Our greatest lack is a habit of self-release, a habit of being free and freely cooperative. Such a habit cannot be acquired by repetition of impulsive revolts or impulsive repentances, nor by jumping at novelties; it requires self-discipline; it depends upon practising a technic. But a technic for freedom in the sphere of life’s values and policies can scarcely be said to exist. Scientific method is indeed the technic of free intelligence conceived as a disinterested observer of events; but something more than on-looking is involved in living. Our difficulty lies in inadequate procedures in the weighing of values and the choice of ends. Here, too, scientific method--as we shall presently see in more detail--is essential to freedom; we are not too enamored of science nor too ready to use its technic, but not enough so. Yet scientific method is only one factor in the technic of self-release. In the absence of the other factors, it becomes, in fact, a servant of inferior, reactionary, or even destructive ways of life, as we abundantly see at the present moment. The inescapable task for our culture--for education, religion, social organization, and (I surmise) literature and the other arts--is to develop a technic for freedom in the sense of continuous release from continuously-forming precedents--release into selves that are neither precedent-ridden nor yet fidgety or flighty but creative. This implies much more than readiness to participate in reform movements. Excitement over the dust and rubbish that have accumulated, or even willingness to clean Augean stables, does not get at causes; it deals only with the products of self-poisoning processes, not with the sources of the poison; it produces little beyond oscillation between the fulness of a vice and the emptiness of a virtue. Even the religion that glories in its ascription of infinite value to persons has failed to develop a technic for releasing personality from its self-imposed limitations. Indeed, the maintenance of some of these limitations in the form of beliefs, institutions, and rules of conduct has been erected into a virtue.