In the last analysis we have no right to say that the world of youth is an illusion. For the child it is a true picture of the world in that it corresponds to, and is justified in, his experience. If he did not have to grow older, it would be quite sufficient because nothing in his experience would contradict it. Our sense of life as we mature is quite different, but there is no reason to think that it has any absolute finality. Perhaps if we lived several hundred years we should acquire a wholly different sense of life, compared with which all our adult philosophy would seem quite callow. The child’s sense of life can be called an illusion only if it is carried over into manhood, for then it ceases to fit his experience and to be justified by events. The habits formed in a childish environment become progressively unworkable and contradictory as the youth is thrust out from the protection of his family into an adult environment. Then the infantile conviction that his wants will somehow be met collides with the fact that he must provide for himself. The world begins to seem out of joint. The child’s notion that things are to be had for the asking becomes a vast confusion in which words are treated as laws, and rhetoric as action. The childish belief that each of us is the center of an adoring and solicitous universe becomes the source of endless disappointments because we cannot reconcile what we feel is due us with what we must resign ourselves to. The sense of the unreality of evil, which our earliest experience seemed to justify, [p190] becomes a deep preference for not knowing the truth, an habitual desire to think of the world as we should prefer it to be; out of this rebellion against truth, out of this determination that the facts shall conform to our wishes, are born all manner of bigotry and uncharitableness. The child’s sense that things do not end, that they are there forever, becomes, once it is carried over into maturity, a vain and anxious effort to possess things forever. The incapacity to realize that the objects of desire will last only a little while makes us put an extravagant value upon them, and to care for them, not as they are and for what they can actually give us, but for what we foolishly insist they ought to be and ought always to give us. The child’s philosophy rests upon the assumption that the world outside is in gear with his own appetites. For this reason an adult with a childish character will ascribe an authority to his appetites which may easily land him in fanaticism or frustration, in a crazy indulgence or a miserable starvation. And to the environment he will ascribe a willingness to conform to him, a capacity to be owned by him, which land him in all sorts of delusions of grandeur. Only the extreme cases are in the asylums. The world is full of semi-adult persons who secretly nurse the notion that they are, or that by rights they ought to be, Don Juan, Crœsus, Napoleon, or the Messiah.