INTRODUCTION TO THE 1914 EDITION
purpose to which our reason in the measure of its strength, submits us. It is what was intended when people used to talk about an Age of Reason, it was vaguely apprehended when the Victorians spoke of Public Opinion. Since writing "Anticipations" I have got into the habit of using for it the not very elegant phrase, the Collective Mind. I hope some one will soon find a better expression. This Collective Mind is essentially an extension of the spirit of science to all human affairs, its method is to seek and speak and serve the truth and to subordinate oneself to one's conception of a general purpose. Its immediate social and political effect is an insistent demand for perfect freedom of thought and discussion. Social and political order it values only as a means of freedom. But in these earlier books and until I had come into contact with those dreams of official controls, "governing classes" and the like, in action, it is manifest how little I apprehended the danger of interference and paralysis which through the self-sufficiency of governing and managing persons any attempt to organise this collective mind involves. That chiefly is what I should alter if I were to rewrite "Anticipations" now. I should point out that the New Republic is not a type and a class of persons but a power in men's minds and in mankind. And that the worst enemies the Collective Mind can have, are a swarm of busy little bureaucrats professing to direct or protect it, gaining a kind of stifling control of it and working in its name. Order is a convenience, but Anarchism is the aim and outcome of that convenience. For the material securities of
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