Intellectualism, in fact, the view that life can be determined by ideas (and of this socialism is the essence) if it can be justified at all has to be justified in the face of all current human values. It is based on an assumption, a grand and generous assumption, I maintain, and one that has to take what is called a sporting chance with all the odds against it. This assumption is, that on the whole human nature can be trusted to take care of itself while the surplus energy of life, commonly absorbed in the struggle against incapacity, sloth, perversity, and disorder ("original sin," to sum it all up), is released for the organization of a better scheme for mankind; and further, that this better scheme, acting on a race naturally capable of a richer and fuller life, will have the effect on men as a whole that re-environing has on any cramped, ill-nourished, unventilated organism, and that art, religion, morals (all that makes up the substance and meaning of life) instead of being checked and blighted in the process will in the end, strong enough to bear transplantation, be re-engendered on a finer and freer basis. This, in a word, is the contention of the intellectual, a splendid gambler's chance, on which the future rests, and to which people have committed themselves more than they know. It is a bridge thrown out across the void, resting at one end on the good intentions of mankind and relying at the other upon mankind's fulfilling those good intentions. It is based like every great enterprise of the modern world upon credit, and its only security is the fact that men thus far and on the whole have measured up to each enlargement of their freedom and responsibility. To feel the force of this one has to think of the world as a world. Just here has been the office of socialism, to show that society is a colossal machine of which we are all parts and that men in the most exact sense are members one of another. In the intellectualist scheme of things that mathematical proof has to come first; it has to take root and bury itself and become the second nature of humankind before the new world of instinct can spring out of it and come to blossom.