Merely to dismiss as dumb folly an all but universal contention of this kind (no doubt in the back of people's minds when they say that socialism, for instance, is "against human nature") is to beg the whole question of intellectualism itself. For, if it could be conclusively shown that any view of life not incidentally but by its nature emasculated life and destroyed the roots of character, then of course, no matter how rationally self-evident it might be and how much confusion and suffering it might avert, it would never even justify its own reason for being--it would never _succeed,_ the best part of human nature would oppose it to the end of time and the intelligence itself would be discredited. And indeed to the man of experience rather than the man of ideas, just because of his rich humanity, just because he never passes out of the personal range, belong the ideal things, morality, philosophy, art. Like charity, these things "begin at home"; and whenever (as in pragmatism, when pragmatism ceases to be a method and claims to be an interpretation of life) they are approached not from the side of experience but from the side of ideas they cease to have any real substance. Morality has no substance when it springs from the mind instead of the conscience, art when it appeals to the mind instead of the perceptions; and as to philosophy, what is any scheme of things that springs out of the head of a man who is not himself wise? It is a certain condemnation of Bergson, for example, that he would never pass muster in a group of old fishermen smoking their pipes on the end of a pier. Not that they would be expected in any case to know what he was talking about, but that his fibre so plainly is the fibre not of a wise but of a clever man and that in everything, as Emerson said, you must have a source higher than your tap.
That is why, as it seems to me, Wells ought not to be considered from any of these absolute standpoints. He has put before us not so much a well-wrought body of artistic work, or a moral programme, or an explanation of life--words quite out of place in connection with him--as a certain new spirit, filled with all sorts of puzzled intimations of a new beauty and even a new religion to be generated out of a new order of things that is only glimpsed at present. And the point I should like to make about this spirit is that it is entirely irrelevant to the values of life as we know them, but that it may in the end prove to have contributed to an altogether fresh basis for human values.