The Time Machine

by H.G. Wells

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

You see I had always anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand odd would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything. Then one of them suddenly asked me a question that showed him to be on the intellectual level of one of our five-year-old children—asked me, in fact, if I had come from the sun in a thunderstorm!

Apparently the single house, and possibly even the household, had vanished. Here and there among the greenery were palace-like buildings, but the house and the cottage, which form such characteristic features of our own English landscape, had disappeared. “‘Communism,’” said I to myself.

Humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions.

The too-perfect security of the Upper-worlders had led them to a slow movement of degeneration, to a general dwindling in size, strength, and intelligence.

“It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble.

even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.