An Epistemological Journey: The Uncertainty of Construed Realities in The Time Machine

Abstract

The above utterance of the Time Traveller at about halfway through H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine signals a crucial resolution of the protagonist. After realising that his time machine has been mysteriously stolen and hidden, and therefore he is marooned in the distant future, in a completely alien and unknown environment, he forces himself to regain his composure after bouts of desperate hysteria and adopt the model attitude of the natural scientist: that of the dispassionate, detached observer, who collects sensory data about the natural phenomena around them and then ventures to set up a hypothesis in order to make sense of them. The Time Traveller’s declaration is also a classic statement of the epistemological optimism characteristic of nineteenth-century positivism: with endurance, patience and systematic work, all the mysteries of this future world will be unravelled, all will be eventually explained.¹