This relative scarcity of exegetic material concerning the ideology and programs of Sun is not the result of any inadequacy on the part of those persons, both Chinese and Western, who have devoted thought and time to his life or to the translation of his works. It is one thing to point out a task that has yet to be done; and quite another, actually to perform it. An interpretation or exposition of Sun’s thought, to be worthy of the great significance of the original, must be very thorough; but scarcely enough time has elapsed to allow a perspective of all the materials, let alone an orientation of Sun in the Far Eastern scene. Yet the importance of Sun demands that something be done to bring his thought to the attention of the world, so that the usual distortion of his personality—arising from the lack of commentaries—may be avoided in present day works. In a sense, the time is not ripe for a definitive treatment of Sun, either as a figure in history or as a contributor to the significant and enduring political thought of modern times; any work now done will, as time passes, fall grotesquely far short of adequacy. On the other hand, there is so much material of a perishable nature—anecdotes and legends not yet committed to print, and the memories of living men—now available, that a present-day work on Sun may gain in color and intimacy what it loses in judgment and objectivity, may gain in proximity what it has to forgo in detachment. And, lastly, the complete absence of any systematic presentation of Sun’s ideas in any Western language is so great a deficiency in the fields of Far Eastern history and world political thought, that even a relatively inadequate exposition of the thought of Sun Yat-sen may prove to be not without value. Sun himself never explained his philosophy, whether theoretical or applied, in any broad, systematic fashion; nor has anyone else done so. If the permissibility of an exposition of Sun Yat-sen’s thought be conceded, there still remains the vexing problem of a choice of method. While the far-flung peripheries of Sun’s thought touch almost every field of knowledge and opinion, a systematic condensation of his views cannot hope to survey the same broad ranges. The problem of proportion, of just emphasis, involves the nice appraisal of the degree of importance which each of Sun’s minor rôles had in his intellectual career as a whole. Nor do the difficulties concerning method end with the consideration of proportion; they merely begin, for there remains the far more important and perplexing problem of a technique of interpretation.