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stirring of problems that seem to return into themselves. Why did he write it if he can hold out no hope of salvation? If the conclusions he has reached negate his own past life, and the possible futures of all the human race, where do we go from there? Wells ’ s thesis is that we have never been going anywhere—we have been carried along by our delusions, believing that any movement is better than none. Whereas the truth is that the reverse, no movement, is the final answer, the answer to the question: What will men do when they see things as they are?
    It is a long way from Mr. Polly ’ s discovery (If you don ’ t like your life you can change it) to: There is no way out or round or through. Barbusse has gone half-way, with his, Truth, what do they mean by it?, which has as a corollary, Change, what difference does it make? Wells has gone the whole distance, and landed us on the doorstep of the Existentialist problem: Must thought negate life?
    Before we pass on to this new aspect of the Outsider ’ s problem, there is a further point of comparison between Barbusse and Wells that deserves comment. Barbusse ’ s hero is an Outsider when we meet him; probably he was always an Outsider. Wells was very definitely an Insider most of his life. Tirelessly he performed his duty to society, gave it good advice upon how to better itself. He was the scientific spirit incarnate: reviewing the history of the life and drawing conclusions, reviewing economics and social history, political and religious history; a descendant of the French Encyclopedists who never ceased to compile and summarize. From him: Truth, what do they mean by it? would have elicited a compendious review of all the ideas of truth in the history of the seven civilizations. There is something so shocking in such a man ’ s becoming an Outsider that we feel inclined to look for physical causes for the change: Wells was a sick, a tired man, when he wrote Mind at the End of Its Tether. May we not accept this as the whole cause and moving force behind the pamphlet?
    Unfortunately, no. Wells declared his conclusions to be objective; if that is so, then to say he was sick when he wrote them down means no more than to say he was wearing a dressing-gown and slippers. It is our business to judge whether the world can be seen in such a way that Wells ’ s conclusions are inevitable; if so, to decide whether such a way of looking at things is truer, more valid, more objective, than our usual way of seeing. Even if we decide in advance that the answer is No, there may be much to learn from the exercise of changing our viewpoint.
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    The Outsider ’ s claim amounts to the same thing as Wells ’ s hero ’ s in The Country of the Blind: that he is the one man able to see. To the objection that he is unhealthy and neurotic, he replies: ‘ In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. ’ His case, in fact, is that he is the one man who knows he is sick in a civilization that doesn ’ t know it is sick. Certain Outsiders we shall consider later would go even further and declare that it is human nature that is sick, and the Outsider is the man who faces that unpleasant fact. These need not concern us yet; for the moment we have a negative position which the Outsider declares to be the essence of the world as he sees it. ‘ Truth/ what do they mean by it. ’ ‘ There is no way out, or round, or through. ’ And it is to this we must turn our attention.
    When Barbusse made his hero ask the first question, he was almost certainly unaware that he was paraphrasing the central problem of a Danish philosopher who had died in 1855 in Copenhagen. Søren Kierkegaard had also decided that philosophic discussion was altogether meaningless, and his reason was Wells ’ s reason: Reality negates it. Or, as Kierkegaard put it, existence negates it. Kierkegaard ’ s attack was directed in particular against the German metaphysician Hegel, who had (rather like Wells) been