828
A 1,013,636
W454d
Wells- Discovery of the future.

FROM THE LIBRARY OF
ROBERT MARK WENLEY
PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY
1896
1929
GIFT OF HIS CHILDŔEN
TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
THW Bicknel del at se
1938
і

828
W454d
THE
DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE
MR. WELLS'S
"EXTRAORDINARILY BRILLIANT BOOK.”
NOTICE.
The Fifth Edition of
Anticipations
IS NOW READY,
by H. G. WELLS
PRICE 7s. 6d.
The SPECTATOR of 18th January 1902, says :-
"Mr. Wells' new book is one of the most remarkable pieces of social
prophecy which we have lately read. In Mr. Wells we have not
merely an imaginative writer of truly original power, but a thinker of
very considerable calibre. . . . We cannot hesitate to recommend this
book to our readers as one of the most suggestive attempts that have
yet been made seriously to grapple with those great problems of the
near future which present themselves to every man. Such vividness
of perception and picturesque wealth of detail as render it hard for the
most unwilling reader to evade its spell . . . a most bracing, strenuous,
and interesting attempt to foreshadow the trend of our present activities,
which no open-minded person can read without being the better for it."
Anticipations
"is a book which must neces-
sarily move modern thought."
Saturday Review.
Anticipations
"is so convincing that even those
whom it will most alarm can
hardly fail to undergo the author's
spell while they read."
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Anticipations
"is a serious, important, and
memorable work."-Academy.
Anticipations
"is vigorous, trenchant, and well
expressed."--Standard.
Anticipations
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that the world has seen for some
time will mark an epoch in
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•
•
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Anticipations
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FIFTH EDITION NOW READY.
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THE DISCOVERY OF
THE FUTURE
:




A DISCOURSE DELIVERED TO THE ROYAL INSTITUTION
ON JANUARY 24, 1902
BY
H. G. WELLS, B.Sc.
AUTHOR of
ANTICIPATIONS'
"

क
LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN
PATERNOSTER SQUARE
1902
}
£
All Rights Reserved.
/\
!
11-18-37
?
THE DISCOVERY OF
THE FUTURE
IT will lead into my subject
most conveniently to contrast
and separate two divergent types
of mind, types which are to be
distinguished chiefly by their
attitude towards time, and more
particularly by the relative im-
portance they attach and the
relative amount of thought they
give to the future of things.
The first of these two types of
mind-and it is, I think, the pre-
8
THE DISCOVERY
$
dominant type, the type of the
majority of living people--is that
which seems scarcely to think of
the future at all, which regards it
as a sort of black non-existence
upon which the advancing present
will presently write events. The
second type, which is, I think,
a more modern and much less
abundant type of mind, thinks
constantly, and by preference, of
things to come, and of present
things mainly in relation to the
results that must arise from them.
The former type of mind, when
one gets it in its purity, is retro-
spective in habit, and it interprets
the things of the present, and
gives value to this and denies it
OF THE FUTURE
9
to that, entirely with relation to
the past. The latter type of mind
is constructive in habit; it inter-
prets the things of the present
and gives value to this or that,
entirely in relation to things de-
signed or foreseen.
While from that former point
of view our life is simply to reap
the consequences of the past, from
this our life is to prepare the
future. The former type one
might speak of as the legal or
submissive type of mind, because
the business, the practice, and the
training of a lawyer dispose him
towards it; he of all men must
most constantly refer to the law
made, the right established, the
10
THE DISCOVERY
precedent set, and most consis-
tently ignore or condemn the
thing that is only seeking to
establish itself. The latter type
of mind I might for contrast call
the legislative, creative, organis-
ing, or masterful type, because
it is perpetually attacking and
altering the established order of
things, perpetually falling away
from respect for what the past
has given us. It sees the world
as one great workshop, and the
present is no more than material
for the future, for the thing that
is yet destined to be. It is in
the active mood of thought, while
the former is in the passive; it
is the mind of youth-it is the
OF THE FUTURE
11
1
mind most manifest among the
Western nations; while the former
is the mind of age-the mind of
the Oriental.
Things have been, says the legal
mind, and so we are here. And
the creative mind says, We are
here, because things have yet to
be.
Now I do not wish to suggest
that the great mass of people
belong to either of these two
types. Indeed, I speak of them
as two distinct and distinguish-
able types mainly for convenience,
and in order to accentuate their
distinction. There are probably
very few people who brood con-
stantly upon the past without
12
THE DISCOVERY
any thought of the future at all,
and there are probably scarcely
any who live and think consis-
tently in relation to the future.
The great mass of people occu-
pies an intermediate position be-
tween these extremes: they pass
daily and hourly from the passive
mood to the active,—they see this
thing in relation to its associa-
tions and that thing in relation
to its consequences, and they do
not even suspect that they are
using two distinct methods in
their minds.
But for all that they are dis-
tinct methods, -the method of
reference to the past, and the
method of reference to the
OF THE FUTURE
13
future; and their mingling in
many of
of our minds
minds no more
abolishes their difference than
the existence of piebald horses
proves that white is black.
I believe that it is not suffi-
ciently recognised just
how
different in their consequences
these two methods are, and just
where their difference and where
the failure to appreciate their
difference takes one.
This pre-
sent time is a period of quite
extraordinary uncertainty and
indecision upon endless questions
-moral questions, æsthetic ques-
tions, religious and political ques-
tions-upon which we should all
of us be happier to feel assured
14
THE DISCOVERY
and settled; and a very large
amount of this floating uncer-
tainty about these important
matters is due to the fact that
with most of us these two in-
sufficiently distinguished ways of
looking at things are not only
present together, but in actual
conflict in our minds, in unsus-
pected conflict; we pass from one
to the other heedlessly, without
any clear recognition of the
fundamental difference in con-
clusions that exists between the
two; and we do this with
disastrous results to our con-
fidence and to our consistency
in dealing with all sorts of
issues.
OF THE FUTURE
15
}
!
But before pointing out how
divergent these two
types or
habits of mind really are, it is
necessary to
to meet a possible
objection to what has been said.
I may put that objection in this
form-Is not this distinction be-
tween a type of mind that
thinks of the past and of a type
of mind that thinks of the future
a sort of hair-splitting — almost
like distinguishing between people
who have left hands and people
who have right? Everybody be-
lieves that the present is entirely
determined by the past, you say;
but then everybody believes also
that the present determines the
future. Are we simply separat-
16
THE DISCOVERY
t
ing and contrasting two sides
of everybody's opinion? To which
I would reply that we are not
discussing what we
what we know and
believe about the relations of
past, present, and future, or of
the relation of cause and effect
to each other in time at all.
We all know the present depends
for its causes on the past, and
that the future depends for its
causes upon the present. But
this discussion concerns the way
in which we approach things upon
this common ground of knowledge
and belief. We may all know
there is an east and a west; but
if some of us always approach
and look at things from the west,
OF THE FUTURE
17
if some of us always approach
and look at things from the east,
and if others, again, wander
about with a pretty disregard of
direction, looking at things as
chance determines, some of us
will get to a westward conclusion
of the journey, and some of
us will get to an eastward con-
clusion, and some of us will
get to no definite conclusion at
all about all sorts of important
matters.
And yet those who are travel-
ling east, and those who are
travelling west, and those who
are wandering haphazard, may
be all upon the same ground of
belief and statement, and amidst
2
18
THE DISCOVERY
the same assembly of proven
facts.
Precisely the same thing will
happen if you always approach
things from the point of view
of their causes, or if you
approach them always with а
view to their probable effects.
And in several very important
groups of human affairs it is
possible to show quite clearly
just how widely apart the two
methods, pursued each
pursued each in its
purity, take those who follow
them.
I suppose that three hundred
years ago all people who thought
at all about moral questions-
about questions of Right and
OF THE FUTURE
19
Wrong-deduced their rules of
conduct absolutely and unreserv-
edly from the past, from some
dogmatic injunction, some finally
settled decree. The great mass
of people do so to-day. It is
written, they say. "Thou shalt
not steal," for example,-that is
the sole, complete, and sufficient
reason why you should not steal;
and even to-day there is a strong
aversion to admit that there is
any relation between the actual
consequences of acts and the
imperatives of right and wrong.
Our lives are to reap the fruits
of determinate things; and it is
still a fundamental presumption
of the established morality that
20
THE DISCOVERY
1
one must do Right though the
heavens fall. But there are
people coming into this world
who would refuse to
to call it
Right if it brought the heavens
about our heads, however autho-
ritative its sources and sanc-
tions; and this new disposition
is, I believe, a growing one. I
suppose in all ages people, in
a timid, hesitating, guilty way,
have tempered the austerity of
a dogmatic moral code, by small
infractions, to secure obviously
kindly ends; but it was, I am
told, the Jesuits who first de-
liberately sought to qualify the
moral interpretations of acts by
a consideration of their results.
OF THE FUTURE
21
To-day there are few people
who have not more or less
clearly discovered the future
as a more or less important
factor in moral considerations.
To-day there is a certain small
proportion of people who frankly
regard morality as a means
to an
an end, as an overriding
of immediate and personal con-
siderations out of regard to
something to be attained in the
future, and who break away
altogether from the idea of a
code dogmatically established for
ever. Most of us are not so
definite as that, but most of us
are deeply tinged with the spirit
of compromise between the past
22
THE DISCOVERY
and the future; we profess an
unbounded allegiance to the pre-
scriptions of the past, and we
practise a general observance of
its injunctions, but we qualify to
a vague, variable extent with
considerations of expediency.
We hold, for example, that we
must respect our promises. But
suppose we find unexpectedly
that for one of us to keep a
promise, must lead to the great
suffering of some other human
being, must lead to practical
evil : would a man
man do right
if he broke such a promise?
The practical decision most
modern people would make
would be to break the promise.
OF THE FUTURE
23
But suppose it was not such
very great suffering we were
going to inflict, but only some
suffering? And suppose it was
a rather solemn promise? With
most of us it would then come
to be a matter of weighing
the promise, the thing of the
past, quite apart from its effect
upon our credit,
our credit, against the
unexpected bad consequence, the
thing of the future. And the
smaller the evil consequences the
more most of us would vacillate.
But neither of the two types of
mind we are contrasting would
vacillate at all. The legal type
of mind would obey the past un-
hesitatingly; the creative would
1
24
THE DISCOVERY
unhesitatingly sacrifice it to the
future. The legal mind would
say that whoever breaks the law
at any point breaks it alto-
gether, while the creative mind
would say, Let the dead past
bury its dead.
I have taken this simple case
of a promise as my illustration
for many reasons, but it is in
the field of sexual morality that
the two methods are most in
conflict.
And I would like to suggest
that until you have definitely
determined to adhere to
to one
or other of these two types of
mental action in these matters,
you are not even within hope of
OF THE FUTURE
25
1
a sustained consistency in the
thought that underlies your
acts, that in every issue of prin-
ciple that comes upon you, you
will be entirely at the mercy
of the intellectual mood that
happens to be at that partic-
ular moment ascendant in your
mind.
In the sphere of public affairs
also these two ways of looking
at things work out into equally
divergent and incompatible con-
sequences. The legal mind in-
sists upon treaties, constitutions,
legitimacies, and charters; the
legislative incessantly assails
these.
Whenever some period
of stress sets
sets in, some great
26
THE DISCOVERY
conflict between institutions and
the forces in things, there comes
a sorting between these two
types of mind. The legal mind
becomes glorified and transfigured
in the form of hopeless loyalty;
the creative mind inspires revolu-
tions and reconstructions. And
particularly is this difference of
attitude accentuated in the dis-
putes that arise out of wars.
In most modern wars there is
a
no doubt quite traceable on one
side or the other distinct
creative idea-a distinct regard
for some future consequence.
But the main dispute even in
most modern wars, and the
sole dispute in most mediæval
1
1
OF THE FUTURE
27
wars, will be found to be
be a
reference not to the future but
to the past; to turn upon a
question of fact and right.
The wars of Plantagenet and
Lancastrian England with France,
for example, were based entirely
upon a dummy claim, supported
by obscure legal arguments, upon
the crown of France. And the
arguments that centre about the
present war in South Africa
ignore any ideal of a great united
South African state almost en-
tirely, and quibble this way and
that about who began the fight-
ing, and what was or was not
written in some obscure revision
of a treaty a score of years ago.
f
28
THE DISCOVERY
Yet beneath the legal issues the
broad creative idea has been very
apparent in the public mind dur-
ing this war. It will be found
more or less definitely formulated
beneath almost all the great wars
of the past century; and a com-
parison of the wars of the nine-
teenth century with the wars of
the Middle Ages will show, I
think, that in this field also there
has been a discovery of the future,
an increasing disposition to shift
the reference and values from
things accomplished to things to
come.
Yet, though foresight creeps
into our politics and a reference
to consequences into our morality,
OF THE FUTURE
29
it is still the past that dominates
our lives. But why? Why are
we so bound to it? It is into
the future we go; to-morrow is
the eventful thing for us. There
lies all that remains to be felt
by us and our children, and all
those that are dear to us. Yet
we marshal and order men into
classes entirely with regard to the
past, we draw shame and honour
out of the past, against the rights
of property, the vested interests,
the agreements and establish-
ments of the past, the future
has no rights. Literature is for
the most part history, or history
at one remove; and what is cul-
ture but a mould of interpretation
།
30
THE DISCOVERY
into which new things are thrust,
a collection of standards, a sort of
bed of King Og, to which all new
expressions must be lopped or
stretched. Our conveniences, like
our thoughts, are all retrospective.
We travel on roads so narrow
that they suffocate our traffic
we live in uncomfortable, incon-
venient, life-wasting houses out
of a love of familiar shapes and
familiar customs and a dread of
strangeness; all our public affairs
are cramped by local boundaries
impossibly restricted and small.
Our clothing, our habits of speech,
our spelling, our weights and
measures, our coinage, our reli-
gious and political theories, all
!
OF THE FUTURE
31
!
witness to the binding power of
the past upon our minds.
Yet we do not serve the past
as the Chinese have done.
There
are degrees. We do not worship
our ancestors, nor prescribe a
rigid local costume; we venture
to enlarge our stock of know-
ledge, and we qualify the classics
with occasional adventures into
original thought. Compared with
the Chinese, we are distinctly
aware of the future; but com-
pared with what we might be,
the past is all our world.
The reason why the retrospec-
tive habit, the legal habit, is so
dominant and always has been
so predominant, is of course a
2
THE DISCOVERY
perfectly obvious one. We follow
the fundamental human principle
and take what we can get. All
people believe the past is certain,
defined, and knowable, and only
a few people believe that it is
possible to know anything about
the future. Man has acquired
the habit of going to the past
because it was the line of least
resistance for his mind. While
a certain variable portion of the
past is serviceable matter for
knowledge in the case of every-
one, the future is, to a mind
without an imagination trained
in scientific habits of thought,
non-existent. All our
are made of memories.
minds
In our
OF THE FUTURE
33

S
But
memories each of us has some-
thing that, without any special
training whatever, will go back
into the past and grip firmly
and convincingly all sorts of
workable facts,-sometimes more
convincingly than firmly.
the imagination, unless it is
strengthened by a very sound
training in the laws of causation,
wanders like a lost child in the
blackness of things to come, and
returns-empty.
Many people believe therefore
that there can be no sort of
certainty about the future. You
can know no more
more about the
future, I was recently assured
by a friend, than you can know
3
34
THE DISCOVERY
!
which way a kitten will jump
next. And to all who hold that
view, who regard the future as
a perpetual source of convulsive
surprises, as an impenetrable,
incurable, perpetual blackness, it
is right and reasonable to derive
such values as it is necessary to
attach to things from the events
that have certainly happened
with regard to them. It is our
ignorance of the future and our
persuasion that that ignorance is
absolutely incurable, that alone

But
gives the past its enormous pre-
dominance in our thoughts.
through the ages the long
unbroken succession of fortune-
tellers -and they flourish still
7
1
1
}
OF THE FUTURE
35
-witnesses to the perpetually
smouldering feeling that after all
there may be a better sort of
knowledge a more serviceable
sort of knowledge than that we
now possess.
On the whole, there is some-
thing sympathetic for the dupe
of the fortune-teller in the spirit
of modern science; it is one of
the persuasions that come into
one's mind, as one assimilates
the broad conceptions of science,
that the adequacy of causation
is universal; that in absolute
fact, if not in that little bubble
of relative fact which constitutes
the individual life in absolute
fact, the future is just as fixed
í
36
THE DISCOVERY
and determinate, just as settled
and inevitable, just as possible a
matter of knowledge, as the past.
Our personal memory gives us
an impression of the superior
reality and trustworthiness of
things in the past, as of things
that have finally committed them-
selves and said their say; but
the more clearly we master the
leading conceptions of science,
the better we understand that
this impression is one of the
results of the peculiar conditions
of our lives, and not an absolute
truth. The man of science comes
to believe at last that the events
of the year A.D. 4000 are as fixed,
settled, and unchangeable as the
OF THE FUTURE
37
Only
events of the year 1600.
about the latter he has some
material for belief, and about
the former-practically none.
And the question arises, how
far this absolute ignorance of the
future is a fixed and necessary
condition of human life, and how
far some application of intellectual
methods may not attenuate, even
if it does not absolutely set aside,
the veil between ourselves and
things to come. And I am ven-
turing to suggest to you, that
along certain lines, and
and with
certain qualifications and limita-
tions, a working knowledge of
things in the future is a possible
and practicable thing.
38
THE DISCOVERY
And in order to support this
suggestion, I would call your
attention to certain facts about
our knowledge of the past, and
more particularly I would insist
upon this, that about the past our
range of absolute certainty is very
limited indeed. About the past,
I would suggest, we are inclined
to overestimate our certainty, just
as I think we
we are inclined to
underestimate the certainties of
the future. And such a know-
ledge of the past as we have is
not all of the same sort, nor
derived from the same sources.
Let us consider just what an
educated man of to-day knows
of the past. First of all, he has
!
OF THE FUTURE
39
the reallest of all knowledge,
the knowledge of his own per-
sonal experiences, his memory.
Uneducated people believe their
memories absolutely, and most
educated people believe theirs
with a few reservations.
Some
of us take up a critical attitude
even towards our own memories;
we know that they not only
sometimes drop things out, but
that sometimes a sort of dream-
ing, or a strong suggestion, will
put things in. But, for all that,
memory remains vivid and real,
as no other knowledge can be,
and to have seen, and heard, and
felt, is to be nearest to absolute
conviction. Yet our memory of
40
THE DISCOVERY
direct impressions is only the
smallest part of what we know.
Outside that bright area comes
knowledge of a different order,
the knowledge brought to us by
other people.
people. Outside our im-
mediate personal memory, there
comes this wider area of facts or
quasi-facts, told us by more or
less trustworthy people, told us
by word of mouth or by the
written word of living and of
dead writers. This is the past
of report, rumour, tradition, and
history-the second sort of know-
ledge of the past. The nearer
knowledge of this sort is abun-
dant, and clear, and detailed;
remoter, it becomes vaguer; still
OF THE FUTURE
41
more remotely in time and space,
it dies down to brief, imperfect
inscriptions and enigmatical tra-
ditions, and at last dies away, so
far as the records and traditions
of humanity go, into a doubt
and darkness as black, just as
black, as futurity. And now let
me remind you that this second
zone of knowledge, outside the
bright area of what we have felt,
and witnessed, and handled for
ourselves, this zone of hearsay,
and history, and tradition, com-
pleted the whole knowledge of
the past that was accessible to
Shakespeare, for example. To
these limits man's knowledge of
the past was absolutely confined
42
THE DISCOVERY
save for some inklings and guesses,
save for some small, almost neg-
ligible beginnings, until the nine-
teenth century began.
Beside the correct knowledge
in this scheme of hearsay and
history, a man had a certain
amount of legend and error that
rounded off the picture in a very
satisfying and misleading way—
according to Bishop Ussher, just
exactly four thousand and four
years B.C. And that was man's
Universal History-that was his
all, until the scientific epoch began.
And beyond those limits? Well,
I suppose the educated man of the
sixteenth century was as certain
of the non-existence of anything
OF THE FUTURE
43
before the creation of the world
as he was, and as most of us are
still, of the practical non-existence
of the future, or, at anyrate, he
was as satisfied of the impossi-
bility of knowledge in one direc-
tion as in another.
But modern science — that is
to say, the relentless systematic
criticism of phenomena-has in
the past hundred years absolutely
destroyed the conception of a
finitely distant Beginning of
Things, has abolished such limits
to the past as a dated creation
set, and added an enormous vista
to that limited sixteenth century
outlook.
And what I would insist upon
44
THE DISCOVERY
is, that this further knowledge
is a new kind of knowledge ob-
tained in a new kind of way.
We know to-day quite as confi-
dently, and in many respects
more intimately than we know
Sargon, or Zenobia, or Caractacus,
the form and the habits of
creatures that no living being
has ever met, that no human
eye has ever regarded, and the
character of scenery that no man
has ever seen or can ever possibly
see; we picture to ourselves the
Labyrinthodon raising its clumsy
head above the waters of the
carboniferous swamps in which
figure the
he lived, and we figure
Pterodactyls, those great bird-
}
OF THE FUTURE
45
lizards, flapping their way athwart
the forests of Mezzozoic age with
exactly the same certainty as
that with which we picture the
rhinoceros or the
the vulture. I
doubt no more about the facts
in this further picture than I do
about those in the nearer. I
: believe in the Megatherium, which
I have never seen, as confidently
as I believe in the hippopotamus
that has engulfed buns from my
hand. A vast amount of detail
in that further picture is now
fixed and finite for all time.
And a countless number of in-
vestigators are persistently and
confidently enlarging, amplifying,
correcting and pushing further
46
THE DISCOVERY
and further back the boundaries
of this Greater Past,-this pre-
human past that the scientific
criticism of existing phenomena
has discovered and restored and
brought for the first time into
the world of human thought.
We have become possessed of a
new and once unsuspected his-
tory of the world, of which all
the history that was known, for
example, to Dr. Johnson, is
only the brief concluding chapter.
And even that concluding chap-
ter has been greatly enlarged
and corrected by the exploring
archæologist working strictly upon
the lines of the new method;
that is to say, the compari-
OF THE FUTURE
47
ン
​=*
son and criticism of suggestive
facts.
I want particularly to insist
upon this, that all this outer
past-this non-historical past-is
the product of a new and keener
habit of inquiry, and no sort of
revelation. It is simply due to
a new and more critical way of
looking at things. Our know-
ledge of the geological past, clear
and definite as it has become, is
of a different and lower order
than the knowledge of our
memory, and yet of a quite
practicable and trustworthy order,
- a knowledge good enough to
go upon. And if one were to
speak of the private memory as
48
THE DISCOVERY
the Personal Past, and the next
wider area of knowledge as the
Traditional or
or Historical Past,
then one might
one might call all that
great and inspiring background
of remoter geological time, the
Inductive Past.
And this great discovery of
the Inductive Past was got by
the discussion and rediscussion
and effective criticism of a-
number of existing facts, odd-
shaped lumps of stone, streaks
and bandings in quarries and
cliffs, anatomical and develop-
mental details, that had always
been about in the world, that
had been lying at the feet of
mankind so
so long as mankind
OF THE FUTURE
49
had existed, but that no one
had ever dreamt before could
supply any information at all,
much more reveal such astound-
ing and enlightening
vistas.
Looked at in a new way, they
became sources of dazzling and
penetrating light, the remoter
past lit up and became a
picture. Considered as effects,
compared and criticised, they
yielded a clairvoyant vision of
the history of interminable years.
And now, if it has been
possible for men-by picking out
a number of suggestive and sig-
nificant - looking things in the
present, by comparing them,
criticising them, and discussing
4
50
THE DISCOVERY
them, with a perpetual insist-
ence upon why? without any
guiding tradition, and, indeed,
in the teeth of established
beliefs-to construct this amaz-
ing searchlight of inference into
the remoter past,-is it really,
after all, such
such an extravagant
and hopeless thing to suggest
that, by seeking for operating
causes instead of for fossils, and
by criticising them as persist-
ently and
and thoroughly as the
geological record has been criti-
cised, it may be possible to
throw a searchlight of inference
forward instead of backward,
and to attain to a knowledge
of coming things as clear, as
OF THE FUTURE
51
universally convincing, and in-
finitely more important to man-
kind than the clear vision of
that geology has
the past
opened to us during the nine-
teenth century?
Let us grant that anything
to correspond with the memory,
anything having the same rela-
tion to the future that memory
has to the past, is out of the
question. We cannot imagine, of
course, that we can ever know
any personal future to corre-
spond with our personal past,
nor any traditional future to
correspond with our traditional
past. But the possibility of an
inductive future to
to correspond
52
THE DISCOVERY
with that great inductive past
of geology and archæology is
an altogether different thing.
I must confess that I believe
quite firmly that an inductive
knowledge of a great number
of things in the future is be-
coming a human possibility. I
believe that the time is draw-
ing near when it will be possible
to suggest a systematic explora-
tion of the future.
And you
must not judge the practicability
of this enterprise by the failures
of the past. So far nothing has
been attempted, so far no first-
class mind has ever focussed
itself upon these issues. But
suppose the laws of social and
OF THE FUTURE
53
political
development, for
ex-
ample, were given
given
as
many
brains, were
given
given
as much
attention, criticism and discus-
sion as we have given to the
laws of chemical combination
during the last fifty years,—
what might we not expect?
To the popular mind of to-day,
there is something very difficult
in such a suggestion, soberly
made, but here, in this Institu-
tion, which has watched for a
whole century over the splendid
adolescence of science, and where
the spirit of science is surely
understood, you will know that,
as a matter of fact, prophecy has
always been inseparably asso-
54
THE DISCOVERY
ciated with the idea of scientific
research. The popular idea of
scientific investigation is a vehe-
ment, aimless collection of little
facts, collected as the bower-bird
collects shells and pebbles, and the
systematic, unreasonable stowing
away of these little facts in
methodical little rows; and out
of this process, in some manner
unknown to the popular mind,
certain conjuring tricks-the cele-
brated wonders of science-in a
sort of accidental way, emerge.
The popular conception of all dis-
covery is accident.
But you will know that the
essential thing in the scientific
process is not the collection of
OF THE FUTURE
55
facts, but the analysis of facts:
facts are the raw material, and not
the substance, of science; it is
analysis that has given us all
ordered knowledge;
and you
know that the aim, and the test,
and the justification of the scien-
tific process is not a marketable
conjuring trick, but prophecy,
Until a scientific theory yields
confident forecasts, you know it
is unsound and tentative; it is
mere theorising, as evanescent as
art talk, or the phantoms poli-
ticians talk about. The splendid
body of gravitational astronomy,
for example, establishes itself upon
the certain forecast of stellar
movements, and you would ab-
56
THE DISCOVERY
solutely refuse to believe its
amazing assertions if it were not
for these same unerring forecasts.
The whole body of medical science
aims, and claims the ability, to
diagnose. Meteorology constantly:
and persistently aims at prophecy,
and it will never stand in a place
of honour until it can certainly
foretell. The chemist forecasts
elements before he meets them-
it is very properly his boast,-and
the splendid manner in which the
mind of Clerk Maxwell reached in
front of all experiment, and fore-
told those things that Marconi
has materialised, is familiar to us
all. All applied mathematics re-
solves into computation to foretell
OF THE FUTURE
57
$
things which otherwise can only
be determined by trial. Even
in so
political
unscientific a science as
economy
been forecasts.
there have
And, if I am right in saying
that science aims at prophecy,
and if the specialist in each
science is, in fact, doing his best
now to prophesy within the limits
of his field, what is there to
stand in the way of our build-
ing up this growing body of fore-
cast into an ordered picture of
the future that will be just as
certain, just as strictly science,
and perhaps just as detailed as
the picture that has been built
up within the last hundred years
58
THE DISCOVERY
}
"
ALMONE
to make the geological
past?
Well, so far and until we bring
the prophecy down to the affairs
of man and his children, it is
just as possible to carry induc-
tion forward as back; it is just
as simple and sure to work out
the changing orbit of the earth
in the future until the tidal drag
hauls one unchanging face at last
towards the sun, as it is to work
back to its blazing and molten
past. Until man comes in, the
inductive future is as real and
convincing as the inductive past.
But inorganic forces are the
smaller part and the minor
interest in this concern. Directly
man becomes a factor the nature
OF THE FUTURE
59
ļ
of the problem changes, and our
whole present interest centres
on the question whether man is
indeed, individually and collec-
tively, incalculable, a new element
which entirely alters the nature
of our inquiry and stamps it at
once as
as vain and hopeless, or
whether his presence complicates
indeed, but does not alter, the
essential nature of the induc-
tion. How far may we hope to
get trustworthy inductions about
the future of man?
Well, I think, on the whole,
we are inclined to underrate our
chance of certainties in the future
just as I think we are inclined
to be too credulous about the
60
THE DISCOVERY
}
historical past. The vividness of
our personal memories, which
are the very essence of reality
to us, throws a glamour of con-
viction over tradition and past
inductions. But the personal
future must in the very nature
of things be hidden from us so
long as time endures, and this
black ignorance at our very feet,
this black shadow that corre-
sponds to the brightness of our
memories behind us, throws a
glamour of uncertainty and un-
reality over all the future. We
are continually surprising our-
-selves by our own wills or want
of will; the individualties about
us are continually producing the
OF THE FUTURE
61
unexpected, and it is very natural
to reason that as we can never
be precisely sure before the time
comes what we are going to do
and feel, and if we can never
count with absolute certainty
upon the acts and happenings
even of our most intimate
friends, how much the more im-
possible is it to anticipate the
behaviour in any direction of
states and communities.
In reply to which I would
advance the suggestion that an
increase in the number of human
beings considered may positively
simplify the case instead of com-
plicating it, that as the indi-
viduals increase in number they
62
THE DISCOVERY
begin to average out.
Let me
illustrate this point by a
by a com-
parison. Angular pit sand has
grains of the most varied shapes.
Examined microscopically, you
will find all sorts of angles and
outlines and variations. Before
you look, you can say of no
particular grain what its outline
will be. And if
if you shoot a
load of such sand from a cart,
you cannot foretell with any
certainty where any particular
grain will be in the heap that
you make. But you can tell-
you can tell pretty definitely-
the form of the heap as a whole.
And further, if you pass that
sand through a series of shoots,
OF THE FUTURE
63
and finally drop it some distance
to the ground, you will be able
to foretell that grains of a
certain sort of form and size will
for the most part be found in
one part of the heap and grains
of another sort of form and size
will be found in another part of
the heap. In such a case, you
see, the thing as a whole may
be simpler than its component
parts, and this, I submit, is also
the case in many human affairs.
So that because the individual
future eludes us completely, that
is no reason why we should
not aspire
aspire to, and discover
and use, safe
safe and serviceable
generalisations upon countless
1
}
64
THE DISCOVERY
:
important issues in the human
destiny.
But there is a very
very grave
and important-looking difference
between a load of sand and a
multitude of human beings, and
this I must face and examine.
Men's thoughts and wills and
emotions are contagious. An ex-
ceptional sort of sand grain a
sand grain that is exception-
ally big and heavy, for example
-exerts no influence worth con-
sidering upon any other of the
sand grains in the load. They
will fall and roll and heap them-
selves just the same, whether that
exceptional grain is with them
or not. But an exceptional man
OF THE FUTURE
65
comes into the world-a Cæsar
or a Napoleon or a Peter the
Hermit and he appears to per-
suade and convince and compel
and take entire possession of the
sand heap I mean the com-
munity, and to twist and alter
its destinies to an almost un-
limited extent. And if this is
indeed the case, it reduces our
project of an inductive know-
ledge of the future to very small
limits. To hope to foretell the
birth and coming of men of ex-
ceptional force and genius is to
hope incredibly, and if indeed
such exceptional men do as
much as they seem to do in
warping the path of humanity,
1
5
66
THE DISCOVERY
SALASANAY
our utmost prophetic limit in
human affairs is a conditional
sort of prophecy. If people do
so and so, we can say, then such
and such results will follow, and
we must admit that that is our
boundary.
But everybody does not believe
in the importance of the leading
man. There are those who will
say that the whole world is
different by reason of Napoleon.
But there are also those who
will say the whole world of
to-day would be very much as it
is now if Napoleon had never
been born. There are those who
believe entirely in the individual
man and those who believe en-
1
OF THE FUTURE
67
J
r、1!,"、,4.༥「、:
tirely in the forces behind the
individual man; and, for my own
part, I must confess myself a
rather extreme case of the latter
kind. I must confess I believe
that if, by some juggling with
space and time, Julius Cæsar,
Napoleon, Edward IV., William
the Conqueror, Lord Rosebery,
and Robert Burns had all been
changed at birth it would not
have produced any serious dis-
location of the course of destiny.
I believe that these great men of
ours are no more than images and
symbols and instruments taken,
as it were, haphazard by the
incessant and consistent forces
behind them; they are the pen-
the
**
68
THE DISCOVERY
nibs Fate has used for her
writing, the diamonds upon the
drill that
that pierces through the
rock. And the more one inclines
to this trust in forces, the more
one will believe in the possibility
of a reasoned inductive view of
the future, that will serve us in
politics, in morals, in social con-
trivances, and in a thousand
spacious ways. And even those
who take the most extreme and
personal and melodramatic view
of the ways of human destiny,
who see life as a tissue of
fairy godmother births and acci-
dental meetings and promises
and jealousies, will, I suppose,
admit there comes a limit to
OF THE FUTURE
69
1
these things-that at last person-
ality dies away and the greater
forces come to their own. The
great man, however great he
be, cannot set back the whole
scheme of things; what he does
in right and reason will remain,
and what he does against the
greater creative forces will perish.
We cannot foresee him; let us
grant this. His personal differ-
ence, the splendour of his effect,
his dramatic arrangement of
events, will be his own; in other
words, we cannot estimate for
accidents and accelerations and
delays but if only we throw
our web of generalisation wide
enough, if only we spin our rope
70
THE DISCOVERY
of induction strong enough, the
final result of the great man, his
ultimate surviving consequences,
will come within our net.
Such, then, is the sort of know-
ledge of the future that I believe
is attainable, and worth attaining.
I believe that the deliberate direc-
tion of historical study, and of
economic and social study towards
the future, and an increasing
reference, a deliberate and cour-
ageous reference to the future in
moral and religious discussion,
would be enormously stimulating
and enormously profitable to our
intellectual life. I have done my
best to suggest to you that such
an enterprise is now a serious and
1
OF THE FUTURE
71
practicable undertaking. But at
the risk of repetition, I would call
your attention to the essential
difference that must always hold
between our attainable knowledge
of the future and our existing
knowledge of the past. The por-
tion of the past that is brightest
and most real to each of us is
the individual past, the personal
memory. The portion of the
future that must remain darkest
and least accessible is the indi-
vidual future. Scientific prophecy
will not be fortune-telling, what-
ever else it may be. Those excel-
lent people who cast horoscopes,
those illegal fashionable palm-
reading ladies who abound so
72
THE DISCOVERY
much to-day, in whom nobody is
so foolish as to believe, and to
whom everybody is foolish enough
to go, need fear no competition
from the scientific prophets. The
knowledge of the future we may
hope to gain will be general, and
not individual; it will be no sort
of knowledge that will either
hamper us in the exercise of our
individual free will, or relieve us
of our personal responsibility.
And now, how far is it possible
at the present time to speculate
on the particular outline the
future will assume, when it is
investigated in this way?
before we
It is interesting, before
answer that question, to take into
1
OF THE FUTURE
73
i
account the speculations of a cer-
tain sect and culture of people
who already, before the middle of
last century, had set their faces
towards the future as the justify-
ing explanation of the present.
These were the Positivists, whose
position is still most eloquently
maintained and displayed by Mr.
Frederic Harrison, in spite of the
great expansion of the human
outlook that has occurred since
Comte. If you read Mr. Harri-
son, and if you are also, as I pre-
sume your presence here indicates,
saturated with that new wine of
more spacious knowledge that has
been given the world during the
last fifty years, you will have been
74
THE DISCOVERY
greatly impressed by the peculiar
limitations of the Positivist con-
ception of the future. So far as
I can gather, Comte was for all
practical purposes totally ignorant
of that remoter past outside the
past that is known to us by his-
tory; or, if he was not totally
ignorant of its existence, he was,
and conscientiously remained, ig-
norant of its relevancy to the
history of Humanity.
narrow and limited past he recog-
nised, men had always been men
like the men of to-day; in the
future he could not imagine that
they would be anything more
than men like the men of to-day.
He perceived, as we all perceive,
In the
OF THE FUTURE
75
that the old social order was
breaking up, and after a richly
suggestive and incomplete analysis
of the forces that were breaking it
up, he set himself to plan a new
static social order to replace it.
If you will read Comte, or what
is much easier and pleasanter, if
you will read Mr. Frederic Har-
rison, you will find this con-
ception constantly apparent-this
conception that there was once a
stable condition of society with
Humanity, so to speak, sitting
down in an orderly and respect-
able manner; that Humanity has
been stirred up and is on the
move; and that finally it will sit
down again on a higher plane,
76
THE DISCOVERY
and for good and all, cultured
and happy, in the reorganised
Positivist state. And since he
could see nothing beyond man in
the future, there, in that millennial
fashion, Comte had to end. Since
he could imagine nothing higher
than man, he had to assert that
Humanity, and particularly the
future of Humanity, was the
highest of all conceivable things.
All that was perfectly com-
prehensible in a thinker of the
first half of the nineteenth
century. But we of the early
twentieth, and particularly that
growing majority of us who
have been born since the Origin
of Species was written, have
OF THE FUTURE
77
past in
no excuse for any such limited
vision. Our imaginations have
been trained upon a past
which the past that Comte
knew is scarcely more than the
concluding moment, we perceive
that man, and all the world of
men, is no more than the present
phase of a development so great
and splendid that, beside this
vision, epics jingle like nursery
rhymes, and all the exploits of
Humanity shrivel to the
to the pro-
portion of castles in the sand.
We look back through countless
millions of years and see the
great Will to Live struggling
out of the intertidal slime, strug-
gling from shape to shape, and
78
THE DISCOVERY
from power to power, crawling,
and then walking confidently,
upon the land; struggling, gene-
ration after generation, to master
the air, creeping down into the
darkness of the deep; we see it
turn upon itself in rage and
hunger, and reshape itself anew;
we watch it draw nearer and
more akin to
to us, expanding,
elaborating itself, pursuing its
relentless, inconceivable purpose,
until at last it reaches us, and
its being beats through our
brains and arteries, throbs and
thunders in our battleships, roars
through our cities, sings in our
music, and flowers in our art.
And when from that retrospect
OF THE FUTURE
79
1
we turn
again towards the
future, surely any thought of
finality, any millennial settlement
of cultured persons, has vanished
from our minds.
This fact, that man is not:
final, is the great, unmanageable,
disturbing fact that rises upon
us in the scientific discovery of
the future; and to my mind,
at anyrate, the question, What
is to come after man? is the
most persistently fascinating and
the most insoluble question in
the whole world.'
Of course we have no answer.
Such imaginations as we have
we
refuse to rise to the task.
But, for the nearer future,
80
THE DISCOVERY
while man is
is still man, there
are a few general statements
that seem to grow more certain.
It seems to be pretty generally
believed to-day, it has become
a
commonplace with cabinet
ministers now-though it was a
mere irresponsible suggestion two
years ago—that our dense popu-
lations are in the opening phase
of a process of diffusion and
aëration. It seems pretty inevit-
able, also, that the mass of white
and yellow population in the world
will be forced some way up the
scale of education and personal
efficiency in the next two or three
decades. It
It is not difficult to
collect reasons for supposing, and
1
OF THE FUTURE
81
such reasons have been collected,
that in the near future-in a
couple of hundred years, as one
rash optimist has written or in
a thousand or so, humanity will
be definitely and consciously or-
ganising itself as a great world
state: a great world state that
will purge from itself much that
is mean, much that is bestial, and
much that makes for individual
dulness and dreariness, greyness,
and wretchedness in the world of
to-day. And although we know
that there is nothing final in that
world state; although we see it
only as something to be reached
and passed; although we are sure
there will be no such sitting down
6
82
THE DISCOVERY
to restore and perfect a culture
as the Positivists foretell, yet few
people can persuade themselves to
see anything beyond that except
in the vaguest and most general
terms. That world state of more
efficient, more vivid, beautiful,
and eventful people is, so to
speak, on the brow of the hill,
and we cannot see over-though
some of us can imagine great up-
lands beyond, and something -
something that glitters elusively,
taking first one form, and then
another, through the haze. We
can see no detail; we can
nothing definable; and it is
simply, I know, the sanguine ne-
can see
cessity of our minds that makes
1
OF THE FUTURE
83
ہوا
13
us believe that those uplands of
the future are still more gracious
and splendid than we can either
hope or imagine. But of things
that can be demonstrated we
have none.
Yet I suppose most of us enter-
tain certain necessary persuasions,
without which a moral life in
this world is neither a reasonable
nor a possible thing. All this
paper is built finally upon certain
negative beliefs that are incapable
of scientific establishment. Our
lives and powers are limited; our
scope in space and time is limited;
and it is not unreasonable that
for fundamental beliefs we must
go outside the sphere of reason,
84
THE DISCOVERY
and set our feet upon Faith. Im-
plicit in all such speculations as
this is a very definite and quite
arbitrary belief, and that belief
is that neither humanity nor,
in truth, any individual human
being, is living its life in vain.
And it is entirely by an act of
faith that we must rule out of
our forecasts certain possibilities
-certain things that one may
consider improbable, and against
the chances; but that no one,
upon scientific grounds, can call
impossible. One must admit that
it is impossible to show why cer-
tain things should not utterly
destroy and end the entire human
race and story; why night should
OF THE FUTURE
85
:
1
i
not presently come down and
make all our dreams and efforts
vain. It is conceivable, for ex-
ample, that some great unsus-
pected mass of matter should
presently rush upon us out of
space, whirl sun and planets
aside like dead leaves before the
breeze, and collide with, and
utterly destroy every spark of
life upon, this earth. So far as
positive human knowledge goes,
this is a conceivable, possible
thing. There is nothing in
science to show why such a thing
should not be.
It is conceivable, too, that some
pestilence may presently appear,
some new disease, that will de-
86
THE DISCOVERY
1
:
stroy, not ten, or fifteen, or twenty
per cent. of the earth's inhabi-
tants, as pestilences have done
in the past, but one hundred
per cent., and so end our race.
No one, speaking from scientific
grounds alone, can say that can-
not be. And no one can dispute
that some great disease of the
atmosphere, some trailing comet-
ary poison, some great emanation
of vapour from the interior of
the earth, such as Mr. Shiel has
made a brilliant use of in his
Purple Cloud, is consistent with
every demonstrated fact in the
world. There may arise new
animals to prey upon us by land
and sea, and there may come
!
!
OF THE FUTURE
87
some drug or a wrecking mad-
ness into the minds of men.
And finally, there is the reason-
able certainty that this sun of
ours must some day radiate itself
towards extinction; that at least
must happen; it will grow cooler
and cooler, and its planets will
rotate ever more sluggishly, until
some day this earth of ours, tide-
less and slow moving, will be
dead and frozen, and all that
has lived upon it will be frozen
out and done with. There surely
man must end. That of all such
nightmares is the most insistently
convincing. And yet one doesn't
believe it. At least I do not.
And I do not believe in these
88
THE DISCOVERY
things, because I have come to
believe in certain other things,
in the coherency and purpose in
the world and in the greatness
of human destiny. Worlds may
freeze and suns may perish, but
I believe that there stirs some-
thing within us now that can
never die again.
Do not misunderstand me when
I speak of the greatness of human
destiny.
If I may speak quite openly
to you, I will confess that, con-
sidered as a final product, I do
not think very much of myself
or (saving your presence) my
fellow-creatures. I do not think
T could possibly join in the
1
1
OF THE FUTURE
89
worship of Humanity with any
gravity or sincerity. Think of
it. Think of the positive facts.
There are surely moods for all
of us when one can feel Swift's
amazement, that such a Being-
should deal in Pride. There are
moods when one can join in the
laughter of Democritus; and they
would come oftener were not the
spectacle of human littleness so
abundantly shot with pain. But
it is not only with pain that
the world is shot-it is shot with
promise. Small as our vanity
and carnality
carnality make us, there
has been a day of still smaller
things. It is the long ascent of
the past that gives the lie to
90
THE DISCOVERY
our despair.
We know now that
all the blood and passion of our
life was represented in the car-
boniferous time by something—
something, perhaps, cold-blooded
and with a clammy skin, that
lurked between air and water,
and fled before the mightier
fishes and amphibia of those days.
For all the folly, blindness, and
pain of our lives, we have come
some way from that. And the
distance we have travelled gives
us some earnest of the way we
have yet to go.
Why should things cease at
man? Why should not this
rising curve rise yet more steeply
and swiftly? There are many
OF THE FUTURE
91
H
things to suggest that we are
now in a phase of rapid and
unprecedented development. The
conditions under which men live
are changing with an ever in-
creasing rapidity, and so far as
our knowledge goes, no sort
of creatures have ever lived
under changing conditions with-
out undergoing the profoundest
changes themselves. In the
past century there was more
change in the conditions of
human life than there had been
in the previous thousand years.
A hundred years ago inventors
and investigators were rare,
scattered men, and now inven-
tion and inquiry is the work of
92
THE DISCOVERY
+
One
an organised army. This century
will see changes that will dwarf
those of the nineteenth century
as those of the nineteenth dwarf
those of the eighteenth.
can see no sign anywhere that
this rush of change will be over
presently, that the dream of a
new static culture phase will ever
be realised. Human society never
has been quite static, and it will
presently cease to attempt to be
static. Everything seems point-
ing to the belief that we are
entering upon a progress that
will go on with an ever widening
and ever more confident stride
for ever. The reorganisation of
society that is going on now
OF THE FUTURE
93
:
beneath the traditional appear-
ances of things is a kinetic
reorganisation. We are getting
into marching order. We have
struck our camp for ever, and we
are out upon the roads.
We are in the beginning of the
greatest change that humanity
has ever undergone. There is no
shock, no epoch-making incident,
but then there is no shock at a
cloudy daybreak. At no point can
we say, Here it commences—and
now, last minute was night and
this is morning. But insensibly
we are in the day. If we care to
look, we can foresee growing know-
ledge, growing order, and pre-
sently a deliberate improvement
94
THE DISCOVERY
of the blood and character of the
race. And what we can see and
imagine gives us a measure and
gives us faith for what surpasses
the imagination.
It is possible to believe that
all the past is but the beginning
of a beginning, and that all that
is and has been is but the twi-
light of the dawn. It is possible
to believe that all that the human
mind has ever accomplished is but
the dream before the awakening.
We cannot see, there is no need
for us to see, what this world will
be like when the day has fully
come. We are creatures of the
twilight. But it is out of our race
and lineage that minds will spring
OF THE FUTURE
95
that will reach back to us in
our littleness to know us better
than we know ourselves, and that
will reach forward fearlessly to
comprehend this future that de-
feats our eyes.
All this world
is heavy with the promise of
greater things, and a day will
come-one day in the unending
succession of days-when beings,
beings who are now latent in
our thoughts and hidden in our
loins, will stand upon this earth
as one stands upon a footstool,
and laugh, and reach out their
hands amidst the stars.
MORRISON AND GIBB LIMIted, edinburgh,

BY THE SAME AUTHOR,
Crown 8vo, Cloth 25.,
Paper is.
Certain Personal
Matters
On the Choice of a Wife-Of Con-
versation-In a Literary Household-
The Literary Regimen-Of Cleverness
-The Book of Curses-On the Art
of Staying at the Seaside-etc. etc.
London: T. FISHER UNWIN.

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