The Discovery of the FutureWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
The Discovery of the Future
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Civilization -- Philosophy; Forecasting; History -- Philosophy; Time
Why should things cease at man? Why should not this rising curve rise
yet more steeply and swiftly? There are many things to suggest that
we are now in a phase of rapid and unprecedented development. The
conditions under which men live 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 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. 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, 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. 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
knowledge, growing order, and presently a deliberate improvement of the
blood and character of the race. And what we can see and imagine gives
us a measure and gives us faith for what surpasses the imagination.
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. We cannot see, there
is no need for us to see, what this world will be like when the day has
fully come. 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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