14 Mr. E. G. Wells [Jan. 24, 



to come. And 1 am venturing to suggest to you, that along certain 

 lines, and with certain qualifications and limitations, a working 

 knowledge of things in the future is a possible and practicable thing. 



And in order to support this suggestion, I would call your atten- 

 tion to certain facts about our knowledge of the past, and more 

 particularly I would insist upon this, that about the past our range 

 of absolute certainty is very limited indeed. About the past, I 

 would suggest, we are inclined to over-estimate our certainty, just as 

 I think we are inclined to under-estimate the certainties of the future. 

 And such a knowledge of the past as we have is not all of the same 

 sort, nor derived from the same sources. 



Let us consider just what an educated man of to-day knows of the 

 past. First of all, he has the reallest of all knowledge, the know- 

 ledge of his own personal experiences, his memory. Uneducated 

 people believe their memories absolutely, and most educated people 

 believe theirs with a few reservations. Some of us take up a critical 

 attitude even towards our own memories ; we know that they not only 

 sometimes drop things out, but that sometimes a sort of dreaming, or 

 a strong suggestion, will put things in. But, for all that, memory 

 remains vivid and real, as no other knowledge can be, and to have 

 seen, and heard, and felt, is to be nearest to absolute conviction. Yet 

 our memory of direct impressions is only the smallest part of what 

 we know. Outside that bright area comes knowledge of a different 

 order, the knowledge brought to us by other people. Outside our 

 immediate personal memory, there comes this wider area of facts or 

 quasi-facts, told us by more or less trustworthy people, told us by 

 word of mouth or by the written word of living and of dead writers. 

 This is the past of report, rumour, tradition, and history — the second 

 sort of knowledge of the past. The nearer knowledge of this sort is 

 abundant, and clear, and detailed ; remoter, it becomes vaguer ; still 

 more remotely in time and space, it dies down to brief, imperfect 

 inscriptions and enigmatical traditions, and at last dies away, so far 

 as the records and traditions of humanity go, into a doubt and dark- 

 ness as black, just as black, as futurity. And now let me remind you 

 that this second zone of knowledge, outside the bright area of what 

 we have felt, and witnessed, and handled for ourselves — this zone of 

 hearsay, and history, and tradition, completed the whole knowledge 

 of the past that was accessible to Shakespeare, for example. To these 

 limits man's knowledge of the past was absolutely confined save for 

 some inklings and guesses, save for some small, almost negligible 

 beginnings, until the nineteenth century began. 



Beside the correct knowledge in this scheme of hearsay and 

 history, a man had a certain amount of legend and error that rounded 

 oti" the picture in a very satisfying and misleading way — according to 

 Bishoj) Ussher, just exactly four thousand and four years B.C. And 

 that was man's Universal History — that was his all, until the scien- 

 tific epoch began. And beyond those limits — ? Well, I sui^pose the 

 educated man of the sixteenth century was as certain of the non- 



