destiny for man and the world; when I count the facts of man's evolution as suggestive of purpose in the universe; when I figure up what it has cost to produce the race and my individual self, I can easily let myself go on to the point of feeling that both the race and myself should fare further, life upon life, beyond this scanty allotted span of years. But in all these emotional outbursts and flights of speculation I must not allow their seductive warmth to delude me into believing that they rest upon proof. They may stimulate me in a way, but they may also paralyze me into complacency, a sense of the priceless value of my own amiable self, and other like immoralities. Hence integrity and safety made it imperative to go out into the open and attempt at least to confront objective fact. While most of these chapters were worked out before the great catastrophe overwhelmed Europe, no serious modification of either fact or conclusion has seemed necessary in consequence. My original plan included a detailed treatment of the educational reconstruction implied in the conclusions here outlined. But the writings of Professor John Dewey and other modernists in education have rendered such a discussion not only gratuitous but presumptuous. This book is frankly not the result of an uncontrollable impulse to tell the world how to run its affairs. It grew honestly out of an attempt to meet an academic situation, to teach a course in which no text was available. Hence it is a coöperative venture, and it is fitting that I should disclaim all originality save in the analyses, the arrangement, and the point of view. The materials were furnished by the great brotherhood of scholarship which has been striving to make this world of ours somewhat more habitable. But special credit is due those friends and colleagues who have been self-sacrificing enough to read and criticize the manuscript. I am particularly indebted to my friend Ray C. Brown for his patient reading of the whole volume; to Professor Joseph Peterson for his aid in clarifying the psychology of the first five chapters; and to Dean L. D. Coffman for reviewing the chapter on educational implications. |