of wide questions in these pages is primarily that of the writer's. But
he hopes and believes that among those who read what he has to say,
there will be found not only many to understand, but some to agree with
him. In many ways he is inclined to believe the development of his
views may be typical of the sort of development that has gone on to a
greater or lesser extent in the minds of many of the younger men during
the last twenty years, and it is in that belief that he is now
presenting them.

And the questions that will be dealt with in relation to this point of
view are all those questions outside a man's purely private self--if he
have a purely private self--in which he interacts with his fellow-man.
Our attempt will be to put in order, to reduce to principle, what is at
present in countless instances a mass of inconsistent proceedings, to
frame a general theory in accordance with modern conditions of social
and political activity.

This is one man's proposal, his attempt to supply a need that has
oppressed him for many years, a need that he has not only found in his
own schemes of conduct, but that he has observed in the thought of
numberless people about him, rendering their action fragmentary,
wasteful in the gross, and ineffective in the net result, the need for
some general principle, some leading idea, some standard, sufficiently
comprehensive to be of real guiding value in social and political
matters, in many doubtful issues of private conduct, and throughout the
business of dealing with one's fellow-men. No doubt there are many who
do not feel such a need at all, and with these we may part company
forthwith; there are, for example, those who profess the artistic
temperament and follow the impulse of the moment, and those who consult
an inner light in some entirely mystical manner. But neither of these I