It would not be difficult to caricature one of
those meetings; the lecturer floundering about with an air of exquisite
illumination, the audience attentive with an expression of thwarted
edification upon its various brows. For my own part I grew so interested
in planning my lecture and in joining up point and point, that my notes
soon outran the possibilities of the hour or so of meeting for which I
was preparing them. The meeting got only a few fragments of what I had
to say, and made what it could of them. And after that was over I let
myself loose from limits of time and length altogether and have expanded
these memoranda into a book.
It is as it stands now the frank confession of what one man of the early
Twentieth Century has found in life and himself, a confession just as
frank as the limitations of his character permit; it is his metaphysics,
his religion, his moral standards, his uncertainties and the expedients
with which he has met them. On every one of these departments and
aspects I write--how shall I put it?--as an amateur. In every section of
my subject there are men not only of far greater intellectual power and
energy than I, but who have devoted their whole lives to the sustained
analysis of this or that among the questions I discuss, and there is a
literature so enormous in the aggregate that only a specialist scholar
could hope to know it.
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