THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE
cannot foresee 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 accelerations 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 consequences, 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, 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
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