Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 1.pdf/25

Rh our individual minds. What we call Science is, in the writer's way of thinking, the knowledge in this Mind; and it develops a will for collective effort and a collective purpose in mankind. A very large proportion of these writings plays about this group of ideas. It is the basis of the writer's socialism and of his international interpretations. The theme of several of the novels is the reaction of the passionate ego-centred individual to the growing consciousness and the gathering imperatives of such a collective mind.

It is the writer's belief that human society is now undergoing changes more rapid and more profound than have ever happened to it before, and that a world community is steadily and swiftly replacing the practically separate national and racial communities of the past. Himself a child of change, born in a home that was broken up by failure in retail trade, and escaping only by very desperate exertions from a life of servitude and frustration, he has been made aware of, and he is still enormously aware of and eager to understand and express, the process of adaptation, destruction, and reconstruction of old moral and intellectual and political and economic formulæ that is going on all about us. Indeed all these volumes are about unrest and change. Even in his novels his characters, like Kipps and Mr. Polly, are either change-driven and unable to understand, or, like Benham of "The Research Magnificent" or Stratton in "The Passionate Friends," they are attempting desperately to understand, and still more desperately attempting to thrust at and interfere with change. xvii