On living in a revolutiion

With two exceptions, all the essays in this volume were written W during the course of this war. I have made some minor re visions necessitated by the passage of events, and in the table of contents have appended the original date and place of publication of each article. I take this opportunity of thanking the editors and proprietors of the various journals for their kind permission to reprint. In particular my thanks are due to Messrs. Jonathan Cape Limited for permission to reprint "Race" in Europe from We Europeans, and to Messrs. George Routledge & Sons Limited for Reconstruction and Peace, which they originally published in pamphlet form under the pseudonym "Balbus." I am very conscious of the fact that many of the essays reflect the circumstances of their birth, and therefore that they either "date" or (what is perhaps the same thing in another guise) have become out-of-date in this or that particular. If, in spite of this, I have decided to republish them in book form, it was because I wished to be on the record, so to speak, in however minor a capacity, in the great debate the world has been holding with itself since September 1939.

Never, I suppose, has the process of re-thinking been so intense as in these past four years. There has been the re-thinking of old problems, the transvaluation of values; and there has been the re direction of thought to new fields, the compulsory cross-fertilization of ideas. As a result, we now live in a quite different world. There has been a revolution of thought, both reinforcing and reinforced by the revolution of economic and social fact.

The biologist inevitably recalls those drastic changes in the history of our planet to which the same term of revolution is applied. At least six of these geological revolutions are known to have occurred in the thousand-million-year span of terrestrial life. They are essentially periods of mountain-building accompanied by the emergence of more land from the sea; but they alter the whole of the environment available to living things. Just as the human revolution we are now living through has changed the world's intellectual and social climate, so they alter the world's physical climate. As a result, at each revolutionary recurrence many groups of animals and plants become extinct, are reduced to a few poor vestiges.