THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE
a friend, than you can know which way a kitten will jump next. And to all who hold that view, who regard the future as a perpetual source of convulsive surprises, as an impenetrable, incurable, perpetual blankness, it is right and reasonable to derive such values as it is necessary to attach to things from the events that have certainly happened with regard to them. It is our ignorance of the future and our persuasion that that ignorance is absolutely incurable that alone gives the past its enormous predominance in our thoughts. But through the ages, the long unbroken succession of fortune-tellers—and they flourish still—witnesses to the perpetually smouldering feeling that after all there may be a better sort of knowledge—a more serviceable sort of knowledge than that we now possess.
On the whole there is something sympathetic for the dupe of the fortune-teller in the spirit of modern science; it is one of the persuasions that come into one's mind, as one assimilates the broad conception of science, that the adequacy of causation is universal; that in absolute fact—if not in that little bubble of relative fact which constitutes the individual life—in absolute fact the future is just as fixed and determinate, just as settled and inevitable, just as possible a matter of knowledge as the past. Our personal memory gives us an impression of the superior reality and trustworthiness of things in the past, as of things that have finally committed themselves and said their say, but the more clearly we master the leading conceptions of science the better we understand that this impression is one of the
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