imagination.

Mr Wells must, also, have been slightly intoxicated by the first
effects of reaction. A passage from _The Future in America_ exhibits
him somewhat gleefully reviving thoughts of the prison-house, and I
quote it in order to account for his first exercises in prophecy by a
study of contrasts. "I remember," he writes, "that to me in my boyhood
speculation about the Future was a monstrous joke. Like most people of
my generation, I was launched into life with millennial assumptions.
This present sort of thing, I believed, was going on for a time,
interesting personally, perhaps, but as a whole inconsecutive, and
then--it might be in my lifetime or a little after it--there would be
trumpets and shoutings and celestial phenomena, a battle of
Armageddon, and the Judgment.... To talk about the Man of the year
Million was, of course, in the face of this great conviction, a
whimsical play of fancy. The year Million was just as impossible, just
as gaily nonsensical as fairyland...."

The imprisoning bottle was opened when he became a student of biology,
under Huxley, and the liquid of his suppressed thought began to
bubble. He prefaced his romances by a sketch in the old _Pall Mall
Gazette_, entitled _The Man of the Year Million_, an a priori study
that made one thankful for one's prematurity. After that physiological
piece of logic, however, he tried another essay in evolution,
published in 1895 in book form under the title of _The Time
Machine_--the first of his romances.

The machine itself is the vaguest of mechanical assumptions; a thing
of ivory, quartz, nickel and brass that quite illogically carries its
rider into an existing past or future. We accept the machine as a