The Undying Fire: A contemporary novel

by H. G. Wells

“What do I see about me?” asked Dr. Barrack. “A struggle for existence. About that I ask a very plain and simple question: why try to get behind it? That is It. It made me. I study it and watch it. It put me up like a cockshy, and it keeps on trying to destroy me. I do my best to dodge its blows. It got my leg. My head is bloody but unbowed. I reproduce my kind—as abundantly as circumstances permit—I stamp myself upon the universe as much as possible. If I am right, if I do the right things and have decently good luck, I shall hold out until my waning instincts dispose me to rest. My breed and influence are the marks of my rightness. What else is there? You may call this struggle what you like. God, if you like. But God for me is an anthropomorphic idea. Call it The Process.”

“Why not Evolution?” said Mr. Huss.

“I prefer The Process. The word Evolution rather begs the moral question. It’s a cheap word. ‘Shon!’ Evolution seems to suggest just a simple and automatic unfolding. The Process is complex; it has its ups and downs—as Mr. Huss understands. It is more like a Will than an Automaton. A Will feeling about. It isn’t indifferent to us as Mr. Huss suggests; it uses us. It isn’t subordinate to us as Sir Eliphaz would have us believe; playing the part of a Providence just for our comfort and happiness. Some of us are hammer and some of us are anvil, some of us are sparks and some of us are the beaten stuff which survives. The Process doesn’t confide in us; why should it? We learn what we can about it, and make what is called a practical use of it, for that is what the will in the Process requires.”

Mr. Dad, stirred by the word ‘practical,’ made a noise of assent. But not a very confident noise: a loan rather than a gift.

“And that is where it seems to me Mr. Huss goes wrong altogether. He does not submit himself to those Realities. He sets up something called the Spirit in Man, or the God in his Heart, to judge them. He wants to judge the universe by the standards of the human intelligence at its present stage of development. That’s where I fall out with him. These are not fixed standards. Man goes on developing and evolving. Some things offend the sense of justice in Mr. Huss, but that is no enduring criterion of justice; the human sense of justice has developed out of something different, and it will develop again into something different. Like everything else in us, it has been produced by the Process and it will be modified by the Process. Some things, again, he says are not beautiful. There also he would condemn. But nothing changes like the sense of beauty. A band of art students can start a new movement, cubist, vorticist, or what not, and change your sense of beauty. If seeing things as beautiful conduces to survival, we shall see them as beautiful sooner or later, rest assured. I daresay the hyenas admire each other—in the rutting season anyhow.... So it is with mercy and with everything. Each creature has its own standards. After man is the Beyond-Man, who may find mercy folly, who may delight in things that pain our feeble spirits. We have to obey the Process in our own place and our own time. That is how I see things. That is the stark truth of the universe looked at plainly and hard.”

The lips of Mr. Dad repeated noiselessly: “plainly and hard.” But he felt very uncertain.

For some moments the doctor sat with his forearms resting on the table as if he had done. Then he resumed.

“I gather that this talk here to-day arose out of a discussion about education.”

“You’d hardly believe it,” said Mr. Dad.

But Dr. Barrack’s next remark checked Mr. Dad’s growing approval. “That seems perfectly logical to me. It’s one of the things I can never understand about schoolmasters and politicians and suchlike, the way they seem to take it for granted you can educate and not bring in religion and socialism and all your beliefs. What is education? Teaching young people to talk and read and write and calculate in order that they may be told how they stand in the world and what we think we and the world generally are up to, and the part we expect them to play in the game. Well, how can we do that and at the same time leave it all out? What is the game? That is what every youngster wants to know. Answering him, is education. Either we are going to say what we think the game is plainly and straightforwardly, or else we are going to make motions as though we were educating when we are really doing nothing of the kind. In which case the stupid ones will grow up with their heads all in a muddle and be led by any old catchword anywhere according to luck, and the clever ones will grow up with the idea that life is a sort of empty swindle. Most educated people in this country believe it is a sham and a swindle. They flounder about and never get up against a reality.... It’s amazing how people can lose their grip on reality—how most people have. The way my patients come along to me and tell me lies—even about their stomach-aches. The idea of anything being direct and reasonable has gone clean out of their heads. They think they can fool me about the facts, and that when I’m properly fooled, I shall then humbug their stomachs into not aching—somehow....