INTRODUCTION IV 



our group activities and relations. Students of the social 

 sciences are attempting to discover and explain the causes 

 of herd action and that of individuals with respect to the 

 group and also to formulate suggestions of ways by which, 

 if we wish, we may change or modify such conduct for the 

 well-being and happiness both of the individual and of society. 



A new factor is transforming world relations. Recent 

 inventions are in effect causing the planet to shrink rapidly. 

 Curtiss, Wright and Lindberg, and Marconi, Edison and Bell 

 have between them practically murdered space. We have 

 crossed the Atlantic in a day and may soon be flying from 

 New York to Tokyo in less time than, a century ago, our 

 fathers moved in ships from Boston to New Haven or in 

 covered wagons from Kansas City to Topeka. Individuals are 

 talking between Philadelphia and London and Berhn as read- 

 ily as our forebears conversed about the village store. Each 

 of us is using every day houses and clothes and machines 

 and toys some part of which comes from Germany, France, 

 England and Japan. Our whole world of 1929 in many 

 ways is more closely packed together than a single province 

 of France or county of England two or three centuries ago. 



We have brilliantly (although not yet with consistent 

 thoroughness) searched out the secrets of the world about us 

 and we have turned this knowledge to very great practical 

 service to ourselves. We have learned much about our own 

 bodies and are now able to protect them against many 

 insidious enemies: germs, harmful foods, improper balance 

 in the action gf glands, unwholesome emotions, unsocial 

 acts. With these tentative findings in our possession in 

 physics, medicine, biology, psychology and the social 

 sciences and with more accurate knowledge increasing 

 steadily (although in a spotty manner and along an irregular 

 front), the question arises as to whether it may not now be 

 possible to make another great push forward in human 

 evolution. 



It is beside the point to dispute as to the relative impor- 

 tance of inheritance and education, of nature vs. nurture; 

 for any great advance must include attention to both the 

 biological and the social. We must, for instance, find some 

 way to avoid wars if the race is not to destroy itself with its 



