THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTUKE. 887 



our.s arc no more than inuii>"os and synihoLs and instrunuMits taken, as 

 it were, haphazard by the ijiccssant and consistent forces behind them; 

 they are the pen nibs Fate has used for her writing, the diamonds 

 upon the drill that pierces through the rock. And the more one 

 inclines to this trust in forces the more one will believe in the pos- 

 sibility of a reasoned inductive view of the future that will .serve 

 us iji yjolitics, in morals, in social contrivances, and in a thousand 

 spacious wa3^s. And even those who take the most extreme and per- 

 sonal and melodramatic view of the ways of human destiny, who see 

 life as a tissue of fair}^ godmother births and accidental meetings and 

 promises and jealousies, will, I suppose, admit there comes a limit to 

 these things — that at last personality dies away and the greater forces 

 come to their own. The great man, however great he l)e, can not set 

 Inick the whole scheme of things; what he docs in right and reason 

 will remain and what he does against the greater crcatiN'e forces will 

 perish. We can not foresee him; let us grant that. His personal 

 difference, the splendor of his effect, his dramatic arrangement of 

 events will be his own — in other words, we can not estimate for acci- 

 dents and accelerations and delays — 1)ut if only we throw our web of 

 generalization wide enough, if only we spin our rope of induction 

 strong enough, the final result of the great man, his ultimate sur\'i\ing 

 consequences, will come within our net. 



Such, then, is the sort of knowdedge of the future that 1 belie^'e is 

 attainable and worth attaining. I believe that the deli))erate direc- 

 tion of historical study and of econoiuic and social studj' toward the 

 future, and an increasing reference, a deliberate and courageous ref- 

 erence, to the future in moral and religious discussion, would ])c enor- 

 mously 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 practicable undertaking. But at the risk of repetition 

 I would call your attention to the essential difference that nuist always 

 hold between our attainable knowledge of the future and our existing 

 knowledge of the past. The portion of the past that is l)rightest and 

 most real to each of us is the individual past — the personal memor3\ 

 The portion of the future that must remain darkest and least acces- 

 sible is the individual future. Scientific piophecy will not be fortune 

 telling, whatever else it may l)e. Those excellent people who cast 

 horoscopes, those illegal fashionable palm-reading ladies who abound 

 so much to-day, in Avhom nobody is so foolish as to ])elie\e, and to 

 whom everybody is foolish enough to go, need fear no competition 

 from the scientific prophets. The knowledge of the future we umy 

 hope to gain will be general and not individual; it will Ik^ no sort of 

 knowdedge that will either hampei- 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 



