A Vision of the Future, Based on the Application of Ethical Principles

Excerpt: 'Social Problems are the chief interest and study of my life. In 1885 I published in London a work entitled Scientific Meliorism and the Evolution of Happiness. The world of thought has acquired new knowledge since then; and many social changes have occurred. The present volume is not a replica of that work, although, as before, my aim has been to gather together the currents of meliorism pursuing diverse courses throughout society and to throw upon these the light of fresh knowledge gained by investigators of economic and social science; and, above all, the light emanating from philosophic thinkers who recognize that the path of improved outward conditions, and the path of inward progress for man, lie parallel to each other. It is my belief that in this dawning epoch of conscious evolution man may, if he so chooses, push forward the actual life of to-day and merge it into the ideal life of to-morrow. There has recently occurred a widespread commemoration of the birth of that pure-souled American, who was pre-eminently a teacher of the ideal life. This volume, I hope, will be read in America, viand, to the memory of Emerson I tender homage, while adopting his phrase, “Hitch Your Wagon to a Star, as the motto of my book. The toil of man’s daily life alas! is indeed as the straining and jolting of a lumbering wagon,—it grovels, it wallows, it drags wearily, and the soul of the wagoner soars not. But there are few thinkers who confront the great social question of the hour as not the rescue of the submerged tenth merely, not the elevation of the masses only, but the uplifting of all Humanity to higher levels in the scale of being. When the great process of social reform is animated and ruled by that lofty aspiration, the lumbering wagon of toil will become a triumphal chariot of moral and spiritual progress.'