stirred by the clash of issues and personalities, but where we know that the country will run on in about the same way, whoever is elected. This knowledge does not work against our interest in the struggle itself, nor in the outcome. It only insures us against defeat. It makes life livable by endowing us with disinterestedness. If we lose, why, better luck next time, or, at worst, is not losing a part of life? The experimenter with life, then, must go into his laboratory with the mind of the scientist. He has nothing at stake except the discovery of the truth, and he is willing to work carefully and methodically and even cold-bloodedly in eliciting it from the tangled skein of phenomena. But it is exactly in this cheerful, matter-of-fact way that we are never willing to examine our own personalities and ideas. We take ourselves too seriously, and handle our tastes and enthusiasms as gingerly as if we feared they would shrivel away at the touch. We perpetually either underestimate or overestimate our powers and worth, and suffer such losses on account of the one and humiliations on account of the other, as serve to unbalance our knowledge of ourselves, and discourage attempts to find real guiding principles of our own or others’ actions. We need this objective attitude of the scientist. We must be self-conscious with a detached self-consciousness, treating ourselves as we treat others, experimenting to discover our possibilities and traits, testing ourselves with situations, and gradually building up a body of law and doctrine for ourselves, a real morality that will have far more worth and power and virtue than all that has been tried and tested before by no matter how much of alien human experience. We must start our quest with no prepossessions, with no theory of what ought to happen when we expose ourselves to certain stimuli. It is our business to see what does happen, and then act accordingly. If the electrical experimenter started with a theory that like magnetic poles attract each other, he would be shocked to discover that they actually repelled each other. He might even set it down to some inherent depravity of matter. But if his theory was not a prejudice but a hypothesis, he would find it possible to revise it quickly when he saw how the poles actually behaved. And he would not feel any particular chagrin or humiliation.