democracy I could hardly make my mental experience clear. As it is, I do
not know whether I can make it clear, but I now propose to try.

My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken
certainty, I learnt in the nursery. I generally learnt it from a nurse;
that is, from the solemn and star-appointed priestess at once of
democracy and tradition. The things I believed most then, the things I
believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to
be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with
them other things are fantastic. Compared with them religion and
rationalism are both abnormal, though religion is abnormally right and
rationalism abnormally wrong. Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country
of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that
judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticised
elfland, but elfland that criticised the earth. I knew the magic
beanstalk before I had tasted beans; I was sure of the Man in the Moon
before I was certain of the moon. This was at one with all popular
tradition. Modern minor poets are naturalists, and talk about the bush
or the brook; but the singers of the old epics and fables were
supernaturalists, and talked about the gods of brook and bush. That is
what the moderns mean when they say that the ancients did not
"appreciate Nature," because they said that Nature was divine. Old
nurses do not tell children about the grass, but about the fairies that
dance on the grass; and the old Greeks could not see the trees for the
dryads.

But I deal here with what ethic and philosophy come from being fed on
fairy tales. If I were describing them in detail I could note many noble
and healthy principles that arise from them. There is the chivalrous
lesson of "Jack the Giant Killer"; that giants should be killed because