  To go, or not to go? Did I want or not want to bicycle over to tea with the Hanbury-Belchers at Pokemore? Wouldn't it be pleasanter to stay at home? I liked the Hanbury-Belchers— Or did I really like them? Still, it might be pleasant? 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, |
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