanity at large is capable of that high education and those creative freedoms our hope demands, much more must its better and more vigorous types be so capable. And if those who have power and scope and freedom to respond to imaginative appeals cannot be won to the idea of collective self-development, then the whole of humanity cannot be won to that. From that one passes to what has become my general conception in politics, the conception of the constructive imagination working upon the vast complex of powerful people, enterprising people, influential people, amidst whom power is diffused to-day, to produce that self-conscious, highly selective, open-minded, devoted, aristocratic culture, which seems to me to be the necessary next phase in the development of human affairs. I see human progress, not as the spontaneous product of crowds of low minds swayed by elementary needs, but as a natural but elaborate result of intricate human interdependencies, of human energy and curiosity liberated and acting at leisure, of human passions and motives, modified and redirected by literature and art.