382 THP] DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURP]. 



SO far as the records and traditions of liunitinit}" g-o, into a don)»t and 

 darkness as 1)lack, just as l)lack, as futurit}'. And now let nic remind 

 you tliat this second zone of knowledge outside the ])rio-ht ai"ca of 

 what we have felt and witnessed and handled for ourselves — this zone 

 of hearsay and liistory and tradition — completed the whole knowledge 

 of tlie past tliat was accessible to Shakespeare, for example. To these 

 limits maiTs knowledge of the past Avas absolutely confined save for 

 som(> iid<lings and guesses, save for some small, almost negligible 

 beginnings, luitil the nineteenth century began. Besides 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 satis- 

 fying and misleading way, according to liisliop Ussher, just exactly 

 400-i years B. C. And that was man's unixersal history — that was his 

 all — until the scientific epoch Ijegan. And l)evond those limits — ? 

 Widl. I su})i)ose the educated man of the sixteenth century was as cer- 

 tain of the nonexistence of anvthing before the creation of the world 

 as h(^ was, and as most of us are still, of the practical nonexistence of 

 the future, or at any rate he was as satisfied of the impossil)ility of 

 knowledge in the one direction as in the other. 



But modiM'ii science, that is to say the rel(Mitless systematic criticism 

 of phenomena, has in the past hundred years a])solutely destroyed the 

 conce})ti()n 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 

 is that this further knowledge is a new kind of knowledge, obtained 

 in a new kind of a way. We know to-day. cjuite as confidently and 

 in many iesi)ects more intimately than we know Sargon or Zenobia 

 or C^aractacus, the form and the hal)its of creatures that no living being- 

 has ev(M' juet, thiit no human eye has ever regarded, and the characti^r 

 of scenery that no man has ever seen or can ever possibly see; we pic- 

 ture to ourselvi^s the lal)yrinth()don raising its clumsy head above the 

 waters of the carl)()niferous swamps in which he lived, and Ave figure 

 the pterodactyls, those g-reat bird lizards, flapping their way titliwart 

 the forests of the Mesozoic age with exactly the same certainty as that 

 with which we picture the rhinoceros or the \ ulture. 1 doid)t no more 

 about the facts in this further pictui'e tluui 1 do alwut those in the 

 nearest. 1 Ixdieve in the megatherium which T have never s(>en as 

 confidently as I believe in the hippopotanms that has engulfinl buns 

 from my hand. A vast amount of detail in that further picture is now 

 fixed and finit(> foi' all time. And a countless number of iin-estigators 

 are persistently and confidcMitly enlai'ging, anii)iifying. correcting, and 

 ])ushitig furtlierand furtluu' luick the boundaries of this greater past — 

 this pi'ehuman ])ast — that the sciiMitific 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 



