4 - H. G. Wells’s Very Ordinary Brains
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 June 2023
Summary
In H. G. Wells’s 1901 scientific romance, The First Men in the Moon, the Grand Lunar, the super-intelligent ruler of a race of moon aliens, is perplexed when he learns about the human institution of democracy. Do human beings really possess no means of distinguishing between superior and inferior minds, and organising their civilisation accordingly? The superiority of the Grand Lunar’s own intellect to those of his subjects is incontrovertible: he has no skull, and so the many ‘ghost[ly]’ ‘undulating’ convolutions of his brain are visible.As Anne Stiles has noted, Wells was here drawing upon the hypothesis that more numerous brain convolutions indicate higher intelligence.Yet Cavor, the novel’s scientist protagonist, has to confess that human intellectual inequality, however profound, has no obvious physical referent:
‘It is all hidden in the brain’, I said, ‘but the difference was there. Perhaps if one could see the minds and souls of men they would be as varied and unequal as the Selenites [the race of aliens who inhabit the moon]. There were great men and small men, men who could reach out far and wide, and men who could go swiftly; noisy, trumpet-minded men, and men who could remember without thinking …’
He interrupted me […] ‘But you said all men rule?’
‘To a certain extent’, I said, and made, I fear, a denser fog with my explanation.
Throughout his writing career, Wells attempted to modernise Plato’s dream of a beautiful city ruled by philosopher kings. In both his fiction and his sociological treatises, he fantasised about a World State devoted to the principles of socialism and scientific rationality and administered by a small, rigorously selected cognitive elite. Although Wells was only briefly a member of the Fabian Society, his faith in the ‘coming predominance of the man of science, the trained professional expert’ and in meritocratic elitism clearly accords with the thinking of Beatrice and Sidney Webb and with the spirit of Fabian socialism in general.
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- Assessing IntelligenceThe Bildungsroman and the Politics of Human Potential in England, 1860-1910, pp. 187 - 237Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2022