Wells was not exactly what one would call a Victorian Pythagoras, but if he claimed to be multidisciplinary no one could have quibbled-- he was a novelist, teacher and historian, and he had formal training in the sciences and dabbled in sketching. So it shouldn't surprise us that in constructing a potential decline-of-man scenario, Wells incorporated a rending of the human soul-- a complete division between man's mechanical and artistic sensibilities. The natural selection referred to by Darwin in his autobiography-- the atrophying of a part of the brain rarely exercised-- occurs, in the time machine, on a massive scale and along class lines.
The Morlocks are the technical side of man. They engage in useful tasks such as production of consumable goods and the maintenance of machinery, they set traps and utilize logic to gain advantage over their enemies. The reason the narrator does not and cannot relate to the Morlocks is that they have lost all sense of the aesthetic. They are not selecting for it, or else they would appear more attractive, and they certainly aren't bathing. In all matters aesthetic they are no better than animals.
The Eloi, on the other hand, completely embody the aesthetic. They are beautiful, they bathe, they are attracted to pretty things, and years ago they must have produced art on a grand and beautiful scale, though they do so no longer. The Eloi have, however, completely abandoned logic. They cannot reason. Their language contains no abstract concepts, and they cannot use machinery. As a result, they live their life in a beautiful pasture and are farmed for their meat, reduced to an entirely different kind of animal.
A human is not simply defined by his ability to reason, nor is he defined by his aesthetic sensibilities. He is comprised of both of these abilities, preferably in equal measures. An artist and a scientist, Wells understood this as well (haha) as anyone. I'm not sure whether or not I'll be able to apply this lesson in my everyday life-- I truly can't abide numbers. But I'll certainly try.
I certainly agree that Wells’ novel presents us w/ a great modeling of Darwin’s devolutionary theory. And I understand, as you do, that traits—be they biological, social, artistic, or otherwise—suffer from disuse. I suppose the question remains whether or not Darwin might be hinting at a more large-scale lack of aesthetic taste than that limited to his own opinion of himself in his autobiography. Might we not recognize Darwin’s theorizing as a mechanism similar to Wells and that found in scifi almost across the board: just as Wells presents a case study of Darwin’s evolutionary theory on an exponential scale (and much of scifi exponentially invents on contemporary conditions/states of being/etc.), could we read the excerpt from Darwin’s autobiography as presenting himself as his own case study… and thus representative of his species? And if we did so, does this mean you would agree or disagree with his position? What you said about the Eloi and the Morlocks was great, but I wasn’t sure exactly how these statements linked up to the prompt for this second blog. Perhaps if you had maintained a focus on Darwin, specifically on Darwin *on* Darwin, your discussion of Wells would have better served as a kind of sounding board for Darwin’s ideas on literature and aesthetic sense. It’s almost as if you could have set up a moment in which you used the Darwin in the autobiography as precisely the case study to prove or disprove his assertion. And then Wells would be the secondary evidence to strengthen your chosen stance. (On a side note: I’m intrigued by your seeming obsession with the bathing rituals of the Eloi and Morlocks!)
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