INTRODUCTION 5 



this hyper-utilitarian age and nation, such an investigation may 

 call for justification. 



One such justification has been mentioned in that we persist in 

 using the term progress despite the fact that we are warned that it 

 has no common meaning. We hear the query raised from time to 

 time as to whether the world is growing better or worse. We 

 Americans are proverbially boastful of our superiority as a nation, 

 and concerning the progress we have made since the venture of 

 '76. But all such queries and all such boasting is vain unless we 

 have a common standard. 1 



Such a study, then, should aid in clear and consistent thinking 

 and that is always desirable. To think logically on this subject, 

 may, perchance, help us to clear thinking concerning matters 

 pertaining to bread and butter. 



Again, this is an age of social Utopias and of all sorts of schemes 

 looking toward social amelioration. Every state legislature is 

 trying to usher in the millennium by force of statutes, for the most 

 part making sorry work of its task. The yellow press and 

 maroon magazine as well as high-grade periodicals fill columns 

 with plans for social reconstruction. Writers in educational 

 journals as well as in the penny press are criticizing our present 

 educational system and trying to formulate a " get-culture- 

 quick " device to correspond to the " get-rich-quick " schemes 

 that have been so fruitful, — to their promoters, — during the 

 past quarter century. 



The one supreme need of this hour is sanity and scientifically 

 worked out policies of social amelioration, and one requisite is an 

 attempt to " see life steadily and see it whole," to climb some 

 height from whose summit the complexities and confusions and 

 contradictions of life may, perchance, seem to form one co-ordinate 

 whole, in which disharmonies enter into the production of a 

 higher harmony. If the view does not thus yield harmony, it 

 does at least yield perspective and a degree of unity not possible 

 in the view that we get from a study of mere details. Such an 

 outlook on life should yield an inner consistency, purpose and 

 power not to be obtained by partial views. It may be, indeed, 



1 Cf. Fiske, Cosmic Evolution, ii, pp. 193 ff. 



