THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE. 389 



countless millions of years and see the jj;reat will to livestruoolini.- out 

 of the intei'tidal slime, struggling from shape to shape and from power 

 to power, crawling and then walking contidcntly ujion the land, strug- 

 gling generation after generation to master the air. creeping down 

 into the darkness of the deep; we see it turn u[)on itself in rage and 

 hunger and reshape itself anew; we watch it draw nearer and more 

 akin to us, expanding, elaborating itself, pursuing its relentless, incon- 

 ceivable purpose, until at last it reaches us and its being l)eats thi'ough 

 our brains and arteries, throbs and thunders in our battle shi})s. roars 

 through our cities, sings in our music, and iiowers in our art. And 

 when, from that retrospect, we turn again toward the futur(\ surely 

 any thought of linality, an}" millennial settlement of cultured peisons, 

 has vanished from our minds. 



This fact that man is not final is the great unmanageal)le. distui-hing 

 fact that rises upon us in the scientific discov(MT of the future, and to 

 my mind, at any rate, the question what is to come after man is the 

 most persistently fascinating and the most insoluble (|uestion in the 

 whole w^orld. 



Of course we have no answei'. Such imaginations as wo have refuse 

 to rise to the task. 



But for the nearer future, while man is still man, there are a few 

 general statements that seem to grow more certain. It seems to be 

 pretty generally believed to-day that our dense populations are in the 

 opening phase of a process of diffusion and aeration. It seems pretty 

 inevital)le also that at least the mass of white population in the world 

 will be forced some way up the scale of education and personal (efficiency 

 in the next two or three decades. It is not difficult to collect reasons 

 for supposing — and such reasons have been collected — that in the near 

 future, in a couple of hundred years, as one rash optimist has written, 

 or in a thousand or so, humanity will ])e detinitely and consciously 

 organizing itself as a great world state — a great world state that will 

 purge from itself much that is mean, nmch that is bestial, and much 

 that makes for individual dullness and dreariness, grayness and 

 wretchedness in the world of to-day; and although ^\'o know that 

 there is nothing linal in that world state, although we see it oidy as 

 something to l>e reached and passed, although we iU'c sure there will 

 be no such sitting down to restore and ixM'fect a culture as the posi- 

 tivists foretell, yet few people can persuade themselves to see anything 

 beyond that except in the vaguest and more genei-al t(>rms. That 

 world state of more efficient, more vivid, beautiful, and eventful people 

 is, so to speak, on the brow of the hill, and we can not see over, though 

 some of us can imagine great uplands l)eyond and something, something 

 that glitters elusively, taking first onc^ form and then another, through 

 the haz(\ We cxm see no detail, we can see nothing detinable, and it 

 is simply, 1 know, the sanguine necessity of our minds that makes us 



