Herbert George Wells
I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human
intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly
towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as
its watchword, it had attained its hopesto come to this at last. Once, life
and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been
assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No
doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social
question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.
It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.
Time Machine
No one would have believed in the last years of the
nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by
intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men
busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and
studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise
the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With
infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little
affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible
that the infusoria under the microscope do the same.
The War of the Worlds
For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might have foreseen had not terror and disaster blinded our minds. These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things--taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to manythose that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance--our living frames are altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. Already when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.
The War of the Worlds
