ere
was a good ground for attacking them; but so long as they were wholly
humble, they were wholly victorious. There were possible answers to
Huxley; there was no answer possible to Darwin. He was convincing
because of his unconsciousness; one might almost say because of his
dulness. This childlike and prosaic mind is beginning to wane in the
world of science. Men of science are beginning to see themselves, as
the fine phrase is, in the part; they are beginning to be proud of
their humility. They are beginning to be aesthetic, like the rest of
the world, beginning to spell truth with a capital T, beginning to talk
of the creeds they imagine themselves to have destroyed, of the
discoveries that their forbears made. Like the modern English, they
are beginning to be soft about their own hardness. They are becoming
conscious of their own strength--that is, they are growing weaker. But
one purely modern man has emerged in the strictly modern decades who
does carry into our world the clear personal simplicity of the old
world of science. One man of genius we have who is an artist, but who
was a man of science, and who seems to be marked above all things with
this great scientific humility. I mean Mr. H. G. Wells. And in his
case, as in the others above spoken of, there must be a great
preliminary difficulty in convincing the ordinary person that such a
virtue is predicable of such a man. Mr. Wells began his literary work
with violent visions--visions of the last pangs of this planet; can it
be that a man who begins with violent visions is humble? He went on to
wilder and wilder stories about carving beasts into men and shooting
angels like birds. Is the man who shoots angels and carves beasts into
men humble? Since then he has done something bolder than either of
these blasphemies; he has prophesied the political future of all men;
prophesied it with aggressive authority and a ringing decision of
detail. Is the prophet of the future of all men humble? It will indeed
be difficult, in the present condition of current thought about such
things as pride and humility, to answer the query of how a man can be
humble who does such big things and such bold things. For the only
answer is the answer which I gave at the beginning of this essay. It
is the humble man who does the big things. It is the humble man who
does the bold things. It is the humble man who has the sensational
sights vouchsafed to him, and this for three obvi