Voorspellen van historische ontwikkelingen

Prediction of historical developments. Apart from the thirst for knowledge concerning the past, the urge to see into the future has invariably fulfilled an important function in the historical activity of the mind. Our ancestors in the middle ages, who gave a mystic interpretation to historical events, regarded history purely as a divine plan which would ultimately lead to the end of the world and the Day of Judgment. Their successors of the Renaissance period, after the Middle Ages, looked back to the ancient classical times by cultivating the notion that the historical process constituted a cycle with a continuous rise and fall, which would continue unchanged in the historical future. Modern history then created two notions regarding the future — developed from historical interpretation — which, although widely different, found each other and entered into a close union in the eighteenth and the nineteenth century. These were the notion of History as a Human Plan and the notion of History as Evolution. It is interesting to observe how at the present time, whilst eagerly weighing the chances of our Western future, new prognoses are actually being tried out — with more extensive material than ever before — but also how these prognoses of our time have changed nothing in and have added nothing to the four older systems. In the present era the four themes are powerfully active — completely at random — in our world of thought.