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fears. So far as we can judge, he has no wants or fears. He merely tells you what is going to be. Judged by this test we must, I think, reject Thrasymachus, as purely propagandist. Mr Joad wants to popularize immorality. He tries to persuade us to join the ranks of the libertines lest we be swamped in the coming Neopuritan revival. By the same token we must, reluctantly, reject Mrs Bertrand Russell. In Hypatia the quasi-prophetic rôle is assumed, we fear, merely as a vantage point from which to wage sex-war.

Coming to the genuine prophets, I would divide them into two kinds; the mechanists and the vitalists, not however, using these terms in their traditional philosophical senses. The mechanists are those who view the future in terms of the development of machinery. Man, having a nature very much what it is to-day, is seen in an environment of mechanical perfection, a world of wireless telegraphy, television, fuelless traffic, moving pavements, rubber roads, windows of flexible glass, rustless metals, dustless and smokeless cities, and private houses fit for a plumber’s paradise.

The vitalists, of whom I take Mr Haldane to be the leading spokesman, have a message in the face of which the wonders of wireless are relatively tame. The time has come, they say, when our science and our inventive genius are to be applied to life itself. In a sense, of course, the journalists and men of letters got in first. Kapek with his Robots made the idea dramatic; but the mechanical tradition was too strong. The Robot was little more than clockwork. Wells’s “Men like Gods” are perhaps a slight advance, but the gods are all too human, and a bit too much like Mr Wells. Shaw, I think, got nearest. In Back to Methuselah the problem of biological invention was approached in a more biological manner. But all these are prophets of the transition. They are at heart Utopians, and neglect the evidences of the present upon which the forecast must be based.