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+---
+title: 'The Time Machine'
+date: '2018-08-15'
+tags: ['writings', 'book', 'reflection']
+draft: false
+summary: 'The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was
+expounding a recondite matter to us. His pale grey eyes shone and
+twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated...'
+---
+
+# The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
+
+_Title_: The Time Machine
+
+_Author_: H. G. Wells
+
+_Subject_: Science Fiction
+
+_Language_: English
+
+_Source_: [Project Gutenberg](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35)
+
+## Introduction
+
+The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was
+expounding a recondite matter to us. His pale grey eyes shone and
+twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire
+burnt brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the
+lilies of silver caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our
+glasses. Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and caressed us rather
+than submitted to be sat upon, and there was that luxurious
+after-dinner atmosphere, when thought runs gracefully free of the
+trammels of precision. And he put it to us in this way—marking the
+points with a lean forefinger—as we sat and lazily admired his
+earnestness over this new paradox (as we thought it) and his fecundity.
+
+“You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two
+ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance,
+they taught you at school is founded on a misconception.”
+
+“Is not that rather a large thing to expect us to begin upon?” said
+Filby, an argumentative person with red hair.
+
+“I do not mean to ask you to accept anything without reasonable ground
+for it. You will soon admit as much as I need from you. You know of
+course that a mathematical line, a line of thickness _nil_, has no real
+existence. They taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane.
+These things are mere abstractions.”
+
+“That is all right,” said the Psychologist.
+
+“Nor, having only length, breadth, and thickness, can a cube have a
+real existence.”
+
+“There I object,” said Filby. “Of course a solid body may exist. All
+real things—”
+
+“So most people think. But wait a moment. Can an _instantaneous_ cube
+exist?”
+
+“Don’t follow you,” said Filby.
+
+“Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real
+existence?”
+
+Filby became pensive. “Clearly,” the Time Traveller proceeded, “any
+real body must have extension in _four_ directions: it must have
+Length, Breadth, Thickness, and—Duration. But through a natural
+infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we
+incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three
+which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. 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.”
+
+“That,” said a very young man, making spasmodic efforts to relight his
+cigar over the lamp; “that . . . very clear indeed.”
+
+“Now, it is very remarkable that this is so extensively overlooked,”
+continued the Time Traveller, with a slight accession of cheerfulness.
+“Really this is what is meant by the Fourth Dimension, though some
+people who talk about the Fourth Dimension do not know they mean it. It
+is only another way of looking at Time. _There is no difference between
+Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our
+consciousness moves along it_. But some foolish people have got hold of
+the wrong side of that idea. You have all heard what they have to say
+about this Fourth Dimension?”
+
+“_I_ have not,” said the Provincial Mayor.
+
+“It is simply this. That Space, as our mathematicians have it, is
+spoken of as having three dimensions, which one may call Length,
+Breadth, and Thickness, and is always definable by reference to three
+planes, each at right angles to the others. But some philosophical
+people have been asking why _three_ dimensions particularly—why not
+another direction at right angles to the other three?—and have even
+tried to construct a Four-Dimensional geometry. Professor Simon Newcomb
+was expounding this to the New York Mathematical Society only a month
+or so ago. You know how on a flat surface, which has only two
+dimensions, we can represent a figure of a three-dimensional solid, and
+similarly they think that by models of three dimensions they could
+represent one of four—if they could master the perspective of the
+thing. See?”
+
+“I think so,” murmured the Provincial Mayor; and, knitting his brows,
+he lapsed into an introspective state, his lips moving as one who
+repeats mystic words. “Yes, I think I see it now,” he said after some
+time, brightening in a quite transitory manner.
+
+“Well, I do not mind telling you I have been at work upon this geometry
+of Four Dimensions for some time. Some of my results are curious. For
+instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at
+fifteen, another at seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All
+these are evidently sections, as it were, Three-Dimensional
+representations of his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and
+unalterable thing.
+
+“Scientific people,” proceeded the Time Traveller, after the pause
+required for the proper assimilation of this, “know very well that Time
+is only a kind of Space. Here is a popular scientific diagram, a
+weather record. This line I trace with my finger shows the movement of
+the barometer. Yesterday it was so high, yesterday night it fell, then
+this morning it rose again, and so gently upward to here. Surely the
+mercury did not trace this line in any of the dimensions of Space
+generally recognised? But certainly it traced such a line, and that
+line, therefore, we must conclude, was along the Time-Dimension.”
+
+“But,” said the Medical Man, staring hard at a coal in the fire, “if
+Time is really only a fourth dimension of Space, why is it, and why has
+it always been, regarded as something different? And why cannot we move
+in Time as we move about in the other dimensions of Space?”
+
+The Time Traveller smiled. “Are you so sure we can move freely in
+Space? Right and left we can go, backward and forward freely enough,
+and men always have done so. I admit we move freely in two dimensions.
+But how about up and down? Gravitation limits us there.”
+
+“Not exactly,” said the Medical Man. “There are balloons.”
+
+“But before the balloons, save for spasmodic jumping and the
+inequalities of the surface, man had no freedom of vertical movement.”
+
+“Still they could move a little up and down,” said the Medical Man.
+
+“Easier, far easier down than up.”
+
+“And you cannot move at all in Time, you cannot get away from the
+present moment.”
+
+“My dear sir, that is just where you are wrong. That is just where the
+whole world has gone wrong. We are always getting away from the present
+moment. 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. Just as we should travel _down_
+if we began our existence fifty miles above the earth’s surface.”
+
+“But the great difficulty is this,” interrupted the Psychologist. ’You
+_can_ move about in all directions of Space, but you cannot move about
+in Time.”
+
+“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
+civilised man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go
+up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that
+ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the
+Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?”
+
+“Oh, _this_,” began Filby, “is all—”
+
+“Why not?” said the Time Traveller.
+
+“It’s against reason,” said Filby.
+
+“What reason?” said the Time Traveller.
+
+“You can show black is white by argument,” said Filby, “but you will
+never convince me.”
+
+“Possibly not,” said the Time Traveller. “But now you begin to see the
+object of my investigations into the geometry of Four Dimensions. Long
+ago I had a vague inkling of a machine—”
+
+“To travel through Time!” exclaimed the Very Young Man.
+
+“That shall travel indifferently in any direction of Space and Time, as
+the driver determines.”
+
+Filby contented himself with laughter.
+
+“But I have experimental verification,” said the Time Traveller.
+
+“It would be remarkably convenient for the historian,” the Psychologist
+suggested. “One might travel back and verify the accepted account of
+the Battle of Hastings, for instance!”
+
+“Don’t you think you would attract attention?” said the Medical Man.
+“Our ancestors had no great tolerance for anachronisms.”
+
+“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato,” the
+Very Young Man thought.
+
+“In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The
+German scholars have improved Greek so much.”
+
+“Then there is the future,” said the Very Young Man. “Just think! One
+might invest all one’s money, leave it to accumulate at interest, and
+hurry on ahead!”
+
+“To discover a society,” said I, “erected on a strictly communistic
+basis.”
+
+“Of all the wild extravagant theories!” began the Psychologist.
+
+“Yes, so it seemed to me, and so I never talked of it until—”
+
+“Experimental verification!” cried I. “You are going to verify _that_?”
+
+“The experiment!” cried Filby, who was getting brain-weary.
+
+“Let’s see your experiment anyhow,” said the Psychologist, “though it’s
+all humbug, you know.”
+
+The Time Traveller smiled round at us. Then, still smiling faintly, and
+with his hands deep in his trousers pockets, he walked slowly out of
+the room, and we heard his slippers shuffling down the long passage to
+his laboratory.
+
+The Psychologist looked at us. “I wonder what he’s got?”
+
+“Some sleight-of-hand trick or other,” said the Medical Man, and Filby
+tried to tell us about a conjuror he had seen at Burslem, but before he
+had finished his preface the Time Traveller came back, and Filby’s
+anecdote collapsed.