This fear is natural and inevitable, but it is none the less dangerous and discreditable. Human arrangements are no longer so foolproof as they may once have been when the world moved far more slowly than it now does. It should therefore be a good deed to remove or lighten any of the various restraints on thought. I believe that there is an easy and relatively painless way in which our respect for the past can be lessened so that we shall no longer feel compelled to take the wisdom of the ages as the basis of our reforms. My own confidence in what President Butler calls "the findings of mankind" is gone, and the process by which it was lost will become obvious as we proceed. I have no reforms to recommend, except the liberation of Intelligence, which is the first and most essential one. I propose to review by way of introduction some of the new ideas which have been emerging during the past few years in regard to our minds and their operations. Then we shall proceed to the main theme of the book, a sketch of the manner in which our human intelligence appears to have come about. If anyone will follow the story with a fair degree of sympathy and patience he may, by merely putting together well-substantiated facts, many of which he doubtless knows in other connections, hope better to understand the perilous quandary in which mankind is now placed and the ways of escape that offer themselves. NOTES. [1] George Bernard Shaw reaches a similar conclusion when he contemplates education in the British Isles. "We must teach citizenship and political science at school. But must we? There is no must about it, the hard fact being that we must not teach political science or citizenship at school. The schoolmaster who attempted it would soon find himself penniless in the streets without pupils, if not in the dock pleading to a pompously worded indictment for sedition against the exploiters. Our schools teach the morality of feudalism corrupted by commercialism, and hold up the military conqueror, the robber baron, and the profiteer, as models of the illustrious and successful."--_Back to Methuselah_, xii. * * * * * II Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for everyone thinks himself so abundantly provided with it that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess.--DESCARTES.