FIRST AND LAST THINGS
A CONFESSION OF FAITH AND RULE OF LIFE
BY
H.G. WELLS.
INTRODUCTION.
Recently I set myself to put down what I believe. I did this with no
idea of making a book, but at the suggestion of a friend and to interest
a number of friends with whom I was associated. We were all, we found,
extremely uncertain in our outlook upon life, about our religious
feelings and in our ideas of right and wrong. And yet we reckoned
ourselves people of the educated class and some of us talk and lecture
and write with considerable confidence. We thought it would be of very
great interest to ourselves and each other if we made some sort of frank
mutual confession. We arranged to hold a series of meetings in which
first one and then another explained the faith, so far as he understood
it, that was in him. We astonished ourselves and our hearers by the
irregular and fragmentary nature of the creeds we produced, clotted at
one point, inconsecutive at another, inconsistent and unconvincing to a
quite unexpected degree. It would not be difficult to caricature one of
those meetings; the lecturer floundering about with an air of exquisite
illumination, the audience attentive with an expression of thwarted
edification upon its various brows. For my own part I grew so interested
in planning my lecture and in joining up point and point, that my notes
soon outran the possibilities of the hour or so of meeting for which I
was preparing them. The meeting got only a few fragments of what I had
to say, and made what it could of them. And after that was over I let
myself loose from limits of time and length altogether and have expanded
these memoranda into a book.
It is as it stands now the frank confession of what one man of the early
Twentieth Century has found in life and himself, a confession just as
frank as the limitations of his character permit; it is his metaphysics,
his religion, his moral standards, his uncertainties and the expedients
with which he has met them. On every one of these departments and
aspects I write--how shall I put it?--as an amateur. In every section of
my subject there are men not only of far greater intellectual power and
energy than I, but who have devoted their whole lives to the sustained
analysis of this or that among the questions I discuss, and there is a
literature so enormous in the aggregate that only a specialist scholar
could hope to know it. I have not been unmindful of these professors and
this literature; I have taken such opportunities as I have found, to
test my propositions by them. But I feel that such apology as one makes
for amateurishness in this field has a lesser quality of
self-condemnation than if one were dealing with narrower, more defined
and fact-laden matters. There is more excuse for one here than for the
amateur maker of chemical theories, or the man who evolves a system of
surgery in his leisure. These things, chemistry, surgery and so forth,
we may take on the reputation of an expert, but our own fundamental
beliefs, our rules of conduct, we must all make for ourselves. We may
listen and read, but the views of others we cannot take on credit; we
must rethink them and "make them our own." And we cannot do without
fundamental beliefs, explicit or implicit. The bulk of men are obliged
to be amateur philosophers,--all men indeed who are not specialized
students of philosophical subjects,--even if their philosophical
enterprise goes no further than prompt recognition of and submission to
Authority.
And it is not only the claim of the specialist that I would repudiate.
People are too apt to suppose that in order to discuss morals a man must
have exceptional moral gifts. I would dispute that naive supposition. I
am an ingenuous enquirer with, I think, some capacity for religious
feeling, but neither a prophet nor a saint. On the whole I should be
inclined to classify myself as a bad man rather than a good; not indeed
as any sort of picturesque scoundrel or non-moral expert, but as a
person frequently irritable, ungenerous and forgetful, and
intermittently and in small but definite ways bad. One thing I claim, I
have got my beliefs and theories out of my life and not fitted them to
its circumstances. As often as not I have learnt good by the method of
difference; by the taste of the alternative. I tell this faith I hold as
I hold it and I sketch out the principles by which I am generally trying
to direct my life at the present time, because it interests me to do so
and I think it may interest a certain number of similarly constituted
people. I am not teaching. How far I succeed or fail in that private and
personal attempt to behave well, has nothing to do with the matter of
this book. That is another story, a reserved and private affair. I offer
simply intellectual experiences and ideas.
It will be necessary to take up the most abstract of these questions of
belief first, the metaphysical questions. It may be that to many readers
the opening sections may seem the driest and least attractive. But I
would ask them to begin at the beginning and read straight on, because
much that follows this metaphysical book cannot be appreciated at its
proper value without a grasp of these preliminaries.
