20 Mr. H. O. Wells [Jan. 24, 



— ^but if only we throw our web of generalisation wide enough, if 

 only we spin our rope of induction strong enough, the final result of 

 the great man, his ultimate surviving consequences, will come within 

 our net. 



Such, then, is the sort of knowledge of the future that I believe 

 is attainable, and worth attaining. I believe that the deliberate 

 direction of historical study, and of economic and social study 

 towards the future, and an increasing reference, a deliberate and 

 courageous reference to the future in moral and religious discussion, 

 would be enormously stimulating and enormously profitable to our 

 intellectual life. I have done my best to sui^gest to you that such 

 an enterprise is now a serious and practicable undertaking. But at 

 the risk of repetition, I would call your attention to the essential 

 difference that must always hold between our attainable knowledge of 

 the future and our existing knowledge of the past. The portion of 

 the past that is brightest and most real to each of us is the individual 

 past, the personal memory. The portion of the future that must 

 remain darkest and least accessible is the individual future. Scientific 

 prophecy will not be fortune-telling, whatever else it may be. Those 

 excellent people who cast horoscopes, those illegal fashionable palm- 

 reading ladies who abound so much to-day, in whom nobody is so 

 foolish as to believe, and to whom everybody is foolish enough to go, 

 need fear no competition from the scientific prophets. The know- 

 ledge of the future we may hope to gain will be general, and not 

 individual ; it will be no sort of knowledge that will either hamper 

 us in the exercise of our individual free will, or relieve us of our 

 personal responsibility. 



And now, how far is it possible at the present time to speculate 

 on the particular outline the future will assume, when it is investi- 

 gated in this way ? 



It is interesting, before we answer that question, to take into 

 account the speculations of a certain sect and culture of people who 

 already, before the middle of last century, had set their faces towards 

 the future as the justifying explanation of the present. These were 

 the Positivists, whose position is still most eloquently maintained 

 and displayed by Mr. Frederic Harrison, in spite of the great 

 expansion of the human outlook that has occurred since Comte. If 

 you read Mr. Harrison, and if you are also, as I presume your presence 

 here indicates, saturated with that new wine of more spacious know- 

 ledge that has been given the world during the last fifty years, you 

 will have been greatly impressed by the peculiar limitations of the 

 Positivist conception of the future. So far as I can gather, Comte 

 was for all practical purposes totally ignorant of that remoter past 

 outside the past that is known to us by history ; or, if he was not 

 totally ignorant of its existence, he was, and conscientiously remained, 

 ignorant of its relevancy to the history of Humanity. In the narrow 

 and limited past he recognised, men had always been men like the 

 men of to-day ; in the future he could not imagine that they would 



