February 6, 1902] 



NA TURE 



327 



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 deter- 

 mines the future. Are we simply separating and contrasting 

 two sides of everybody's opinion > To which one replies 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. We all 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 Wily 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 deter- 

 mines, some of us will get to a westward conclusion of this 

 journey, and some of us will get to an eastward conclusion, and 

 some of us will get to no definite conclusion at all about all 

 sorts of important matters. And yet those who are travelling 

 east, and those who are travelling west, and those who are 

 wandering haphazard, may be all upon the same ground of 

 belief and statement and amidst the same assembly 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 unreser- 

 vedly 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 that 

 there is any relation between the actual consequences of acts and 

 the imperatives of right and wrong. Our lives are to reap the 

 fruits of determinate things, and it is still a fundamental pre- 

 sumption 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 sanctions, 

 and this new disposition is, I believe, a growing one, I suppose 

 in all ages people in a timid, hesitating, guilty way have tem- 

 pered 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 inter- 

 pretation of acts by a consideration of their results. To-day 

 there arc few people who have not more or less clearly dis- 

 covered 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 so definite as that, but most of us 

 are deeply tinged with the spirit of compromise between the 

 past and the future ; we profess an unbounded allegiance to the 

 prescriptions of the past, and we practise a general observance 

 of its injunctions, but we qualify to a vague, variable extent 

 with considerations of expediency. We hold, for example, that 

 we must respect our promises. But suppose we find unexpec- 

 tedly that for one of us to keep a promise, which has been 

 sealed and sworn in the most sacred fashion, must lead to the 

 great suffering of some other human being, must lead, in fact, to 

 practical evil ? Would a man do right or wrong if he broke 

 such a promise ? The practical decision most modern people 

 would make would be to break the promise. Most would say 

 that they did evil to avoid a greater evil. But suppose it was 

 not such very great suffering we were going to inflict, but only 

 some suffering ? And suppose it was a rather important promise ? 

 With most of us it would then come to be a matter of weighing 

 the promise, the thing of the past, against this unexpected bad 

 consequence, the thing of the future. And the smaller the over- 

 plus of evil consequences, the more most of us would vacillate. 



NO. 1684, VOL. 65"} 



But neither of the two types of mind we are contrasting would 

 vacillate at all. The legal type of mind would obey the past 

 unhesitatingly, the creative would unhesitatingly sacrifice it to 

 the future. The legal mind would say, " they who break the 

 law at any point, break it altogether," while the creative mind 

 would say, " let the dead past bury its dead." It is convenient 

 to take my illustration from the sphere of promises, but it is in 

 the realm of sexual morality that the two methods are most 

 acutely in conflict. 



And I would like to suggest that until you have definitely 

 determined either to obey the real or imaginary imperatives of 

 the past, or to set yourself towards the demands of some ideal 

 of the future, until you have made up your mind to .idhere to 

 one or other of these two types of mental action in these matters, 

 you are not even within hope of a sustained consistency in the 

 thought that underlies your acts, that in every issue of principle 

 that comes upon you, you will be entirely at the mercy of the 

 intellectual mood that happens to be ascendant at that particular 

 moment in your mind. 



In the sphere of public affairs also, these two ways of looking 

 at things work out into equally divergent and incompatible con- 

 sequences. The legal mind insists upon treaties, constitutions, 

 legitimacies and charters ; the legislative incessantly assails 

 these. Whenever some period of stress sets in, some great 

 conflict between institutions and the forces in things, there 

 comes a sorting between these two types of mind. The legal 

 mind becomes glorified and transfigured in the form of hopeless 

 loyalty, the creative mind inspires revolutions and reconstruc- 

 tions. And particularly is this difference of attitude accentuated 

 in the disputes that arise out of wars. In most modern wars 

 there is no doubt quite traceable on one side or the other a 

 distinct creative idea, a distinct regard for some future con- 

 sequence. But the main dispute even in most modern wars and 

 the sole dispute in most mediaeval wars will be found to be a 

 reference, not to the future, but to the past ; to turn upon a 

 question of fact and right. The wars of Plantagenet and 

 Lancastrian England with France, for example, were based 

 entirely upon a dummy claim, supported by obscure legal argu- 

 ments, upon the crown of France. And the arguments that 

 centre about the present war in South Africa ignore any ideal 

 of a great united South African State almost entirely, and 

 quibble this way and that about who began the fighting and 

 what was <^t was not written in some obscure revision of a 

 treaty a score of years ago. Vet beneath the legal issues, the 

 broad creative idea has been very apparent in the public mind 

 during this war. It will be found more or less definitely 

 formulated beneath almost all the great wars of the past century, 

 and a comparison of the wars of the nineteenth century with the 

 wars of the middle ages will show, I think, that in this field 

 also there has been a discovery of the future, an increasing dis- 

 position to shift the reference and values from things accom- 

 plished to things to come. 



Vet though foresight creeps into our politics and a reference 

 to consequence into our morality, it is still the past that domin- 

 ates our lives. But why ? Why are we so bound to it ? It is 

 mto the future we go, to-morrow is the eventful thing for us. 

 There lies all that remains to be felt by us and our children and 

 all those that are dear to us. Vet we marshal and order men 

 into classes entirely with regard to the past, we draw shame and 

 honour out of the past ; against the rights of property, the vested 

 interests, the agreements and establishments of the past, the 

 future has no rights. Literature is for the most part history or 

 history at one remove, and what is culture but a mould of inter- 

 pretation into which new things are thrust, a collection of 

 standards, a sort of bed of King Og, to which all new 

 expressions must be lopped or stretched ? Our coiiveniences, 

 like our thoughts, are all retrospective. We travel on 

 roads so narrow that they suffocate our traffic ; we live in 

 uncomfortable, inconvenient, life-wasting houses out of a 

 love of familiar shapes and familiar customs and a dread 

 of strangeness, all our public affairs are cramped by local 

 boundaries impossibly restricted and small. Our clothing, our 

 habits of speech, our spelling, our weights and measures, our 

 coinage, our religious and political theories, all witness to the 

 binding power of the past upon our minds. Vet — we do not 

 serve the past as the Chinese have done. There are degrees. 

 We do not worship our ancestors or prescribe a rigid local 

 costume ; we venture to enlarge our stock of knowledge, and we 

 qualify the classics with occasional adventures into original 

 thought. Compared with the Chinese we are distinctly aware 



