MR. WELLS'S ENCYCLOPAEDIA
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—Your criticism of my paper on a World Encyclopaedia, read to the Royal Institution, and available as a pamphlet published by the Hogarth Press, and also as a supplement to Nature—I supply these references because you give no indication of the source of the material you are criticising— would be more helpful if your reviewer had not completely misinterpreted the essence of my proposal. He accuses me of wanting an intellectual class, a non-existent class, to rule the world. In my paper I did my utmost to anticipate that sort of misconception. With emphasis, with repetitions,
I tried to make it clear even to the most stupidly registent mind, that I did not imagine anything of the sort was possible.
I insisted there was no scientific elite capable of government.
I thought at the time I was over-elaborating that point. Throughout I was discussing the practicability of making contemporary knowledge and thought readily and universally accessible. To every class. To everyone. Your reviewer's lack of grasp upon contemporary mental conditions is shown by his saying, with an air of triumphant refutation ; " he does not mean that the Encyclopaedia should transcribe, in clear and understandable language, the Nazi, the Japanese, the British, the American, the Communist views of society which are indeed the ruling concepts of our time, but rule only as the gods in Valhalla who fought continually with themselves." That, of course, is exactly what I do want done. I want to bring these poor pretences of cultural systems together and strip them bare in a bright light against the broad facts of social biology.
The Open Conspiracy at which your reviewer sneers is essentially a conspiracy to illuminate. He sneers because he has probably read nothing about it, or read about it in the same slovenly and selective manner that characterises his account of my paper. My statement of the idea of the Open Conspiracy has always been perfectly clear. All educated men who think clearly and frankly belong to the open conspiracy and cannot help but belong to it. They conspire as a crystal crystallises. Those mystical " others " who, according to your reviewer, without science and ordered intelligence, are going to " give " the world a social order, are consolation phantoms of his imagination. No social order can spring out of mental disorder and pretentious ignorance. There is no hope for the world without a strenuous mental renascence. I wish he had expanded a little more about those mystical " others " who without knowledge or orderly ideas are going to save the world. Is it Buchmanism, by any chance he has in mind, or the profound and secretive Uspensky, or Major Douglas or the Praying Nuns of Little [1. Our article was not a review ; if it had been, reference to the book reviewed would have been given. It was a dis- cussion of a lecture given to the Royal Institution—as was clearly stated.
2. A long extract from Mr. Wells' paper, giving his own definition of the nature and purpose of the World Encyclo- paedia, was embodied in the article.
3. There was no more of a sneer in the reference to Mr. Wells' Open Conspiracy than in the reference to " that admirable book, The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind." —En. The Spectator.]
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