This notion is in itself quite outside socialism and does not necessarily lead into socialism. It was Huxley who said that the world and the universe, society and nature, are demonstrably at cross purposes, and that man has to pit his microcosm against the macrocosm. Huxley, in his famous lecture on _Ethics and Evolution,_ went on from this to a kind of informal and unavowed socialism, figuring society as a well-tended garden preserved by man's careful art from the ravages and invasions of that hostile world of chance, with its gigantic weeds and blind impulsions, which everywhere lies waiting round about it. Our work, he implied, must be in every way to minimize for ourselves the elements of chance, to become aware of our species in a collective sense, battling with nature and moulding our own future. I do not suppose that Wells consciously adopted this idea from Huxley. In itself that would be of little consequence, except so far as it shows the continuity of thought and the development of socialism out of science. But Wells was for several years a pupil of Huxley, and it is reasonably plain that the mood in which he wrote his scientific romances was strongly impregnated by Huxley's influence. The sinister, incalculable, capricious, destructive forces outside man are symbolized, as I have said, by those colliding comets, invading Martians, and monstrous creatures among which the earlier Wells moved and had his being; just as the sinister, incalculable, capricious forces within man which urge him to destruction form so great a part of his later novels. Most of his heroes (typified in _The New Machiavelli_) come to grief through the blind irrational impulsions within themselves. And he is equally haunted by what he has called the "Possible Collapse of Civilization." I do not know how much this is due to an evangelical childhood, in which Time, Death, and Judgment are always imminent; how much to an overbalancing study of science at the expense of the humanities; how much to an overdeveloped sense of the hazard that life is; and how much to plain facts. But there it is: it has always been a fixed conviction with Wells that man personal and man social is dancing on a volcano.