described. The reverie goes on all the time not only in the mind of
the mill hand and the Broadway flapper, but equally in weighty judges
and godly bishops. It has gone on in all the philosophers, scientists,
poets, and theologians that have ever lived. Aristotle's most abstruse
speculations were doubtless tempered by highly irrelevant reflections.
He is reported to have had very thin legs and small eyes, for which he
doubtless had to find excuses, and he was wont to indulge in very
conspicuous dress and rings and was accustomed to arrange his hair
carefully.[4] Diogenes the Cynic exhibited the impudence of a touchy
soul. His tub was his distinction. Tennyson in beginning his "Maud"
could not forget his chagrin over losing his patrimony years before as
the result of an unhappy investment in the Patent Decorative Carving
Company. These facts are not recalled here as a gratuitous
disparagement of the truly great, but to insure a full realization of
the tremendous competition which all really exacting thought has to
face, even in the minds of the most highly endowed mortals.

And now the astonishing and perturbing suspicion emerges that perhaps
almost all that had passed for social science, political economy,
politics, and ethics in the past may be brushed aside by future
generations as mainly rationalizing. John Dewey has already reached
this conclusion in regard to philosophy.[5] Veblen[6] and other
writers have revealed the various unperceived presuppositions of the
traditional political economy, and now comes an Italian sociologist,
Vilfredo Pareto, who, in his huge treatise on general sociology,
devotes hundreds of pages to substantiating a similar thesis affecting
all the social sciences.[7] This conclusion may be ranked by students
of a hundred years hence as one of the several great discoveries of
our age. It is by no means fully worked out, and it is so opposed to
nature that it will be very slowly accepted by the great mass of those