3V)() THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE. 



believe those uplands of the future are still more f^raeious and splendid 

 than we can either hope or imagine. But of things that ean be demon- 

 strated we have none. 



Yet 1 suppose most of us entertain eertain necessary persuasions, 

 without which a moral life in this world is neither a reasonable nor a 

 possible thing. All this paper is built finally upon certain negative 

 beliefs that are incapable of scientific establishment. Our lives and 

 powers are limited, our scope in space and time is limited, and it is 

 not unreasonable that for fundamental beliefs we must go outside the 

 sphere of reason and set our feet upon faith. Implicit in all such 

 speculations as this, is a very definite and quite arbitrary belief, and 

 that l)elief is that neither humanit}^ nor in truth any individual human 

 being- is living its life in vain. And it is entirely l)y an act of faith 

 that we must rule out of our forecasts certain possibilities, certain 

 things that one may considei' improbable and against the chances, l)ut 

 that no one upon scientific grounds can call impossible. One must 

 admit that it is impossible to show why certain things should not 

 utterly destroy and end the entire human race and stor}^, why night 

 should not presently come down and make all our dreams and 

 efforts vain. It is conceivable, for example, that some great unex- 

 pected mass of matter should presently rush upon us out of space, 

 whirl sun and planets aside like dead leaves before the breeze, and 

 collide w^ith and utterly destroy every spark of life upon this earth. 

 So far as positive human knowledge g'oes, this is a conceivaV)ly possible 

 thing. There is nothing in science to show why such a thing- should 

 not be. It is conceivable, too, that some pestilence may presentl}' 

 appear, some new disease, that will destroy, not 10 or 15 or 20 per 

 cent of the earths' inhabitants as pestilences have done in the past, but 

 100 per cent, and so end our race. iS^o one, speaking from scientific 

 grounds alone, can say. That can not be. And no one can dispute 

 that some great disease of the atmosphere, some trailing cometary 

 poison, some great emanation of vapor from the interior of the earth, 

 such as Mr. Shiel has made a brilliant use of in his "Purple Cloud," 

 is consistent with every demonstrated fact in the world. There may 

 arise new animals to pre}^ upon us l)y land and sea, and there may 

 come some drug or a wrecking madness into the minds of men. And 

 finally, there is the reasona})le certainty that this sun of ours nuist 

 some day radiate itself toward extinction; that, at least, nuist happen; 

 it will grow cooler and cooler, and its planets will rotate ever more 

 sluggishly until some day this (^arth of ours, tideless and sknv moving', 

 will be dead and frozen, and all that has lived upon it will l)e frozen 

 out and done with. There surely man nmst end. 'I'lial of all such 

 nightmares is the most insistently convincing. 



And yet one doesn't l)elieve it. 



At least 1 do not. And 1 do not IxMiexe in thoso things because I 



