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 disadvantage of leaving it alone to the dissatisfaction of
attempting to deal with it. The disadvantage of leaving it alone is
obvious. Existence is, and must be, a compromise between the claims of
the moment and the claims of the future--and how can that compromise
be wisely established if one has not somehow made up one's mind about
the future? It cannot. But--I repeat--I would not blame the plain man.