As with his previous title, 'Keys to the Kingdom of Truth', this new work tends to utilize both aphorisms discursively and maxims sequentially in a kind of compromise between contrasting approaches to John O'Loughlin's writing, the one more literary and the other more technical, with some material of an autobiographical nature included for good measure, as also in an attempt to clarify his situation as a self-styled intellectual whose 'journey' to a well-nigh definitive realization of his thinking did not happen overnight or without considerable effort both personally and vis-a-vis whatever obstacles domestic and/or environmental circumstances may have thrown in his way. Nevertheless, the intellectual adventure somehow continued, and one is relieved to say that it has eventually attained to something of a culmination beyond which further progress in this regard would be virtually impossible, given the conclusive nature of, in particular, so many of the maxims, whose sequentially comprehensive structures matured only gradually but nonetheless cumulatively to a point from which it should be possible for their author to leave off 'journeying', having reached his adventure's end in what must surely be the most logically definitive philosophy imaginable, if not - dare one say it? - ever, the form of which - if there is such - follows from the content and not vice versa, which makes for a certain contentment with the overall results that, in this instance, have put the distinctions - as Mr O'Loughlin interprets them - between decadence and degeneration in relation to civilization at the very core of its overall focus within a text that, as with previous titles, prides itself on being eclectic.