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Towards the Great Peace by Ralph Adams Cram
page 27 of 220 (12%)
not time and we dare not hope for the divine miracle whereby "in the
twinkling of an eye we shall all be changed." Still less by sole
reliance on some series of new political, social, economic and
educational devices; there is no plan, however wise and profound, that
can work effectively under the dead weight of a society that is made up
of individuals whose moral sense is defective. Either of these two
methods, put into operation by itself, will fail. Acting together they
may succeed.

I repeat what I have said before. The material thing and the spiritual
force work by inter-action and coördinately. The abandonment or reform
of some device that has proved evil or inadequate, and the substitution
of something better, changes to that extent the environment of the
individual and so enables him more perfectly to develop his inherent
possibilities in character and capacity, while every advance in this
direction reacts on the machinery of life and makes its improvement more
possible. With a real sense of my own personal presumption, but with an
equally real sense of the responsibility that rests on every man at the
present crisis, I shall venture certain suggestions as to possible
changes that may well be effected in the material forms of contemporary
society as well as in its methods of thought, in order that the
spiritual energies of the individual may be raised to a higher level
through the amelioration of a hampering environment, and, with even
greater diffidence, others that may bear more directly on the
character-development of the individual. In following out this line of
thought I shall, in the remaining seven lectures, speak successively on:
A Working Philosophy; The Social Organism; The Industrial and Economic
Problem; The Political Organization of Society; The Function of
Education and Art; The Problem of Organic Religion; and Personal
Responsibility.
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