The Discovery of the FutureB. W. Huebsch, 1913 - 61 pages |
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Common terms and phrases
absolute approach and look attainable B. W. HUEBSCH believe entirely blank bright area Cæsar Carboniferous certainty cial comes Comte confidently conse creative mind criticised definite difference DISCOVERY ditional divergent dogmatic dream Edward Howard Griggs example facts farther picture finally forces forecasts foretell fortune-teller Frederic Harrison future to correspond geological habit heap human affairs human destiny ical past idea of scientific ignorance imagine individual inductive knowledge inductive past insist interprets the things legal mind limited lives looking at things matter ment method of reference mind that thinks mind would say mood moral Napoleon nineteenth century non-existence particular grain perpetual personal future personal memory positivist present promise prophecy quences question remoter past retro sand grain science aims sort of form sort of knowledge speak splendid static suppose thing in relation thing to suggest thought tion tory tradition ture type of mind University of California vidual vision whole
Popular passages
Page 60 - 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.
Page 55 - And finally, there is the reasonable certainty that this sun of ours must some day 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. That of all such nightmares is the most insistently convincing. And yet one doesn't believe it....
Page 30 - I want particularly to insist upon this, that all this outer past — this nonhistorical past — is the product of a new and keener habit of inquiry, and no sort of revelation. It is simply due to a new and more critical way of looking at things. Our knowledge of the geological past, clear and definite as it has become, is of a different and lower order than the knowledge of our memory, and yet of a quite practicable and trustworthy order — a knowledge good enough to go upon; and if one were to...
Page 45 - ... 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...
Page 24 - I am venturing to suggest to you that along certain lines and with certain qualifications and limitations a working knowledge of things in the future is a possible and practicable thing. And in order to support this suggestion I would call your attention to certain facts about our knowledge of the past, and more particularly I would insist upon this, that about the past our range of absolute certainty is very limited indeed. About the past I would suggest we are inclined to overestimate our certainty,...
Page 6 - I think a more modern and much less abundant type of mind, thinks constantly and by preference of things to come, and of present things mainly in relation to the results that must arise from them. The former type of mind, when one gets it in its purity, is retrospective in habit, and it interprets the things of the present, and gives value to this and denies it to that, entirely with relation to the past. The latter type of mind is constructive in habit, it interprets the things of the present and...
Page 34 - So far nothing has been attempted, so far no first-class mind has ever focussed itself upon these issues; but suppose the laws of social and political development, for example, were given as many brains, were given as much attention, criticism, and discussion as we have given to the laws of chemical combination during the last fifty years, what might we not expect?
Page 60 - 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.
Page 28 - ... conception of a finitely distant beginning of things; has abolished such limits to the past as a dated creation set, and added an enormous vista to that limited sixteenth century outlook. And what I would insist upon is that this further knowledge is a new kind of knowledge, obtained in a new kind of way. We know to-day, quite as confidently and in many respects more intimately than we know Sargon or Zenobia or Caractacus, the form and the habits of creatures that no living being has ever met,...
Page 20 - ... stretched? Our conveniences, like our thoughts, are all retrospective. We travel on roads so narrow that they suffocate our traffic; we live in uncomfortable, inconvenient, life-wasting houses out of a love of familiar shapes and familiar customs and a dread of strangeness, all our public affairs are cramped by local boundaries impossibly restricted and small. Our clothing, our habits of speech, our spelling, our weights and measures, our coinage, our religious and political theories, all witness...