Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 11.pdf/210

 in connection with the badly-taught and little known language of Ancient Greece. So a naturally elementary discussion has been made into an intricate and allusive one. It needs erudition and accumulated and alien literature to make metaphysics obscure, and some of the most fruitful and able metaphysical discussion in the world was conducted by a number of unhampered men in small Greek cities, who knew no language but their own and had scarcely a technical term. The true metaphysician is after all only a person who says, "Now let us take thought for a moment before we fall into a discussion of the broad questions of life, lest we rush hastily into impossible and needless conflict. What is the exact value of these thoughts we are thinking and these words we are using?" He wants to take thought about thought. There are, of course, ardent spirits who, on the contrary, want to plunge into action or controversy or belief without taking thought; they feel that there is not time to examine thought. "While you argue," they say, "the house is burning." They are the kin of those who rush and struggle and make panics in theatre fires. But they are not likely to be among the readers of this book.

It seems to me that most of the troubles of humanity are really misunderstandings. Men's compositions and characters are, I think, more similar than their views, and if they had not needlessly different modes of expression upon many broad issues, they would be practically at one upon a hundred matters where now they widely differ.

Most of the great controversies of the world, most