matter of examinations we have to chronicle the issue of a most excellent syllabus for the new London matriculation which should ultimately have great influence on the teaching in many schools.

Further, the Geographical Association, a body now of several hundred teachers, has made great progress. It has recently commenced the issue of a journal known as the "Geographical Teacher," one of whose functions appears to be the criticism of the questions set in various public examinations.

In the University of Cambridge the interests of geography are doubtless not overlooked, but they are not conspicuously in evidence, and I have no trustworthy data of the progress made in their maintenance.

In military schools the report of the late committee appointed to consider the education of army officers shows clearly enough that among all the necessary subjects for a cadet's education which have to be crammed into the exceedingly short course of his military schooling that branch of geography which is embraced by the term “military topography" finds a very conspicuous place. The short course of a military school will never turn out an accomplished geographical surveyor; nor does it in any way outflank the necessity for a military school for professional topographers. But it teaches the young officer how maps are made and instructs him in the use of topographical symbols. It would be well if it could be pushed a little further--if it could teach him how to make use of the maps when they are made--for personal experience convinces me that the apathy shown by many of our foremost generals and leaders on the subject of maps arises chiefly from a well-founded doubt of their own ability to make use of them. As for the broader basis of general geographical instruction which would deal with the distribution of important military posts and strategic positions throughout the Empire and teach officers the functions of such positions, either individually or in combination, during military or naval operations, it is perhaps better that such a strategic aspect of geography should be relegated to a later age, when the average intelligence of the cadet has become more fully developed.

Taking it for all in all, there are distinct signs of a more general interest and more scholarly standard of thought in the subject of geography. This is probably due to the efforts of a comparatively small group of workers at a time of general educational reform, possibly partly stimulated by the disclosures in connection with the late war. The methods of further improvement are simple-better teachers and better examining -and for both it is probable that we must look more directly to civil sources than to the tentative efforts of the military schools.

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE."

By H. G. WELLS."

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 of things.

events.

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 black nonexistence upon which the advancing present will presently write 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 most constantly refer to the law made, the right established, the precedent set, and most consistently ignore or con.demn the thing that is only seeking to establish itself. The latter type of mind I might for contrast call the legislative, creative, organizing, or masterful type, because it is perpetually attacking and altering the established order of things, perpetually falling away from respect for

a Reprinted by permission from "Nature," London, No. 1684, vol. 65, Feb. 6, 1902. A discourse delivered at the Royal Institution on Friday, January 24, 1902, by Mr. H. G. Wells.

what the past has given us. It sees the world as one great workshop, and the present is no more than material for the future, for the thing that is yet destined to be. It is in the active mood of thought, while the former is in the passive; it is the mind of youth, it is the mind. more manifest among the western nations, while the former is the mind of age, the mind of the oriental.

Things have been, says the legal mind, and so we are here. And the creative mind says we are here because things have yet to be.

Now I do not wish to suggest that the great mass of people belong to either of these two types. Indeed, I speak of them as two distinct and distinguishable types mainly for convenience and in order to accentuate their distinction. There are probably very few people who brood constantly upon the past without any thought of the future at all, and there are probably scarcely any who live and think consistently in relation to the future. The great mass of people occupy an intermediate position between these extremes, they pass daily and hourly from the passive mood to the active, they see this thing in relation to its associations and that thing in relation to its consequences, and they do not even suspect that they are using two distinct methods in their minds.

But for all that they are distinct methods, the method of reference to the past and the method of reference to the future, and their mingling in many of our minds no more abolishes their difference than the existence of piebald horses proves that white is black.

I believe that it is not sufficiently recognized just how different in their consequences these two methods are, and just where their difference and where the failure to appreciate their difference takes one. This present time is a period of quite extraordinary uncertainty and indecision upon endless questions-moral questions, æsthetic questions, religious and political questions-upon which we should all of us be happier to feel assured and settled, and a very large amount of this floating uncertainty about these important matters is due to the fact that with most of us these two insufficiently distinguished ways of looking at things are not only present together, but in actual conflict in our minds, in unsuspected conflict; we pass from one to the other heedlessly without any clear recognition of the fundamental difference in conclusions that exists between the two, and we do this with disastrous results to our confidence and to our consistency in dealing with all sorts of things.

But before pointing out how divergent these two types or habits of mind really are, it is necessary to meet a possible objection to what has been said. I may put that objection in this form: Is not this distinction between a type of mind that thinks of the past and of a type of mind that thinks of the future a sort of hair splitting, almost like distinguishing between people who have left hands and people who

have right? Everybody believes that the present is entirely determined by the past you say; but then everybody believes also that the present determines the future. Are we simply separating and contrasting two sides of everybody's opinion? To which one replies that we are not discussing what we know and believe about the relations of past, present, and future, or of the relation of cause and effect to each other in time. We all know the present depends for its causes on the past, and that the future depends for its causes upon the present. But this discussion concerns the way in which we approach things upon this common ground of knowledge and belief. We may all know there is an east and a west, but if some of us always approach and look at things from the west, if some of us always approach and look at things from the east, and if others again wander about with a pretty disregard of direction, looking at things as chance determines, some of us will get to a westward conclusion of this journey, and some of us will get to an eastward conclusion, and some of us will get to no definite conclusion at all about all sorts of important matters. And yet those who are traveling east, and those who are traveling west, and those who are wandering haphazard, may be all upon the same ground of belief and statement and amidst the same assembly of proven facts. Precisely the same thing will happen if you always approach things from the point of view of their causes, or if you approach them always with a view to their probable effects. And in several very important groups of human affairs it is possible to show quite clearly just how widely apart the two methods, pursued each in its purity, take those who follow them.

I suppose that three hundred years ago all people who thought at all about moral questions, about questions of right and wrong, deduced their rules of conduct absolutely and unreservedly from the past, from some dogmatic injunction, some finally settled decree. The great mass of people do so to-day. It is written, they say. Thou shalt not steal, for example-that is the sole, complete, and sufficient reason why you should not steal, and even to-day there is a strong aversion to admit that there is any relation between the actual consequences of acts and the imperatives of right and wrong. Our lives are to reap the fruits of determinate things, and it is still a fundamental presumption of the established morality that one must do right though the heavens fall. But there are people coming into this world who would refuse to call it right if it brought the heavens about our heads, however authoritative its sources and sanctions, and this new disposition is, I believe, a growing one. I suppose in all ages people in a timid, hesitating, guilty way have tempered the austerity of a dogmatic moral code by small infractions to secure obviously kindly ends, but it was, I am told, the Jesuits who first deliberately sought to qualify the