THE DISCOVEKY OF THE FUTUKK. 383 



once unsuspected history of the world — of which all the history that 

 was known, for example, -to Dr. rTohihson is only the ])v\vi concluding- 

 chapter; and even that concludino- chapter has been o-reatly enlarged 

 and cori'ected by the exploring archieologists working strictly upon 

 the lines of the new niethotl — that is to say, the comparison and criti- 

 cism of suggestive facts. 



I want particularlv to insist upon this, that all this outer past- this 

 nonhistorical past — is the product of a new and k<'ener habit of 

 inquiry, and no sort of revelation. It is simply due to a new and 

 more critical way of looking at things. Our knowledge of the geolog- 

 ical i)ast, clear and delinite as it has become, is of a different and lower 

 order than the knowledge of our memory, and vet of a (piite practica- 

 ble and trustworthy order — a know^ledge good enough to go ui)on; 

 and if one were to speak of th(^ private memory as the ])crs()nal past, 

 as the next wider area of knowledge as the traditional or historical 

 past, then one might call all that great and inspiring background of 

 remoter geok)gical time the inductive past. 



And tins great discovery of the inductive past was got, by the dis- 

 cussion and rediscussion and elective criticism of a number of existing 

 facts, odd-shaped lum})s of stone, streaks and bandings in quarries and 

 clili's. anatomical and developmental details that had always becMi about 

 in the world, that had been lying at the feet of mankind so long as 

 mankind had existed, but that no one had ever dreanu^d before could 

 supply any information at all, much more reveal such astounding and 

 enlightening vistas. Looked at in a new w^ay 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 signiticant looking things in the ])resent, ])v com- 

 paring them, criticising them, and discussing them, with a perpetual 

 insistence upon wdiy ? without any guiding tradition, and indeed in the 

 teeth of estal)lished beliefs, to construct this amazing search light of 

 inferenc(> into the remoter past, is it really, after all, such an extrava- 

 gant and hopeless thing to suggest that, by seeking for operating- 

 causes instead of for fossils, and by criticising them as persistently and 

 thoroughly as the geological rcM'ord has b(>en ci'iticised, it may be pos- 

 sible to throw a search light of infei-ence forwai'd instead of backward, 

 and to attain to a knowledge of coming things as clear, as uni\ersally 

 convincing, and inlinitely more im])ortant to mankind than the clear 

 vision of the past that geology has opened to us during the inneteenth 

 century ( 



Let us grant that anything to correspond witii tiie memory, anything 

 having the sam« relation to the future that memory has to the past, is 

 out of the (juestion. W(> can not imagine, of course, that we can ever 



