The theory, however, does happen to be indestructible, partly because old age is such a terrible long way off, partly because the young honestly believe themselves to have a monopoly of wisdom, partly because every plain man is convinced that his case will be different from all the other cases, and chiefly because endeavour--not any particular endeavour, but rather any endeavour!--is a habit that corresponds to a very profound instinct in the plain man. So the reputation of Timbuctoo as a pleasure resort remains entirely unimpaired, and the pilgrimages continue with unabated earnestness. And there is another and a paramount reason why the pilgrimages should continue. The two men in the parable both said that they just had to start--and they were right. We have to start, and, once started, we have to keep going. We must go somewhere. And at the moment of starting we have neither the sagacity nor the leisure to invent fresh places to start for, or to cut new paths. Everybody is going to Timbuctoo; the roads are well marked. And the plain man, with his honour of being peculiar, sets out for Timbuctoo also, following the signposts. The fear of not arriving keeps him on the trot, the fear of the unknown keeps him in the middle of the road and out of the forest on either side of it, and hope keeps up his courage. Will any member of the Society for the Suppression of Moral Indignation step forward and heatedly charge the plain man with culpable foolishness, ignorance, or gullibility; or even with cowardice in neglecting to find a convincing answer to the fundamental question about the other end of his life? IV There is, however, a third form of the fundamental question which is less unanswerable than the two forms already mentioned. The plain man may be excused for his remarkable indifference as to what his labour and his tedium will gain for him "later on," when "later on" means beyond the grave or thirty years hence. But we live also in the present, and if proper existence is a compromise between the claims of the present and the claims of the future the present must be considered, and the plain man ought surely to ask himself the fundamental question in such a form as the following: "I am now--this morning--engaged in something rather tiresome. What do I stand to gain by it this evening, to-morrow, this week--next week?" In this form the fundamental question, once put, can be immediately answered by experience and by experiment.