And there is another and a paramount reason why the pilgrimages should continue.  The two men in the parable both said that they just had to start—­and they were right.  We have to start, and, once started, we have to keep going.  We must go somewhere.  And at the moment of starting we have neither the sagacity nor the leisure to invent fresh places to start for, or to cut new paths.  Everybody is going to Timbuctoo; the roads are well marked.  And the plain man, with his honour of being peculiar, sets out for Timbuctoo also, following the signposts.  The fear of not arriving keeps him on the trot, the fear of the unknown keeps him in the middle of the road and out of the forest on either side of it, and hope keeps up his courage.

Will any member of the Society for the Suppression of Moral Indignation step forward and heatedly charge the plain man with culpable foolishness, ignorance, or gullibility; or even with cowardice in neglecting to find a convincing answer to the fundamental question about the other end of his life?

IV

There is, however, a third form of the fundamental question which is less unanswerable than the two forms already mentioned.  The plain man may be excused for his remarkable indifference as to what his labour and his tedium will gain for him “later on,” when “later on” means beyond the grave or thirty years hence.  But we live also in the present, and if proper existence is a compromise between the claims of the present and the claims of the future the present must be considered, and the plain man ought surely to ask himself the fundamental question in such a form as the following:  “I am now—­this morning—­engaged in something rather tiresome.  What do I stand to gain by it this evening, to-morrow, this week—­next week?” In this form the fundamental question, once put, can be immediately answered by experience and by experiment.

But does the plain man put it?  I mean—­does he put it seriously and effectively?  I think that very often, if not as a general rule, he does not.  He may—­in fact he does—­gloomily and savagely mutter:  “What pleasure do I get out of life?” But he fails to insist on a clear answer from himself, and even if he obtains a clear answer—­even if he makes the candid admission, “No pleasure,” or “Not enough pleasure”—­even then he usually does not insist on modifying his life in accordance with the answer.  He goes on ignoring all the interesting towns and oases on the way to his Timbuctoo.  Excessively uncertain about future joy, and too breathlessly preoccupied to think about joy in the present, he just drives obstinately ahead, rather like a person in a trance.  Singular conduct for a plain man priding himself on common sense!