sun shines, and he finds the road a little hot and
dusty; the rain falls, and he splashes through the muddy puddles. It
makes no matter--all is pleasant; his fathers went this way before him;
they made this road for him to tread, and, when they bred him, passed
into his fibre the love of doing things as they themselves had done them.
So he walks on and on, resting comfortably at nights under the roofs that
have been raised to shelter him, by those who went before.

Suddenly one day, without intending to, he notices a path or opening in
the hedge, leading to right or left, and he stands, looking at the
undiscovered. After that he stops at all the openings in the hedge; one
day, with a beating heart, he tries one.

And this is where the fun begins.

Out of ten of him that try the narrow path, nine of him come back to the
broad road, and, when they pass the next gap in the hedge, they say: "No,
no, my friend, I found you pleasant for a while, but after that-ah! after
that! The way my fathers went is good enough for me, and it is obviously
the proper one; for nine of me came back, and that poor silly tenth--I
really pity him!"

And when he comes to the next inn, and snuggles in his well-warmed, bed,
he thinks of the wild waste of heather where he might have had to spend
the night alone beneath the stars; nor does it, I think, occur to him
that the broad road he treads all day was once a trackless heath itself.

But the poor silly tenth is faring on. It is a windy night that he is
travelling through a windy night, with all things new around, and nothing
to help him but his courage. Nine times out of ten that courage fails,
and he goes down into the bog. He has seen the undiscovered, and--like
Ferrand in this book--the undiscovered has engulfed him; his spirit,
tougher than the spirit of the nine that burned back to sleep in inns,
was yet not tough enough. The tenth time he wins across, and on the
traces he has left others follow slowly, cautiously--a new road is opened
to mankind! A true saying goes: Whatever is, is right! And if all men
from the world's beginning had said that, the world would never have
begun--at all. Not even the protoplasmic jelly could have commenced its
journey; there would have been no motive force to make it start.

And so, that other saying had to be devised before the world could set up
business: Whatever is, is wrong! But since the Cosmic Spirit found that
matters moved too fast if