In H. G. Wells’s 1901 scientific romance, The First Men in the Moon, the Grand Lunar, the super-intelligent ruler of a race of moon aliens, is perplexed when he learns about the human institution of democracy. Do human beings really possess no means of distinguishing between superior and inferior minds, and organising their civilisation accordingly? The superiority of the Grand Lunar’s own intellect to those of his subjects is incontrovertible: he has no skull, and so the many ‘ghost[ly]’ ‘undulating’ convolutions of his brain are visible.As Anne Stiles has noted, Wells was here drawing upon the hypothesis that more numerous brain convolutions indicate higher intelligence.Yet Cavor, the novel’s scientist protagonist, has to confess that human intellectual inequality, however profound, has no obvious physical referent:

Throughout his writing career, Wells attempted to modernise Plato’s dream of a beautiful city ruled by philosopher kings. In both his fiction and his sociological treatises, he fantasised about a World State devoted to the principles of socialism and scientific rationality and administered by a small, rigorously selected cognitive elite. Although Wells was only briefly a member of the Fabian Society, his faith in the ‘coming predominance of the man of science, the trained professional expert’ and in meritocratic elitism clearly accords with the thinking of Beatrice and Sidney Webb and with the spirit of Fabian socialism in general.