This book states as plainly and clearly as possible the essential ideas
of my life, the perspective of my world. Everything else that I have
been or done seems to me to have been contributory to or illustrative
of these ideas and suggestions. My other writings, with hardly an
exception, explore, try over, illuminate, comment upon or flower out of
the essential matter that I here attempt at last to strip bare to its
foundations and state unmistakably. This is my religion. Here are my
directive aims and the criteria of all I do.
Since the subject of this book is the whole destiny of man, and the
whole duty of man, it will certainly be called a pretentious book.
That will be a charge too obvious to miss and we can consider it made.
But it is no more pretentious to work upon the whole of life than upon
parts and aspects of life; it is a question of scale and method; the
intellectual effort needed, the quality of the work required for making
the map of a continent may be less than and inferior to that demanded
by the chemical examination of a muscle fibre or the investigation of
atomic structure. A man is not pretentious because he works with the
theodolite instead of the microscope. Some men work upon the bulkier
common issues; some upon finer and subtler questions. To every man his
task. There is no hierarchy in human thought.
Here, given tentatively, with many evident faults and gaps, is a scheme
for all human conduct. It discusses what should man be doing and what
should men be doing. It states a general form and direction for the
crowding rush of modern ideas and impulsions. I believe that upon
such lines as I have drawn, the creative forces in our species can
be organised and may be organised, in a comprehensive fight against
individual and collective frustration and death. I believe also that
there is no other direction but this direction along which mankind can
escape from the insecurity of an animal which has been evolved and
which may presently be degraded or extinguished in the play of material
things. The accident of a great opportunity, I hold, has happened to
our kind. It is opportunity and not destiny we face.
So I bear my witness and argue my design. This is, I declare, the truth
and the way of salvation. If I could, I would put this book before
every mind in the world. I would say, tell me where this is wrong, or
tell me why you do not live after these principles.
I pray the reader for a patient reading. This is, I submit, matter of
very great moment to him. My phrasing, my idiom of thought may not be
his. Will he forgive that for the sake of the substance I am putting
before him? It is astir already in many intelligences and it is an
amplifying group of ideas. I am merely the observer who notes his own
adhesion and draws attention, eagerly and earnestly, to what is going
on and to the quality of our present occasion. Will the reader at
least try to understand before he refutes? I am discussing here the
possibility of an immense and hopeful revolution in human affairs and
of an enlivening and ennobling change in our lives. I am discussing
whether our species, he and I with it and part of it, is to live or
die.