Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 4.pdf/403

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

If you read Mr. Harrison, and if you are also, as I presume your presence here indicates, saturated with that new wine of more spacious knowledge that has been given the world during the last fifty years, you will have been greatly impressed by the peculiar limitations of the positivist conception of the future. 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 through 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