An Inquiry Into Thought and Motive By W. Duncan McKim, M.D., Ph.D. 'T is the times' plague, when madmen lead the blind. -King Lear. To do battle against Unreason without or within, and smite in Però pur va', ed in andando ascolta.-Dante. G. P. Putnam's Sons AUG 22 1928 To MY WIFE WHOSE HONESTY OF MIND, CLEARNESS OF INSIGHT, AND SYMPATHY HAVE BEEN AN INSPIRATION PREFACE : IN his memoirs, after extensive travel in Europe and America, Li Hung Chang wrote, of the Chinese Empress and her councilors: "Oh, if these great personages could have but seen "-what he had seen-"they would no more dream as children!" We all are as children and our mental life, at least in great part, is a dream. We live in a real world, but we do not truly apprehend it. Our thought is full of fantastic misconceptions and our conduct is based mainly not upon what is but upon what seems. It is the purpose of the present book to travel with the reader through parts of the mind which the average man has never explored, to show him some important things which he may not know, to remind him of other things which, although known, he seldom remembers, to urge that, as far as may be, he wake from his dream. It is the aim of the book to generate a mood, to incite a habit of reasonableness, to call a salutary attention to the limits of a man's capacities; and the gist of its purpose cannot be better represented, perhaps, than by that homely and familiar cautionary notice, “Stop. Look. Listen!" In these thrilling times of world-strife, it is hard to withdraw our interest from the front line of action, but the mechanism of man's mind, through which his failures and successes are to be explained, remains al |