The World Set Free

by H. G. Wells

  the twentieth century. Officially, I know, politically, that

  intelligence didn't tell-but it was there. And I question your

  hypothesis. I doubt if that discovery could have been delayed.

  There is a kind of inevitable logic now in the progress of

  research. For a hundred years and more thought and science have

  been going their own way regardless of the common events of life.

  You see-they have got loose. If there had been no Holsten there

  would have been some similar man. If atomic energy had not come

  in one year it would have come in another. In decadent Rome the

  march of science had scarcely begun… Nineveh, Babylon, Athens,

  Syracuse, Alexandria, these were the first rough experiments in

  association that made a security, a breathing-space, in which

  inquiry was born. Man had to experiment before he found out the

  way to begin. But already two hundred years ago he had fairly

  begun… The politics and dignities and wars of the nineteenth

  and twentieth centuries were only the last phoenix blaze of the

  former civilisation flaring up about the beginnings of the new.

  Which we serve… 'Man lives in the dawn for ever,' said

  Karenin. 'Life is beginning and nothing else but beginning. It

  begins everlastingly. Each step seems vaster than the last, and

  does but gather us together for the nest. This Modern State of

  ours, which would have been a Utopian marvel a hundred years ago,

  is already the commonplace of life. But as I sit here and dream

  of the possibilities in the mind of man that now gather to a head

  beneath the shelter of its peace, these great mountains here seem

  but little things…'

  Section 6

  About eleven Karenin had his midday meal, and afterwards he slept

  among his artificial furs and pillows for two hours. Then he

  awoke and some tea was brought to him, and he attended to a small

  difficulty in connection with the Moravian schools in the

  Labrador country and in Greenland that Gardener knew would

  interest him. He remained alone for a little while after that,

  and then the two women came to him again. Afterwards Edwards and

  Kahn joined the group, and the talk fell upon love and the place

  of women in the renascent world. The cloudbanks of India lay

  under a quivering haze, and the blaze of the sun fell full upon

  the eastward precipices. Ever and again as they talked, some vast

  splinter of rock would crack and come away from these, or a wild

  rush of snow and ice and stone, pour down in thunder, hang like a

  wet thread into the gulfs below, and cease…

  Section 7

  For a time Karenin said very little, and Kahn, the popular poet,

  talked of passionate love. He said that passionate, personal

  love had been the abiding desire of humanity since ever humanity

  had begun, and now only was it becoming a possible experience. It

  had been a dream that generation after generation had pursued,

  that always men had lost on the verge of attainment. To most of

  those who had sought it obstinately it had brought tragedy. Now,

  lifted above sordid distresses, men and women might hope for

  realised and triumphant love. This age was the Dawn of Love…

  Karenin remained downcast and thoughtful while Kahn said these

  things. Against that continued silence Kahn's voice presently

  seemed to beat and fail. He had begun by addressing Karenin, but

  presently he was including Edith Haydon and Rachel Borken in his

  appeal. Rachel listened silently; Edith watched Karenin and very

  deliberately avoided Kahn's eyes.

  'I know,' said Karenin at last, 'that many people are saying this

  sort of thing. I know that there is a vast release of

  love-making in the world. This great wave of decoration and

  elaboration that has gone about the world, this Efflorescence,

  has of course laid hold of that. I know that when you say that

  the world is set free, you interpret that to mean that the world

  is set free for love-making. Down there,-under the clouds, the

  lovers foregather. I know your songs, Kahn, your half-mystical

  songs, in which you represent this old hard world dissolving into

  a luminous haze of love-sexual love… I don't think you are

  right or true in that. You are a young, imaginative man, and you

  see life-ardently-with the eyes of youth. But the power that

  has brought man into these high places under this blue-veiled

  blackness of the sky and which beckons us on towards the immense

  and awful future of our race, is riper and deeper and greater

  than any such emotions…

  'All through my life-it has been a necessary part of my work-I

  have had to think of this release of sexual love and the riddles

  that perfect freedom and almost limitless power will put to the

  soul of our race. I can see now, all over the world, a beautiful

  ecstasy of waste; "Let us sing and rejoice and be lovely and

  wonderful."… The orgy is only beginning, Kahn… It was

  inevitable-but it is not the end of mankind…

  'Think what we are. It is but a yesterday in the endlessness of

  time that life was a dreaming thing, dreaming so deeply that it

  forgot itself as it dreamt, its lives, its individual instincts,

  its moments, were born and wondered and played and desired and

  hungered and grew weary and died. Incalculable successions of

  vision, visions of sunlit jungle, river wilderness, wild forest,

  eager desire, beating hearts, soaring wings and creeping terror

  flamed hotly and then were as though they had never been. Life

  was an uneasiness across which lights played and vanished. And

  then we came, man came, and opened eyes that were a question and

  hands that were a demand and began a mind and memory that dies

  not when men die, but lives and increases for ever, an over-mind,

  a dominating will, a question and an aspiration that reaches to

  the stars… Hunger and fear and this that you make so much of,

  this sex, are but the elementals of life out of which we have

  arisen. All these elementals, I grant you, have to be provided

  for, dealt with, satisfied, but all these things have to be left

  behind.'

  'But Love,' said Kahn.

  'I speak of sexual love and the love of intimate persons. And

  that is what you mean, Kahn.'

  Karenin shook his head. 'You cannot stay at the roots and climb

  the tree,' he said…

  'No,' he said after a pause, 'this sexual excitement, this love

  story, is just a part of growing up and we grow out of it. So far

  literature and art and sentiment and all our emotionalforms have

  been almost altogether adolescent, plays and stories, delights

  and hopes, they have all turned on that marvellous discovery of

  the love interest, but life lengthens out now and the mind of

  adult humanity detaches itself. Poets who used to die at thirty

  live now to eighty-five. You, too, Kahn! There are endless years

  yet for you-and all full of learning… We carry an excessive

  burden of sex and sexual tradition still, and we have to free

  ourselves from it. We do free ourselves from it. We have learnt

  in a
thousand different ways to hold back death, and this sex,

  which in the old barbaric days was just sufficient to balance our

  dying, is now like a hammer that has lost its anvil, it plunges

  through human life. You poets, you young people want to turn it

  to delight. Turn it to delight. That may be one way out. In a

  little while, if you have any brains worth thinking about, you

  will be satisfied, and then you will come up here to the greater

  things. The old religions and their new offsets want still, I

  see, to suppress all these things. Let them suppress. If they

  can suppress. In their own people. Either road will bring you

  here at last to the eternal search for knowledge and the great

  adventure of power.'

  'But incidentally,' said Rachel Borken; 'incidentally you have

  half of humanity, you have womankind, very much specialised

  for-for this love and reproduction that is so much less needed

  than it was.'

  'Both sexes are specialised for love and reproduction,' said

  Karenin.

  'But the women carry the heavier burden.'

  'Not in their imaginations,' said Edwards.

  'And surely,' said Kahn, 'when you speak of love as a

  phase-isn't it a necessary phase? Quite apart from reproduction

  the love of the sexes is necessary. Isn't it love, sexual love,

  which has released the imagination? Without that stir, without

  that impulse to go out from ourselves, to be reckless of

  ourselves and wonderful, would our lives be anything more than

  the contentment of the stalled ox?'

  'The key that opens the door,' said Karenin, 'is not the goal of

  the journey.'

  'But women!' cried Rachel. 'Here we are! What is our future-as

  women? Is it only that we have unlocked the doors of the

  imagination for you men? Let us speak of this question now. It

  is a thing constantly in my thoughts, Karenin. What do you think

  of us? You who must have thought so much of these perplexities.'

  Karenin seemed to weigh his words. He spoke very deliberately.

  'I do not care a rap about your future-as women. I do not care

  a rap about the future of men-as males. I want to destroy these

  peculiar futures. I care for your future as intelligences, as

  parts of and contribution to the universal mind of the race.

  Humanity is not only naturally over-specialised in these matters,

  but all its institutions, its customs, everything, exaggerate,

  intensify this difference. I want to unspecialise women. No new

  idea. Plato wanted exactly that. I do not want to go on as we go

  now, emphasising this natural difference; I do not deny it, but I

  want to reduce it and overcome it.'

  'And-we remain women,' said Rachel Borken. 'Need you remain

  thinking of yourselves as women?'

  'It is forced upon us,' said Edith Haydon.

  'I do not think a woman becomes less of a woman because she

  dresses and works like a man,' said Edwards. 'You women here, I

  mean you scientific women, wear white clothing like the men,

  twist up your hair in the simplest fashion, go about your work as

  though there was only one sex in the world. You are just as much

  women, even if you are not so feminine, as the fine ladies down

  below there in the plains who dress for excitement and display,

  whose only thoughts are of lovers, who exaggerate every

  difference… Indeed we love you more.'

  'But we go about our work,' said Edith Haydon.

  'So does it matter?' asked Rachel.

  'If you go about your work and if the men go about their work

  then for Heaven's sake be as much woman as you wish,' said

  Karenin. 'When I ask you to unspecialise, Iamthinking not of

  the abolition of sex, but the abolition of the irksome,

  restricting, obstructive obsession with sex. It may be true that

  sex made society, that the first society was the sex-cemented

  family, the first state a confederacy of blood relations, the

  first laws sexual taboos. Until a few years ago morality meant

  proper sexual behaviour. Up to within a few years of us the

  chief interest and motive of an ordinary man was to keep and rule

  a woman and her children and the chief concern of a woman was to

  get a man to do that. That was the drama, that was life. And the

  jealousy of these demands was the master motive in the world. You

  said, Kahn, a little while ago that sexual love was the key that

  let one out from the solitude of self, but I tell you that so far

  it has only done so in order to lock us all up again in a

  solitude of two… All that may have been necessary but it is

  necessary no longer. All that has changed and changes still very

  swiftly. Your future, Rachel, AS WOMEN, is a diminishing future.'

  'Karenin?' asked Rachel, 'do you mean that women are to become

  men?'

  'Men and women have to become human beings.'

  'You would abolish women? But, Karenin, listen! There is more

  than sex in this. Apart from sex we are different from you. We

  take up life differently. Forget we are-females, Karenin, and

  still we are a different sort of human being with a different

  use. In some things we are amazingly secondary. Here am I in

  this place because of my trick of management, and Edith is here

  because of her patient, subtle hands. That does not alter the

  fact that nearly the whole body of science is man made; that does

  not alter the fact that men do so predominatingly make history,

  that you could nearly write a complete history of the world

  without mentioning a woman's name. And on the other hand we have

  a gift of devotion, of inspiration, a distinctive power for truly

  loving beautiful things, a care for life and a peculiar keen

  close eye for behaviour. You know men are blind beside us in

  these last matters. You know they are restless-and fitful. We

  have a steadfastness. We may never draw the broad outlines nor

  discover the new paths, but in the future isn't there a

  confirming and sustaining and supplying role for us? As

  important, perhaps, as yours? Equally important. We hold the

  world up, Karenin, though you may have raised it.'

  'You know very well, Rachel, that I believe as you believe. Iam

  not thinking of the abolition of woman. But I do want to

  abolish-the heroine, the sexual heroine. I want to abolish the

  woman whose support is jealousy and whose gift possession. I

  want to abolish the woman who can be won as a prize or locked up

  as a delicious treasure. And away down there the heroine flares

  like a divinity.'

  'In America,' said Edwards, 'men are fighting duels over the

  praises of women and holding tournaments before Queens of

  Beauty.'

  'I saw a beautiful girl in Lahore,' said Kahn, 'she sat under a

  golden canopy like a goddess, and three fine men, armed and

  dressed like the ancient paintings, sat on steps below her to

  show their devotion. And they wanted only her permission to fight

  for her.'

  'That is the men's doing,' said Edith Haydon.

  'I SAID,' cried Edwards, 'that man's imagination was more

  specialised for sex than the whole being of
woman. What woman

  would do a thing like that? Women do but submit to it or take

  advantage of it.'

  'There is no evil between men and women that is not a common

  evil,' said Karenin. 'It is you poets, Kahn, with your love

  songs which turn the sweet fellowship of comrades into this

  woman-centred excitement. But there is something in women, in

  many women, which responds to these provocations; they succumb to

  a peculiarly self-cultivating egotism. They become the subjects

  of their own artistry. They develop and elaborate themselves as

  scarcely any man would ever do. They LOOK for golden canopies.

  And even when they seem to react against that, they may do it

  still. I have been reading in the old papers of the movements to

  emancipate women that were going on before the discovery of

  atomic force. These things which began with a desire to escape

  from the limitations and servitude of sex, ended in an inflamed

  assertion of sex, and women more heroines than ever. Helen of

  Holloway was at last as big a nuisance in her way as Helen of

  Troy, and so long as you think of yourselves as women'-he held

  out a finger at Rachel and smiled gently-'instead of thinking of

  yourselves as intelligent beings, you will be in danger

  of-Helenism. To think of yourselves as women is to think of

  yourselves in relation to men. You can't escape that

  consequence. You have to learn to think of yourselves-for our

  sakes and your own sakes-in relation to the sun and stars. You

  have to cease to be our adventure, Rachel, and come with us upon

  our adventures…' He waved his hand towards the dark sky above

  the mountain crests.

  Section 8

  'These questions are the next questions to which research will

  bring us answers,' said Karenin. 'While we sit here and talk

  idly and inexactly of what is needed and what may be, there are

  hundreds of keen-witted men and women who are working these

  things out, dispassionately and certainly, for the love of

  knowledge. The next sciences to yield great harvests now will be

  psychology and neural physiology. These perplexities of the

  situation between man and woman and the trouble with the

  obstinacy of egotism, these are temporary troubles, the issue of

  our own times. Suddenly all these differences that seem so fixed

  will dissolve, all these incompatibles will run together, and we