16 Mr. R. G. WelU [Jan. 24, 



And this great discovery of the Inductive Past was got by the 

 discussion and rediscussion and effective criticism of a number of 

 existing facts, odd-shaped lumps of stone, streaks and bandings in 

 quarries and cliffs, anatomical and developmental details, that had 

 always been about in the world, that had been lying at the feet of 

 mankind so long as mankind had existed, but that no one had ever 

 dreamt before could supply any information at all, much more reveal 

 such astounding and enlightening vistas. Looked at in a new way, 

 they became sources of dazzling and penetrating light — the remoter 

 past lit up and became a picture. Considered as effects, compared 

 and criticised, they yielded a clairvoyant vision of the history of 

 interminable years. 



And now, if it has been possible for men — by picking out a 

 number of suggestive and significant-looking things in the present, 

 by comparing them, criticising them, and discussing them, with a 

 perpetual insistence upon why ? without any guiding tradition, and, 

 indeed, in the teeth of established beliefs — to construct this amazing 

 searchlight of inference into the remoter past, — is it really, after all, 

 such an extravagant and hopeless thing to suggest that, by seeking 

 for operating causes instead of for fossils, and by criticising them as 

 persistently and thoroughly as the geological record has been criti- 

 cised, it may be possible to throw a searchlight of inference forward 

 instead of backward, and to attain to a knowledge of coming things 

 as clear, as universally convincing, and infinitely more important to 

 mankind than the clear vision of the past that geology has opened 

 to us during the nineteenth century? 



Let us grant that anything to correspond with the memory, any- 

 thing having the same relation to the future that memory has to the 

 past, is out of the question. We cannot imagine, of course, that we 

 can ever know any personal future to correspond with our personal 

 past, nor any traditional future to correspond with our traditional 

 past. But the possibility of an inductive future to correspond with 

 that great inductive past of geology and archaeology is an altogether 

 different thing. 



I must confess that I believe quite filrmly that an inductive know- 

 ledge of a great number of things in the future is becoming a human 

 possibility. I believe that the time is drawing near when it will be 

 possible to suggest a systematic exploration of the future. And you 

 must not judge the practicability of this enterprise by the failures 

 of the past. So far nothing has been attempted, so far no first-class 

 mind has ever focussed itself upon these issues. But suppose the 

 laws of social and political development, for example, were given as 

 many brains, were given as much attention, criticism and discussion 

 as we have given to the laws of chemical combination during the 

 last fifty years, — what might we not expect ? 



To the popular mind of to-day, there is something very difficult 

 in such a suggestion, soberly made, but here, in this Institution, 

 which has watched for a whole century over the splendid adolescence 



