The Discovery of the Future

by H. G. Wells

To the popular mind of to-day there is something very difficult in such a suggestion, soberly made. But here, in this institution (the Royal Institution of London) which has watched for a whole century over the splendid adolescence of science, and where the spirit of science is surely understood, you will know that as a matter of fact prophecy has always been inseparably associated with the idea of scientific research.

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. The popular conception of all discovery is accident. But you will know 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; it is mere theorizing, as evanescent as art talk or the phantoms politicians talk about. The splendid body of gravitational astronomy, for example, establishes itself upon the certain forecast of stellar movements, and you would absolutely refuse to believe its amazing assertions if it were not for these same unerring forecasts. The whole body of medical science aims, and claims the ability, to diagnose. Meteorology constantly and persistently aims at prophecy, and it will never stand in a place of honor until it can certainly foretell. The chemist forecasts elements before he meets them—it is very properly his boast—and the splendid manner in which the mind of Clerk Maxwell reached in front of all experiments and foretold those things that Marconi has materialized is familiar to us all.

All applied mathematics resolves into computation to foretell things which otherwise can only be determined by trial. 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? Well, so far and until we bring the prophecy down to the affairs of man and his children, it is just as possible to carry induction forward as back; it is just as simple and sure to work out the changing orbit of the earth in the future until the tidal drag hauls one unchanging face at last toward the sun as it is to work back to its blazing and molten past. 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. How far may we hope to get trustworthy inductions about the future of man?

Well, I think, on the whole, we are inclined to underrate our chance of certainties in the future, just as I think we are inclined to be too credulous about the historical past. The vividness of our personal memories, which are the very essence of reality to us, throws a glamor of conviction over tradition and past inductions. But the personal future must in the very nature of things be hidden from us so long as time endures, and this black ignorance at our very feet—this black shadow that corresponds to the brightness of our memories behind us—throws a glamor of uncertainty and unreality over all the future. We are continually surprising ourselves by our own will or want of will; the individualities about us are continually producing the unexpected, and it is very natural to reason that as we can never be precisely sure before the time comes what we are going to do and feel, and if we can never count with absolute certainty upon the acts and happenings even of our most intimate friends, how much the more impossible is it to anticipate the behavior in any direction of states and communities.

In reply to which I would advance the suggestion that an increase in the number of human beings considered may positively simplify the case instead of complicating it; that as the individuals increase in number they begin to average out. Let me illustrate this point by a comparison. Angular pit-sand has grains of the most varied shapes. Examined microscopically, you will find all sorts of angles and outlines and variations. Before you look you can say of no particular grain what its outline will be. And if you shoot a load of such sand from a cart you cannot foretell with any certainty where any particular grain will be in the heap that you make; but you can tell—you can tell pretty definitely—the form of the heap as a whole. And further, if you pass that sand through a series of shoots and finally drop it some distance to the ground, you will be able to foretell that grains of a certain sort of form and size will for the most part be found in one part of the heap and grains of another sort of form and size will be found in another part of the heap. In such a case, you see, the thing as a whole may be simpler than its component parts, and this I submit is also the case in many human affairs. So that because the individual future eludes us completely that is no reason why we should not aspire to, and discover and use, safe and serviceable, generalizations upon countless important issues in the human destiny.

But there is a very grave and important-looking difference between a load of sand and a multitude of human beings, and this I must face and examine. Our thoughts and wills and emotions are contagious. An exceptional sort of sand grain, a sand grain that was exceptionally big and heavy, for example, exerts no influence worth considering upon any other of the sand grains in the load. 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. And if this is indeed the case, it reduces our project of an inductive knowledge of the future to very small limits. To hope to foretell the birth and coming of men of exceptional force and genius is to hope incredibly, and if, indeed, such exceptional men do as much as they seem to do in warping the path of humanity, our utmost prophetic limit in human affairs is a conditional sort of prophecy. If people do so and so, we can say, then such and such results will follow, and we must admit that that is our limit.

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. There are those who believe entirely in the individual man and those who believe entirely in the forces behind the individual man, and for my own part I must confess myself a rather extreme case of the latter kind. I must confess I believe that if by some juggling with space and time Julius Cæsar, Napoleon, Edward IV., William the Conqueror, Lord Rosebery, and Robert Burns had all been changed at birth it would not have produced any serious dislocation of the course of destiny. I believe that these great men of ours are no more than images and symbols and instruments taken, as it were, haphazard by the incessant and consistent forces behind them; they are the pen-nibs Fate has used for her writing, the diamonds upon the drill that pierces through the rock. 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 there comes a limit to these things—that at last personality dies away and the greater forces come to their own. The great man, however great he be, cannot set back the whole scheme of things; what he does in right and reason will remain, and what he does against the greater creative forces will perish. We cannot foresee him; let us grant that. His personal difference, the splendor 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 generalization 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 toward 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 everybody is foolish enough to go, need fear no competition from the scientific prophets. The knowledge of the future we may hope to gain will be general and not individual; it will be no sort of knowledge that will either hamper us in the exercise of our individual free will or relieve us of our personal responsibility.

And now, how far is it possible at the present time to speculate on the particular outline the future will assume when it is investigated in this way?

It is interesting, before we answer that question, to take into account the speculations of a certain sect and culture of people who already, before the middle of last century, had set their faces toward the future as the justifying explanation of the present. These were the positivists, whose position is still most eloquently maintained and displayed by Mr. Frederic Harrison, in spite of the great expansion of the human outlook that has occurred since Comte.