This book is in all probability the last of a series ofwritings, of which—disregarding certain earlier disconnectedessays—my Anticipations was the beginning. Originally Iintended Anticipations to be my sole digression from my artor trade (or what you will) of an imaginative writer. I wrote thatbook in order to clear up the muddle in my own mind aboutinnumerable social and political questions, questions I could notkeep out of my work, which it distressed me to touch upon in astupid haphazard way, and which no one, so far as I knew, hadhandled in a manner to satisfy my needs. But Anticipationsdid not achieve its end. I have a slow constructive hesitating sortof mind, and when I emerged from that undertaking I found I hadstill most of my questions to state and solve. In Mankind in theMaking, therefore, I tried to review the social organisation ina different way, to consider it as an educational process insteadof dealing with it as a thing with a future history, and if I madethis second book even less satisfactory from a literary standpointthan the former (and this is my opinion), I blundered, I think,more edifyingly—at least from the point of view of my owninstruction. I ventured upon several themes with a greaterfrankness than I had used in Anticipations, and came out ofthat second effort guilty of much rash writing, but with aconsiderable development of formed opinion. In many matters I hadshaped out at last a certain personal certitude, upon which I feelI shall go for the rest of my days. In this present book I havetried to settle accounts with a number of issues left over oropened up by its two predecessors, to correct them in someparticulars, and to give the general picture of a Utopiathat has grown up in my mind during the course of thesespeculations as a state of affairs at once possible and moredesirable than the world in which I live. But this book has broughtme back to imaginative writing again. In its two predecessors thetreatment of social organisation had been purely objective; here myintention has been a little wider and deeper, in that I have triedto present not simply an ideal, but an ideal in reaction with twopersonalities. Moreover, since this may be the last book of thekind I shall ever publish, I have written into it as well as I canthe heretical metaphysical scepticism upon which all my thinkingrests, and I have inserted certain sections reflecting upon theestablished methods of sociological and economic science....
The last four words will not attract the butterfly reader, Iknow. I have done my best to make the whole of this book as lucidand entertaining as its matter permits, because I want it read byas many people as possible, but I do not promise anything but rageand confusion to him who proposes to glance through my pages justto see if I agree with him, or to begin in the middle, or to readwithout a constantly alert attention. If you are not already alittle interested and open-minded with regard to social andpolitical questions, and a little exercised in self-examination,you will find neither interest nor pleasure here. If your mind is“made up” upon such issues your time will be wasted on these pages.And even if you are a willing reader you may require a littlepatience for the peculiar method I have this time adopted.
That method assumes an air of haphazard, but it is not socareless as it seems. I believe it to be—even now that I amthrough with the book—the best way to a sort of lucid vaguenesswhich has always been my intention in this matter. I tried overseveral beginnings of a Utopian book before I adopted this. Irejected from