ABSTRACT
In 1920 the novelist and scientific popularizer, H. G. Wells, published his bestselling Outline of History. This survey of mankind from the earliest times to the twentieth century concluded with a chapter that looked forward, envisaging ‘The Possible Unification of the World into One Community of Knowledge and Will’. Twenty-five years later the dying Wells produced a final essay that was meant to update his history. He gave it the gloomy title Mind at the End of its Tether, and in it he surveyed ‘a jaded world devoid of recuperative power’.1 Both the earlier optimism and the later pessimism were exaggerated. Yet each tells us something important about the ideological and cultural experience of Europe during the epoch of the two world wars.
