One could fling about such questions almost endlessly, till every _’ism_ should disappear under interrogation points. Every such _’ism_, clearly, is but a half-truth, an arrested development, suffering from malinformation. One is reminded of the experiment in which a psychologist gave a ring-puzzle to a monkey, and--in another room--a like puzzle to a university professor: the monkey fell upon the puzzle at once with teeth and feet and every manner of hasty and haphazard reaction,--until at last the puzzle, dropped upon the floor, came apart by chance; the professor sat silent and motionless before the puzzle, working out in thought the issue of many suggested solutions, and finally, after forty minutes, touched it to undo it at a stroke. Our _’isms_ are simian reactions to the social puzzle. We jump at conclusions, we are impinged upon extremes, we bound from opposite to opposite, we move with blinders to a passion-colored goal. Some of us are idealists, and see only the beautiful desire; some of us are realists, and see only the dun and dreary fact; hardly any of us can look fact in the face and see through it to that which it might be. We “bandy half-truths” for a decade and then relapse into the peaceful insignificance of conformity.[296] It dawns on students of social problems, as it dawned long since on philosophers, that the beginning of their wisdom is a confession of their ignorance. We know now that the thing we need, and for lack of which we blunder valiantly into futility, is not good intentions but informed intelligence. All problems are problems of education; all the more so in a democracy. Not because education can change the original nature of man, but because intelligent coöperation can control the stimuli which determine the injuriousness or beneficence of original dispositions. Impulse is not the enemy of intelligence; it is its raw material. We desire knowledge--and particularly knowledge of ourselves--so that we may know what external conditions evoke destructive, and what conditions evoke constructive, responses. We do not, for example, expect intelligence to eradicate pugnacity; we do not want it to do so; but we want to eradicate the environmental conditions which turn this impulse to wholesale suicide. Men should fight; it is the essence of their value that they are willing to fight; the problem of intelligence is to discuss and to create means for the diversion of pugnacity to socially helpful ends. Character is _per se_ neither good nor bad, but becomes one or the other according to the nature of the stimuli presented. What we call moral reform, then, waits on information and consequent remoulding of the factors determining the direction of our original dispositions. We become “better” men and women only so far as we become more intelligent. Just as psychoanalysis can, in some measure, reconstruct the personal life, so social analysis can reconstruct social life and turn into productive channels the innocent