Catching Up with Wells: The Political Theory of H. G. Wells’s Science Fiction

In her 2015 PEN H. G. Wells lecture, novelist Ali Smith decried the UK government’s proposal to abandon the Human Rights Act as evidence of “evolution going backwards.” ¹ This same lecture serves as the Introduction to Penguin’s very recent reissue of H. G. Wells’s The Rights of Man: Wells’s 1940 revision and expansion upon his “Declaration of the Rights of Man” which originally appeared in a letter to the London Times. Wells’s Rights laid the groundwork for the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights, adopted two years after Wells’s death in 1946. Smith believes it is necessary to return once more to this visionary science- and non-fiction writer to remind ourselves of the future he had envisioned, and that we have still failed to achieve. She writes of the book’s reissue: “Wells was always ahead of his time, and always timely. This book is a reminder of why we instigated Human Rights legislation in the first place, how seminal the visionary Wells was in this process, and, in a time of threat to such legislation, how vital it is for us to protect it. It’s time to catch up with H.G. Wells.” ²

Smith is certainly not the first—nor will she be the last—to call Wells prophetic. Wells’s science fiction relies, writes Patrick Parrinder, “upon our hunger for foreknowledge and our need to contemplate shadows of the future as part of the process of self-discovery.” ³ Wells himself declared, “we prophets write for our own time.” ⁴ It was always his contention that whatever prophetic elements were present in his scientific romances were there as a by-product, or result, of his orientation toward his contemporary condition. Wells’s Rights of Man is a call for a “real federation of mankind” directly responding to the atrocities of the World Wars: “the decisive question before our species is whether this time it will set its face resolutely towards that drastic remoulding of ideas and relationships, that world revolution, which it has shirked for a quarter of a century.” ⁵ His Declaration of ten articles includes protection against discrimination on race or colour, entitlement to education, protection of property, and the right of men to “move freely around the world.” ⁶ This right of movement, about which Wells speaks at length in his expansion of the Declaration’s articles, is seminal to his cosmopolitan-socialist vision: at this “great turning point of human history, we need . . . [an] assertion of the ‘claims of the common man’”; “the more collectivist we become—and continually we become more collectivist—the more the sense of propriety has to shift to the community as a whole.” ⁷

John S. Partington has presented Wells as a “liberal internationalist,” discussing the Rights and Wells’s earlier Outline of History, which Wells claimed “was the first conscious attempt to tell the story of humankind from a non-nationalist perspective.” ⁸ Following from the chaos and horrors of the First and Second World Wars, Wells, Partington writes, lost faith in the viability of the nation-state and “became convinced that the choice for humankind was between cosmopolitan unity and human extinction.” ⁹ Here we can see the prophetic nature of Wells’s cosmopolitanism in dialogue with contemporary calls for a more cosmopolitan, or “stateless,” ethic, specifically relating to the nation-state’s control over movement and migration. Arash Abizadeh and Joseph Carens are recent critics of the restriction of immigration or movement across borders by nation-states, seeming to echo H. G. Wells’s 1940 call to re-evaluate how humanity must be compelled to organize itself on the globe. ¹⁰ Like Wells, who was writing in a time of great global crisis, theorists like Abizadeh and Carens are spurred and validated by our contemporary crises of global migration, to which nation-states respond with great variance. Wells’s prophecy remains: an appeal to a common humanity is not yet fulfilled, despite Wells’s recommendations almost eighty years ago.

The resurgence of interest in Wells’s non-fiction, reflected by Penguin’s re-issue of his Rights of Man, coupled with the resurgence of his applicability to contemporary issues, politics, and debates, suggests that it is also time to re-assess the applicability of Wells’s science fiction to our contemporary world; in particular, if we are to heed Smith’s call that we ought to catch up to Wells in matters of human rights and international relations, then Wells’s conception of humanity needs to be examined and made clear. The Rights of Man, so reliant on the language of “common humanity,” is heavily influenced by Wells’s life-long preoccupation with science. A student of T.H. Huxley’s (“Darwin’s Bulldog”), Wells permeated his non- and science-fiction with the vocabulary and argumentation of a natural scientist. Wells’s global collectivism in the Rights is founded in the understanding of humanity as a species that is under real threat of extinction: “unless we can struggle through the mounting perplexities of to-day, to a new world order of law and safety, unless we can keep our heads and our courage, so as to re-establish a candid life, our species will perish.” ¹¹ He defines ‘man’ in the Rights with the words of a scientist—“‘man’ in these Declarations obviously means any living specimen of Homo Sapiens, male or female, young or old” ¹² —and this language certainly seems to make sense of Smith’s invocation of evolutionary rhetoric in calling the UK’s abandonment of the Human Rights Act evidence of “evolution going backwards.”

While it may be accurate to term Wells a “liberal internationalist” or “cosmopolitan,” it is not, however, accurate to impute to him a social-Darwinist theory of human progress. It is more accurate to Wells’s own biography and writings to associate his account of humanity with that of his teacher, T.H. Huxley, who rejected the Darwinian faith in the progress of natural selection or evolution, instead favouring an account of the human species which did not see its survival and flourishing as inevitably progressive but at constant risk of failure. As Wells writes in his essay, “Zoological Retrogression”: “The assumption [of man] is that before him lies a long future of profound modification, but whether that will be, according to the present ideals, upward or downward, no one can forecast. . . . It may be that, instead of this, Nature is, in unsuspected obscurity, equipping some now humble creature with wider possibilities of appetite, endurance or destruction, to rise in the fullness of time and sweep homo away into the darkness from which the universe arose.” ¹³

Wells’s early scientific romances—which include The Time Machine (1895) and The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896)—emphasize this profound uncertainty about the identity and fate of the human species. Citing Dr. Moreau in particular, contemporary scholars emphasize the elements present in Wells’s science fiction that satirize or call into question the assumed superiority or progression of the civilized human being: The Island of Dr. Moreau, claims Philip Armstrong (which was written, Wells himself stated, “under the influence of Swift’s tradition”), “turns upon a very Swiftian chiasmus . . . the opposition between ‘man and beast’ disintegrates as it is reversed, reinstated and reversed again.” ¹⁴ The identity of man, or humanity—a natural species among others—is subjected to profound anthropological doubt when the “notorious vivisector,” Dr. Moreau, “lay[s] bare the contradictions of human subjectivity” in his attempted creation of the Island’s Beast-People. ¹⁵ Dr. Moreau, whose island is populated with his created “half-bestial creatures” ¹⁶ famously claims that he has devoted his life to the study of the “plasticity of living forms,” which can be vivisected both physically and mentally: “the possibilities of vivisection do not stop at mere physical metamorphosis. A pig may be educated. The mental structure is even less determinate than the bodily.” ¹⁷ Moreau’s justification of his scientific method is demonstrably drawn from Wells’s own non-fiction writings, primarily found in “The Limits of Individual Plasticity,” and “Human Evolution, An Artificial Process.” ¹⁸ Wells claims that “a living being may also be regarded as raw material, as something plastic, something that may be shaped and altered. . . . Very much indeed of what we call moral education is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct.” ¹⁹ There is, he claims, “(1) an inherited factor, the natural man, who is the product of natural selection, the culminating ape, and a type of animal more obstinately unchangeable than any other living creature; and (2) an acquired factor, the artificial man, the highly plastic creature of tradition, suggestion and reasoned thought. In the artificial man we see all that makes the comforts and securities of civilization a possibility. That factor and civilization have developed, and will develop together.” ²⁰

Wells’s Moreau, like his political non-fiction writing, is being increasingly invoked for its contemporary relevance in asserting that the distinctively “human” factor of rationality and morality is an artificial construct, and that our affinity with the natural and animal kingdom is irrevocable. Seemingly claiming in the figure of Dr. Moreau that our acquired and inherited factors are manipulable, Wells is said to prophesize transgenic technologies, such as Donna Haraway’s OncoMouse or cyborgs. ²¹ Species categories, which are now being “extinguished in biotechnology,” ²² are ever-more fluid. As Scott Bennett writes, “given the state of chimera technology, the division between human and animal has become a continuum and not a bright line.” ²³ The “mad-scientist,” exemplified by Moreau, is, Evelyn Tsitas argues, an early shadow of contemporary scientific experiments and methods: “created by science, [his] hybrids blur the species boundary.” ²⁴ Indeed, the suggestion in combining these accounts is that humans and animals are all Beast-People (or “cyborgs”). Human distinctiveness is elusive, given the plasticity—or construction—of the human, illuminated by Dr. Moreau through the vivisection of humans and animals. Wells’s presentation of the traveller Edward Prendick’s encounter with Dr. Moreau and his beasts is seen as an engagement with the “unstable” and “contested” negotiations of the human being’s place in the taxonomy of living things, which is “accompanied by doubt and anxiety, both ethical and epistemological.” ²⁵ In sum, the human species, while distinct, is one species among many, subject always to modification but not necessarily progress; and to morals and civilizations that may not persist.

What, then, are we to make of Wells’s “humanity”? Embracing the real possibility of human extinction or self-destruction, Wells placed a hesitant stake on the very fictions or creations of human life—morality, theology, politics, and science itself—that can lift human beings out of miserable failures and skepticisms. The development of the “acquired factor” for Wells—of “moral ideas”—“is inseparably interwoven, on the one hand with the development of theological ideas, and the other with political institutions.” He calls for an “apparatus of education and moral suggestion, held together by a common faith and common sentiment, and shaping the minds and acts and destinies of men.” ²⁶ As he writes in The Rights of Man, a civilized and united world “will be continually be replanning itself, rebuilding itself.” ²⁷

A Declaration of the Rights of Man is one such apparatus for reconstruction: one that Wells sees as capable of preventing the degeneration or destruction of the human species in the contemporary world. What Wells offers, therefore, is a political theory that takes as its foundation the human need for common fictions—including, in the modern era, science fictions—to define humanity itself. The only bulwark against the truth of the human condition—that we are, indeed, all products of a pitiless commonality with nature—is a persistent faith in the capacity of our common apparatuses, or artificialities, to prevent a further degeneration into solipsistic pessimism or extinction. While, as Wells writes in The Rights of Man, “we have to face the realities of human nature,” we may still discuss a project for a “hopeful world.” ²⁸

The Rights of Man, then, is also an apparatus of hope. As Simon J. James has written in Maps of Utopia: “Wells’s political and historical writing repeatedly insists on mankind’s common biological origin making a nonsense of nationhood as an essential property. National identity is no more an essential category than any other, even of the human being as a species; as species can evolve, so can the nature of the ‘imagined communities’ in which members of that species combine with one another.” ²⁹ Wells’s call for a universal right in a time of crisis is, however, less a call for Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” than it is for what Charles Taylor has, in A Secular Age, called a “cosmic imaginary.” While a “social imaginary,” Taylor writes, “consists of the generally shared background understandings of society, which makes it possible for it to function as it does,” a “cosmic imaginary” is an all-encompassing way of imagining the world and the place of human beings in relation to Nature and the divine. ³⁰ Shifting cosmic imaginaries from the pagan to Judeo-Christian world provided, for Taylor, boundaries for the human experience and attributions of meaning that are now, in this secular age, increasingly unbounded. Wells’s Rights of Man is an attempt to provide a boundary that would supply one of the cosmic imaginaries necessary to the survival of the human species. It is not, then, that Wells prophesied that a cosmopolitan world would necessarily progress, nor that he foresaw or asserted that the human identity as moral or political would, or ought to, be destabilized by our affinity with the rest of nature. It is, rather, that he saw a means to create (or replan) a humanity that desperately required a new cosmic imaginary, a new faith in the future of the species.

For Wells, however, it remains what Simon Critchley has recently called a “supreme fiction”: “a fiction that we know to be a fiction—there being nothing else—but in which we nevertheless believe. A supreme fiction is one self-conscious of its radical contingency.” ³¹ Our “acquired factors” require a “common faith” that shapes the destinies of men; and for Wells a Declaration of Right is—as much as gods, God, or science—a “deity” that rails against the pitiless mechanisms of Nature. ³² To make sense of this ‘supreme fiction’, then, we must turn to Wells’s own fiction. The Island of Dr. Moreau, which Wells called a “theological grotesque,” in particular is representative of the fear Wells expresses about the possibility that the human species could degenerate when it has lost its gods. ³³ In examining Moreau, we will get a fuller picture of Wells: of his scientific, theoretical, and political thoughts and ambitions; and, most essentially, of his faith in the acquired capacities of humankind. An author and a man full of anxiety about the human condition, Wells nevertheless maintained throughout his prophetic science fiction, non-fiction, and political Declaration of the Rights of Man, a hope that through fictions the future of humanity might yet be assured.

I next provide a brief account of the narrative of Dr. Moreau, focusing on the passages relevant to my reading of Wells.

***

H. G. Wells’s character Edward Prendick, the unfortunate visitor to The Island of Dr. Moreau, “had spent some years at the Royal College of Science, and had done some research in biology under Huxley.” ³⁴ Prendick begins the tale he narrates in Dr. Moreau in recounting his escape from an attack on a ship on which he was travelling, the Lady Vain, with two of his companions. In finally deciding that one of the three must be sacrificed for food, the other two occupants of the dinghy fall overboard in an altercation, leaving Prendick alone and to be rescued on the brink of death by a small trading ship. The ship is curiously occupied with an “ocean menagerie,” ³⁵ captained by a drunk, and carrying a passenger with whom Prendick becomes acquainted and who also studied Biology (at University College). This passenger, Montgomery, is in charge of the animals on board and is accompanied by a companion who Prendick finds “deformed,” “curious,” and possessed of “grotesque ugliness.” ³⁶ Because the Captain refuses to take Prendick on with him to the ship’s final destination, Prendick ends up with Montgomery on an island populated with others, described in Prendick’s first days on the island as “grotesque-looking creatures,” “unaccountable men,” and “half-bestial.” ³⁷ Venturing out into the island’s vegetation, Prendick stumbles upon three “men” “reciting some complicated gibberish. . . . Suddenly, as I watched their grotesque and unaccountable gestures, I perceived clearly for the first time what it was that had offended me, what had given me the two inconsistent impressions of utter strangeness and yet of the strangest familiarity. The three creatures engaged in this mysterious rite were human in shape, and yet human beings with the strangest air about them of some familiar animal. Each of these creatures, despite its human form, its rag of clothing, and the rough humanity of its bodily form, has woven into it, into its movements, into the expression of its countenance, into its whole presence, some now irresistible suggestion of a hog, a swinish taint, the unmistakable mark of the beast.” ³⁸

Prendick, staying in the room of a house belonging to a “white Haired man,” hears Montgomery refer to his host as Moreau. Prendick’s memory is jostled as he recalls “The Moreau Horrors”: known for doing great scientific work on the transfusion of blood and “morbid growths,” Dr. Moreau had permanently left England following an incident in which “a wretched dog, flayed and otherwise mutilated, escaped from Moreau’s house.” ³⁹ Collecting his observations (including cries and wails of pain coming from the room next to his), Prendick concludes that this same Dr. Moreau is vivisecting humans on the island, combining their parts with that of beasts, and transforming them into these grotesque monstrosities. Running from his inevitable demise, Prendick flees once again into the Island’s interior, encountering an “ape-like” creature who can speak, and who, after comparing their equally-five-fingered hands, takes Prendick to “the huts.” The Beasts in the hut proclaim: “It is a man, a man, a live man like me. . . . It is a man. He must learn the Law.” ⁴⁰ In what is perhaps the most well-known portion of Wells’s Dr. Moreau, the beasts demand that Prendick “say the words”:

Not to go on all fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?

Not to suck up drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men?

Not to eat flesh or fish; that is the Law. Are we not Men?

. . .

We ran through a long list of prohibitions, and then the chant swung around to a new formula:

His is the House of Pain.

His is the Hand that Makes.

His is the Hand that wounds.

His is the hand that heals.

. . .

A horrible fancy came into my head that Moreau, after animalizing these men, had infected their dwarfed brains with a kind of deification of himself. ⁴¹

Realizing the atrocities that awaited him, Prendick decides to drown himself. Moreau and Montgomery find him in the water, and Moreau insists that he be allowed to explain his “humanizing process” before Prendick does anything too rash. ⁴²

Prendick realizes, following his parley with Moreau, that “the creatures that [he] had seen were not men, and had never been men. They were animals—humanized animals—triumphs of vivisection.” ⁴³ Moreau explains that he is devoted to the “‘study of the plasticity of living forms. . . . It’s not simply the outward form of an animal I can change. The physiology, the chemical rhythm of the creature may also be made to undergo an enduring modification.’ . . . [He] proceeded to point out that the possibilities of vivisection do not stop at a mere physical metamorphosis. . . . Very much indeed of what we call moral education is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct.” ⁴⁴ Moreau goes on to explain that pain is a distinctively animal quality; that “with men, the more intelligent they become the more intelligently they will see after their own welfare, and the less they will need the goad to keep them out of danger.” He claims he is “a religious man . . . for I have sought his laws, in my way”; and yet, he remarks that his experiments are not altogether successful: “somehow the things drift back again, the stubborn beast flash grows. . . . There is still something in everything that I do that defeats me, makes me dissatisfied. . . . Just after I make them, they seem to be indisputable human beings. It’s afterwards I observe them that the persuasion fades. First one animal trait, then another, creeps to the surface and stares at me. . . . But I will conquer yet. Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say: this time I will burn out all the animal, this time I will make a rational creature of my own. After all, what is ten years? Man has been a hundred thousand in the making.” ⁴⁵

Moreau, in the end, is ripped apart and killed by one of his partially completed creations. Montgomery, too, is ravaged and Prendick is left alone with the “bestial monsters.” ⁴⁶ With Moreau’s death, Prendick fails in an attempt to convince the Beast-Folk that the Law persisted without him—for Moreau has only “‘changed his shape—he has changed his body. . . . For a time you will not see him. He is . . . there’—I pointed upward—‘where he can watch you.’” ⁴⁷ Lost in his own thoughts and fears, and failing to adequately propagate the Law in Moreau’s absence, Prendick realizes “more keenly than ever what Moreau had told [him] about the ‘stubborn beast flesh.’ They were reverting, and reverting very rapidly.” ⁴⁸ The “dwindling shreds of humanity” in the Beast-Folk are echoed in Prendick’s own account of himself: “I, too, must have undergone strange changes. My clothes hung about me as yellow rags. . . . My hair grew long, and became matted together. I am told even now that my eyes have a strange brightness, a swift altertness of movement.” ⁴⁹ Having earlier remarked that in the Beast-Folk he saw “the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason and fate, in its simplest form,” ⁵⁰ Prendick is now similarly neither—or both—human and animal. Saved at last, however, by a boat passing by the island containing two corpses of sailors who died at sea, Prendick returns to his native England. No one, he finds, believes his story. He laments: “I could not persuade myself that the men and women I met were not also another, still passably human, Beast People, animals half wrought into the outward image of human souls; and that they would presently begin to revert, to show first this bestial mark and then that . . . I look about me at my fellow men. And I go in fear. I see keen faces and bright, others dull or dangerous, others unsteady, insincere; none that have the authority of a reasonable soul.” Even priests seemed to gibber like the Ape-man, and the intent faces of those reading books in the library “seemed but patient creatures waiting for prey.” ⁵¹

At times, Prendick thinks himself “not a reasonable creature, but only an animal tormented with some strange disorder in its brain, that is sent to wander alone, like a sheep stricken with the gid. But this is a mood that comes to me now—I thank God—more rarely. . . . My days I devote to reading and to experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights in the study of astronomy. There is, though I do not know how there is, or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal in us must find solace and its hope. I hope, or I could not live. And so, in hope and solitude, my story ends.” ⁵²

***

Scholarly attention to Wells’s Moreau typically rotates around two lessons extracted from the narrative: (1) that humanity fails to acknowledge its “beastly” qualities and thus fails to subject itself to anthropological doubt and (2) that Dr. Moreau is an exemplar of “scientific hubris,” ⁵³ and Wells’s presentation of him is a satire of all assumed superiorities of “the human”: rationality, morality, adherence to a system of law, or acceptance of hierarchical structures of power. Like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, The Island of Dr. Moreau is often read as a satire of the corrupt “civilization” of the European as well as a demonstration of “modernity[’s] woeful separation and confusion” of the opposition of man and animal, or civilization and nature. ⁵⁴ The fluidity of these identities expressed in Dr. Moreau is also regularly compared to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: like Prendick’s first encounter with the Ape-Man, and Gulliver’s encounter with the Yahoos, Frankenstein experiences a de-stabilizing moment when his “newly arisen creature . . . first approaches his progenitor.” ⁵⁵

The elements of Shelley’s novel in Wells’s fiction also bring to light the role of Moreau himself in the narrative, who, like Frankenstein, is seen as an “‘animator’ for a new age.” ⁵⁶ Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus is an account based on the Roman myth of Prometheus (as opposed to the Hellenic, the bringer of fire), who is “the animator of clay (plasticator).” ⁵⁷ Seeing the fluidity and malleability of ‘raw materials’ and acknowledging the artificiality of taxonomic distinctions, capacity for language, or human identity, the animation or plastication of human life into the animal on the part of Moreau is premised, seemingly, on the fundamental indeterminacy of the human–animal dichotomy. It is this reading of Wells’s Dr. Moreau that informs the comparison with both contemporary manipulative scientific technologies and philosophies that seek to collapse the human–animal binary, making “the human” indeterminately unique at least, and indefinably inseparable at most. Citing Judith Butler, ⁵⁸ Timothy Christensen, for example, focuses on the indeterminate space of subjectivity in the identity of the human in the Beasts’ recitation of the Law: “It is as though each declarative statement contains within itself the uncertainty of whether or not the statement of the Law is sufficient to make men.” ⁵⁹ This, too, can be seen as reflected in Moreau’s own uncertainty about his project: “somehow the things drift back again, the stubborn beast flash grows. . . . There is still something in everything that I do that defeats me, makes me dissatisfied.” ⁶⁰ The capacity to “grant a symbolic unity to one’s being eludes Moreau just as it eludes his subjects.” ⁶¹

The darker Dr. Moreau, however, as the scientist of plasticity, is also often seen as expressing a less generous account in Wells’s narrative. As the “plasticator,” Moreau is cast as expressing “scientific hubris” in thinking he can, in fact, craft a fully rational being, devoid of pain and bodily concerns. He is disappointed in his failure to fully “burn out all the animal,” ⁶² and thus, in the end, is destroyed by the Beast-Person of his own creation. Consistent with the accounts of the “chimeric” qualities of the human–animal binary, Moreau’s failure is seen in his inability to also see himself as a Beast-Person. He is derisive toward them, abandoning them in pursuit of the rational ideal: he is a creator who “takes no interest” in his less-than-perfect creations. ⁶³ Norbert Lennartz also compares Moreau to a kind of non-benevolent God, calling the Law “the bestialized version of Leviticus 11ff,” and emphasizing that “with the absence of Moreau’s authority, the beasts’ command of communication rapidly subsides.” ⁶⁴ Montgomery points out to Prendick, in fact, that the “humanization” and propagation of the Beast-People does not seem to continue without Moreau’s interference and presence: “they actually bore offspring, but . . . these generally died. There was no evidence of the inheritance of the acquired human characteristics. When they lived, Moreau took them and stamped the human form upon them.” ⁶⁵

Moreau as God, thus, is the only guarantor of the persistence of the “distinctively” human qualities of the Beast-People, for even the Law that the Beast-Folk “were perpetually repeating” they were also “perpetually breaking.” ⁶⁶ In this “theological grotesque,” the character of Moreau himself is seen not only as a corrupt theological figure but as representative of all imposed standards of “the human”: rationality, morality, laws, and, indeed, the structures of power itself. ⁶⁷ Prendick’s return to the priests who babble like Apes and men who appear like animals of prey at every turn is seen to be a kind of pessimistic liberation from the “brittle façade of civilization” through a revelation of the truth behind “anthropological doubt.” ⁶⁸

While accounting for the “theological grotesque,” and for the “anthropological doubt” that is meant to be invoked in Moreau, this reading is profoundly incorrect in a number of ways. It cannot account for the replication of Wells’s own scientific theories in the words of Moreau, and it is not, in fact, correct about the application—or criticism—of science that is present in The Island of Dr. Moreau. Here an account of Wells’s own non-fiction writings, and his scientific influences, will serve a primary place in re-reading the text. But it is important first to reground the stakes of this interpretive correction or disagreement. At work in Wells’s text, and seminal to both the preceding and the following interpretations, is the conflict (discussed above) between the “inherited” factor of the human being, and the “acquired.” Dr. Moreau is read above as a narrative that is satirical in view of criticizing one’s putting a place of supremacy on the second, acquired factor. Stripped down, one could argue, the human being is merely a Beast-Person: a culminated ape, the product of natural selection like all other natural creatures, a species that, having inherited reason, erroneously thinks of itself as purely rational. Wells indeed writes in a short essay, “On Comparative Theology”: “it is one of the humours of life that man the egregious, defines himself as a reasonable soul. Continuously and completely rational beings may perhaps exist, but no man is continuously and completely rational.” ⁶⁹

That The Island of Dr. Moreau is meant to inspire some sort of anthropological doubt is clear. Wells writes in the Preface to the Atlantic Edition that the novel is meant to be a “reminder that humanity is but an animal rough-hewn to a reasonable shape and in perpetual internal conflict between instinct and injunction.” ⁷⁰ Far from a criticism of the acquired factor, however, Wells later writes in “Human Evolution, An Artificial Process” that “what we call Morality becomes the padding of suggested emotional habits necessary to keep the round Paleolithic savage in the square hole of the civilized state. And Sin is the conflict of these two factors—as I have tried to convey in my Island of Dr. Moreau.” ⁷¹ If we are all Beast-People, on Wells’s account, we are all sinners. The “theological grotesque” is that we are in fact in need of “plastication” in response to our own plasticity. While Moreau himself is a failure, it is not that case that one still ought to see the “acquired factor” as the target of the narrative’s derision. The Island of Dr. Moreau is representative of a very real fear that Wells expressed about the possibility that the human species could degenerate when it has lost its gods—and it is in this anxiety that Wells expresses a bifurcation from the Darwinian assumption of humanity’s progress toward a greater evolutionary perfection. Despite the very real truth that humans are essentially “Beast-People,” there is a possibility of redemption in embracing the very fictions that inform our acquired, or artificial, lives.

It is widely assumed that Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory is a profound influence on Wells’s own work, and specifically on The Island of Dr. Moreau. ⁷² Philip Armstrong writes, for example, that “H.G. Wells could hardly have shown himself more persuaded by Darwin’s representation of Homo sapiens as one animal species competing among others.” ⁷³ Others, however, convincingly establish that Wells was more closely aligned with the manners in which T.H. Huxley diverged from Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. ⁷⁴ Patrick A. McCarthy argues, for example, that Darwin attempted in the Descent of Man to “separate moral development from physical evolution, noting that ‘the moral qualities are advanced, either directly or indirectly, much more through the effects of habit, the reasoning powers, instruction, religion, &c, than through natural selection’; but even then he traced ‘the social instincts, which afforded the basis for the development of the moral sense,’ to the operation of natural selection.” ⁷⁵ Huxley, on the other hand, claimed that although “society is ‘a part of nature,’ it nonetheless ‘differs from nature in having a definite moral object’”; “‘In place of ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows.’ . . . Huxley condemns ‘the fanatical individualism of our time’ as ‘a misapplication of the stoical injunction to follow nature,’ arguing that instead of submitting to the demands of our lower natures we should use our ‘intelligence and will’ to ‘modify the conditions of existence,’ thereby ‘curbing the instincts of savagery in civilized men.’” ⁷⁶

John Glendening similarly identifies a Darwinian faith in progress that is antithetical to Wells’s own non-fiction writings: “the upbeat conclusion of the Origin further develops the entangled bank as a representation of law and order, and of progress as well. It exemplifies the triumph of natural selection, which, because it ‘works solely by and for the good of each being, [ensures that] all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.’” ⁷⁷ Wells, in fact, expressed a profound skepticism in the capacity of nature or natural selection to assure the way of human success or perfection, as he makes clear in his essay “Zoological Retrogression.” Grounded also in Max Nordeau’s work on “Degeneracy,” ⁷⁸ Wells’s pessimism about the faith in evolution manifests itself in the degeneration of Moreau’s Island, and the failure of Moreau to, in the words of Huxley, sufficiently “modify the conditions of existence” of its Beast-Folk.

The emphasis in Wells’s non-fiction works on acquired modifications cannot be overstated. We cannot leave the fate of humanity in the hands of natural selection, or the inherited factor, because she provides no comfort or assurance in the survival of the species. As John Glendening very succinctly states, relating this anxiety to the project of Dr. Moreau: the “Beast Folk dramatize the condition of humanity, precariously clinging to what civilization it has attained, ever at the mercy of a confused, complex universe as likely to support as oppose suffering, degeneration, and extinction.” ⁷⁹ There is no “guarantee” of “ascendency,” no “upward” progress, aside from the acquired factors of our own creation. Wells writes, “the artificial factor of mankind—and that is the one reality of civilization—grows, therefore, through the agency of eccentric and innovating people, playwrights, novelists, preachers, poets, journalists, and political reasoners and speakers, the modern equivalents of the prophets.” ⁸⁰ Acknowledging, then, our middle-place between natural (inherited) and artificial (acquired) existence, Wells at once recognizes the fundamental plasticity and indeterminacy of human life and simultaneously calls for plasticators, or prophets, to instigate the collective redemption of our “sinful” and conflicted identity.

There is nothing, for Wells, that can be said to “elevate” or “progress” humankind in nature. What is natural is the chance—the very real possibility—that we, too, will become extinct or exterminated. We, like all of nature’s inhabitants, are subject to indeterminacy and “a blind fate, a vast pitiless mechanism, [that] seem[s] to cut and shape the fabric of existence.” ⁸¹ Given this indeterminacy, Wells writes that it is “no dream, but a possibility to be lost or won by men, as they may have or may not have the greatness of heart to consciously shape their moral conceptions and their lives.” ⁸² The grotesque theology of The Island of Dr. Moreau can thus be seen as presenting a double failure in responding to the plasticity of the human being and the pitiless mechanisms of nature. Prendick fails firstly to embrace the possibility of continuing to shape the lives of the Beast-People in taking up, maintaining, and collectivizing Moreau’s Law: “Had I kept my courage up to the level of the dawn, had I not allowed it to ebb away in solitary thought, I might have grasped the vacant scepter of Moreau.” ⁸³ In managing to escape the island, Prendick’s second failing is in once again retreating to an aporetic solitude, contemplating the “vast and eternal laws of matter,” caring not for “the daily cares and sins of troubled men.” “In hope and in solitude” and in the “glittering hosts of heaven . . . whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope.” ⁸⁴

Prendick’s solitary, contemplative and passive hope is matched in its deficiency—and in its inverse—in the figure of Moreau. Moreau’s failure to acknowledge the interplay of the inherited and acquired factors—the animal and the human, or the natural and artificial—is exemplified in his own extremely active hyper-rationalism. Seeing the necessity, the usefulness and the possibilities of acquired habits, morality, law and theology, Moreau cannot match it with a concern for a collective well-being of the Beast-People in common (including himself). The sins of the Beast-People in Dr. Moreau have no true possibility for redemption.

Where, then, are we left by Wells? In writing of an aquatic species, the Ascidian, in “Zoological Retrogression,” Wells likens its process of extinction to a pairing of poems by John Milton. Wells writes that “a deliberate sobriety gradually succeed[ed] its tremulous vivacity. L’Allegro die[d] away; the tones of Il Pensero bec[a]me dominant.” Milton’s two poems contrast “the active and outgoing life (L’Allegro) with the contemplative and confined (Il Pensero),” ⁸⁵ and here we can see both the indictment of Prendick in its fullest and a reassertion of Wells’s call for courage and greatness in forwarding the acquired factor of man. Prendick’s hope in the face of indeterminacy and skepticism is, in its inactivity, no sign of a “greatness of heart.” ⁸⁶ Echoed in his “Morals and Civilisation,” and echoing Huxley, Wells casts a harsh eye on the “privatism” and “individualism” of modern life: “are we not, at the present time, on a level of intellectual and moral attainment sufficiently high to permit of the formulation of a moral code. . . . The apparatus of moral suggestion, the people who write, preach, and teach that is, needs only too evidently the discipline of a common ideal.” And yet, Wells continues, a “definite stress of effort to determine the development of the public ideals is wanting. And yet one may dream of . . . a real and conscious apparatus of education and moral suggestion, held together by a common faith and a common sentiment, and shaping the minds and acts and destinies of men.” ⁸⁷ The active life, embracing the human being’s acquired factor, is what will prevent the ever-present threat of the degeneration of man. Wells maintains the redemptive dream of a collective apparatus despite the persistence of the image of Moreau’s grotesque failure lurking in the shadows. In education, Wells writes, “lies the possible salvation of mankind from misery and sin.” ⁸⁸

Wells also maintains, however, that these acquired and common conceptions, driving man to, and preserving, “civilisations” and morality are themselves fictions—as facets of the acquired factor in man, they are and always will be artificial. Moral ideas, he writes, are “inseparably interwoven, on the one hand with the development of theological ideas, and on the other with political institutions,” ⁸⁹ which shift and change over the course and time of history. It is the case that “hitherto, moral ideas of vital import have been presented to men as correlated with religious conceptions,” ⁹⁰ but Wells also claims that contemporary science “is always sliding toward mystic interpretations. . . . Yet many of us who reject each and every transcendentalism that is offered us, do still find it imperative to believe in spite of the absolute darkness that the whole of being has an interaction and a correlation.” ⁹¹ He calls Natural Selection itself a “deity,” ⁹² and seemingly relegates even his own theory of plasticity to the sphere of belief: “there is in science, and perhaps even more so in history, some sanction for the belief that a living thing might be taken in hand and . . . moulded and modified.” ⁹³ Even, it seems, science—including Wells’s own—is a fiction.

The priority that Wells places on these acquired fictions can be seen as nothing other than faith; and it is a faith that is made most apparent in his scientific romances. Drawing on the conclusion of another of Wells’s science fictions, The Time Machine, makes this even more evident: “He, I know for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made, thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilisation only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.” ⁹⁴ There is nothing for human beings but to put their faith in their acquired faculties—in their poets and prophets and scientists, in their civilisations—despite the indeterminacies of nature’s mechanisms and the unknowns of the future of the species. The lesson of Dr. Moreau, however, is to always see the human being as vivisected: a splicing and conflict of both natural and artificial identity, both of which can “fall back upon and destroy its makers.” We cannot “burn out all the beast” but must also not think of ourselves as, nor aspire to, a purely detached rationality. ⁹⁵ The hope of humanity persists in its common fictions, which must persist both due to—and in spite of—the vast, conflictual, and pitiless indeterminacies of human nature.

Returning, then, to Wells’s Rights of Man we can see echoes of his much earlier science fiction and his scientific writings: while “we have to face the realities of human nature,” we may still discuss a project for a “hopeful world.” ⁹⁶ What the failures of Moreau’s “theological grotesque” reveal is that this must be active, not passive; collectivist, not individualistic. When writing the Declaration, Wells declares that “the battle for world regeneration enters upon a new phase. . . . This little book begins and ends to advocate a renewal of the Declaration of the Rights of Man as an instrument of primary necessity and importance in the adjustment of human affairs to that world collectivism that is overtaking the entire planet.” ⁹⁷ This must not, however, merely be imposed by world leadership for Wells—“we do not want leaders.” ⁹⁸ Moreaus—individual plasticators—will not be sufficient. It must also come from a “common sentiment,” or a common faith and commitment, to the survival and future of the species: “in a sane world, the idea and the law will dictate and we shall have no more use for personal dictators.” ⁹⁹

Wells himself, as a prophet, is not enough. An active claim on the future of, and by, the species as a whole is required. It is not sufficient to merely recite the law (as did the Beast-People) or to recite the Declaration. Prendick’s failure on the island to turn Moreau’s law into a deity—to make it a common faith as opposed to a recitation of all individuals in common—is a lesson necessary to understanding Wells’s Rights of Man. If humanity is to redeem itself, it must do so with a new cosmic imaginary. In Wells’s own words, this must be a common apparatus or, in Simon Critchley’s words, a “supreme fiction.” As Wells writes in the Rights, “unless we can struggle through the mounting perplexities of today, to a new world order of law and safety, unless we can keep our heads and our courage, so as to re-establish a candid life, our species will perish.” Without this courage, we are left, Wells writes (replicating exactly the description of the “gibbering” priests and Ape-men of Moreau), “mad, fighting and gibbering, a dwindling swarm of super-Nazis on a devastated earth.” ¹⁰⁰ The Declaration of the Rights of Man is a necessary “supreme fiction,” “self-conscious of its radical contingency.” ¹⁰¹ It is contingent, for Wells, because its success is far from certain; and it is contingent because it is a means by which humanity may fight against its own natural inheritance: the ever-present threat of a subsumption into the pitiless mechanisms of nature and extinction.

What Wells offers to counter the indeterminacy, or frailty, of the human identity is a political theory prophetic of our contemporaries Charles Taylor and Simon Critchley. It is a political theory that takes as its foundation the human need for common fictions or imaginaries to define humanity itself. Far from Susan McHugh’s claim that the destabilization of the “human” disrupts “above all [the] human being as the basis of politico-ethical life,” ¹⁰² Wells’s claim is that this very destabilization can lead to an active claim on the future of the human, as exercised precisely through our acquired politico-ethical life. Ali Smith’s call for us to catch up to Wells remains. But it is not merely necessary to catch up to his 1940 “Declaration of the Rights of Man.” For Wells, it is necessary to the redemption and survival of humanity that we find a common identity in sharing a common faith in the future of the species. It is a simultaneous indictment and appeal, echoing the words of The Island of Dr. Moreau: “are we not men?” If so, we must make ourselves so.