Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 4.pdf/397

 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 honour 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 materialised is familiar to us all.

All applied mathematic 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 towards the sun as it is to work back to its blazing and molten past. Until man comes in,