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 
hasno 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.! 
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. 
