The new century and the new millennium make us unusually conscious of our responsibility for making the human world, our self-made habitat. What we have learned over the past millennium is that we are capable of transforming our world through the power of our consciousness.
Ideas can re-make what ideas have made.
Above all, we have seen the transformatory power of law, the means by which a society makes itself, conserves what it has made, and constantly re-makes itself. But this heightened self-consciousness seems to be accompanied by a profound spiritual confusion. We are exceptionally aware also of the scale of human inhumanity, in all forms of social evil, including endemic war and world-wide social injustice. Our response to the challenge of a new self-enlightenment must begin with our amazing capacity to think about ourselves in the activity traditionally known as philosophy. Over the last two centuries we have come to understand better the way in which our minds work, and hence the way in which we make human reality, the way in which we do good and evil socially.