sery,
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 that everything is as it must always have been, being unfolded
without fault from the beginning. The leaf on the tree is green
because it could never have been anything else. Now, the fairy-tale
philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely because it
might have been scarlet. He feels as if it had turned green an
instant before he looked at it. He is pleased that snow is white
on the strictly reasonable ground that it might have been black.
Every colour has in it a bold quality as of choice; the red of garden
roses is not only decisive but dramatic, like suddenly spilt blood.
He feels that something has been DONE. But the great determinists
of the nineteenth century were strongly against this native
feeling that something had happened an instant before. In fact,
according to them, nothing ever really had happened since the beginning
of the world. Nothing ever had happened since existence had happened;
and even about the date of that they were not very sure.

The modern world as I found it was solid for modern Calvinism,
for the necessity of things being as they are. But when I came
to ask them I f