The World Set Free

'We want to know has the plaintiff added anything to this or

hasn't he?' said the judge, 'we don't want to have your views

whether Sir Philip Dass's improvements were merely superficial

adaptations or whether they were implicit in your paper. No

doubt-after the ma

were ever likely to be discovered are implicit in your papers. No

doubt also you think too that most subsequent additions and

modifications are merely superficial. Inventors have a way of

thinking that. The law isn't concerned with that sort of thing.

The law has nothing to do with the vanity of inventors. The law

is concerned with the question whether these patent rights have

the novelty the plantiff claims for them. What that admission

may or may not stop, and all these other things you are saying in

your overflowing zeal to answer more than the questions addressed

to you-none of these things have anything whatever to do with

the case in hand. It is a matter of constant astonishment to me

in this court to see how you scientific men, with all your

extraordinary claims to precision and veracity, wander and wander

so soon as you get into the witness-box. I know no more

unsatisfactory class of witness. The plain and simple question

is, has Sir Philip Dass made any real addition to existing

knowledge and methods in this matter or has he not? We don't

want to know whether they were large or small additions nor what

the consequences of your admission may be. That you will leave to

us.'

Holsten was silent.

'Surely?' said the judge, almost pityingly.

'No, he hasn't,' said Holsten, perceiving that for once in his

life he must disregard infinitesimals.

'Ah!' said the judge, 'now why couldn't you say that when counsel

put the question?…'

An entry in Holsten's diary-autobiography, dated five days later,

runs: 'Still amazed. The law is the most dangerous thing in this

country. It is hundreds of years old. It hasn't an idea. The

oldest of old bottles and this new wine, the most explosive wine.

Something will overtake them.'

Section 4

There was a certain truth in Holsten's assertion that the law was

'hundreds of years old.' It was, in relation to current thought

and widely accepted ideas, an archaic thing. While almost all the

material and methods of life had been changing rapidly and were

now changing still more rapidly, the law-courts and the

legislatures of the world were struggling desperately to meet

modern demands with devices and procedures, conceptions of rights

and property and authority and obligation that dated from the

rude compromises of relatively barbaric times. The horse-hair

wigs and antic dresses of the British judges, their musty courts

and overbearing ma

intimations of profounder anachronisms. The legal and political

organisation of the earth in the middle twentieth century was

indeed everywhere like a complicated garment, outworn yet strong,

that now fettered the governing body that once it had protected.

Yet that same spirit of free-thinking and outspoken publication

that in the field of natural science had been the begi

the conquest of nature, was at work throughout all the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries preparing the spirit of the new world

within the degenerating body of the old. The idea of a greater

subordination of individual interests and established

institutions to the collective future, is traceable more and more

clearly in the literature of those times, and movement after

movement fretted itself away in criticism of and opposition to

first this aspect and then that of the legal, social, and

political order. Already in the early nineteenth century Shelley,

with no scrap of alternative, is denouncing the established

rulers of the world as Anarchs, and the entire system of ideas

and suggestions that was known as Socialism, and more

particularly its international side, feeble as it was in creative

proposals or any method of transition, still witnesses to the

growth of a conception of a modernised system of

inter-relationships that should supplant the existing tangle of

proprietary legal ideas.

The word 'Sociology' was invented by Herbert Spencer, a popular

writer upon philosophical subjects, who flourished about the

middle of the nineteenth century, but the idea of a state,

pla

reference to pre-existing apparatus, upon scientific lines, did

not take a very strong hold upon the popular imagination of the

world until the twentieth century. Then, the growing impatience

of the American people with the monstrous and socially paralysing

party systems that had sprung out of their absurd electoral

arrangements, led to the appearance of what came to be called the

'Modern State' movement, and a galaxy of brilliant writers, in

America, Europe, and the East, stirred up the world to the

thought of bolder rearrangements of social interaction, property,

employment, education, and government, than had ever been

contemplated before. No doubt these Modern State ideas were very

largely the reflection upon social and political thought of the

vast revolution in material things that had been in progress for

two hundred years, but for a long time they seemed to be having

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