I have tried in these pages to do that for myself. I am under no illusion as to the present value of the conceptions arrived at. I regard them simply as a probable clue to the understanding of modernity. If the clue is the correct one, the more we explore the modern world the more coherence it will give to our understanding of it. A true insight is fruitful; it multiplies insight, until at last it not [p230] only illuminates a situation but provides a practical guide to conduct. I believe the insight of high religion into the value of disinterestedness will, if pursued resolutely, untangle the moral confusion of the age and make plain, as it is not now plain, what we are really driving at in our manifold activity, what we are compelled to want, what, rather dimly now, we do want, and how to proceed about achieving it. To say that is to say that I believe in the hypothesis. I do believe in it. I believe that this valuation of human life, which was once the possession of an élite, now conforms to the premises of a whole civilization. The proof of that must lie in a detailed and searching examination of the facts all about us. If the ideal of human character which is prophesied in high religion is really suitable and necessary in modern civilization, then an examination ought to show that events themselves are pregnant with it. If they are not, then all this is moonshine and cobwebs and castles in the air. Unless circumstance and necessity are behind it, the insight of high religion is still, as it has always been hitherto, a noble eccentricity of the soul. For men will not take it seriously, they will not devote themselves to the discovery and invention of ways of cultivating maturity, detachment, and disinterestedness unless events conspire to drive them to it. The realization of this ideal is plainly a process of education in the most inclusive sense of that term. But it will not do much good to tell mothers that they should lead their children away from their childishness; an actual mother, even if she understood so abstruse a bit of advice, and did not reject it out of hand as a reflection upon the [p231] glory of childhood, would insist upon being told very concretely what this good advice means and how with a bawling infant in the cradle you go about cultivating his capacity to be disinterested. It is not much better to offer the advice to school teachers; they will wish to know what they must not do that they now do, and what they must do that they leave undone. But the answers to these questions are no more to be had from the original concept than are rules for breeding fine cattle to be had from the theory of evolution and Mendel’s law. By the use of the concept, psychologists and educators may, if the concept is correct and if they are properly encouraged, thread their way by dialectic and by experiment to practical knowledge which is actually usable as a method of education and as a personal discipline.