I selected as illustrations those social questions which seemed to me most significant for our period. A few of them admitted an approach with experimental methods, others merely a dissection of the psychological and psychophysiological roots. The problems of sex, of socialism, and of superstition seemed to me especially important, and if some may blame me for overlooking the problem of suffrage, I can at least refer to the chapter on the jury, which comes quite near to this militant question.
Most of this material appears here for the first time. The chapter on thought transference, however, was published in shorter form in the Metropolitan Magazine, that on the jury, also abbreviated, in the Century Magazine, and that on naïve psychology in the Atlantic Monthly. The paper on sexual education is an argument, and at the same time an answer in a vivid discussion. Last summer I published in the New York Times an article which dealt with the sex problem. It led to vehement attacks from all over the country. The present long paper replies to them fully. I hope sincerely that it will be my last word in the matter. The advocates of sexual talk now have the floor; from now on I shall stick to the one policy in which I firmly believe, the policy of silence.
Hugo Münsterberg.
Cambridge, Mass., January, 1914.