NATURE 



[February 6, 1902 



and convince and compel and lake entire possession of the sand 

 heap — I mean the community — and to twist and alter its destinies 

 to an almost unlimited extent. And if this is indeed the case, 

 it reduces our project of an inductive knowledge of the future to 

 very small limits. To hope to foretell the birth and coming of 

 men of exceptional force and genius is to hope incredibly, and 

 if, indeed, such exceptional men do do as much as they seem 

 to do in warping the path of huinanity, our utmost prophetic 

 limit in human affairs is a conditional sort of prophecy. If 

 people do so and so, we can say, then such and such results will 

 follow, and we must admit that that is our limit. 



But everybody docs not Ijelieve in the importance of the 

 leading man. There are those who will say that the whole 

 world is different by reason of Napoleon. But there are also 

 those who will say the whole world of to-day would be very 

 much as it is now if Napoleon had never been born. There are 

 those who believe entirely in the individual man and those who 

 believe entirely in the forces behind the individual man, and for 

 my own part I must confess myself a rather extreme case of the 

 latter kind. I must confess I believe that if by .some juggling 

 with space and time Julius Qesar, Napoleon, Edward I\'., 

 William the Conqueror, Lord Rosebery and Robert Burns had 

 all been changed at birth, it would not have produced any 

 serious dislocation of the course of destiny. I believe that these 

 great men of ours are no more than images and symbols and 

 instruments taken, as it were, haphazard by the incessant and 

 consistent forces behind them ; they are the pen-nibs Fate has 

 used for her writing, the diamonds upon the drill that pierces 

 through the rock. And the more one inclines to this trust in 

 forces, the more one will believe in the possibility of a reasoned 

 inductive view of the future that will serve us in politics, in 

 morals, in social contrivances, and in a thousand spacious ways. 

 And even those who take the most extreme and personal and 

 melodramatic view of the ways of human destiny, who see life 

 as a tissue of fairy godmother births and accidental meetings 

 and promises and jealousies, will, I suppose, admit there comes 

 a limit to these things, that at last personality dies away and the 

 greater forces come to their own. The great man, however 

 great he be, cannot set back the whole scheme of things ; what 

 he does in right and reason will remain, and what he does 

 against the greater creative forces will perish. We cannot fore- 

 see him, let us grant that. His personal difference, the splendour 

 of his effect, his dramatic arrangement of events will be his own 

 — in other words, we cannot estimate for accidents and accelera- 

 tions and delays — but if only we throw our web of generalisation 

 wide enough, if only we spin our rope of induction strong enough, 

 the final result of the great man, his ultimate surviving conse- 

 quences, will come within our net. 



Such, then, is the sort of knowledge of the future that I 

 believe is attainable, and worth attaining. I believe that the 

 deliberate direction of historical study and of economic and 

 social study towards the future, and an increasing reference, a 

 deliberate and courageous reference, to the future in moral and 

 religious discussion, would be enormously stimulating and 

 enormously profitable to our intellectual life. I have done my 

 best to suggest to you that such an enterprise is now a serious 

 and practicable undertaking. But at the risk of repetition I 

 would call your attention to the essential difference that must 

 always hold between our attainable knowledge of the future and 

 our existing knowledge of the past. The portion of the past 

 that is brightest and most real to each of us is the individual 

 past, the personal memory. The portion of the future that 

 must remain darkest and least accessible is the individual 

 future. Scientific prophecy will not be fortune telling, what- 

 ever else it may be. Those excellent people who cast horo- 

 scopes, those illegal fashionable palm-reading ladies who abound 

 so much to-day, in whom nobody is so foolish as to believe, and 

 lo whom everybody is foolish enough to go, need fear no com- 

 petition from the scientific prophet.s. The knowledge of the 

 future we may hope to gain will be general and not individual ; 

 it will be no sort of knowledge that will either hamper us in the 

 exercise of our individual free will or relieve us of our personal 

 responsibility. 



And now, how far is it possible at the present time to specu- 

 late on the particular outline the future will assume when it is 

 investigated in this way ? 



It is interesting, before we answer that question, to take 

 into account the speculations of a certain sect and culture of 

 people who already, before the middle of last century, had 

 set their faces towards the future as the justifying explanation 



NO. 1684. VOL. 65] 



of the present. These were the positivists, whose position is 

 still most eloquently maintained and displayed by Mr. I'Vederic 

 Harrison, in spite of the great expansion of the human outlook 

 that has occurred since Comte. If you read Mr. Harrison, and 

 if you are also, as I presume your presence here indicates, 

 saturated with that new wine of more spacious knowledge that 

 has been given the world during the last fifty years, you will 

 have been greatly impressed by the peculiar limitations of the 

 po.sitivist conception of the future. So far as I can gather, 

 Comte was, for all practical purposes, totally ignorant of that 

 remoter past outside the past that is known to us by history, or 

 if he was not totally ignorant of its existence, he was, and con- 

 scientiously remained, ignorant of its relevancy to the history of 

 humanity. In the narrow and limited past he recognised, men 

 had always been like the men of to-day ; in the future he 

 could not imagine that they would be anything more than 

 men like the men of to-day. He perceived, as we all per- 

 ceive, 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 |)lan 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 — 

 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 re-organised positivist state. 

 .\nd 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 thai 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. Our imaginations have been trained 

 upon a past 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 exploits 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 jiower to power, crawling and then walking 

 confidently upon the land, struggling generation after genera- 

 tion to master the air, creeping down into the darkness of the 

 deep ; we see it turn upon itself in rage and hunger and reshape 

 iiself anew, we watch it dr.aw nearer and more akin to us, 

 expanding, elaborating itself, pursuing its relentless incon- 

 ceivable 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, sings 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 

 millennial settlement of cultured persons, has vanished from our 

 minds. 



This fact that man is not final is the great unmanageable dis- 

 turbing 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 aflcr 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. 



But for the nearer future, while man is still man, there are a 

 few general statements that seem to grow more certain. It seems 

 to be pretty generally believed to-day that our dense populations 

 are in the opening phase of a process of diffusion and aeration. It 

 seems pretty inevitable also that at least the' mass of white popu- 

 lation in the world will be forced some way up the scale of 

 education and personal efficiency in the next two or three 

 decades. It is not difficult to collect reasons for supposing, and 

 such reasons have been collected, that in the near future, in a 

 couple of hundred years as one rash optimist has written, or in 

 a thousand or so, humanity will be definitely and consciously 

 organising itself as a great world State, a great world State that 

 will purge from itself much that is mean, much that is bestial, 

 and much that makes for individual dulness and dreariness, grey- 



