I have a friend who suspects that in moments of intense consciousness two and two, weary of making four, would make five for a change. I have heard it argued against him by mathematicians that the fourness of four—four’s very existence, as it were—depends on its being related to two in the subtle fashion suggested by the well-known dogma, but I can discern no grounds for this assertion. Consider the fate that would befall a man who went for a ride on an omnibus for the purpose of making use of this one fact. He might be aware that the fare to Putney was fourpence, and, proud of his mathematical knowledge, might pay his fare in two instalments of twopence. What would be his consternation to find that, as he reached his journey’s end, he would have to pay another penny because he had not paid his fourpence in one lump sum? In terms of ’bus fares, two and two do not make four, and I would multiply examples of such exceptions to the accepted rule. But even if two and two really did make four, the fact would remain supremely useless. However cunningly it was conveyed, the statement would not abate one tear from the sorrows of a child, nor would it brighten, even for an instant, the eyes of a dying man. You could not win a girl with it, because the man who counts his kisses is damned from the start. A poet could not turn it into song; it would draw no briefest flame from the ashes of a storyteller’s fire. The thing is cold, inhuman; it is made for lawyers and politicians, and the persons who argue their lives away on matters of no importance. We who are simpler never put two and two together for the purpose of making four, for four is of no more use to us than a nice brace of twos. The infinite is the answer of all our mathematical problems, and if we cannot find it we are quick to sponge the sum off our slates. The belief that two and two make four leads most people to think four a better fellow than two; to hold, for instance, that a man with four millions must be richer than a man with two, though the groans of our pauper millionaires never cease to admonish our national cupidity. Two and two make just what your heart can compass, neither more nor less, and, if your unit is worthless, they make nothing at all. Facts are worse than useless, for they limit the journeys of the human mind; but there is a common sense not founded on facts that represents the extreme limits of our intellectual pilgrimages. It is common only in this: it is true for all humanity when humanity is wise enough to accept it. Shakespeare had it deliciously, and even now we are only beginning to learn the things he knew. For instance— “We are such stuff as dreams are made of, And our little life is rounded with a sleep.” This seems more wisely true to us to-day than it did to the men and women of his age, but it was as true when he wrote it as it is now. Or again—