ABSTRACT
There are certain criteria which every attempt, however fantastic, to forecast the future should satisfy. In the first place, the future will not be as we should wish it. The Pilgrim Fathers were much happier in England under King James I. than they would be in America under President Coolidge. Most of the great ideals of any given age are ignored by the men of later periods. They only interest posterity in so far as they have been embodied in art or literature. I have pictured a human race on the earth absorbed in the pursuit of individual happiness; on Venus mere components of a monstrous ant-heap. My own ideal is naturally somewhere in between, and so is that of almost every other human being alive to-day. But I see no reason why my ideals should be realized. In the language of religion, God’s ways are not our ways; in that of science, human ideals are the products of natural processes which do not conform to them.
