3. How to overcome the various types of frustration mentioned above: frustration on its intellectual side, or the reconciliation of specialist efficiency with breadth and relatedness; frustration on the character side. Frustration in the social relations, as in marriage, or as in the case of defective children. Frustration through bereavement, or the privation suffered by the going out of our life of lives with which we are inseparably connected by ethical as well as affectional ties. Frustration in the attempt to carry out projects of social betterment; on what moral ground to assert the possible moral value of life in the slums today, and at the same time to put forth and to stimulate the most assiduous efforts to abolish the slum; on what grounds to affirm that the best life is possible under the worst conditions, and yet not to cease or for an instant relax the effort to change the conditions. The problem of how to support and console the wretched multitudes of mankind in the interval that must elapse before the reform of conditions can take real effect; the problem of support and consolation in fatal sickness, on the deathbed, and in the harrowing recollection of irremediable and irrevocable wrong done to others; the problem raised by the prospective extinction, or the possible old age and degeneration before extinction of mankind—all these problems should be taken together, not one, for instance the so-called social problem, accentuated, leaving the rest out of sight. From one peg they all hang, on one cardinal idea they all depend—the idea of personality as positively defined, of the holy thing as not merely inviolable without regard to its content, but inviolable because of a certain positive content. The ascription of worth to man, in this sense, is the fundamental problem of all, and to the full discussion of this we shall turn in the constructive part of the volume which is now to follow. FOOTNOTES: [16] See the published accounts of the Ethical Culture School. [17] The word “edification” as commonly used has a sentimental flavor. It does not as a rule convey the idea of constructiveness at all. It frequently suggests a kind of warm, moist, semi-tropical atmosphere for the emotions of the hearer to simmer in. But in its genuine meaning of “building up” it is too valuable a word to lose. [18] A new conception of culture is needed, based neither on exclusive specialism, nor on the ambition to know everything after the manner of Goethe in his early days, and such a conception of culture must supply the foundation of an educational philosophy. BOOK II PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY REMARKS: CRITIQUE OF KANT