I would not have the reader infer that I overrate the place of science or exact knowledge in the life of man. Science, which is but the most accurate information available about the world in which we live and the nature of ourselves and of our fellow men, is not the whole of life; and except to a few peculiar persons it can never be the most absorbing and vivid of our emotional satisfactions. We are poetic and artistic and romantic and mystical. We resent the cold analysis and reduction of life to the commonplace and well substantiated--and this is after all is said, the aim of scientific endeavor. But we have to adjust ourselves to a changing world in the light of constantly accumulating knowledge. It is knowledge that has altered the world and we must rely on knowledge and understanding to accommodate ourselves to our new surroundings and establish peace and order and security for the pursuit of those things that to most of us are more enticing than science itself.[27] No previous generation has been so perplexed as ours, but none has ever been justified in holding higher hopes if it could but reconcile itself to making bold and judicious use of its growing resources, material and intellectual. _It is fear that holds us back._ And fear is begotten of ignorance and uncertainty. And these mutually reinforce one another, for we feebly try to condone our ignorance by our uncertainty and to excuse our uncertainty by our ignorance. Our hot defense of our ideas and beliefs does not indicate an established confidence in them but often half-distrust, which we try to hide from ourselves, just as one who suffers from bashfulness offsets his sense of inferiority and awkwardness by rude aggression. If, for example, religious beliefs had been really firmly established there would have been no need of "aids to faith"; and so with our business system to-day, our politics and international relations. We dread to see things as they would appear if we thought of them honestly, for it is the nature of critical thought to metamorphose our familiar and approved world into something strange and unfamiliar. It is undoubtedly a nervous sense of the precariousness of the existing social system which accounts for the present strenuous opposition to a fair and square consideration of its merits and defects.