Editing World Brain (section)

=== A Permanent World Encyclopedia ===
This section was first published in ''[[Harper's Magazine]]'', April 1937, and contributed to the new ''[[Encyclopédie française]]'', August 1937.

In this essay, Wells explains how current encyclopaedias have failed to adapt to both the growing increase in recorded knowledge and the expansion of people requiring information that was accurate and readily accessible. He asserts that these 19th-century encyclopaedias continue to follow the 18th-century pattern, organisation and scale. "Our contemporary encyclopedias are still in the coach-and-horse phase of development," he argued, "rather than in the phase of the automobile and the aeroplane".<ref name=WB38/>{{rp|58}}

Wells saw the potential for world-altering impacts this technology could bring. He felt that the creation of the encyclopaedia could bring about the peaceful days of the past, "with a common understanding and the conception of a common purpose, and of a commonwealth such as now we hardly dream of".<ref>[http://sherlock.berkeley.edu/wells/world_brain.html "The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia"]. Contribution by H. G. Wells to the new ''Encyclopédie Française'', August 1937</ref>

Wells anticipated the effect and contribution that his World Brain would have on the [[university]] system as well.<ref name=Rayward/>{{rp|561}} He wanted to see universities contributing to it, helping it grow, and feeding its search for holistic information. "Every university and research institution should be feeding it" (p.&nbsp;14). Elsewhere Wells wrote: "It would become the logical nucleus of the world's research universities and post-graduate studies."<ref>Wells, H.G. (1931a) ''[[The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind]]'', New York: Greenwood. p.&nbsp;796</ref> He suggested that the organization he was proposing "would outgrow in scale and influence alike any single university that exists, and it would inevitably take the place of the loose-knit university system of the world in the concentration of research and thought and the direction of the general education of mankind".<ref name=WB38/>{{rp|95}} In fact the new encyclopedism he was advocating was "the only possible method I can imagine, of bringing the universities and research institutions around the world into effective cooperation and creating an intellectual authority sufficient to control and direct collective life".<ref name=WB38/>{{rp|48}} Ultimately the World Encyclopaedia would be "a permanent institution, a mighty super-university, holding together, utilizing and dominating all of the teaching and research organizations at present in existence".<ref>Wells, H.G. (1942a) [https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.159480 ''Science and the World Mind''], London: New Europe Publishing Co. p.&nbsp;59.</ref>