He says: "I adopt certain be-lofs because I feel the need of them and because I feel an often quite unanalysable rightness in them. My belief in them rests upon the ject that they work for me and satisfy: my, desire fo: harmony and beauty." Mr. Wells cannot pr the beliefs he has adopted ave incontrovertible realities, He does not even claim that his ereed would satisfy everybody. He is not propagandist and does not wis! to impose "his universe," as he calls it, on others. So he but his voluminous wri contradict him. Since his early and entrancing days of pure romance, he has never written a book' that was without a purpose. He professes to be no preacher and yet many of his orities claim that he has spoiled Se all his later books by making them vehicles for expounding his peculiar views on life as it should be lived, Mr. Wells is ike the boy who was thrashed for wasting his time makin poetry and who sobbed out, "0! father, on me pity take and I n more will verses make." Ha of things" in the universe, He will not go so far as to postulate a schemer but he refuses to believe that life is chaotic because that would "leave my life ineffectual." He refuses to see himself condemned ce fatuity like a blind-folded donkey turning a mill, He sees order and coordination as distinguished from that which is haphazard.
Now, as we have said, we have all a working belief of our own, There may be those who believe, in contradistinction to Mr. Wells, that all things come by chance. That there is not only no schemer but no scheme and it must be can adduce It needs an effort to keep up a steady adherence to such a dismal creed. Those who believe otherwise are, possibly, like a child blowing bubbles, only enchant-jing themaclves with the irridescent hues on the shining edge of a vacuum, But if it be an illusion it is an illusion that gives a sense of solidity. The shining star by which they steer their ship may be only a subjective image on the retina and have no extrinsic existence the ship, somehow, comes into port.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.