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THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

by

H. G. WELLS







[Illustration]

New York
B. W. Huebsch
1913

Copyright, 1913,
By B. W. Huebsch

Printed in U. S. A.




THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE[1]

BY H. G. WELLS

  [1] A discourse delivered at the Royal Institution.


It will lead into my subject most conveniently to contrast and separate
two divergent types of mind, types which are to be distinguished chiefly
by their attitude toward time, and more particularly by the relative
importance they attach and the relative amount of thought they give to
the future.

The first of these two types of mind, and it is, I think, the
predominant type, the type of the majority of living people, is that
which seems scarcely to think of the future at all, which regards it as
a sort of blank non-existence upon which the advancing present will
presently write events. The second type, which is, 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
gives value to this or that, entirely in relation to things designed or
foreseen.

While from that former point of view our life is simply to reap the
consequences of the past, from this our life is to prepare the future.
The former type one might speak of as the legal or submissive type of
mind, because the business, the practice, and the training of a lawyer
dispose him toward it; he of all men must constantly refer to the law
made, the right established, the precedent set, and consistently ignore
or condemn the thing that is only seeking to establish itself. The
latter type of mind I might for contrast call the legislative, creative,
organizing,