Herbert Wells

An an­imal per­fectly in har­mony with its en­vir­on­ment is a per­fect mech­an­ism.

There is no dif­fer­ence between Time and any of the three di­men­sions of Space ex­cept that our con­scious­ness moves along it.

There is no dif­fer­ence between Time and any of the three di­men­sions of Space ex­cept that our con­scious­ness moves along it

Our men­tal ex­ist­ences, which are im­ma­ter­ial and have no di­men­sions, are passing along the Time-Di­men­sion with a uni­form ve­lo­city from the cradle to the grave. Just as we should travel down if we began our ex­ist­ence fifty miles above the earth’s sur­face.”

These figures will serve perhaps to give one some conception of the immense emptiness of space in which the drama of life goes on.

Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that per­ish, in­tel­lects vast and cool and un­sym­path­etic, re­garded this Earth with en­vi­ous eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his van­ity, that no writer, up to the very end of the nine­teenth cen­tury, ex­pressed any idea that in­tel­li­gent life might have de­veloped there far, or in­deed at all, bey­ond its earthly level.

And be­fore we judge of them too harshly we must re­mem­ber what ruth­less and ut­ter de­struc­tion our own spe­cies has wrought, not only upon an­im­als, such as the van­ished bison and the dodo, but upon its in­ferior races.

At times I suf­fer from the strangest sense of de­tach­ment from my­self and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the out­side, from some­where in­con­ceiv­ably re­mote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all.

The fever of war that would presently clog vein and artery, deaden nerve and des­troy brain, had still to de­velop.