As with "The Stolen Body," "The Inexperienced Ghost" (perhaps Wells' most anthologized ghost story after "The Red Room" - with good reason, for it is a masterpiece of speculative fiction) is designed to caution anthropocentric hubris. Men plumb the seas, reach into the heavens, bore through the earth, comb through the forests, and plow through the snow, eager and confident in the prospects of discovery. So too do they reach out into the intangible ether to make fleeting contact with whatever denizens there may be of the spirit world. But what might reach back and pull? Comfort is poisonous to Wells. His evolutionary training recoils at the thought of complacency, at satisfaction. During the Edwardian Era mankind was developing airplanes, submarines, arctic vessels, and even rockets, shuttling a race of highly evolved albeit overconfident apes into zones which they were never meant to explore.