The matter resolves itself at last into Pilate’s question: What is truth? We do not know, and shall never know. But it seems to involve a certain focussing and concentration of the attention that brings all the life within us into harmony. When this happens to us, we discover that truth is the only thing we had ever really cared about in the world. The thing seems to be the same thing, no matter which avenue we reach it by. At whatever point we are touched, we respond. A quartet, a cathedral, a sonnet, an exhibition of juggling, anything well done--we are at the mercy of it. But as the whole of us responds to it, so it takes a whole man to do it. Whatever cracks men up and obliterates parts of them, makes them powerless to give out this vibration. This is about all we know of individualism and the integrity of the individual. The sum of all the philosophies in the history of the world can be packed back into it. All the tyrannies and abuses in the world are only bad because they injure this integrity. We desire truth. It is the only thing we desire. To have it, we must develop the individual. And there are practical ways and means of doing this. We see that all our abuses are only odious because they injure some individual man’s spirit. We can trace the corruption of politics into business, and find private selfishness at the bottom of it. We can see this spread out into a network of invisible influence, in the form of intellectual dishonesty blighting the minds of our people. We can look still closer and see just why and how the temperament of the private man is expressed. We study this first in social life; for social life is the source and fountain of all things. The touchstone for any civilization is what one man says to another man in the street. Everything else that happens there bears a traceable relation to the tone of his voice. The press reflects it, the pulpit echoes it, the literature reproduces it, the architecture embodies it.