thickly populated community you
will still need to understand your own nature and the natures of other
people. No matter what you desire of life, other people's aims,
ambitions and activities constitute vital obstructions along your
pathway. You will never get far without the co-operation, confidence and
comradeship of other men and women.

Primitive Problems

It was not always so. And its recentness in human history may account
for some of our blindness to this great fact.

In primitive times people saw each other rarely and had much less to do
with each other. The human element was then not the chief problem. Their
environmental problems had to do with such things as the elements,
violent storms, extremes of heat and cold, darkness, the ever-present
menace of wild beasts whose flesh was their food, yet who would eat them
first unless they were quick in brain and body.

Civilization's Changes

But all that is changed. Man has subjugated all other creatures and
now walks the earth its supreme sovereign. He has discovered and
invented and builded until now we live in skyscrapers, talk around the
world without wires and by pressing a button turn darkness into
daylight.

Causes of Failure

Yet with all our knowledge of the outside world ninety-nine lives out
of every hundred are comparative failures.

The reason is plain to every scientific investigator. We have failed
to study ourselves in relation to the great environmental problem of
today. The stage-setting has been changed but not the play. The game is
the same old game--you must adjust and adapt yourself to your
environment or it will destroy you.

Mastering His Own Environment

The cities of today _look_ different from the jungles of our ancestors
and we imagine that because the brain of man overcame the old menaces no
new ones have arisen to take their place. We no longer fear
extermination from cold. We turn on the heat. We are not afraid of the
vast oceans which held our primitive forebears in thrall, but pass
swiftly, safely and luxuriously over their surfaces. And soon we shall
be breakfasting in New York and dining the same evening in San
Francisco!

Facing New Enemies

But in building up this stupendous superstructure of modern
civilization man has brought into being a society so intricate and
complex that he now faces the new environmental problem of human
relationships.

The Modern Spider's Web

Today we depend for life's n