1902.] on the Discovery of the Future. 9 



manifest among the Western nations ; while the former is the mind 

 of age — the mind of the Oriental. 



Things have been, says the legal mind, and so we are here. And 

 the creative mind says, We are here, because things have yet to be. 



Now I do not wish to suggest that the great mass of people belong 

 to either of these two types. Indeed, I speak of them as two distinct 

 and distinguishable types mainly for convenience, and in order to 

 accentuate their distinction. There are probably very few people 

 who brood constantly upon the past without any thought of the 

 future at all, and there are probably scarcely any who live and 

 think consistently in relation to the future. The great mass of 

 people occupies an intermediate position between these extremes : 

 they pass daily and hourly from the passive mood to the active — 

 they see this thing in relation to its associations and that thing in 

 relation to its consequences, and they do not even suspect that they 

 are using two distinct methods in their minds. 



But for all that they are distinct methods — the method of refer- 

 ence to the past, and the method of reference to the future ; and 

 their mingling in many of our minds no more abolishes their dif- 

 ference than the existence of piebald horses proves that white is black. 



I believe that it is not sufficiently recognised just how different 

 in their consequences these two methods are, and just where their 

 difference and where the failure to appreciate their difference takes 

 one. This present time is a period of quite extraordinary uncertainty 

 and indecision upon endless questions — moral qiiesticms, aesthetic 

 questions, religious and political questions — upon which we should 

 all of us be happier to feel assured and settled ; and a very large 

 amount of this floating uncertainty about these important matters is 

 due to the fact that with most of us these two insufficiently dis- 

 tinguished ways of looking at things are not only present together, 

 but in actual conflict in our minds, in unsuspected conflict ; we pass 

 from one to the other heedlessly, without any clear recognition of the 

 fundamental difference in conclusions that exists between the two ; 

 and we do this with disastrous results to our confidence and to our 

 consistency in dealing with all sorts of issues. 



But before pointing out how divergent these two types or habits 

 of mind really are, it is necessary to meet a possible objection to 

 what has been said. I may put that objection in this form — Is not 

 this distinction between a type of mind that thinks of the past and of 

 a type of mind that thinks of the future a sort of hair-splitting — 

 almost like distinguishing between people who have left hands and 

 people who have right ? Everybody believes that the present is 

 entirely determined by the past, you say ; but then everybody 

 believes also that the present determines the future. Are we simply 

 separating and contrasting two sides of everybody's opinion ? To 

 which I would reply that we are not discussing what we know and 

 believe about the relations of past, present, and future, or of the 

 relation of cause and effect to each other in time at all. We all 



