imitations, he argued, a
working knowledge of the things of the future was practicable and
possible. As during the past century the amazing searchlights of
inference had been passed into the remoter past, so by seeking for
operating causes instead of for fossils the searchlight of
inference might be thrown into the future. The man of science would
believe at last that events in A. D. 4000 were as fixed, settled,
and unchangeable as those of A. D. 1600, with the exception of the
affairs of man and his children. It is as simple and sure to work
out the changing orbit of the earth in future until the tidal drag
hauls one unchanging face at last toward the sun, as it is to work
back to its blazing, molten past. We are at the beginning of the
greatest change that humanity has ever undergone. There will be no
shock, as there is no shock at a cloudy daybreak. We are creatures
of twilight, but out of our minds and the lineage of our minds will
spring minds that will reach forward fearlessly. A day will
come--one day in the unending succession of days--when the beings
now latent in our thoughts, hidden in our loins, shall stand on
this earth as one stands on a footstool, and they shall laugh and
reach out their hands among the stars."

Mr. Wells is a disciple of Darwin, and he is applying to the life of
humanity certain laws of evolution. In this lecture he argued that great
men are merely "the images and symbols and instruments taken at
haphazard by the incessant, consistent forces behind them. They were the
pen nibs which fate used in her writing, and the more one was inclined
to trust these forces behind individuals, the more one could believe in
the possibility of a reasoned inductive view of the future that would
serve us in politics, morals, social contrivances, and in a thousand
ways."

The lecturer argued that "a deliberate direction of historical,
economic, and social study toward the future, and a deliberate and
courageous reference to the future in moral and religious discussion,
would be enormously stimulating and profitable to the intellectual
life."

One incalculable aid in thus throwing a spiritual searchlight forward
and discussing the future is the realization embodied by Dr. Lyman
Abbott, that there is no death, and no dead; that the entire universe is
life; and that we are encompassed round about by invisible comp