1902.] on the Discovery of the Future. IS 



possible to know anything about the future. Man has acquired the 

 habit of going to the past because it was the line of least resistance 

 for his mind. While a certain variable portion of the past is service- 

 able matter for knowledge in the case of everyone, the future is, to 

 a mind without an imagination trained in scientific habits of thought, 

 non-existent. All our minds are made of memories. In our me- 

 mories each of us has something that, without any special training 

 whatever, will go back into the past and grip firmly and convincingly 

 all sorts of workable facts — sometimes more convincingly than firmly. 

 But the imagination, unless it is strengthened by a very sound train- 

 ing in the laws of causation, wanders like a lost child in the blackness 

 of things to come, and returns — empty. 



Many people believe therefore that there can be no sort of 

 certainty about the future. You can know no more about the future, 

 I was recently assured by a friend, than you can know which way a 

 kitten will jump next. And to all who hold that view, who regard 

 the future as a perpetual source of convulsive surprises, as an in- 

 penetrable, incurable, perpetual blackness, it is right and reasonable 

 to derive such values as it is necessary to attach to things from the 

 events that have certainly happened with regard to them. It is our 

 ignorance of the future and our persuasion tliat that ignorance is 

 absolutely incurable, that alone gives the past its enormous pre- 

 dominance in our thoughts. But through the ages the long unbroken 

 succession of fortune-tellers — and they flourish still — witnesses to 

 the perpetually smouldering feeling that after all there may be a 

 better sort of knowledge, a more serviceable sort of knowledge 

 than that we now possess. 



On the whole, there is something sympathetic for the dupe of the 

 fortune-teller in the spirit of modern science ; it is one of the per- 

 suasions that come into one's mind, as one assimilates the broad 

 conceptions of science, that the adequacy of causation is universal ; 

 that in absolute fact, if not in that little bubble of relative fact which 

 constitutes the individual life, in absolute fact, the future is just as 

 fixed and determinate, just as settled and inevitable, just as possible 

 a matter of knowledge, as the past. Our personal memory gives us 

 an impression of the superior reality and trustworthiness of things in 

 the past, as of things that have finally committed themselves and 

 said their say ; but the more clearly we master the leading concep- 

 tions of science, the better we understand that this impression is one 

 of the results of the peculiar conditions of our lives, and not an 

 absolute truth. The man of science comes to believe at last that the 

 events of the year a.d. 4000 are as fixed, settled, and unchangeable 

 as the events of the year 1600. Only about the latter he has some 

 material for belief, and about the former — practically none. 



And the question arises, how far this absolute ignorance of the 

 future is a fixed and necessary condition of human life, and how far 

 some application of intellectual methods may not attenuate, even if 

 it does not absolutely set aside, the veil between oui'selves and things 



