NATURE 



[February 6, 1902 



of the future. But compared with what we might be, the past is 

 all our world. 



The reason why the retrospective habit, the legal habit, is 

 so dominant and always has been so predominant, is of course 

 a perfectly obvious one. We follow the fundamental human 

 principle and lake what we can get. All people believe the 

 past is certain, defined and knuwable, and only a few people 

 believe that it is possible to know anything about the future. 

 Man has acquired the habit of going to the past because it was 

 the line of least resistance for his mind. While a certain variable 

 portion of the past is serviceable matter for knowledge in the 

 case of everyone, the future is, to a mind without an imagina- 

 tion trained in scientific habits of thought, non-existent. All 

 our minds are made of memories. In our memories each of us 

 has something that without any special training whatever will 

 go back into the past and grip firmly and convincingly all sorts 

 of workable facts, sometimes more convincingly than firmly. 

 But the imagination, unless it is strengthened by a very sound 

 training in the laws of causation, wanders like a lost child in the 

 blackness of things to come and returns— empty. 



Many people believe, therefore, that there can be no sort of 

 certainty about the future, ^'ou can know no more about the 

 future, I was recently assured by a friend, than you can know 

 which way a kitten will jump next. And to all who hold that 

 view, who regard the future as a perpetual source of convulsive 

 surprises, as an impenetrable, incurable, perpetual blackness, it 

 is right and reasonable to derive such values as it is necessary to 

 attach to things from the events that have certainly happened 

 with regard to them. It is our ignorance of the future and our 

 persuasion that that ignorance is absolutely incurable that alone 

 gives the past its enormous predominance in our thoughts. But 

 through the ages, the long unbroken succession of fortune 

 tellers— and they flourish still — witnesses to the perpetually 

 smouldering feeling that after all there may be a better sort of 

 knowledge — a more serviceable sort of knowledge than that we 

 now possess. 



On the whole there is something sympathetic for the dupe of 

 the fortune teller in the spirit of modern science ; it is one of 

 the persuasions that come into one's mind, as one assimilates 

 the broad conceptions of science, that the adequacy of causation 

 is universal ; that in absolute fact, if not in that little bubble of 

 relative fact, which constitutes the individual life, in absolute 

 fact the future is just as fixed and determinate, jus as settled 

 and inevitable, just as possible a matter of knowledge as the 

 past. Our personal memory gives us an impres.cion of the 

 superior reality and trustworthiness of things in the past, as of 

 things that have finally committed themselves and said their say, 

 but the more clearly we master the leading conceptions of science 

 the better we understand that this impression is one of the 

 results of the peculiar conditions of our lives and not an absolute 

 truth. The man of science comes to believe at last that the 

 events of the year A.i). 4000 are as fixed, settled and unchange- 

 able as the events of the year 1600. Only about the latter he 

 has some material for belief and about the former practically 

 none. 



And the question arises how far this absolute ignorance of the 

 future is a fixed and necessary condition of human life, and how 

 far some application of intellectual methods may not attenu.ate 

 even if it does not absolutely set aside the veil between ourselves 

 and things to come. And I am venturing to suggest to you 

 that, along certain lines and with certain qualifications and 

 limitations, a working knowledge of things in the future is a 

 possible and practicable thing. 



And in order to support this suggestion I would call your 

 attention to certain facts about our knowledge of the past, and 

 more particularly I would insist upon this, that about the past 

 our range of absolute certainty is very limited indeed. About 

 the past I would suggest we are inclined to overestimate our 

 certainty, just as I think we are inclined to underestimate the 

 certainties of the future. And such a knowledge of the past 

 as we have is not all of the same sort, or derived from the 

 same sources. 



Let us consider just what an educated man of to-day knows 

 of the past. First of all he has the reallest of all knowledge, 

 the knowledge of his own personal experiences, his memory. 

 Uneducated people believe their memories absolutely, and most 

 educated people believe them with a few reservations. Some of 

 us lake up a critical attitude even towards our own memories ; 

 we know that they not only .sometimes drop things out, but that 

 sometimes a sort of dreaming or a strong suggestion will put 



NO. 1684, VOL. 65] 



things in. But for all that memory remains vivid and real as no 

 other knowledge can be, and to have seen and heard and felt is 

 to be nearest to absolute conviction. Yet our memory of direct 

 impressions is only the smallest part of what we know. Outside 

 that bright area comes knowledge of a diflerent order, the 

 knowledge brought to us by other people. Outside our 

 immediate personal memory there comes this wider area of 

 facts, or quasi facts, told us by more or less trustworthy people, 

 told us by word of mouth or by the written word of living and 

 of dead writers. This is the past of report, rumour, tradition 

 and history, the second sort of knowledge of the past. The 

 nearer knowledge of this sort is abundant and clear and 

 detailed, remoter it becomes vaguer, still more remotely in time 

 and space it dies down to brief, imperfect inscriptions and 

 enigmatical traditions, and at last dies away, so far as the records 

 and traditions of humanity go, into a doubt and darkness as 

 black, just as black, as futurity. And now let me remind you 

 that this second zone of knowledge outside the bright area of 

 what we have felt and witnessed and handled for ourselves, this 

 zone of hear.say and history and tradition completed the whole 

 knowledge of the past that was accessible to Shakespeare, for 

 example. To these limits man's knowledge of the past was 

 absolutely confined save for some inklings and guesses, save for 

 some small, almost negligible beginnings, until the nineteenth 

 century began. Beside the correct knowledge in this scheme of 

 hearsay and history a man had a certain amount of legend and 

 error that rounded oft' the picture in a very satisfying and 

 misleading way, according to Bishop Us,sher, just exactly 4004 

 years B.C. And that was man's universal history — that was his 

 all, until the scientific epoch began. And beyond those 

 limits — ? Well, I suppose the educated man of the sixteenth 

 century was as certain of the non-existence of anything before 

 the creation of the world as he was, and as most of us are still, 

 of the practical non-existence of the future, or at any rate he was 

 as .satisfied of the impossibility of knowledge in the one direction 

 as in the other. 



But modern science, that is to say, the relentless systematic 

 criticism of phenomena, has in the past hundred years absolutely 

 destroyed the conception of a finitely distant beginning of things ; 

 has abolished such limits to the past as a dated creation set, 

 and added an enormous vista to that limited sixteenth century 

 outlook. And what I would insist upon is that this further 

 knowledge is a new kind of knowledge, obtained in a new 

 kind of way. We know to-day, quite as confidently and in 

 many respects more intimately than we know Sargon, or 

 Zenobia, or Caractacus, the form and the habits of creatures 

 that no living being has ever met, that no human eye has ever 

 regarded, and the character of scenery that no man has ever 

 seen or can ever possibly see ; we picture to ourselves the 

 l.ibyrinthodon raising its clumsy head above the waters of the 

 Carboniferous swamps in which he lived, and we figure the 

 pterodactyls, those great bird lizards, flapping their way athwart 

 the forests of the Mesozoic age with exactly the same certainty 

 as that with which we picture the rhinoceros or the vulture. 

 I doubt no more about the facts in this further picture than I do 

 about those in the nearest. I believe in the megatherium 

 which I have never seen as confidently as I believe in the 

 hippopotamus that has engulfed buns from my hand. A vast 

 amount of detail in that further picture is now fixed and finite 

 for all time. And a countless number of investigators are 

 persistently and confidently enlarging, amplifying, correcting 

 and pushing further and further back the boundaries of this 

 greater past, this pre-human past that the scientific criticism of 

 existing phenomena has discovered and restored and brought 

 for the first time into the world of human thought. We have 

 become possessed of a new and once unsuspected history of the 

 world — of which all the history that was known, for example, 

 to Doctor Johnson, is only the brief concluding chapter. And 

 even that concluding chapter h.as been greatly enlarged and 

 corrected by the exploring archreologist working strictly upon 

 the lines of the new method, that is to say, the comparison and 

 criticism of suggestive facts. 



I want particularly to insist upon this, that all this outer i»sl 

 — this non-historical past — is the product of a new and keener 

 habit of inquiry, and no sort of revelation. It is simply due to 

 a new and more critical way of looking at things. Our know- 

 ledge of the geological past, clear and definite as it has become, 

 is of a diflerent and lower order than the knowledge of our 

 memory, and yet of a quite practicable and trustworthy order, 

 a knowledge good enough to go upon. And if one were to 



