Probable, not certain; for who can tell, in the millioned complexity of affairs, what new factor may not arise? A man may go round on a mule calling himself a prophet, and change the whole world to-morrow.
Yet men prophesy to-day, when all is mist and fog. They prophesy as never did they prophesy before: with an assurance and a conviction born of physical science misapplied.
This passion for prophesying has several sources which converge to produce such modern folly. I think the strongest motive is mere relief to the nerves. Men find that, by prophesying that a thing will take place which they desire to take place, they are themselves soothed.
One could make shoals of books by merely cutting such pronouncements out of the European papers during the last ten years, cuttings in which it would be manifest that the writer was in a reckless mood, indifferent to the probability of his assertion.
Another motive is the motive of reputation; for if the prophet brings it off, he can point to his success and be sure of a following, whereas if he does not bring it off, he can rely upon that atrophy of the memory which the universal reading of the daily press has brought about. Another cause, as I have said, is the influence of physical science, that influence which affects the whole of modern life, and nearly always for ill. Physical science has proceeded from discovery to discovery in our time, until men are prepared for any marvel. It is true that side by side with this advance in the control of physical things there has gone a corresponding decline in the critical faculty, in the powers of reason: and a still more rapid decline in morals. But the main fact is familiar to the whole world, and is, superficially, the most astonishing thing of to-day. Our time has advanced in its knowledge of inanimate nature and in its control thereof as no other past time advanced.
Now this process was everywhere accompanied by, and tested by, prophecy. The seeker after some new ‘law’ (as a sequence of physical phenomena is rather oddly called) would experiment until sequence was discovered, and, when it was discovered, he could confidently presume upon its completion; as, for instance, in the series of atomic weights. He could say, ‘You will find that this series will follow upon such and such a course,’ and when he was proved right he had achieved his end. The whole method of the progress was of this nature. It was like a man plotting down points upon a curve until he had aligned a sufficient number to give him the general formula, after which he could confidently say, ‘You will find, when the curve is fully described, such and such other points to lie along it.’ Or it was like a man reëstablishing a Roman road. He says: ‘I find a section of it here pointing right to a neighbouring port, and a little way on another section still pointing the same, and I am confident that I shall find some place-name or parish boundary or other relic confirming that Roman road throughout.’ He is pretty certain to be right.
On the parallel of physical science, this habit of prophecy as the confirmation of judgment spread to things, in which, by their nature, mechanical judgment is impossible.
Another negative source was ignorance, and especially ignorance of the past. Our moderns have more and more lost the knowledge of the past. They have been taught to despise it; they think of it first as of something foreign and odd; later, if they study, as of something very different from what it was. They, therefore, miss the lessons of the past, and especially the chief lesson, which is that the developments of society follow no mechanical process; that their way is not the way of an arrow, but of a serpent. Ignorant of this, men fall into the simple error of taking the tangent to the curve, of prolonging the actions of causes immediately before their eyes, and of conceiving the future in terms of the present, as children do. Hence these confident assertions that in so many years such and such a country will have grown to such and such a population: that such and such a language will have become dominant—and so forth.
But it is to be noted that this process is not often applied to evils, for men do not like to face an evil future.
I notice in this political or social prophecy one very strange omission: they never by any chance allow for that cause which is the major cause of change in human affairs: I mean religion.
Thirteen hundred years ago, the great fact before all men’s eyes was the Roman Empire of the East. The commander of the armies, a half-divine being seated in Constantinople, was the centre of the world and the acknowledged head of all that counted, from the Atlantic to the Persian borders, and from the Northern barbarism to the desert. Pressure menaced from the Persian hills and from the Tigris, and there was pressure from savage hordes in the mountains, and in the plains beyond to the north. Had men then been in the habit of prophesying after our foolish modern fashion, they would have told you this or that, but all in terms of the Empire, or the German and Slav barbarians, or the Persians; and while they so thought in terms of the only things they knew, there had already arisen, in a place remote and utterly insignificant, among tribes of a few hundreds without power, culture, or tradition, under conditions utterly negligible, the flaming spirit of Islam.
To our own modern world there must come either some vast religious reaction, or some vast religious novelty, or both. It is inevitable; for men live by religion. Yet no one speaking of the future takes it for one moment into account. I know of but one book, a book of singular genius, in which the thing appears, though tentatively; and that is in Jefferies’ fine vision called ‘After London.’ But even Jefferies did not make of it the main source of change. In his day men had already begun to lose the significance of religion in human affairs.
The great light of the Forelands on the weather side, the Goodwin Lights on the lee, stood like the lamps of a street in the fall of that darkness as, with the tide beneath us, we ran up for London River. But, the wind coming from more northerly, we had to choose between beating up and standing out.
We did the last, though the wind was falling, because that lane of water is full of the world’s shipping, and it was plainer to keep a course. By midnight the breeze had died down to a light air, and, somewhat later, the sky now very clear, we bore up on the other tack, the starboard tack, and went round till we had the dying air right abeam, and so came under brilliant stars within the point of Thanet land and dropped anchor and slept.
But early the next morning we woke to see the sun rising up undimmed over the wide North Sea, cut sharply by the calm horizon. It promised a warm and kindly day....
I could wish that this book, already so long as to have become intolerable to the reader, the writer, the printer, and all others concerned in its production, already so heavy as to have become a business to the publisher, the carman, and the railway people (if, indeed, they transport it, but I have known of books transported in bulk on shipboard, and sinking to the glory of God, before they reached their destination, and that to the great advantage of our miserable world, which is abominably overcrowded with books)—I could wish that this book, already so prolix, so otiose, so weary of its way that no poor gabbler in an inn ever more offended his audience than I will mine; I could wish that this book, which may be called The Great Sea Serpent of books, or again, The Cromwell Road of Books, or once again, The Pambiblicon, or endless Compendium, or again, The Long Arctic Night—what you will—I could wish that this book were longer still, I say, in order that I might drag you to perdition with the tedium of a million memories north of the Forelands, north of the Goodwins, north of Long Nose: memories of the Muddy Rivers of the Trinobantes, whose descendants inhabit rather than cultivate the Essex clay: memories of sandbanks rising out of the misty seas like whales, and of the platters of Harwich, and of the King’s ship called The Serpent, and of Orford River, and of the Onion, and of Lowestoft, Yarmouth, and the exceedingly difficult labyrinth of the Wash, and of the awful great tide at King’s Lynn.
But I renounce—not so much for your sakes as for my own, nor do I even speak of that Thames River which sailors called London River, and of the getting across it slantwise in spite of the great ships and the way in which time has silted up that harbour.
There are many curious things to be noted about the opening of London River. There is the double tide, so that a man making Long Nose from the Channel finds a new tide taking him up towards London. There is the way in which the best of all the channels into the river is the one least used, because it would make ships go out of their way. Ships come into the Thames either from the north or from the south, so they save time, which is money, by skirting either coast, but the main mid channel only the Dutchmen use when they have occasion to come up London River; I approve them. Then there is the way in which undoubtedly all this has silted up and risen since the time of the ancients. It is not only the stuff brought down by the river which has piled up these banks; there is also, I am sure, a lifting of the land. Nothing else could account for Thanet ceasing to be an island, or for Richborough standing now high and dry. The surface of the earth moves slowly up and down over centuries, and no one shall persuade me that Pevensey has run dry, Rye has been drained, Lympne has run far inland, Dover inlet has been closed, and the Wensum turned from a great sea passage to a ditch by any action other than the lifting of the land. The last thing to be said about Thamesmouth is this, that it was never shut for traffic since the beginning of recorded time ... until.... Men always traded up and down it with a swarm of shipping since men first left memorial of their doings, _until_ the fourth of August, 1914.