So much other statisticians have deduced, but Mr. Webb went farther and obtained a direct proof of his conclusion by the circulation of several hundred question blanks among middle-class families. The results are startling. Out of a total of one hundred and twenty families reporting in one category, there were only seven in which the number of children was not intentionally limited. The average number of children in such limited families is one and a half, which is only one third what it was twenty-five years ago. In about sixty per cent of the cases "the poverty of the parents in relation to their standard of comfort" was a cause in the limitation of the family.
This shows how important a factor the increased expense of raising children has become in well-to-do families, and unless the population of the future is to be recruited very largely by the improvident, ignorant, and debased, it points toward some form of state encouragement of the production of well-born children. Wells suggested a differential income tax. Doctor Galton advocated the endowment of gifted parents. The war has brought this question out of the realm of speculative controversy into that of practical necessity. Some of the remedies proposed now make the measures suggested by Wells ten years before seem timid and conservative.
His early training in dynamical physics and evolutionary biology furnished him with the modern scientific point of view when he entered upon the old battlegrounds of sociology and metaphysics. He therefore never could believe in a static state, socialistic or other, and he saw clearly that much of what passes for sound philosophical reasoning is fallacious, because the world cannot be divided up into distinct things of convenient size for handling, each done up in a neat package and plainly labeled as formal logic requires. Here he is extremely radical, going quite as far as Bergson in his anti-intellectualism though attacking the subject in a very different way. He denies the categories, the possibility of number, definition, and classification.[9] He brings three charges against our Instrument of Knowledge: first, that it can work only by disregarding individuality and treating uniques as identically similar objects in this respect or that; and, second, that it can only deal freely with negative terms by treating them as though they were positive; and, third, that the sort of reasoning which is valid for one level of human thought may not work at another. No two things are exactly alike, and when we try to define a class of varied objects we get a term which represents none of them exactly and may therefore lead to an erroneous conclusion when brought back again to a concrete case. Or, as Wells puts it in his laboratory language: "The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it." "Of everything we need to say this is true, but it is not quite true."
What the artist long ago taught us, that there are no lines in nature, the scientist has come to believe, and perhaps in time the logicians will come to see it too. At present, however, they are, as Wells says, in that stage of infantile intelligence that cannot count above two. This is amusingly illustrated in a defense of logic by Mr. Jourdain in which he says:[10]
To these strictures of Mr. Wells on logic we may reply, it seems to me, that either they are psychological—in which case they are irrelevant to logic—or they are false. Thus the principle that "no truth is quite true", implying as it does that itself is quite true, implies its own falsehood, and is therefore false.
This sort of thing might have passed as a good joke in the days of Epimenides, the Cretan, when logic was a novelty, and people amused themselves, like boys learning to lasso, in tripping each other up with it. But it is funny to see this ancient weapon of scholasticism brought out to ward off the attacks of modernism, such attacks from without the ramparts as Wells's essay and from within as F. C. S. Schiller's big volume, "Formal Logic."
Wells has not only the sense of continuity in space, but, what is rarer, the sense of continuity in time. "The race flows through us, the race is the drama and we are the incidents. This is not any sort of poetical statement: it is a statement of fact." "We are episodes in an experience greater than ourselves." There is a desperate sincerity about the man that I like. He seems always to be struggling to express himself with more exactness than language allows, to say neither more nor less than he really believes at the time. I do not think that he takes delight in shocking the bourgeoisie as Shaw does. Wells would rather, I believe, agree with other people than disagree. He is not a congenital and inveterate nonconformist. But he insists always on "painting the thing as he sees it." His later novels have come under the ban of the British public libraries because, conceiving sex as a disturbing element in life, he put it into his novels as a disturbing element, thus offending both sides, those of puritanical temperament who wanted it left out altogether and those of profligate temperament who wanted to read of amorous adventure with no unpleasant facts obtruded. His sociological works, in which, while insisting on permanent monogamy as the ideal, he prophesied that the future would show greater toleration toward other forms of marital relationship, aroused less criticism than the frank portrayal of existing conditions in his novels.
All his longer novels are largely concerned with the problem of marital life but the only one of them that comes near to a solution is that entitled "Marriage." The couple in this case, the Traffords, are exceptionally decent people for characters in a modern novel, and if their marriage is not a success it is not on account of any interference from a third party, but rather because of the cares and complications that come from family life and financial prosperity. The heroine is a charming specimen of the modern young woman, educated at "Oxbridge", whose chief fault is a constitutional inability to keep her accounts straight. She spends money with excellent taste, but without regard to her husband's bank balance. Consequently Trafford has to lay aside his researches in molecular physics to work out a successful process for synthetic rubber—easy to a man of his ability.
Mr. Wells apparently adopts the theory formulated by Professor Devine, of Columbia, as to the normal division of labor between husband and wife, that men should be experts in the art of getting money and women experts in the art of spending it. Where both parties fail is in regarding these duties as ends in themselves, the men getting absorbed in business and the women buying things that they do not want, that nobody needs, just for the sake of buying. Apparently Mr. Wells has hope of curing the men, but none of curing the women.
Premature attempts at realization, the demand for immediate results, the disregard of purely scientific research, the swamping of life by restless activity and futile efforts at reform, these are the ailments of the modern world, according to our author. His satire spares neither conservatives nor radicals. The following passage would apply to New York as well as London: