The journalistic production in "An Englishman Looks at the World" reflects Wells's turn from novel-writing to journalism, which began in the years before the outbreak of the Great War. He was more and more frequently invited to write articles for popular periodicals like the Daily Mail. Included in the collection are an account of "My First Flight," a long essay entitled "The Great State" that prefigured many of the themes of The Outline of History, and a philosophical essay entitled "The So-Called Science of Sociology," arguing that sociology would never be a science because "counting, classification, measurement, the whole fabric of mathematics, is subjective and deceitful, and . . . the uniqueness of individuals is the objective truth."