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Excerpt from Anatomy of the Future
It is not without significance that an increasing number of historians, whose province has always been the past, are con cerning themselves with the future. However diverse their in dividual formulations and conclusions, they share a common if tacit belief that history is susceptible, in part or in whole, of some measure of extrapolation. That is to say, history is conceived in terms of a process, unilinear or cyclical, exhibiting a discernible pattern of trends or tendencies whose trajectory into the future is vouchsafed by their established and meaningful occurrence in the past. Predictability, however, is the hallmark of a science based on immutable laws. In claiming a like prerogative without a comparable scaffolding of historic laws and principles in the enigmatic field of human affairs, historians may well seem, in contrast to scientists, like vagabonds skating on thin ice. But if history has not yet attained the Status of a science, historians may perhaps retort, with some Show of plausibility, that the art which enables them to comprehend the past entitles them to speculate upon the future. Even in the cold and rigorous domain of science, intuition has been known to precede knowledge.
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