10 Mr. H. G. Wells [Jan. 24, 



know the present depends for its causes on the past, and that the 

 future depends for its causes upon the present. But this discussion 

 concerns the way in which we approach things upon this common 

 ground of knowledge and belief. We may all know there is an east 

 and a west ; but if some of us always approach and look at things 

 from the west, if some of us always approach and look at things from 

 the east, and if others, again, wander about with a pretty disregard of 

 direction, looking at things as chance determines, some of us will get 

 to a westward conclusion of the journey, and some of us will get to 

 an eastward conclusion, and some of us will get to no definite con- 

 clusion at all about all sorts of important matters. 



And yet those who are travelling east, and those who are travel- 

 ling west, and those who are wandering haphazard, may be all upon 

 the same ground of belief and statement, and amidst the same as- 

 sembly of proven facts. 



Precisely the same thing will happen if you always approach 

 things from the point of view of their causes, or if you approach 

 them always with a view to their probable effects. And in several 

 very important groups of human affairs it is possible to show quite 

 clearly just how widely apart the two methods, pursued each in its 

 purity, take those who follow them. 



I suppose that three hundred years ago all people who thought 

 at all about moral questions — about questions of Right and Wrong — 

 deduced their rules of conduct absolutely and unreservedly from the 

 past, from some dogmatic injunction, some finally settled decree. 

 The great mass of people do so to-day. It is written, they say, 

 " Thou shalt not steal," for example — that is the sole, complete, and 

 sufficient reason why you should not steal ; and even to-day there is 

 a strong aversion to admit tliat there is any relation between the 

 actual consequences of acts and the impeiatives of right and wrong. 

 Our lives are to reap the fruits of determinate things ; and it is 

 still a fundamental presumption of the established morality that one 

 must do Right though the heavens fall. But there are people coming 

 into this world who would refuse to call it Right if it brought the 

 heavens about our heads, however authoritative its sources and sanc- 

 tions ; and this new disposition is, I believe, a growing one. I sup- 

 pose in all ages j)eople, in a timid, hesitating, guilty way, have 

 tempered the austerity of a dogmatic moral code, by small infrac- 

 tions, to secure obviously kindly ends ; but it was, I am told, the 

 Jesuits who first deliberately sought to qualify the moral interpreta- 

 tions of acts by a consideration of their results. To-day there are 

 few people who have not more or less clearly discovered the future 

 as a more or less important factor in moral considerations. To-day 

 there is a certain small proportion of people who frankly regard 

 morality as a means to an end, as an overriding of immediate and 

 personal considerations out of regard to something to be attained in 

 the future, and who break away altogether from the idea of a code 

 dogmatically established for ever. Most of us are not eo definite as 



