THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE
extravagant and hopeless thing to suggest that by seeking for operating causes instead of for fossils, and by criticising them as persistently and thoroughly as the geological record has been criticised, it may be possible to throw a searchlight of inference forward instead of backward, and to attain to a knowledge of coming things as clear, as universally convincing, and infinitely more important to mankind than the clear vision of the past that geology has opened to us during the nineteenth century?
Let us grant that anything to correspond with the memory, anything having the same relation to the future that memory has to the past, is out of the question. We cannot imagine, of course, that we can ever know any personal future to correspond with our personal past, or any traditional future to correspond with our traditional past; but the possibility of an inductive future to correspond with that great inductive past of geology and archæology is an altogether different thing.
I must confess that I believe quite firmly that an inductive knowledge of a great number of things in the future is becoming a human possibility. I believe that the time is drawing near when it will be possible to suggest a systematic exploration of the future. And you must not judge the practicability of this enterprise by the failures of the past. So far nothing has been attempted, so far no first-class mind has ever focussed itself upon these issues; but suppose the laws of social and political development, for example, were given as many brains, were given as much attention, criticism, and discussion as we
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