WALLAS.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

I have made hardly any changes in the book as it first appeared, beyond
the correction of a few verbal slips. The important political
developments which have occurred during the last eighteen months in the
English Parliament, in Turkey, Persia, and India, and in Germany, have
not altered my conclusions as to the psychological problems raised by
modern forms of government; and it would involve an impossible and
undesirable amount of rewriting to substitute 'up-to-date' illustrations
for those which I drew from the current events of 1907 and 1908. I
should desire to add to the books recommended above Mr. W. M'Dougall's
_Social Psychology_, with special reference to his analysis of Instinct.

G.W.

LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE, CLARE MARKET, LONDON,
W.C.,

_30th December 1909._

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION (1920)

This edition is, like the second edition (1910), a reprint, with a few
verbal corrections, of the first edition (1908). I tried in 1908 to make
two main points clear. My first point was the danger, for all human
activities, but especially for the working of democracy, of the
'intellectualist' assumption, 'that every human action is the result of
an intellectual process, by which a man first thinks of some end which
he desires, and then calculates the means by which that end can be
attained' (p. 21). My second point was the need of substituting for that
assumption a conscious and systematic effort of thought. 'The whole
progress,' I argued, 'of human civilisation beyond its earliest stages,
has been made possible by the invention of methods of thought which
enable us to interpret and forecast the working of nature more
successfully than we could, if we merely followed the line of least
resistance in the use of our minds' (p. 114).

In 1920 insistence on my first point is not so necessary as it was in
1908. The assumption that men are automatically guided by 'enlightened
self-interest' has been discredited by the facts of the war and the
peace, the success of an anti-parliamentary and anti-intellectualist
revolution in Russia, the British election of 1918, the French election
of 1919, the confusion of politics in America, the breakdown of
political machinery in Central Europe, and the general unhappiness which
has resulted from four years of the most intense and heroic effort that
the human race has ever made. One only needs to c