Strange Powers
“G. Wells began his final book Mind at the End of Its Tether, written in 1945, the year before his death. It sounded like one of the Jehovah's Witnesses' doomsday prophecies. 'The end of everything we call life is at hand,' said Wells, 'and cannot be evaded.' In the quarter of a century that has passed since his death, there has been no obvious sign of the 'fundamental change' that Wells foresaw. But no, that is not quite true. There has been a change, and a very important one: not in the condit...ions of life, but in the attitude of the civilized western mind to those conditions. It is a change that would have amazed Wells, and perhaps irritated him. For although Wells could not have known it, he died in the last decade before the end of scientific determinism. This determinism—the belief that the universe is basically a machine, and that life is just a highly complicated mechanical process—had reigned supreme for more than a century, and it seemed to have come to stay. Its basic attitude could be summarized like this: 'Man has always been infinitely capable of error and self-deception.MoreLess
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