The Discovery of the FutureB. W. Huebsch, 1913 - 61 pages |
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Common terms and phrases
1817 ARTES SCIENTIA absolute approach and look attainable B. W. HUEBSCH believe entirely blank Cæsar Carboniferous certainty cial comes Comte confidently conse creative mind criticised 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 Libraries 1817 ARTES limited lives looking at things matter Michigan Libraries 1817 mind that thinks mind would say mood moral Napoleon nineteenth century non-existence particular grain past-this 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 thing to suggest thought tion tory tradition ture type of mind University of Michigan 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 34 - So far nothing has been attempted, so far no first-class mind has ever focused 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 33 laws of chemical combination during the last fifty years, what might we not expect?
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 9 - ... suspect that they are using two distinct methods in their minds. But for all that they are distinct methods, the method of reference to the past and the method of reference to the future, and their mingling in many of our minds no more abolishes their difference than the existence of piebald horses proves that white is black. I believe that it is not sufficiently recognized just how different in their consequences these two methods are, and just where their difference and where the failure to...
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 41 - 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 Caesar 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...
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...
Page 58 - ... 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.