sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man
is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at
once. Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex; it is like a man
plucking five pears in mere absence of mind. The aesthetes touched the
last insane limits of language in their eulogy on lovely things. The
thistledown made them weep; a burnished beetle brought them to their
knees. Yet their emotion never impressed me for an instant, for this
reason, that it never occurred to them to pay for their pleasure in any
sort of symbolic sacrifice. Men (I felt) might fast forty days for the
sake of hearing a blackbird sing. Men might go through fire to find a
cowslip. Yet these lovers of beauty could not even keep sober for the
blackbird. They would not go through common Christian marriage by way of
recompense to the cowslip. Surely one might pay for extraordinary joy in
ordinary morals. Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because
we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for
sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.

Well, I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I
have not found any books so sensible since. I left the nurse guardian of
tradition and democracy, and I have not found any modern type so sanely
radical or so sanely conservative. But the matter for important comment
was here, that when I first went out into the mental atmosphere of the
modern world, I found that the modern world was positively opposed on
two points to my nurse and to the nursery tales. It has taken me a long
time to find out that the modern world is wrong and my nurse was right.
The really curious thing was this: that modern thought contradicted this
basic creed of my boyhood on its two most essential doctrines. I have
explained that the fairy tales founded in me two convictions; first,
that this world is a wild and startling place, which might have been
quite different, but which is quite delightful; second, that before this
wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the queerest
limitations of so queer a kindness. But I found the whole modern world
running like a high tide against both my tendernesses; and the shock of
that collision created two sudden and spontaneous sentiments, which I
have had ever since and which, crude as they were, have since hardened
into convictions.

First, I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism;
saying