Parenting & Family Quote by H.G. Wells

Wells flips the usual flattery of human exceptionalism into an accusation: we are “unnatural” not because we lack nature, but because we can’t stop arguing with it. The phrase “rebel child” is doing quiet, brutal work. A child is made by a parent; rebellion implies dependence, grievance, and ambition all at once. Wells suggests our defining trait isn’t harmony but refusal - the refusal to accept the terms of existence handed down by biology, climate, disease, scarcity.

The “harsh and fitful hand” is nature anthropomorphized as a bad guardian: inconsistent, indifferent, sometimes generous, often cruel. That matters because it underwrites the moral logic of rebellion. If the parent is capricious, defiance starts to look less like arrogance and more like self-defense. Wells, a writer steeped in Darwin and the shock of modern science, is pointing at the growing human ability to edit life’s conditions: medicine, sanitation, industrial power, eventually eugenics and technocracy in the era’s imagination. His “more and more” isn’t just observation; it’s acceleration, a forecast.

The subtext is Wells’s recurring tension between progress and peril. To turn “against” nature can mean vaccines and refrigeration - triumphs that blunt the old tyrannies. It can also mean an arms race with the planet itself: extraction, ecological disruption, the fantasy that intelligence cancels consequence. Wells isn’t scolding curiosity; he’s warning that our revolt is now strong enough to become a new kind of fate, one we author ourselves.