As a historical student who for a good many years has been especially
engaged in inquiring how man happens to have the ideas and convictions
about himself and human relations which now prevail, the writer has
reached the conclusion that history can at least shed a great deal of
light on our present predicaments and confusion. I do not mean by
history that conventional chronicle of remote and irrelevant events
which embittered the youthful years of many of us, but rather a study
of how man has come to be as he is and to believe as he does.

No historian has so far been able to make the whole story very plain
or popular, but a number of considerations are obvious enough, and it
ought not to be impossible some day to popularize them. I venture to
think that if certain seemingly indisputable historical facts were
generally known and accepted and permitted to play a daily part in our
thought, the world would forthwith become a very different place from
what it now is. We could then neither delude ourselves in the
simple-minded way we now do, nor could we take advantage of the
primitive ignorance of others. All our discussions of social,
industrial, and political reform would be raised to a higher plane of
insight and fruitfulness.

In one of those brilliant divagations with which Mr. H. G. Wells is
wont to enrich his novels he says:

When the intellectual history of this time comes to be written,
nothing, I think, will stand out more strikingly than the empty
gulf in quality between the superb and richly fruitful scientific
investigations that are going on, and the general thought of other
educated sections of the community. I do not mean that scientific
men are, as a whole, a class of supermen, dealing with and thinking