1902.] on the Discovery of the Future. 17 



of science, and where the spirit of science is surely understood, you 

 will know that, as a matter of fact, prophecy has always been in- 

 separably associated with the idea of scientific research. The popular 

 idea of scientific investigation is a vehement, aimless collection of 

 little facts, collected as the bower-bird collects shells and pebbles, 

 and the systematic, unreasonable stowing away of these little facts 

 in methodical little rows ; and out of this process, in some manner 

 unknown to the popular mind, certain conjuring tricks — the cele- 

 brated wonders of science — in a sort of accidental way, emerge. The 

 popular conception of all discovery is accident. 



But you will know that the essential thing in the scientific pro- 

 cess is not the collection of facts, but the analysis of facts : facts are 

 the raw material, and not the substance, of science ; it is analysis 

 that has given us all ordered knowledge ; and you know that the 

 aim, and the test, and the justification of the scientific process is 

 not a marketable conjuring trick, but prophecy. Until a scientific 

 theory yields confident forecasts, you know it is unsound and tenta- 

 tive ; it is mere theorising, as evanescent as art talk, or the phantoms 

 politicians talk about. The splendid body of gravitational astronomy, 

 for example, establishes itself upon the certain forecast of stellar 

 movements, and you would absolutely refuse to believe its amazing 

 assertions if it were not for these same unerring forecasts. The 

 whole body of medical science aims, and claims the ability, to diag- 

 nose. Meteorology constantly and persistently aims at prophecy, 

 and it will never stand in a place of honour until it can certainly 

 foretell. The chemist forecasts elements before he meets them — it 

 is very properly his boast ; and the splendid manner in which the 

 mind of Clerk Maxwell reached in front of all experiment, and fore- 

 told those things that Marconi has materialised, is familiar to us all. 

 All applied mathematics resolves into computation to foretell things 

 which otherwise can only be determined by trial. Even in so un- 

 scientific a science as political economy there have been forecasts. 



And, if I am right in saying that science aims at prophecy, and 

 if the specialist in each science is, in fact, doing his best now to 

 prophecy within the limits of his field, what is there to stand in the 

 way of our building up this growing body of forecast into an ordered 

 picture of the future that will be just as certain, just as strictly 

 science, and perhaps just as detailed as the picture that has been 

 built up within the last hundred years to make the geological past ? 

 Well, so far and until we bring the prophecy down to the affairs of 

 man and his children, it is just as possible to carry induction forward 

 as back ; it is just as simple and sure to work out the changing orbit 

 of the earth in the future until the tidal drag hauls one unchanging 

 face at last towards the sun, as it is to work back to its blazing and 

 molten past. Until man comes in, the inductive future is as real 

 and convincing as the inductive past. But inorganic forces are the 

 smaller part and the minor interest in this concern. Directly man 

 becomes a factor the nature of the problem changes, and our whole 



Vol. XVII. (No. 96.) 



