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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: chapter{Section 4PREFACE. What is true to-day may be logically contradicted to-morrow. The everlasting turn of the mighty wheel of life mixes matters eternally and brings before the eye of the observer a kaleidoscopic view that dazzles the eye, spirit and soul. It produces an eternal change of mind of each living individual, and as each change again produces a different impression on every person, it forms new thoughts and ideas, with a result of a chaos-like con- glomerata, that is bewildering and that makes us stand aghast of the end. Of this fact I was impressed soon after I had somewhat seen the lights and shades of social life and when I began to study the observations of others in regard to this theme I found that they either repeated the thoughts of other thinkers or wrote deliberate falsehoods, which would further their own ends. Then I stopped "to see through the eyes of others and concluded to make the "study of our moral, social and political life" my task, and thenceforth I endeavored to sift "facts" from "arguments, wishes or illusions," and all dissecting necessary I did1 with the help of plain common sense. Acts and deeds, which were in opposition to moral and social laws, advices and teachings that seemed directly aimed against common sense or the laws of nature I noted down carefully for years, and during certain periods I compared them again and again, until I believed myself capable of separating "the cause from the deed," and then by either subtraction or multiplication I gained the end-result. Now, after more than thirty years of such study I shall give the so-gained facts to the public, but thereby arises the doubt whether my capacity to master the English language will be found sufficient to express myself correctly and plainly, because, as a foreig...