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Discovery Of The Future

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 toward 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, whatever else it may be. Those excellent people who cast horoscopes, those illegal fashionable palm-reading ladies who abound so much to-day, in whom nobody is so foolish as to believe, and to whom everybody is foolish enough to go, need fear no competition from the scientific prophets. 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 speculate 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 toward the future as the justifying explanation of the present. These were the positivists, whose position is still most eloquently maintained and displayed by Mr. Frederic 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 positivist 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 conscientiously remained, ignorant of its relevancy to the history of humanity. In the narrow and limited past he recognized 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 perceive, 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 plan 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 reorganized positivist state. And 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 that 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 will to live struggling out of the intertidal slime, struggling from shape to shape and from power to power, crawling and then walking confidently upon the land, struggling generation after generation to master the air, creeping down into the darkness of the deep; we see it turn upon itself in rage and hunger and reshape itself anew; we watch it draw nearer and more akin to us, expanding, elaborating itself, pursuing its relentless, inconceivable 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 toward 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, disturbing fact that arises upon us in the scientific discovery of the future, and to my mind, at any rate, the question what is to come after 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 population 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 conscientiously organizing 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 dullness and dreariness, grayness and wretchedness in the world of to-day; and although we know that there is nothing final in that world state, although we see it only as something to be reached and passed, although we are sure there will be no such sitting down to restore and perfect a culture as the positivists foretell, yet few people can persuade themselves to see anything beyond that except in the vaguest and most general terms. That world state of more vivid, beautiful, and eventful people is, so to speak, on the brow of the hill, and we cannot see over, though some of us can imagine great uplands beyond and something, something that glitters elusively, taking first one form and then another, through the haze. We can see no detail, we can see nothing definable, and it is simply, I know, the sanguine necessity of our minds that makes us believe those uplands of the future are still more gracious and splendid than we can either hope or imagine. But of things that can be demonstrated we have none. Yet I suppose most of us entertain certain necessary persuasions, without which a moral life in this world is neither a reasonable nor a possible thing. All this paper is built finally upon certain negative beliefs that are incapable of scientific establishment. Our lives and powers are limited, our scope in space and time is limited, and it is not unreasonable that for fundamental beliefs we must go outside the sphere of reason and set our feet upon faith. Implicit in all such speculations as this is a very definite and quite arbitrary belief, and that belief is that neither humanity nor in truth any individual human being is living its life in vain. And it is entirely by an act of faith that we must rule out of our forecasts certain possibilities, certain things that one may consider improbable and against the chances, but that no one upon scientific grounds can call impossible. One must admit that it is impossible to show why certain things should not utterly destroy and end the entire human race and story, why night should not presently come down and make all our dreams and efforts vain. It is conceivable, for example, that some great unexpected mass of matter should presently rush upon us out of space, whirl sun and planets aside like dead leaves before the breeze, and collide with and utterly destroy every spark of life upon this earth. So far as positive human knowledge goes, this is a conceivably possible thing. There is nothing in science to show why such a thing should not be. It is conceivable, too, that some pestilence may presently appear, some new disease, that will destroy, not 10 or 15 or 20 per cent. of the earth’s inhabitants as pestilences have done in the past, but 100 per cent.; and so end our race. No one, speaking from scientific grounds alone, can say, “That cannot be.” And no one can dispute that some great disease of the atmosphere, some trailing cometary poison, some great emanation of vapor from the interior of the earth, such as Mr. Shiel has made a brilliant use of in his “Purple Cloud,” is consistent with every demonstrated fact in the world. There may arise new animals to prey upon us by land and sea, and there may come some drug or a wrecking madness into the minds of men. And finally, there is the reasonable certainty that this sun of ours must radiate itself toward extinction; that, at least, must happen; it will grow cooler and cooler, and its planets will rotate ever more sluggishly until some day this earth of ours, tideless and slow moving, will be dead and frozen, and all that has lived upon it will be frozen out and done with. There surely man must end. That of all such nightmares is the most insistently convincing. And yet one doesn’t believe it. At least I do not. And I do not believe in these things because I have come to believe in certain other things—in the coherency and purpose in the world and in the greatness of human destiny. Worlds may freeze and suns may perish, but there stirs something within us now that can never die again. Do not misunderstand me when I speak of the greatness of human destiny. If I may speak quite openly to you, I will confess that, considered as a final product, I do not think very much of myself or (saving your presence) my fellow-creatures. I do not think I could possibly join in the worship of humanity with any gravity or sincerity. Think of it! Think of the positive facts. There are surely moods for all of us when one can feel Swift’s amazement that such a being should deal in pride. There are moods when one can join in the laughter of Democritus; and they would come oftener were not the spectacle of human littleness so abundantly shot with pain. But it is not only with pain that the world is shot—it is shot with promise. Small as our vanity and carnality make us, there has been a day of still smaller things. It is the long ascent of the past that gives the lie to our despair. We know now that all the blood and passion of our life were represented in the Carboniferous time by something—something, perhaps, cold-blooded and with a clammy skin, that lurked between air and water, and fled before the giant amphibia of those days. For all the folly, blindness, and pain of our lives, we have come some way from that. And the distance we have travelled gives us some earnest of the way we have yet to go. Why should things cease at man? Why should not this rising curve rise yet more steeply and swiftly? There are many things to suggest that we are now in a phase of rapid and unprecedented development. The conditions under which men live are changing with an ever-increasing rapidity, and, so far as our knowledge goes, no sort of creatures have ever lived under changing conditions without undergoing the profoundest changes themselves. In the past century there was more change in the conditions of human life than there had been in the previous thousand years. A hundred years ago inventors and investigators were rare scattered men, and now invention and inquiry are the work of an unorganized army. This century will see changes that will dwarf those of the nineteenth century, as those of the nineteenth dwarf those of the eighteenth. One can see no sign anywhere that this rush of change will be over presently, that the positivist dream of a social reconstruction and of a new static culture phase will ever be realized. Human society never has been quite static, and it will presently cease to attempt to be static. Everything seems pointing to the belief that we are entering upon a progress that will go on, with an ever-widening and ever more confident stride, forever. The reorganization of society that is going on now beneath the traditional appearance of things is a kinetic reorganization. We are getting into marching order. We have struck our camp forever and we are out upon the roads. We are in the beginning of the greatest change that humanity has ever undergone. There is no shock, no epoch-making incident—but then there is no shock at a cloudy daybreak. At no point can we say, “Here it commences, now; last minute was night and this is morning.” But insensibly we are in the day. If we care to look, we can foresee growing knowledge, growing order, and presently a deliberate improvement of the blood and character of the race. And what we can see and imagine gives us a measure and gives us faith for what surpasses the imagination. It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all that the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening. We cannot see, there is no need for us to see, what this world will be like when the day has fully come. We are creatures of the twilight. But it is out of our race and lineage that minds will spring, that will reach back to us in our littleness to know us better than we know ourselves, and that will reach forward fearlessly to comprehend this future that defeats our eyes. All this world is heavy with the promise of greater things, and a day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when beings, beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amid the stars. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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