pecially Mr. G.S. Street) said that it was
all very well for me to tell everybody to affirm his cosmic theory, but
that I had carefully avoided supporting my precepts with example. "I
will begin to worry about my philosophy," said Mr. Street, "when Mr.
Chesterton has given us his." It was perhaps an incautious suggestion to
make to a person only too ready to write books upon the feeblest
provocation. But after all, though Mr. Street has inspired and created
this book, he need not read it. If he does read it, he will find that in
its pages I have attempted in a vague and personal way, in a set of
mental pictures rather than in a series of deductions, to state the
philosophy in which I have come to believe. I will not call it my
philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made
me.

I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English
yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England
under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas. I
always find, however, that I am either too busy or too lazy to write
this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposes of
philosophical illustration. There will probably be a general impression
that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to
plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be
the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool. I am not here concerned to
deny that he looked a fool. But if you imagine that he felt a fool, or
at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant
emotion, then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich
romantic nature of the hero of this tale. His mistake was really a most
enviable mistake; and he knew it, if he was the man I take him for. What
could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the
fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane
security of coming home again? What could be better than to have all
the fun of discovering South Africa without the disgusting necessity of
landing there? What could be more glorious than to brace one's self up
to discover New South Wales and then realize, with a gush of happy
tears, that it was really old South Wales. This at least seems to me the
main problem for philosophers, and is in a manner the main problem of
this book. How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and
yet at home in it? How can this queer cosmic to