we should see the cooling sun grow dim and the parching earth drink up the seas, and see man become a cave-dweller again, mining for moisture, more precious then than gold.
FORETELLING THE FUTURE
No man is able to foretell the future except from his knowledge of the present, and what he foresees must result from present tendencies. There can be no effect without a cause, and there can be no cause which is not in itself an effect of a preceding cause. Every effect is in turn a cause for other effects exactly equal to itself. There can be no more effects in nature, therefore, than are exactly equal to producing causes.
Every atom in existence follows a course mathematically exact—a course determined for it by the combined forces exerted upon it of all the other atoms in existence and as exact as the orbit of a star. We know, therefore, that the sum of all the forces of all nature at the present moment is exactly the sum of the combined forces exerted between atoms. Hence we know that all events of history, and all phenomena, and all evolutions of organic and inorganic, animate and inanimate nature, during all time, have been exactly those that have resulted from the sum of the combined forces of all the atoms in existence acting upon one another.
There is no haphazard in nature. There is no such thing as luck or chance. Our lives are part and parcel of the great cosmic procession, and even our free will is predestined to will as it does, for we can no more will without a cause for willing than a sun can be deflected from its orbit without cause for that deflection.
Standing here upon the threshold of all that is yet to be, had we infinite knowledge of causes now operating, and of their trend, we should have infinite foresight too; but our knowledge is so small and our powers are so finite that we can at best but speculate and generalize.
WHAT WE CAN PREDICT
Yet there is much that we can predict with some degree of assurance. It is safe to predict that man's advancement from now on will be vastly more rapid than it has ever been before, and possibly the millennium of intellectual achievement may not be so far ahead as has been the habit of our conjecture.
The present is an age of mechanical and chemical engineering and invention, an age of science, an age of material achievement; and it will be followed by a sociological age, an era of achievement in ethics and philosophy and the development of higher physical health—an age of intellectual and moral perfecting.
Even at the present time, from a humane point of view, we are standing miles higher than the ancients stood. In olden times there was no recognition of such a thing as inalienable human rights; and when one people were able to rob or enslave another people with profit, it was looked upon as weakness and bad business not to rob and enslave them.
When Julius Cæsar fell upon the German camp, while negotiations for peace were pending, and surprised and slew two hundred and fifty thousand men, women, and children in a few hours, it was thought a very masterful stroke of Roman policy, for the Romans saw no use in those Germans.
One of the greatest blessings of modern civilization is that it widens the range of human usefulness. It would now be considered an extravagance and a waste of human life to fall upon a neighboring people and cut them down to the last person.
There is a growing recognition of the fact that this world we live in is only a larger country. Patriotism is outgrowing national boundary lines. There is a growing spirit of international brotherhood, a growing knowledge of the truth that all mankind feeds at a common board and sits by a common fireside and that selfish sea-gull ethics do not pay.
The warmth of the fire is better enjoyed when shared than when monopolized at the cost of crowding others into the cold. The half of a sweet morsel shared is better than the whole unshared. Mutuality in the enjoyment of possessions is what gives them most value.
MUTUALITY IN POSSESSIONS
Carnegie is but placing libraries in his larger house. J. P. Morgan, in his gifts of valuable paintings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is but hanging them upon the walls of the great house he shares with others. Rockefeller is expending millions to better his environment and to purchase the goodwill of the tenantry of the great house in which he and his children must live. Philanthropists expend large sums every year on the great human habitation, thereby making it more comfortable for themselves.
A great French philosopher once truly
