But how beforehand can one ever tell? Experience? I was still, I felt, as ignorant of life as a new-born infant; experience has taught me nothing; what I needed was some definite, a priori principle, some deep conception of the meaning of existence, in the light of which problems of this kind would solve themselves at once.
I leant my bicycle against the gate, and sat down to think the matter out. Calling to mind the moral debates of the old philosophers, I meditated on that Summum Bonum, or Sovereign Felicity of which they argued; but from their disputes and cogitations what came back most vividly—what seemed to fall upon one almost in a hush of terror—was that paralysis or dread balance of desire they imagined; the predicament in fact of that philosophic quadruped, who, because he found in each of them precisely the same attraction, stood, unable to move, between two bundles of hay, until he perished of hunger.
VERTIGO
No! I don't like it; I can't approve of it; I have always thought it most regrettable that serious and ethical Thinkers like ourselves should go scuttling through space in this undignified manner. Is it seemly that I, at my age, should be hurled, with my books of reference, and bed-clothes, and hot-water bottle, across the sky at the unthinkable rate of nineteen miles a second? As I say, I don't at all like it. This universe of astronomical whirligigs makes me a little giddy.
That God should spend His eternity—which might be so much better employed—in spinning countless Solar Systems, and skylarking, like a great child, with tops and teetotums—is not this a serious scandal? I wonder what all our circumgyrating Monotheists really do think of it?