THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE
west, and those who are wandering haphazard, may be all upon the same ground of belief and statement and amid the same assembly of proven facts. Precisely the same thing, divergence of result, 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 unreservedly 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, 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 presumption 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 tempered the austerity
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