1902.] on the Discovery of the Future. 21 



be anything more than men like the men of to-day. He perceived, 

 as we all perceive, that the old social order was breaking up, and 

 after a richly suggestive and incomplete analysis of the forces that 

 were breaking it up, he set himself to plan a new static social order 

 to replace it. If you will read Comte, or what is much easier and 

 pleasanter, if you will read Mr. Frederic Harrison, you will find this 

 conception constantly apparent — this conception that there was once 

 a stable condition of society, with Humanity, so to speak, sitting 

 down in an orderly and respectable manner ; that Humanity has been 

 stirred up and is on the move ; and that finally it will sit down again 

 on a higher plane, and for good and all, cultured and happy, in the 

 reorganised Positivist state. And since he could see nothing beyond 

 man in the future, there, in that millennial fashion, Comte had to 

 end. Since he could imagine nothing higher than man, he had to 

 assert that Humanity, and particularly the future of Humanity, was 

 the highest of all conceivable things. 



All that was perfectly comprehensible in a thinker of the first 

 half of the nineteenth century. But we of the early twentieth, and 

 particularly that growing majority of us who have been born since 

 the ' Origin of Species ' was written, have no excuse for any such 

 limited vision. Uur imaginations have been trained upon a pasr in 

 which the past that Comte knew is scarcely more than the concluding 

 moment ; we perceive that man, and all the world of men, is no more 

 than the present phase of a development so great and splendid that, 

 beside this vision, epics jingle like nursery rhymes, and all the ex- 

 ploits of Humanity shrivel to the proportion of castles in the sand. 

 We look back through countless millions of years and see the great 

 Will to Live struggling out of the intertidal slime, struggling from 

 shape to shape, and from power to power, crawling, and then walking 

 confidently, upon the land ; struggling, generation after generation, 

 to master the air, creeping down into the darkness of the deep ; we 

 see it turn upon itself in rage and hunger, and reshape itself anew ; 

 we watch it draw nearer and more akin to us, expanding, elaborating 

 itself, pursuing its relentless, inconceivable purpose, until at last it 

 reaches us, and its being beats through our brains and arteries, 

 throbs and thunders in our battleships, roars through our cities, slugs 

 in our music, and flowers in our art. And when from that retrospect 

 we turn again towards the future, surely any thought of finality, 

 any milleniai settlement of cultured persons, has vanished from our 

 minds. 



This fact, that man is not final, is the great, unmanageable, 

 disturbing fact that rises upon us in the scientific discovery of the 

 future ; and to my mind, at any rate, the question. What is to come 

 after man ? is the most persistently fascinating and the most insoluble 

 question in the whole world. 



Of course we have no answer. Such imaginations as we have 

 refuse to rise to the task. 



