1902.] on the Discovery of the Future. 15 



existence of aoythino before the creation of the world as he was, and 

 as most of us are still, of the practical non-existence of the future, or 

 at any rate, he was as satisfied of the impossibility of knowledge in 

 one direction as in another. 



But modern science — that is to say, the relentless systematic 

 criticism of phenomena — has in the past hundred years absolutely 

 desti-oyed the conception of a finitely distant Beginning of Things, 

 has abolished such limits to the past as a dated creation set, and 

 added an enormous vista to that limited sixteenth century outlook. 



And what I would insist upon is, that this further knowledge is a 

 new kind of knowledge obtained in a new kind of way. We know 

 to-day quite as confidently, and in many respects more intimately 

 than we know Sargon, or Zenobia, or Caractacus, the form and the 

 habits of creatures that no living being has ever met, that no human 

 eye has ever regarded, and the character of scenery that no man has 

 ever seen or can ever possibly see ; we picture to ourselves the Laby- 

 rinthodon raising its clumsy head above the waters of the carboni- 

 ferous swamps in which he lived, and we figure the Pterodactyls, 

 those great bird-lizards, flapping their way athwart the forests of 

 Mesozoic age with exactly the same certainty as that with which 

 we picture the rhinoceros or the vulture. I doubt no more about 

 the facts in this further picture than I do about those in the nearer. 

 I believe in the Megatherium, which I have never seen, as confidently 

 as I believe in the hippopotamus that has engulfed buns from my 

 hand. A vast amount of detail in that further picture is now fixed 

 and finite for all time. And a countless number of investigators are 

 persistently and confidently enlarging, amplifying, correcting and 

 pushing further and further back the boundaries of this Greater Past, 

 — this pre-human past that the scientific criticism of existing phe- 

 nomena has discovered and restored and brought for the first time into 

 the world of human thought. We have become possessed of a new 

 and once unsuspected history of tho world, of which all the history 

 that was known, for example, to Dr. Johnson, is only the brief con- 

 cluding chapter. And even that concluding chapter has been greatly 

 enlarged and corrected by the exploring archaeologist working strictly 

 upon the lines of the new method ; that is to say, the comparison and 

 criticism of suggestive facts. 



I want particularly to insist upon this — that all this outer past — 

 this non-historical past — is the product of a new and keener habit of 

 inquiry, and no sort of revelation. It is simply due to a new and 

 more critical way of looking at things. Our knowledge of the geo- 

 logical past, clear and definite as it has become, is of a different and 

 lower order than the knowledge of our memory, and yet of a quite 

 i^racticable and trustworthy order — a knowledge good enough to go 

 upon. And if one were to speak of the private memory as the 

 Personal Past, and the next wider area of knowledge as the Tradi- 

 tional or Historical Past, then one might call all that great and 

 inspiring background of remoter geological time the Inductive Past. 



