No one doubts that a prosperous and happy life is possible to all if only wealth were properly distributed. As the control of affairs passes more and more completely into plebeian hands and as the tastes and dilemmas of mediocrity come to set standards of value, the world is supposed to be getting better. This questionable assumption leads to distortion of fact by both parties, and must continue to do so as long as the controversy is kept on this level. I wonder what would happen if instead of merely drawing hasty inferences from these naïve assumptions, it should become the practice to examine them. Perhaps the issue might be re-stated in more significant terms. But what concerns us at present is not the social problem as such, but the fact that the attempt to clear up the intellectual muddle about it means that education is going on. A glance at the nature of the presuppositions we have been discussing will help us to understand why it is that they are so seldom examined. They flatter. Apart from their radical or conservative implications, such ideas are congenial to the average man. They pat him on the back. It is no small satisfaction to believe that the environment is responsible for all human ills, that evil may easily be removed by mass action; that given material abundance, the good life follows automatically; that distinctions among men are reducible to economic factors; that the supremacy of our own type is the goal of progress. I believe that the level at which one’s education stops, the particular set of dilemmas in which one’s mind becomes fixed is usually determined by some self-satisfying assumption. If my ego can remain elated over the possession of an automobile, or the right to vote, or the belief that I and my kind are or ought to be socially superior, or because I can play the saxophone, or am able to resist the temptation to pick pockets, the problems which have live interest for me will be the problems which lie on these levels. I recently talked with a man who was quite pleased with himself because for some years he had not been in jail. He frequently compared the advantages and disadvantages of life “on the inside” and “on the outside.” To his mind all days and all people were thought of as “inside” or “outside,” a point of view which I imagine few people linger over or find personally gratifying. But the virtues men pride themselves on are as a rule those which compensate them for the particular vices to which they are tempted.