THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE
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 enquiry are the work of an unorganised 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 a new static phase of culture will ever be realised. 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, for ever. The re-organisation of society that is going on now beneath the traditional appearance of things is a kinetic re-organisation. We are getting into marching order. We have struck our camp for ever 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
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