The text of this novel of ideas presents itself as a book that has been written as the result of a promise to a dying man. William Porphyry Benham is a man who has lived a life devoted to a complicated, protean idea: "that he had to live life nobly and thoroughly." He has left behind him "half a score of patent files quite distended [with papers] and a writing-table drawer-full," and the novel is by implication what his friend White, who has promised to "see after your book," has produced to acquit himself of the promise, since the papers themselves are "an indigestible aggregation."