H. G. Wells

“ 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 [61] stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amid the stars. ”

“ 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 [57] 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. ”

“ Even in so unscientific a science as economics there have been forecasts. And if I am right in saying that science aims at prophecy, and if the specialist in each science is in fact doing his best now to prophesy within the limits of his field, what is there to stand in the way of our building up this growing body of forecast into an ordered picture of the future that will be just as certain, just as strictly science, and perhaps just as detailed as the picture that has been built up within the last hundred years of the geological past? ”

“ And to all who hold that view, who regard the future as a perpetual source of convulsive surprises, as an impenetrable, incurable, perpetual blankness, it is right and reasonable to derive such values as it is necessary to attach to things from the events that have certainly happened with regard to them. It is our ignorance of the future and our persuasion that that ignorance is absolutely incurable that alone gives the past its enormous predominance in our thoughts. ”

“ On the whole there is something sympathetic for the dupe of the fortune-teller in the spirit of modern science; it is one of [23] the persuasions that come into one’s mind, as one assimilates the broad conception of science, that the adequacy of causation is universal; that in absolute fact—if not in that little bubble of relative fact which constitutes the individual life—in absolute fact the future is just as fixed and determinate, just as settled and inevitable, just as possible a matter of knowledge as the past. ”

“ The latter type of mind I might for contrast call the legislative, creative, organizing, or masterful type, because it is perpetually attacking and altering the established order of things, perpetually falling away from respect for what the past has given us. It sees the world as one great workshop, and the present is no more than material for the future, for the thing that is yet destined to be. ”

“ But before pointing out how divergent these two types or habits of mind really are, it is necessary to meet a possible objection to what has been said. I may put that objection in this form: Is not this distinction between a type of mind that thinks of the past and a type of mind that thinks of the future a sort of hair-splitting, almost like distinguishing between people who have left hands and people who have right? Everybody believes that the present is entirely determined by the past, you say; but then everybody believes also that the present determines the future. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yet though foresight creeps into our politics and a reference to consequence into our morality, it is still the past that dominates our lives. But why? Why are we so [19] bound to it? It is into the future we go, to-morrow is the eventful thing for us. There lies all that remains to be felt by us and our children and all those that are dear to us. Yet we marshal and order men into classes entirely with regard to the past; we draw shame and honor out of the past; against the rights of property, the vested interests, the agreements and establishments of the past the future has no rights. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And this great discovery of the inductive past was got by the discussion and rediscussion and effective criticism of a number of existing facts, odd-shaped lumps of stone, streaks and bandings in quarries and cliffs, anatomical and developmental detail that had always been about in the world, that had been lying at the feet of mankind so long as mankind had existed, but that no one had ever dreamed before could supply any information at all, much more reveal such astounding and enlightening vistas. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Our clothing, our habits of speech, our spelling, our weights and measures, our coinage, our religious and political theories, all witness to the binding power of the past upon our minds. Yet we do not serve the past as the Chinese have done. There are degrees. We do not worship our ancestors or prescribe a rigid local costume; we dare to enlarge our stock of knowledge, and we qualify the classics with occasional adventures into original thought. ”

“ But everybody does not believe in the importance of the leading man. There are those who will say that the whole world is different by reason of Napoleon. There are those who will say that the world of to-day would be very much as it is now if Napoleon had never been born. Other men would have arisen to make Napoleon’s conquests and codify the law, redistribute the worn-out boundaries of Europe and achieve all those changes which we so readily ascribe to Napoleon’s will alone. ”

“ Some of us take up a critical attitude even toward our own memories; we know that they not only sometimes drop things out, but that sometimes a sort of dreaming or a strong suggestion will put things in. But for all that, memory remains vivid and real as no other knowledge can be, and to have seen and heard and felt is to be nearest to absolute conviction. ”

“ But suppose we find unexpectedly that for one of us to keep a promise, which has been sealed and sworn in the most sacred fashion, must lead to the great suffering of some other human being, must lead, in fact, to practical evil? Would a man do right or wrong if he broke such a promise? ”

“ Man has acquired the habit of going to the past because it was the line of least resistance for his mind. While a certain variable portion of the past is serviceable matter for knowledge in the case of everyone, the future is, to a mind without an imagination trained in scientific habits of thought, non-existent. All our minds are made of memories. In our memories each of us has something that without any special training whatever will go back into the past and grip firmly and convincingly all sorts of workable facts, sometimes more convincingly than firmly. ”

“ Our personal memory gives us an impression of the superior reality and trustworthiness of things in the past, as of things that have finally committed themselves and said their say, but the more clearly we master the leading conceptions of science the better we understand that this impression is one of the results of the peculiar conditions of our lives, and not an absolute truth. The man of science comes to believe at last that the events of the year A.D. 4000 are as fixed, settled, and unchangeable as the events of the year 1600. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Are we simply separating and contrasting two sides of everybody’s opinion? To which one replies that we are not discussing what we know and believe about the relations of past, present, and future, or of the relation of cause and effect to each other in time. [11] We all know the present depends for its causes on the past, and the future depends for its causes upon the present. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Until man comes in, the inductive future is as real and convincing as the inductive past. But inorganic forces are the smaller part and the minor interest in this concern. Directly man becomes a factor the nature of the problem changes, and our whole present interest centers on the question whether man is, indeed, individually and collectively incalculable, a new element which entirely alters the nature of our inquiry and stamps it at once as vain and hopeless, or whether his presence complicates, but does not alter, the essential nature of the induction. ”

“ The popular conception of all discovery is accident. But you will know [35] that the essential thing in the scientific process is not the collection of facts, but the analysis of facts. Facts are the raw material and not the substance of science. It is analysis that has given us all ordered knowledge, and you know that the aim and the test and the justification of the scientific process is not a marketable conjuring trick, but prophecy. Until a scientific theory yields confident forecasts you know it is unsound and tentative ”

“ The legal mind becomes glorified and transfigured in the form of hopeless loyalty, the creative mind inspires revolutions and reconstructions. And particularly is this difference of attitude accentuated in the disputes that arise out of wars. In most modern wars there is no doubt quite traceable on one side or the other a distinct creative idea, a distinct regard for some future consequence; but the main dispute even in most modern wars and the sole dispute in most mediæval wars will be found to be a reference, not to the future, but to the past ”

“ The popular idea of scientific investigation is a vehement, aimless collection of little facts, collected as a bower bird collects shells and pebbles, in methodical little rows, and out of this process, in some manner unknown to the popular mind, certain conjuring tricks—the celebrated “wonders of science”—in a sort of accidental way emerge. ”

“ And the more one inclines to this trust in forces the more one will believe in the possibility of a reasoned inductive view of the future that will serve us in politics, in morals, in social contrivances, and in a thousand spacious ways. And even those who take the most extreme and personal and melodramatic view of the ways of human destiny, who see life as a tissue of fairy godmother births and accidental meetings and promises and jealousies, will, I suppose, admit [44] there comes a limit to these things—that at last personality dies away and the greater forces come to their own. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They will fall and roll and heap themselves just the same whether that exceptional grain is with them or not; but an exceptional man comes into the world, a Cæsar or a Napoleon or a Peter the Hermit, and he appears to persuade and convince and compel and take entire possession of the sand heap—I mean the community—and to twist and alter its destinies to an almost unlimited extent. ”

“ Compared with the Chinese we are distinctly aware of the future. But compared with what we might be, the past is all our world.
The reason why the retrospective habit, the legal habit, is so dominant, and always has been so predominant, is of course a perfectly obvious one. We follow a fundamental human principle and take what we can get. All people believe the past is certain, defined, and knowable, and only a [21] few people believe that it is possible to know anything about the future. ”

“ And I would like to suggest that until you have definitely determined either to obey the real or imaginary imperatives of the past, or to set yourself toward the demands of some ideal of the future, until you have made up your mind to adhere to one or other of these two types of mental action in these matters, you are not even within hope of a sustained consistency in the thought that underlies your acts, that in every issue of principle that comes upon you, you will be entirely at the mercy of the intellectual mood that happens to be ascendent at that particular moment in your mind. ”