Are Human Beings Ultimately Ignorant?

Huxleian Preoccupations in H. G. Wells's The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds

Abstract

This paper analyzes that part of Huxley’s theories which denied the absoluteness and certainty of science and compares it to the representation of science given in the fin-de-siècle novels The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. I shall argue that the scientific and the agnostic enterprises aimed at the explanation of knowledge as conducted by Huxley in the last decades of the nineteenth century inexorably led to an admission of ignorance. The same concerns are present in the scientific romances of Wells. In order to affirm this, I shall initially investigate how the scientific journalism that underpins Wells’s early fiction shares Huxley’s insistence upon the contingency of human knowledge, and then demonstrate how his novels take up these Huxleian preoccupations. This is achieved by means of the representation of the protagonists’ accounts as not completely accurate and reliable because they are passionately involved in the events they witness. Moreover, Wells characterizes human knowledge of the external reality as imprecise and not offering any certainty which could guarantee lasting safety and comfort for human beings. Science and its method are finally represented by Wells as offering no definitive and useful knowledge of reality.