The Time Machine

by H.G. Wells

“any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and—Duration.

There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives.”

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.

“That is the germ of my great discovery. But you are wrong to say that we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become absent-minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of Time, any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect.

“It sounds plausible enough to-night,” said the Medical Man; “but wait until to-morrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.”

I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then.

There were no hedges, no signs of proprietary rights, no evidences of agriculture; the whole earth had become a garden.

This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then come languor and decay.

I am too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours—that is another matter.

“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.