THE CONTEMPORARY STARTING-POINT
to the conclusion that causation in human affairs is multiple
—in other words, that any given event has many causes.
Hence it follows that there can be no single sovereign
cure for the diseases of the body politic. The remedy for
social disorder must be sought simultaneously in many
different fields. Accordingly, in the succeeding chapters,
I proceed to consider the most important of these fields of
activity, beginning with the political and economic and
proceeding to the fields of personal behaviour. In every
case I suggest the kind of changes that must be made if
meji are to realize the ideal ends at which they .all profess
to be aiming. This involves us, incidentally, in a dis-
cussion of die relation of means to ends. Good ends,
as I have frequently to point out, can be achieved only
by the employment of appropriate means. The end
cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious
reason that lie means employed determine the nature of
the ends produced.
These chapters, from the second to the twelfth, con-
stitute a kind of practical cookery book of reform. They
contain political recipes, economic recipes, educational
recipes, recipes for the organization of industry, of local
communities, of groups of-devoted individuals. They
also contain, by way of warning, descriptions of the way
things ought not to be done—recipes for not realizing
the ends one professes to desire, recipes for stultifying
idealism, recipes for paving hell with good intentions.
This cookery book of reform culminates in the last
section of the book, in which I discuss the relation existing
between the theories and the practices of reformers on the
one hand and the nature of the universe on the other.
What sort of world is this, in which men aspire to good
and yet so frequently achieve evil? "What is the sense
and point of the whole affair? What is man's place in it
and how are his ideals, his systems of values, related to
AI Q