Book Description

Excerpt from Liberty and Democracy and Other Essays in War-Time All human thinking is temporary and experimental, like the life of which it is a part. But in time of war, and of such a war as this that now wracks the world, the temporal perils of thought swell to new measures. Our emotions are intense; familiar things take on discolourations, while strange orders of fact breed strangely new perceptions, making easy the inroads of fantasy and suspicion; and even the mind consciously in search of a truth that is eternal finds itself hypnotically in bond to the garish actualities of the present. Nevertheless, there are no times when hard thinking is more the need; Such intelligence as we have is meant (if meant for anything) to be of service under stress; and that citizen and that student who fails to respond with his clearest effort betrays at once his country and the best part of human nature, - namely, its quest of rational guidance. The essays which form the present volume represent but one man's endeavour to discover the light of reason in a period of tremendous stress. They were written, from time to time, under the impulse of events, and for contemporary reading. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.