I have called this book "What Is Wrong with the World?"
and the upshot of the title can be easily and clearly stated.
What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right.

* * *

II

WANTED, AN UNPRACTICAL MAN

There is a popular philosophical joke intended to typify
the endless and useless arguments of philosophers; I mean
the joke about which came first, the chicken or the egg?
I am not sure that properly understood, it is so futile an inquiry
after all. I am not concerned here to enter on those deep
metaphysical and theological differences of which the chicken
and egg debate is a frivolous, but a very felicitous, type.
The evolutionary materialists are appropriately enough
represented in the vision of all things coming from an egg,
a dim and monstrous oval germ that had laid itself by accident.
That other supernatural school of thought (to which I
personally adhere) would be not unworthily typified in the fancy
that this round world of ours is but an egg brooded upon
by a sacred unbegotten bird; the mystic dove of the prophets.
But it is to much humbler functions that I here call the awful
power of such a distinction. Whether or no the living bird
is at the beginning of our mental chain, it is absolutely
necessary that it should be at the end of our mental chain.
The bird is the thing to be aimed at--not with a gun, but a
life-bestowing wand. What is essential to our right thinking is this: