The Outline of History, Vols. I and II by H. G. Wells — Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs, Lists. If history of humanity feels a lot like the following video to you, then you need to read this book, or at least my review of it: http: //www. Jhik.. (PG- 1. 3 for violence and some language, but it is VERY relevant!). The premise of this monumental work of H. G. Wells’ is staggering: sketch all of history as succinctly as possible while critiquing major figures and events, noting their contributions to the evolving story and progress of humankind, and imagining for the reader the trajectory along which everything is barreling.
Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church pdf by H. G. Wells Though he returned with the great appetite for american cardinal hinsley and bearing.
Wells pulled it off quite nicely, although it was inevitable that sections of the work would became bogged down by a litany of names, dates, and places; but I’m assuming there were critics to please, and people who would feel he was doing history buffs a disservice by leaving out names and events that meant a lot to a particular demographic. His chronological table alone spans 1. You can’t please them all, but Wells did as well as anyone I’ve read. I have been asked a couple of times why I am reading an out- of- date historical work. The last revision to the Outline in Wells’ lifetime was published in 1.
Later, Raymond Postgate updated it, trying to preserve the вЂvoice’ of Wells (which I think he did a fine job of); and Wells’ son, G. P. Wells, updated the final edition in 1. It appears that since the last update in 1. Mostly, Wells was timeless in the unique way he chose to outline and summarize happenings and, more importantly, ideas, for he believed that “all human history is fundamentally a history of ideas. His remarkable storytelling stands out far beyond other histories that are a mere recitation of facts. The work as a whole may better represent historiography or philosophy of history instead of history per se, so, as much as I hate to say it, it is most likely already going the way of the dinosaur as far as a plain chronicle of episodes is concerned. This is an assumption, but there are probably other works out there that can do that job better.
PDF’s; Reviews. T. Brodie. Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church in 1943. church by so eminent a world figure as H.G. Wells. Links: Crux.
I wish people could make the connection between what they love in H. G. Wells’ other writings, and infer that the same creative mind is at work in this Outline to help readers understand the deep meaning of humanity’s experiences, but that isn’t likely. So, my peeps, allow me to regurgitate for you. Wells fully commits to the story of early humanity in a way that few seldom know to do. He seems to really understand all that was and is hanging on humanity’s evolution, and all the ramifications of the nuanced changes and milestones.
Crux Ansata: An Indictment Of The Roman Catholic Church By H. G. Wells cassell to florence in crux ansata - academic dictionaries and sikhism words and pictures h. g. H. G. Wells. a.k.a. Herbert George Wells, Reginald Bliss * Author Code: EHGW. Crux Ansata 1943: 60: 348k: EHGW016: In The Days of the Comet 1906: 155: 1005k. Herbert George Wells (Bromley, Kent. 1943 - Crux Ansata; 1943 - The Mosley Outrage; 1944 - '42 to '44: A Contemporary Memoir; 1945 - Mind at the End of Its Tether. It was under this sort of duress that he wrote Crux Ansata. In Crux, Wells uses his pulpit of public teacher to add fuel to the fire of British morale.
His grasp of the origins of religion is especially illuminating. He reduces much early religion to a fear of the Old Man in a tribal culture who was the dominant male that ensured the survival of the tribe, monopolized the females, and demanded the fear, servility and absolute reverence of the other males. The taboo associated with tampering with any of the belongings of the Old Man carved deep grooves in the tribe’s psyche—“the fear of the Old Man was the beginning of social wisdom”—and probably influenced posterity’s fear of the Old Man coming back, since a fetish- awed mentality shrouded the dead in supernatural possibilities. Slowly but surely, “The fear of the Father passed by imperceptible degrees into the fear of the Tribal God. There are traces here of Herbert Spencer’s ideas, one of the fathers of evolution who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”, which developed the idea that religion’s root lies in the chief of a tribe whose mastery over his people and environment began to be understood by his contemporaries and successive generations as a difference that is “not of degree only, but of kind” (from Universal Progress).
The chief was a superman to his ordinary brethren, and the dead chief became the archetype of the aboriginal deity. Wells stretches this theory further to account for the growing fear and respect for priest- craft, which cultivated a hegemony of power by forging “secrets in order to have secrets to tell. This groping veneration culminated in what we now consider to be the most barbaric of rituals and self- sacrifice. The blood- letting which characterized many of the primitive cultures was a matter of course. To lift curses, to remove evils, to confirm and establish, one must needs do potent things. And was there anything more potent in existence than killing, the shedding of life- blood? What began as fetishism in the late Paleolithic period morphed over the epochs into full- blown animism and later, as language developed in the Neolithic stage, into crudely systematized and heavily ritualized religious belief.
Out of all these factors, out of the Old Man tradition, out of the emotions that surround Women for men and Men for women, out of the desire to escape infection and uncleanness, out of the desire for power and success through magic, out of the sacrificial tradition of seedtime, and out of a number of like beliefs and mental experiments and misconceptions, a complex something was growing up in the lives of men which was beginning to bind them together mentally and emotionally in a common life and action. This something we may call religion.
It was not a simple or logical something, it was a tangle of ideas about commanding beings and spirits, about gods, about all sorts of вЂmusts’ and вЂmust- nots’. Like all other human matters, religion has grown.
It must be clear from what has gone before that primitive man—much less his ancestral apes and his ancestral Mesozoic mammals—could have had no idea of God or religion; only very slowly did his brain and his powers of comprehension become capable of such general conceptions. Religion is something that has grown up with and through human association, and God has been and is still being discovered by man…Hitherto a social consciousness had been asleep and not even dreaming in human history. Before it awakened, it produced nightmares. Pre- written and written history is so vast.
It blows my mind. Some experts say that we can only picture a small number of separate, concrete units in our mind at one time—I think that number is ten—and the rest is abstraction and generalization. There are so many factors to consider in historical surveys.
What factors are we classifying in history as significant, and what myriad elements have those factors combined with in their time, and over the eons, that adulterate the isolated fact, making it a m. Г©lange of influences, or an altogether different thing from the original fact? Billions of data are interacting with billions of data, and those billions upon billions of results interacting with old and new data to form objects, acts, events, people, ideas, cultures, civilizations and worlds. Where does one datum end and another begin? Where do we draw the lines for meaningful memories and studies, and if we could draw the lines of discrete facts and interactions, how do we hold it all in our little mind?
History is infinitely complex, as is each of our experience in history, and the best we can do is redraw our internal maps and strategies using the most significant and reliable information as we can receive and understand. This is one of the reasons Wells titled his book as an Outline, a bird’s- eye- view, which, if we’re being honest, is the best any of us can do.
Even as an outline the book in places became bogged down in names, dates, and deeds, much of which couldn’t be well- described for lack of space. The amount of material one has to summarily skip over is in itself mind- numbing. I’m sure the decision about what to include may not have been nearly has difficult to determine as what to exclude. In the end, Wells has hope for humanity, but he’s not a blind optimist…not after the World Wars.
He has been criticized over the years for his materialistic notions, socialist leanings, and utopian ideals, some of which he gave verbal apologies for, but his Outline Of History is a very balanced and cautiously optimistic approach to hope and progress. He does seem to understand the tenuous and fragile thing peace and intelligence is, and I think he was doing his utmost to help the world realize its fullest human potential. Modern civilization…is an embryo, or it is a thing doomed to die…our present civilization may be no more than one of those crops farmers sow to improve their land by the fixation of nitrogen from the air; it may have grown only that, accumulating certain traditions, it may be ploughed into the soil again for better things to follow. So, in the big picture, have we as humans come far? I think Wells’ answer is yes, but not without loss.
His wrap- up to his chapter ending WWI is probably how he ultimately tallies the results of wins/losses throughout history, and how far he could see from where he last stood. Nearly everyone had lost too much and suffered too much to rejoice with any fervor. This review has been abridged for Goodreads. For the full review, visit: http: //bookburningservice.