The Future of an Illusion

I wish to express my thanks to the Editor and to Mr. James Strachey for reading through this translation and making many helpful suggestions.

W. D. R.-S.

CHAPTER I

When one has lived for long within a particular culture[1] and has often striven to discover its origins and the path of its development, one feels for once the temptation to turn one’s attention in the other direction and to ask what further fate awaits this culture and what transformations it is destined to undergo. But one soon finds that the value of such an enquiry is diminished from the outset by several considerations. Above all, by the fact that there are only a few people who can survey human activity in all its ramifications. Most people have been compelled to restrict themselves to a single, or to a few, spheres of interest; but the less a man knows of the past and the present the more unreliable must his judgement of the future prove. And further it is precisely in the matter of this judgement that the subjective expectations of the individual play a part that is difficult to assess; for these prove to be dependent on purely personal factors in his own experience, on his more or less hopeful attitude to life, according as temperament, success or failure has prescribed for him. And finally one must take into account the remarkable fact that in general men experience the present naïvely, so to speak, without being able to estimate its content; they must first place it at a distance, i.e. the present must have become the past before one can win from it points of vantage from which to gauge the future.

Footnote 1:

The German word Kultur has been translated sometimes as ‘culture’ and sometimes as ‘civilization’, denoting as it does a concept intermediate between these and at times inclusive of both.—ED.

And so he who yields to the temptation to deliver an opinion on the probable future of our culture will do well to remind himself of the difficulties just indicated, and likewise of the uncertainty that attaches quite universally to every prophecy. It follows from this that in hasty flight from so great a task I shall seek out the small tract of territory to which my attention has hitherto been directed, as soon as I have defined its position in general.