I venture to think that this problem may be soluble, that principles can be elucidated which might effect a successful junction between the intricacies of the environment and the simplicities of human faculty. It goes without saying that what I shall present here is no final statement of these principles. At most and at best it may be a clue, with some illustrations, that can be developed by research. But even that much assurance seems to me rash in the light of the difficulties which the problem has always presented, and so, following Descartes, I add that “after all, it is possible I may be mistaken; and it is but a little copper and glass I take for gold and diamonds.”[17] FOOTNOTES: [17] _Discourse on Method_, Part I. Chapter VII THE NATURE OF A PROBLEM 1 Somewhat in the spirit of Descartes, let us begin by supposing that your whole experience were confined to one glimpse of the world. There would be, I think, no better or worse in your sight, neither good men nor bad, patriots nor profiteers, conservatives nor radicals. You would be a perfect neutral. From such an impression of things, it would never occur to you that the crest of a mountain endured longer than the crest of a wave, that people moved about and that trees did not, or that the roar of an orator would pass sooner than the roar of Niagara. Lengthen your experience, and you would begin to notice differences in the constancy of things. You would know day and night, perhaps, but not winter and summer, movement in space, but little of age in time. And if you then formulated your social philosophy, would you not almost certainly conclude that the things you saw people doing then it was ordained they should do always, and that their characters as you had seen them that day would be thus and so forever? And would not the resulting treatise pass almost unnoticed in any collection of contemporary disquisitions on the nations, the races, the classes or the sexes? But the more you lengthened the span of your impression, the more variability you would note, until at last you would say with Heraclitus that all things flow. For when the very stars and the rocks were seen to have a history, men and their institutions and customs, habits and ideals, theories and policies could seem only relatively permanent. And you would have to conclude that what at first glance you had called a constant turns out after you had watched it longer merely to be changing a little more slowly than something else.