Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 11.pdf/214

 Cambridge respectively. They had shared experiences of a lecturer, I forget his name, who lectures in both these radiant centres of wisdom. This incredible person lectures, they assured me, upon all philosophies ancient and modern. Poor Omniscience just knows everything, but this marvel knows what everybody has thought about everything. He told his classes what they all thought, all these wise men, and how they "derived" one from another. These two young people were in consequence more like bags of broken fragments from the ages than living intelligences; they discussed glibly of the Platonic Ideal and the Golden Mean, of Categories and Imperatives, of Induction and Syllogism and Materialism; if you spoke of Plotinus they whispered "Mysticism," and if you said Lucretius, the atoms glittered in their eyes. Also they had a fine stock of lecture-room anecdotes. I tried them then upon one or two current questions. And on the whole they thought rather worse than if they had spent these same studious years upon embroidery.

It is time the educational powers began to realise that the questions of metaphysics, the elements of philosophy, are, here and now, to be done afresh in each mind. So far as the thought that has gone before us enlightens our present inquiry so far it lives still. The rest is for the museum and the special scholar. What is wanted is philosophy, and not a shallow smattering of the history of philosophy. Our children ask for bread and we give them worn millstones

The proper way to discuss metaphysics, like the