380 THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE, 



political theories, all witness to the binding power of the past upon 

 our inincls. Yet we do not serve the past as the Chinese have done. 

 There are degrees. We do not worship our ancestors or prescribe a 

 rigid local costume; we venture to enlarge our stock of knowledge, 

 and we qualify the classics with occasional adventures into original 

 thought. Compared with the Chinese we are distinctly aware of the 

 future. But compared with wdiat we might l)e the past is all our 

 world. 



The reason wh}- the retrospective habit, the legal habit, is so domi- 

 nant, and always has been so predominant, is of course a perfectly 

 obvious one. We follow the fundamental human principle and take 

 what we can get. All people believe the past is certain, dehned, 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 l)ecause it was the line of least resistance for his mind. While 

 a certain variable portion of the i)ast is serviceable matter for knowl- 

 edge in the case of everyone, the future is, to a mind without an im- 

 agination trained in scientific hal)its of thought, nonexistent. All 

 our minds are made of memories. In our memories each of us has 

 something 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. But the imagina- 

 tion, uidess it is strengthened by a very sound training in the laws of 

 causation, wanders like a lost child in the l>lackness of things to come 

 and returns empty. 



Many people believe, therefore, that there can be no sort of cer- 

 tainty about the future. You can know no more about the future, I 

 was recently assured by a friend, than you can know which wav a kit- 

 ten will jump next. And to all who hold that view, who regard the 

 future as a ])ei'petual source of convulsive surprises, as an impenetra- 

 ble, incural)le. perpetual blackness, it is right and reas()nal)le to derive 

 such values as it is necessary to attach to things from the events that 

 have certaiidy ha})pened with regard to them. It is our ignoi'ance of 

 the future and our persuasion that that ignorance is absolutely incura- 

 ble that alone gives the past its enormous predominance in oui' 

 thoughts. But through the ages, the long un])roken succession of 

 foi'tune tellers — and they flourish still — witness(\s to the [)erpetually 

 smoldering feeling that after all there may ho a better sort of knowl- 

 (Hlg(» — a more servicealde sort of knowledge than that we now possess. 



On the whole there is sonn^thing sym[)athetic for tin* du))e of the 

 fortun(>-teIlei' in tlu^ spii'it of modern science; it is one of the persua- 

 sions that come into one's mind, as one assimilates the broad concep- 

 tions of science, that the adecjuacy of causation is universal; that in 

 absolute fact, if not in that little bubl)le of relative fact, which consti- 

 tutes th(^ iiidixidnal life, in al)solut(^ fact the futui'(^ is pist as fixed and 



