“Perhaps not,” breathed the plain man.  “But it’s generally supposed—­” He faltered.  There was a silence, which was broken by the traveller, who inquired: 

“Any interesting places en route?”

“I don’t know.  I never troubled about that,” said the plain man.

“But do you mean to tell me,” the traveller exclaimed, “that you are putting yourself to all this trouble, peril, and expense of trains and steamers and camel-back without having asked yourself why, and without having satisfied yourself that the thing was worth while, and without having even ascertained the most agreeable route?”

Said the plain man, weakly: 

“I just had to start for somewhere, so I started for Timbuctoo.”

Said the traveller: 

“Well, I’m of a forgiving disposition.  Shake hands.”

III

The two individuals in the foregoing parable were worrying each other with fundamental questions.  And what makes the parable unrealistic is the improbability of real individuals ever doing any such thing.  If the plain man, for instance, has almost ceased to deal in fundamental questions in these days, the reason is not difficult to find.  The reason lies in the modern perception that fundamental questions are getting very hard to answer.  In a former time a dogmatic answer was ready waiting for every fundamental question.  You asked the question, but before you asked it you knew the answer, and so there was no argument and nearly no anxiety.  In that former time a mere child could glance at your conduct and tell you with certainty exactly what you would be doing and how you would be feeling ten thousand years hence, if you persisted in the said conduct.  But knowledge has advanced since then, and the inconvenience of increased knowledge is that it intensifies the sense of ignorance, with the result that, though we know immensely more than our grandfathers knew, we feel immensely more ignorant than they ever felt.  They were, indeed, too ignorant to be aware of ignorance—­which is perhaps a comfortable state.  Thus the plain man nowadays shirks fundamental questions.  And assuredly no member of the Society for the Suppression of Moral Indignation shall blame him.

All fundamental questions resolve themselves finally into the following assertion and inquiry about life:  “I am now engaged in something rather tiresome.  What do I stand to gain by it later on?” That is the basic query.  It has forms of varying importance.  In its supreme form the word “eternity” has to be employed.  And the plain man is, to-day, so sensitive about this supreme form of the question that, far from asking and trying to answer it, he can scarcely bear to hear it even discussed—­I mean discussed with candour.  In practise a frank discussion of it usually tempts him to exhibitions of extraordinary heat and bitterness, and wisdom is thereby but obscured.  Therefore he prefers the