The Time Machine.6: The Other Inside

“And because we are still such barbarians, any trust in the laws of human nature seem to us a dangerous and unethical naturalism. Why is this? Because under the barbarian's thin veneer of culture the wild beast lurks in readiness, amply justifying his fear. 

But the beast is not tamed by locking it up in a cage. There is no morality without freedom. When the barbarian lets loose the beast within him, that is not freedom but bondage. Barbarism must first be vanquished before freedom can be won. This happens, in principle, when the basic root and driving force of morality are felt by the individual as constituents of his own nature and not as external restrictions. How else is man to attain this realization but through the conflict of opposites?"
C.G. Jung

The Traveller tried to remain objective, to continue being the scientific detective of what he called with increasing irony the “Golden Age” of the future.

Why should he care about the fate of the Eloi? That they were “mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon...” He tried to think of the entire situation as only “a rigorous punishment of human selfishness.”

But now the Traveller realizes he is not studying this phenomenon from a distance—he is part of it. Because he is living on the surface, the Morlocks evidently consider him one of the Eloi—enough, in any event, to make him meat in their eyes. He has become what the Eloi are to the Morlocks: the beasts who are not us, the prey, the Others. And now the Morlocks have become to him what they are to the Eloi: the ones to be feared, the enemy, the Others.

The Traveller takes Weena to the Palace of Green Porcelain, which turns out to be the remains of a museum. Nearly all the exhibits have decayed and he learns nothing about how this future came to be. But he does find a box of matches in a hermetically sealed container, and an old machine that he dismembers to extract a metal rod that he might use to pry open the bronze door hiding his time machine—or use as a weapon against the Morlocks.

Wells portrays the Morlocks as capable of planning;
this comic book illustration is suitable for children

Now comes the most violent episode of the novel. The Traveller and Weena find themselves in the woods between the Palace and their safe shelter. He lights a small fire to slow the Morlocks down but becomes disoriented as he and Weena flee through the woods. He makes a campfire to spend the rest of the night but falls asleep, and awakes to find the campfire has gone out, and Morlocks are closing in.

He fights for his life with his weapon but is being overwhelmed, when the darkness is suddenly suffused with a dull luminous glow, and the Morlocks begin running away. Then he hears the crackling and smells the burning—"it was my first fire come after me"-- an inferno raging through the forest. The Morlocks scatter, blinded and terrified.

An even more exaggerated Morlock
monster and an even more sexualized
Weena.  This story is a particular origin
of this now familiar imagery.

But when the Traveller turns to find Weena, she is gone. The Morlocks have captured her. For hours he searches for her but in vain, and at first light he is stumbling back into the Eloi's encampment, exhausted and disheartened.

In addition to the violence, in this episode the Traveller expresses the most varied, volatile and violent emotions. He starts out tired and irritable, but afraid of what will happen if he and Weena sleep. In a fever, he rushes forward. When the Morlocks first appear he brandishes fire with aggressive glee. He pushes on grimly, feeling the Morlock's pursuit. In driving them off he loses his sense of direction, and lost in the dark woods he feels panic.

In fighting the swarming Morlocks by striking and killing them with his iron lever, he feels a "strange exultation." When they stop attacking him, he feels hope that they are afraid. He is amazed by the forest fire, distressed by the loss of Weena, and at daybreak, even though he survived, he is feeling wretched and terribly lonely.

The Traveller has been portrayed as a man who thinks scientifically, but he is now swamped by emotions. According to the prevailing view, feelings aren’t supposed to determine the workings of science any more than feelings affect the gears of machines. But although science provides the powerful appearance of objectivity, it can also hide the emotions, drives, and hidden agendas of scientists, as well as its own unacknowledged assumptions and prejudices. In that, scientists are the same as everyone else.

This denial of emotion’s existence is the tragic flaw, the hubris of science and scientists. Thomas Kuhn in his now celebrated theory of paradigm shifts has shown how scientific theories develop when and how they do partly due to the human foibles of human scientists and the pressures and prejudices of the surrounding society, and not just in immediate response to brilliant insights and careful research, in the stately, automatic and emotionless accumulation of knowledge.

Science can be manipulated, and the appearance of science can provide false justification for unacknowledged emotions and complex psychological reactions, as well as simply providing hypocritical cover for self-interest. All of this occurred in the late 19th century, with what historian Peter Gay calls "alibis for aggression" and "the cultivation of hatred."

Some of it would prolong the awful carnage of World War I with jingoistic and pseudo-racial patriotism, often justified by misinterpretations of Darwin. Some would flower in the evils of World War II and the European Holocaust, and some would haunt more recent times, in the long nuclear fear of the Cold War.

Just as science can fool itself unknowingly, people can fool themselves unconsciously. In the second half of the 1890s, a Vienna physician named Sigmund Freud was beginning to discuss his theories on how humans fool themselves. He began a systematic exploration of a known but significantly unmapped territory called the unconscious. So fraught with terrors and wonders was this world within every human, that many denied its existence.

Freud 1895

Freud proposed various mechanisms, such as repression, resistance and transference, to explain observations from his psychoanalytic practice with disturbed and mentally ill patients, and the analysis of his own dreams. In the same year The Time Machine was published, he wrote a paper describing the common stratagem he called projection.

People who are not really being attacked or overtly threatened nevertheless may ascribe terrible motives or sinister qualities to those they fear, with or without rational justification. Freud suggested that they are projecting their own aggressiveness and whatever else they accuse their enemy of, onto the face of that other group, class, race, gender or person. "That other" doesn't even have to be a true adversary, just someone else who can in some way be defined as different: the Other.

We project the ugliness inside ourselves we cannot face, onto the face of the Other. It helps a great deal if we don't know much about this Other, if the face is relatively blank. Then everything horrible we can imagine becomes the face of the Other that we see.

When even in Wells time, actual European travelers came back with stories of newly discovered animals or previously unknown peoples, they often drew pictures of them. They are usually quite inaccurate in very obvious ways. They seem to be exaggerated versions, or combinations of well-known imagery of demons or angels, for instance.

But it's more than a case of seeing what we think we see. Projection is one strategy for denying to ourselves what we actually feel, or even what we really do. And in a further convolution, it can reflect envy for those who we believe do have or can express the quality we vilify in the Other. It can be a product of insecurity, which is rampant in times of change, and possibly even more pronounced when an aggressive war of all against all is supposedly the natural state of affairs.

We are willing captives of the unconscious when we do not accept that we are complex beings, and that the most powerful as well as the most terrifying form of knowledge is the knowledge of ourselves.

We can be captives of our projections even when we are facing an enemy that really is bent on our destruction, as the Traveller was really attacked by the Morlocks. But the difference is when the Traveller takes responsibility for his own behavior, and does not project its cause only outward to the enemy.

The spirit of the scene, though the Traveller is depicted
as younger (and less clothed) than the novel 

At the height of the violence in The Time Machine, the Traveller is pulled down to the ground in the dark woods and covered by Morlocks. "I felt little teeth nipping at my neck." But in the midst of this horror his hand finds the iron lever he had dropped. He renews his struggle to stand, "shaking the human rats from me," and strikes with his iron. "I thrust where I judged their faces might be. I could feel the succulent giving of flesh and bone under my blows, and for a moment I was free."

It is that word "succulent" that critic John Huntington singles out because it "conveys both the pleasure the Time Traveller gets from such battery and the strange similarity between such violent activity and Morlock cannibalism. The Time Traveller here reveals himself as like the Morlocks…"

Though the Traveller is obviously fighting in self-defense, this observation rings true, and seems to be intentional on Wells' part since he includes three notable mentions of the Traveller’s taste for meat-eating: when the Traveller first sees the bloody meat in the Morlocks's lair (and before he knows its origin) he approves that they at least are meat-eaters, and then when he returns to his own time and home, before he tells his story, he calls for and devours some mutton: "What a treat it is to stick a fork into meat again!" (Although this occurs after his journey, we read it at the beginning of the novel.) He refers to this delight again after telling his story.

A taste for flesh is not the only similarity. The attacking Morlocks have evoked reactions and emotions in him—aggressive energy, a "strange exultation" in battle, and a physical pleasure in smashing and killing, which we assume are qualities the Morlocks are more likely to embody than the Eloi.

Does this make the Traveller the same as the Morlocks? Presumably there is some genetic similarity, as the Traveller is a genetic forebearer. (The genetic differences between humans and other animals, particularly apes, were later found to be quite small, which would confirm Darwin and further scandalize his 19th century opponents.) The difference may not be so much in physicality as in behavior, and choices of behavior made according to perception and values.

As artists and storytellers knew long before Freud, what we project on others is often an image based on values in conflict within ourselves. The Eloi and the Morlocks are the Others in each other’s eyes, as they are in ours. In fictional terms, they are archetypes—the angels and the devils—but archetypes functioning as projections of the emotions of Wells’ time.

The Eloi are the working man’s cliché of the artist: weak, simpering, useless; children dancing around in dresses and eating fruit. But more than just ribald sneering at tutus, they are, for example, the projection of all the contempt and envy generations of working and lower middle class parents have heaped upon their artistically inclined children.

Similarly the Morlocks are the muted sorrow and real fear that the rich and middle class have for the gross, clumsy, violent, dirty, proudly mindless but physically strong underclass hordes. But they may also be the projection of all the contempt and envy generations of elite parents have heaped upon their children who feel compassion for the downtrodden, who react with shame and anger at the injustice and separation they see, who don't value money and power and social position over a sense of common humanity, or who even value fair play and a physical life over abstract hypocrisies.

Wells' own background comes into play. He grew up with the real fear of falling down the precipice of poverty and illness. He had a few encounters with industrial workers and how they lived, and he reportedly reacted with repulsion and anxiety. At the same time, he could empathize with the downtrodden. He had grown up poor and deprived, with a low iron ceiling on his hopes.

Early and often, Wells had expressed his anger and contempt for the upper class that limited what he as a child was permitted to learn and achieve because he happened to be born into a lower middle class family. He saw through the pretentiousness of the elite, and the hypocrisy of their piously held—and now pseudo-scientific—views, that conveniently allowed them to feel angelically justified in piling up wealth and power at the expense of everyone else, and especially of anyone who got in their way.

But he also admired the graceful spaciousness of Up Park (the estate where his mother was housekeeper), the educated elite of science, the arts and world affairs, and those among the rich who championed the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of learning.

Wells' attitudes towards the Haves and the Have-nots of his time, the things he feared or disapproved of, and the things he admired and longed for, are represented in how he structures this story, and the characterizations of the Eloi and Morlocks. Projecting onto the page, projecting the story in the air or on the screen, is part of what artists do. Those images can then be examined, worked with, thought about, by both storyteller and audience.

What feelings do they evoke, what thoughts do they inspire? Free from too close an identification, free from personal criticism or exposure or betrayal, free from sin, we find more freedom in considering fictional characters and situations than in our own lives. Distance lends enchantment; the story is a playground of the soul.

And sometimes the more distant, the clearer we can see the outlines of action, character and meaning. This becomes one of the key discoveries about this kind of fiction, in which aspects of a present time are projected in time or space, to a distant time or a faraway planet, onto faces of beings no one has seen except in that story.

But projection in the real world has real consequences. One purpose of understanding projection is to cut down on the damage that projection and other unconscious stratagems motivate, channel or indirectly cause. We can do this by become aware of what's going on inside us, and by applying tools for understanding at least enough of what's going on inside us so we can question our motives, and when appropriate, change our behavior.

The Traveller for example might understand that for many thousands of years, humans have been omnivores—meat-eating is part of our evolutionary heritage. Cannibalism is so repulsive that it might have some sort of biological component. But in any case, the lines drawn by nature or culture have become part of our values that guide our behavior.

Similarly, the exultation the Traveller feels in battle is a response that has likely helped the human species survive when attacked by predators, or to make the body keener for the difficulties and dangers of the hunt.

On the other hand, while the Traveller’s exultant smashing of the Morlocks may be an organic human response, such pleasure in violence can also result in murder, rape and aggressive war-making which has become an agent of mass death. It may fuel less obvious aggressions, such as those against the natural world, which can endanger the existence of all life on earth.

Some (including a few in Wells’ time) have advocated dampening or eradicating these aggressive tendencies with drugs or genetic manipulation. But the result could well be the Eloi.

The Traveller has qualities of both Morlock and Eloi. From either’s perspective, he contains the Other. That’s the essence of his humanity. He is the living synthesis, and his strength and intelligence are derived from that union. He is both angel and devil, and the difference is in how he sees things, and how he behaves.

It also suggests Wells’ ultimate solution to the human conundrum of natural selection, and the key to human evolution.

...To be continued.  For earlier posts in this series, click on the "Soul of the Future" label below.

The Time Machine.5: Humans Divided

“...go, Teachers of content and honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of man’s neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring up in air so foul that it extinguishes the soul’s bright torch as fast as it is kindled!”
Charles Dickens
Martin Chuzzlewit

The Traveller resists the idea of following the Morlocks to their underground lair, yet if he is to recover the time machine, he knows he must. He senses and begins to share the Eloi’s fear of the dark, and notices his own unreasoning dread of the Morlock’s “pallid bodies...They were “the half-bleached color of the worms” he has seen in the zoological museum.

But with a frightened Weena watching, he climbs down the ladder of one of the wells and enters the underground darkness, equipped with only his last few matches. He sees machinery and some meat on a table, but he cannot communicate with the Morlocks. They quietly attack him, and he barely escapes.

Back on the sunny surface, he considers his emotions, and reconsiders the order of this future world. His third hypothesis adjusts the relationship of the two species descended from the human race he knew in his own time.

“The Upper-world people might have once been the favored aristocracy, and the Morlocks their mechanical servants, but that had long since passed away. The two species that had resulted from the evolution of man were sliding downwards...”

The Eloi “had decayed to a mere beautiful futility.” They had the surface to themselves because the Morlocks could no longer stand the light. “And the Morlocks made their garments” and maintained them “perhaps through the survival of an old habit of service.”

The Traveller takes Weena on an expedition towards a distant structure he calls the Palace of Green Porcelain. But the day wanes before they can return, and they stop for the night on an isolated hill near an expanse of endless woods. It is then that the Traveller's fourth and final hypothesis comes to him unbidden, as he is looking at the stars and thinking gentle cosmic thoughts.

In his brief foray underground he had seen a table of red meat, noted with scientific objectivity that the Morlocks were meat-eaters, and wondered where the meat could come from, for he had seen no animals. Now in the still silence of night he realizes "what the meat I had seen might be. Yet it was too horrible! I looked at little Weena sleeping beside me, her face white and starlike under the stars, and forthwith dismissed the thought."

But with the assurance of dawn he stands up and faces what he now knows to be true. The Eloi are the Morlocks’ lunchmeat. The Morlocks keep them like cattle. And he has his fourth hypothesis, no longer obscured by philosophies or anything less than the biological truth: humanity has divided into predator and prey.

But now the Traveller realizes he is not studying this phenomenon from a distance—he is now part of it, and he must act. He is living on the surface with the Eloi, and the Morlocks evidently consider him one of them—enough, in any event, to make him meat in their eyes. He has become what the Eloi are to the Morlocks: the beasts who are not us, the prey, the Others.

And now the Morlocks have become to him what they are to the Eloi: the ones to be feared, the enemy, the Others.

Though Wells' endows the Morlocks with some human emotion and at least one positive act (as the Traveller later finds, they have carefully cleaned and oiled his time machine), they are portrayed mostly as mechanically capable cannibals. Technically perhaps they aren't cannibals, because they are now a different species from the Eloi. But that of course is the point, and the horror of it: humanity has created its own predator, and made part of itself the prey.

The Time Machine has become a horror story. Humanity has divided into two separate and mutually dependent species, locked together in an ultimate inhuman symbiosis.

It is the final reflection of fears in the Traveller’s own time, where workers fear that the elites will keep them separate and enslaved, and drive them into the depths of despair, while elites fear the dark energy of the lower class and the "lower races" they exploit, so they tamp it down with the oppression of force and the shaming pretensions of science and culture.

The primal fears of the insecurely powerful are fulfilled in this future, as the apparently servile stalk them in the night, to devour them and all they have. Some of the Traveller’s contemporaries would see this future as just a reversal of predator and prey. They would assert that “predatory capitalism,” the rich preying on the poor describes the Traveller’s present.

Of course these fears remain, for the divisions are still with us, however reconfigured and sustained by new technologies and dogmas. And so the story continues to be haunting.

based on the 1960 film

Though the Eloi and Morlocks may be acting out of instinct at the time the Traveller visits them, they are the descendants of conscious humans who must have chosen to separate, and in a sense collaborated to divide. Perhaps violent conflict threatened to destroy them both. So the winners and losers of their common world divided into different environments that they each reinforced with their own creations, and then they each adapted to the environments they created and accepted.

Each species is separate, and both are incomplete. This is the key to Wells' portrayal of them, as simplified and unattractive opposites. Locked in the eternal dark and clanging of machine hell, the morbid, moronic Morlocks are the sketch of death. The Eloi, the cloying elite, are parodies of life and light. The Morlocks are pure evil, the Eloi pure innocence, but neither has the power of demons or angels, or gods of the future. They are satires of parts of humanity and segments of society. And in a sense those parts are interchangeable.

If the Morlocks are satirized Satans and the Eloi are travesties of angels, the two species define each other. Symbolically as well as symbiotically, without each other they don't exist. And this may be the most savage point Wells makes: the Eloi and Morlock devolved as separate species because humanity divided. On what basis they divided is a secondary point—it might be class, or race, religion or gender. It is all based finally on the dualism of the superior and inferior, of Us and Them.

Back in London the guests around the Time Traveller's baronial dinner table were right: it is a trick, a practical joke. The joke is that instead of showing how humans reflect in their cultures aspects of their biological evolution, in Wells' future, humanity has biologically evolved from its own cultural creations—and destruction.

But it's a very dark joke; no laughter interrupts. And the story is not over.

...To be continued.  For prior posts in this series, click on the "Soul of the Future" label below. 

The Time Machine.4: Be Careful What You Ask For

’See the value of imagination,’ said Holmes. “It is the one quality which [Inspector] Gregory lacks. We imagined what might have happened, acted upon the supposition, and find ourselves justified. Let us proceed.’”
Arthur Conan Doyle “The Adventure of Silver Blaze”

Critics have found models for Wells’ Time Traveller in a variety of fictional characters and real people, from Beowulf to Gulliver, Oedipus to Edison. Doubtless there are multiple sources, but there’s one never mentioned that I believe must be prominently included: Sherlock Holmes.

After their paths nearly crossed at the Emporium in Southsea, both Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle became writers whose work sometimes appeared in the same issues of the Strand magazine. They also became neighbors and friends, and traveled together in Europe.

Conan Doyle had the first success, with his Sherlock Holmes stories. Wells read and admired them, and in 1894—a year in which he was completing The Time Machine—he recommended the Holmes stories as a model for writing about science:

“The fundamental principles of construction underlie such stories as Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ or Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, are precisely those that should guide a scientific writer...First the problem, then the gradual piecing together of the solution.”

Conan Doyle called Holmes a “scientific detective.” Like Holmes, the Traveller employs the scientific method in making observations in this completely unknown world of the future, then forms a hypothesis, and makes further observations to test it.

The Traveller’s basic assumption about the future didn’t last very long: he saw the large buildings in the distance and the graceful and beautiful Eloi as evidence of the progress he expected from the future. Then he realized the Eloi were on the level of children.

This poster suggests the size of the Eloi as described
in the text--Weena as child-size.

So the problem becomes: what happened to humanity? Yet even in his disappointment in this passive childlike race, his hypothesis followed the lines of progress, and beyond: The Eloi were the weak heirs of success. Humanity had triumphed over nature and violence, and the beautiful buildings suggested centuries of artistic accomplishment and peaceful living. But no longer needing strength, intelligence and other qualities for the struggle of existence, the species selected for indolence.

The Traveller sat on the crest of a hill to watch the sunset and reflect on what he sees. The landscape is like a garden, with the palace-like buildings embedded in greenery. It was perfect. “The air was free of gnats, the earth from weeds or fungi; everywhere were fruits and sweet and delightful flowers... I saw mankind housed in splendid shelters, gloriously clothed, and yet I found them engaged in no toil.”

Yet for all the peace and beauty, the indolence and indifference of the Eloi suggested “humanity on the wane. The ruddy sunset had me thinking of the sunset of mankind.”

But this hypothesis about this future is soon to be shattered as well.

As darkness falls heralding his first night in the future, the Traveller looks down on the huge marble sculpture of a winged sphinx (part human, part animal) upon a large pedestal. He’d arrived in his time machine on the lawn in front of it. But his machine is not there.

He searches for it frantically that night, questioning the Eloi as his frustration and confusion mount, terrified that he will be marooned in this future.

The next morning he sees impressions on the grass that tell him the machine has been taken inside the pedestal, but he can find no way in.

Over the next few days he continues his explorations and observation, with the disappearance of the time machine always on his mind. He notices a number of circular wells dotting the land, and examines one. He hears a repeating thudding sound coming from below.

Among the Eloi he sees no evidence of machines, yet their clothes appear new. (He has already noted that their clothes are identical, with few clues to their gender.) He notes the absence of tombs. He has no idea who took his time machine—the Eloi seem incapable as well as uninterested.

Publicity still from the 1960 Time Machine feature with a Morlock
menacing a sexualized Weena--by that time, it already was a
monster movie cliche. The Morlock is also larger than the story
describes, and a greenish color rather than white.

Then when he watches the Eloi swimming in the clear river, he notices one is drowning. None of the others attempt a rescue, so he does. He doesn’t expect gratitude but he is surprised when “my little woman, as I believe she was” gave him flowers and clung to him.

“She was exactly like a child.” Her name is Weena, and she becomes his constant companion. She stayed especially close at night, and seemed very afraid of the dark.

The Traveller had already caught phantom glimpses of a “white, ape-like creature” in the night. Then one morning, as he escaped the heat of day (for the weather was “much hotter” than England in his own time), he entered a sheltered space and saw a pair of eyes glaring at him from deeper in the darkness.

He saw the creature clamber down the well shaft. He had met a Morlock. He began piecing together what he had observed. He realized they lived underground, that the wells were ventilation shafts, and that the thuds he’d heard were unseen machines.

So the Traveller forms his second hypothesis.

“But gradually, the truth dawn upon me: Man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals: that my graceful children of the Upperworld were not the sole descendants of our generation, but that the bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing, which had flashed before me, was also heir to all the ages."

How could this have happened? The Traveller elaborates on his second hypothesis—that two species diverged from one—by speculating on the obvious parallels to his own time: the Eloi descend from the elite, the Capitalists, the Haves; the Morlocks from the servile, Labor, the Have-nots. Specifically the Morlocks descend from the workers of the industrial age, sent down for their short lives into the darkness of the mines, or into the "dark satanic mills." They are sent down there out of sight with the machinery, while the elite above enjoy the fruits of their labor.

What may appear to us now as mostly a metaphor was more powerful and shocking to Wells' first readers. The imagery of the Eloi and Morlocks resonate with us as classic caricature—boldly opposing images of fey beauty and disfigured horror out of folk and fairy tales, or religious images of angels and devils. But citizens of 19th century London could on any given day see suggestions of Eloi and Morlocks walking among them.

As several commentators suggest, the Eloi resemble the ideal look of the fashionable young aesthetes, the gentle hedonists of Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations, somewhere between the innocence of the Pre-Raphaelites earlier in the century, and the Art Nouveau of the period.

The monstrous-looking Morlocks would seem more exaggerated, but are they?  Blake was not the only writer to invoke Satan.  In describing workers in the mills, novelists Charles Dickens and Elisabeth Gaskell use almost exactly the same terms: that they appear as "demons among the flame and smoke" (Dickens.)

But the reality even outside the dark mines and mills was equally monstrous.
Social historian Lewis Mumford praises 19th century working class families for their heroism in just surviving, and his description of their living conditions explains why—even as it eerily suggests the Morlocks:

"…whole quarters and cities, acres, square miles, provinces were filled with such dwellings, which mocked every boast of material success that the 'Century of Progress' uttered. In these new warrens, a race of defectives was created.

 Poverty and the environment of poverty produced organic modifications: rickets in children, due to the absence of sunlight, malformations of the bony structure and organs, defective functioning of the endrocrines, through a vile diet; skin diseases for lack of the elementary hygiene of water; smallpox, typhoid, scarlet fever, septic sore throat, through dirt and excrement; tuberculosis, encouraged by a combination of bad diet, lack of sunshine, and room overcrowding, to say nothing of the occupational diseases, also partly environmental."

The idea of this division was not original with Wells. Dickens wrote about it, as did Benjamin Disraeli with his famous formulation of the "two nations" of rich and poor in an 1845 novel. But it isn't just the fact of this division that Wells is exposing.

There were those in his time who believed this kind of division was regrettable but necessary—not simply that there were always poor people but that poverty and deprivation were simply part of how things naturally worked, and worked out for the best. It was survival—and triumph—of the fittest.

There were several interpretations of Darwin’s natural selection applied to human affairs that came to be known as Social Darwinism.

It was not Darwin but English public philosopher Herbert Spencer who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest." He had applied it directly to humanity a decade or so before Darwin announced his biological findings. But Spencer and others who rallied to a simplified version of Spencer’s views were eager to claim Darwin’s theory as the ultimate scientific justification.

At least implicit in Social Darwinism is that evolution decrees all-out social warfare of the strong against the weak. As unfit losers fade away, the race is strengthened because the fittest survive. Those who obtain wealth and power by any means are acting as nature intends. Large companies should not be obstructed from getting larger, and the defeated in war are to be granted no help or mercy.

John D. Rockefeller

Not surprisingly, the wealthiest and most powerful eagerly subscribed to this notion. “The growth of a large business is merely the survival of the fittest,” said monopolist John D. Rockefeller.

“The laws of competition, while sometimes hard for the individual...is best for the race because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department,” wrote industrialist Andrew Carnegie. “"We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment."

In Wells’ novel, "great inequality of environment" is exactly what could lead, in time, to one species becoming two. In his second hypothesis, the Traveller concludes this is just what happened.

He could see the process beginning in his own time, with the rich and poor separating in every way. “So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour.”

“The great triumph of Humanity I had dreamed of took a different shape in my mind. It had been no such triumph of moral education and general cooperation as I had imagined. Instead, I saw a real aristocracy, armed with a perfected science and working to a logical conclusion the industrial system of today. Its triumph had not been simply a triumph over Nature, but a triumph over Nature and their fellow man.”

Wells had given the adherents of Social Darwinism the world they wanted. He made their theory a fact of nature—and then he shows the consequences: two species, neither of them fully human. The fittest survive, but humanity does not.

Yet there are more surprises to come for the Traveller, along with his final hypothesis, and its proof.