If self-knowledge is the highest aim of man, I ought by this time to have little to learn. And yet, if I am awake, some of my teachers--unable, perhaps, to control the divine fire of the poetic imagination which is so closely akin to, if not a part of, the mythopoeic faculty--have surely dreamed dreams. So far as my humbler and essentially prosaic faculties of observation and comparison go, plain facts are against them. But, as I may be mistaken, I have thought it well to prefix to the letters (by way of "Prolegomena") an essay which appeared in the "Nineteenth Century" for January, 1888, in which the principles that, to my mind, lie at the bottom of the "social question" are stated. So far as Individualism and Regimental Socialism are concerned, this paper simply emphasizes and expands the opinions expressed in an address to the members of the Midland Institute, delivered seventeen years earlier, [190] and still more fully developed in several essays published in the "Nineteenth Century" in 1889, which I hope, before long, to republish.* * See Collected Essays, vol. i. p. 290 to end; and this volume, p. 147. The fundamental proposition which runs through the writings, which thus extend over twenty years, is, that the common a priori doctrines and methods of reasoning about political and social questions are essentially vicious; and that argumentation on this basis leads, with equal logical force, to two contradictory and extremely mischievous systems, the one that of Anarchaic Individualism, the other that of despotic or Regimental Socialism. Whether I am right or wrong, I am at least consistent in opposing both to the best of my ability. Mr. Booth's system appears to me, and, as I have shown, is regarded by Socialists themselves, to be mere autocratic Socialism, masked by its theological exterior. That the "fantastic" religious skin will wear away, and the Socialistic reality it covers will show its real nature, is the expressed hope of one candid Socialist, and may be fairly conceived to be the unexpressed belief of the despotic leader of the new Trades Union, who has shown his zeal, if not his discretion, in championing Mr. Booth's projects. [See Letter VIII.] Yet another word to commentators upon my letters. There are some who rather chuckle, and [191] some who sneer, at what they seem to consider the dexterity of an "old controversial hand," exhibited by the contrast which I have drawn between the methods of conversion depicted in the New Testament and those pursued by fanatics of the Salvationist type, whether they be such as are now exploited by Mr. Booth, or such as those who, from the time of the Anabaptists, to go no further back, have worked upon similar lines.