This question can be asked and answered without saying whether this which we want really exists or is ultimately attainable. I shall not enter into the metaphysical question whether we are in process of discovering an ideal world that already exists; or whether we are participating in the creation of an ideal reality that shares existence with the unideal; or whether ideals are, in last analysis, chimerical. My sole question is this: If our likes could be filled to the very brim, what kind of world should we then find ourselves living in? It is appropriate to remark, however, that unless we permit our wants to go exploring, we cannot find out what the resources of the world are. We learn where food is, and where it is not, because hunger sets us upon a quest. Nature teaches us when we, the pupils, put questions to her. If, then, we desire to know whether our world-system is a fit habitation for persons, we must make the experiment of acting as persons, and then observe what happens. We must know what we want, and then go after it. There is a tendency, which grows naturally out of the order in which the sciences developed--first the physical, then the biological, then the psychological and sociological--to invert the order of inquiry that has just been named, asking first what the environment contains and only afterwards what our desires are. Then, under a general theory of adaptation, the assumption is made that our desires, in the nature of the case, must be adapted to the particular environment that most occupies scientific attention. If we say that we want something more than _this_ environment provides, we are assured that we have misinterpreted ourselves, and that what we “really” want is only that which the already-assumed environment is ready to supply. Love is “in reality” only “galloping gonads,” as a college student put it; and idealistic cravings are “in reality” an expression of some physiological vacuum. This type of procedure regards itself as strictly objective, whereas it is infected with subjectivity in that a particular mental habit prevents consideration of unaccustomed questions. It is sheer self-imitation that makes us believe that the fundamental apprehension of our world is to be had by way of the physical sciences. It is a self-deceived subjectivity that restricts the description of our wants to sub-human categories instead of letting these wants speak for themselves. The universe may make possible what we want, or it may not; the issue must be determined by observation and experiment under hypotheses adapted to testing the free flight of desire. This free flight is what now concerns us, and what we want to know is the direction in which it goes when it is most free, most completely personal and venturesomely rational. To change the figure, what is the medium that our wings must press against in order to fly? The answer is partly implied in the preceding sections.