388 THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE. 



the particular outline the future will assume when it is investigated in 

 this way ^ 



It is interesting, before we answer that (question, to take into account 

 the speculations of a certain sect and culture of people who alread}^ 

 before the middle of last century, had set their faces toward the 

 future as the justifying explanation of the present. These were the 

 positivists, whose position is still most eloquently maintained and dis- 

 played b}^ Mr. Frederic Harrison, in spite of the great expansion of 

 the human outlook that has occurred since Comte. If you read Mr. 

 Harrison, and if you are also, as I presume your presence here indi- 

 cates, saturated with that new wine of more spacious knowledge that 

 has been given the world during the last fifty years, you will have 

 been greatly impressed by the peculiar limitations of the positivist 

 conception 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 histor}", or if he was not totally ignorant 

 of its existence, he w^as, and conscientiously remained, ignorant of its 

 relevanc}^ to the history of humanity. In the narrow and limited past 

 he recognized men had always been 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, that 

 the old social order Avas breaking up, and after a richly suggestive and 

 incomplete analysis of the forces that were breaking it up he set him- 

 self to plan a new static social order to replace it. If you will read 

 Comte, or, what is much easier and pleasanter, if 3'ou will read Mr. 

 Frederic Harrison, you. w411 iind this conception constantly apparent — 

 that there was once a stable condition of society with humanity, so to 

 speak, sitting down in an orderly and respectable manner; that 

 humanity has been stirred up and is on the move, and that finally it 

 will sit down again on a higher plane, and for good and all, cultured 

 and happy, in the reorganized positivist state. And since he could 

 see nothing beyond man in the future, there, in that milleimial 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 perfect!}^ comprehensible in a thinker of the first half of 

 the nineteenth century. But we of the earl}'^ twentieth, and particu- 

 larly that growing majority of us who have been born since the 

 Origin of Species was written, have no excuse for any such limited 

 vision. Our imaginations have been trained upon a past in 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 hinnanity 

 shrivel to the propoi-tion of castles in the sand. We look back through 



