hat humanity may choose its own purpose
and set up its own goal; and the most elementary sense of order will
teach us that this choice must be social, not merely individual. In
whatever measure ill-controlled individuals may yield to personal
impulses or attractions, the aim of the race must be a collective aim. I
do not mean an austere demand of self-sacrifice from the individual,
but an adjustment--as genial and generous as possible--of individual
variations for common good. Otherwise life becomes discordant and
futile, and the pain and waste react on each individual. So we raise
again, in the twentieth century, the old question of 'the greatest
good,' which men discussed in the Stoa Poikile and the suburban groves
of Athens, in the cool atria of patrician mansions on the Palatine and
the Pincian, in the Museum at Alexandria, and the schools which Omar
Khayyam frequented, in the straw-strewn schools of the Middle Ages and
the opulent chambers of Cosimo dei Medici."

And again:

"The old dream of a co-operative effort to improve life, to bring
happiness to as many minds of mortals as we can reach, shines above
all the mists of the day. Through the ruins of creeds and philosophies,
which have for ages disdained it, we are retracing our steps toward that
height--just as the Athenians did two thousand years ago. It rests on
no metaphysic, no sacred legend, no disputable tradition--nothing that
scepticism can corrode or advancing knowledge undermine. Its foundations
are the fundamental and unchanging impulses of our nature."

And again:

"The revolt which burns in so much of the abler literature of our time
is an unselfish revolt, or non-selfish revolt: it is an outcome of
that larger spirit which conceives the self to be a part of the general
social organism, and it is therefore neither egoistic nor altruistic.
It finds a sanction in the new intelligence, and an inspiration in the
finer sentiments of our generation, but the glow which chiefly illumines
it is the glow of the great vision of a happier earth. It speaks of
the claims of truth and justice, and assails untruth and injustice,
for these are elemental principles of social life; but it appeals
more confidently to the warmer sympathy which is linking the scattered
children of the race, and it urges all to co-operate in the restriction
of suffering and the creation of happiness. The advance guard of the
race, the men and women in whom mental alertness is