Excerpt from A Philosophy of the Future It is always better to take your reader straight to the point and spare him a long preamble. This is particularly advisable when the book itself is offered as an introduction. If it takes a long time to get to the matter, the mind tends to refuse what is really needful. This work consists largely of material first delivered as lec tures. If the spoken word can still be heard (where it should be heard), well and good. It helps if you tell someone the way as well as point it out; yet what the voice spends only the letter vita brevis, ars longa. There are many schools of thought and primers for the ascent to the heights. The steps are as old as (if not older than) Parnassus. And there are many Introductions to Philosophy that advertise themselves as such. This one is its' prole gomena are more direct than indirect; it doesn't represent all the branches, or accord space to all the topics. Still, -there's compensation, even if the approach seems rather precipitate for the first affair with wisdom. Too many guides offer roads that end up nowhere in particular; and too often the lack of any philosophy to introduce is the reason for writing an introduction to it. The kind of neutral commentary produced for the un Sophisticated tends also to intimidate the reader, and the dis interested report of an impersonal and ideologically reticent narrator can obscure the matter itself.