than the natural explanations I have heard.  The thing is magic, true or false.  Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it.  There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art; whatever it meant it meant violently.  Third, I thought this purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects, such as dragons.  Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint:  we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them.  We owed, also, an obedience to whatever made us.  And last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin.  Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods:  he had saved them from a wreck.  All this I felt and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it.  And all this time I had not even thought of Christian theology.

V THE FLAG OF THE WORLD

When I was a boy there were two curious men running about who were called the optimist and the pessimist.  I constantly used the words myself, but I cheerfully confess that I never had any very special idea of what they meant.  The only thing which might be considered evident was that they could not mean what they said; for the ordinary verbal explanation was that the optimist thought this world as good as it could be, while the pessimist thought it as bad as it could be.  Both these statements being obviously raving nonsense, one had to cast about for other explanations.  An optimist could not mean a man who thought everything right and nothing wrong.  For that is meaningless; it is like calling everything right and nothing left.  Upon the whole, I came to the conclusion that the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist, and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself.  It would be unfair to omit altogether from the list the mysterious but suggestive definition said to have been given by a little girl, “An optimist is a man who looks after your eyes, and a pessimist is a man who looks after your feet.”  I am not sure that this is not the best definition of all.  There is even a sort of allegorical truth in it.  For there might, perhaps, be a profitable distinction drawn between that more dreary thinker who thinks merely of our contact with the earth from moment to moment, and that happier thinker who considers rather our primary power of vision and of choice of road.

But this is a deep mistake in this alternative of the optimist and the pessimist.  The assumption of it is that a man criticises this world as if he were house-hunting, as if he were being shown over a new suite of apartments.  If a man came to this world from some other world in full possession of his powers he might discuss whether the advantage of midsummer woods made up for the disadvantage of